Three days after the raid during which he’d awakened, Sesako looked out at the emperor’s floating volcano with a wolf’s grin.

A hundred years waiting. You bastard. You murderous bastard.

I’m coming for you.

Sesako had not quite known in his heart how greatly he wished to kill the emperor until today.

Today would not be his chance, but it would come.

One day, one day I’m going to kill you.

Had the emperor been present, this plan would have been too risky.

In addition to his canniness as a commander of men, the emperor alone could defeat a dozen cultivators with a profound soul in battle. Fortunately, their spies had established that the Celestial Emperor was more than two thousand leagues away in the far western reaches of his empire.

He was only one man, and his presence ensured that the nations which he had reconquered did not rise up again, and that the nations which yet maintained their independence along his border did not choose this time to attack when a huge portion of the emperor’s army was in the far, far east.

Three days of wracking bombardments. Three days. The more weakly defended towers cracked and crumbled, one by one.

That fell sound of time: Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

For three days, awful days, stones that were badly deflected struck the city one after another. Vast craters surrounded by tall buildings. This city had taken centuries to build, the emperor’s unbuilding could succeed in a week or two.

Three days since Sesako and his other had first fully drawn upon the power of a celestial.

The magical reserves of the city had been worn down far faster than they had expected, and Sesako did not have enough of the crimson celestial power to supplement the power in the other towers in any substantial way. Especially since most of the little he’d drawn would now need to be used for a trick.

The emperor had infused his power into every single stone that his cultivators threw.

These empowered stones took greater effort to neutralize than had been anticipated when the course of the defense had been calculated. This effect became far worse once the blue power in the towers that did not serve as the residence of one of the seven had been fully exhausted, and all that was left was the purple power of the purified cores.

The difference of two tiers in power made it nearly impossible for the teams to shock the stones all the way off course.

Many towers had been struck in the past day.

Parts of the city had been pounded, blasted, burnt, and broken.

The seven had been forced to stay awake each night, as the throwing sporadically continued in the dark, despite the loss of accuracy.

But the men of Yatamo mostly yet lived. And what was more, the Great Ones yet lived.

So far all of the damage mostly amounted to the loss of a great store of piled up wealth. The population had hidden deep in tunnels under the city or had fled from the siege into the broader countryside.

That murderous bastard.

Despite Sesako’s hatred for him, Sesako had always had respect for the emperor as an opponent.

More than ten thousand stones had been thrown at the city already, and the emperor had personally enchanted every single one.

Sesako had many times been called upon to fill stones with power. Hundreds of them where he’d done the work were in the storehouses of the city, and more than two thousand had been thrown against the defenders in various sieges he’d participated in.

A boring, thankless task that nevertheless required close concentration and complete alertness, because a mistake could destroy an artifact that cost hundreds of Imperials and required a skilled enchanter to work for the best part of a year.

The emperor had probably filled twenty or thirty thousand stones for this siege.

Perhaps he’d found a method that would allow him to quicken the imbuing process substantially — if nothing else he must be more willing to break the stones in the name of speed, since his time and energy was more valuable than Sesako’s. But no matter what corners he’d cut, the emperor had spent more than two solid years just imbuing stones.

Sesako’s previous view of that murderous bastard — the one who'd killed his mother and his little sister and brother in a fit of pique as he fled the city — had been of a distant cold ruler who killed, and killed, and delighted to kill, but who took on few of the burdens and little of the labor of rule.

The proof that he would not skirt the actual work of rule was being hurled against his beloved city thousands of times a day.

That did not reduce the desperate desire Sesako had to kill the emperor.

Anxiety gnawed at Sesako’s gut, and in his belly button.

Each day he threw himself into endless work to ward off the fear.

A capable enemy. Capability was scarier than stupidity.

As the old saying went: May the Fates always grant us stupid enemies.

His murderous, vile, evil enemy was capable.

Thus, this plan of insanity, in which the Yatamo would risk everything on a single toss of the dice. Time to destroy the floating volcano, whatever it might cost them, and even if it worked, it might cost dear indeed.

Success would pay the wergild.

Thirty years, and an incalculable quantity of resources had built that floating volcano. Like all of the most successful secrets, the emperor had built it in the open. He’d claimed it was a monument celebrating his recovery from his wounds, but everyone knew there was some secret research embedded in it. But the various stories and rumors about what it really was, which Sesako now believed to have been spread about by the emperor himself, had blinded Yatamo, the one nation really threatened by it, to its true significance.

Thirty years.

Sesako had not yet fully matured the core of his profound soul when the emperor had begun his work upon this giant structure.

Almost as many human beings had worked upon the artificial island as lived in Yatamo.

Just destroy it.

At the bottom of the volcano’s caldera there was an unknown source of vast and enormous power that produced enough heat that the entire ocean within the bay was hotter than in the peak of summer. The fish around were dying. Some mystical mechanism within the island replicated the very forces that made power bubble up into ley lines from deep within the center of the earth.

Their best guess was that he was using deep metal in some way, but no one could understand the details.

Kisiko believed this was the product of research the emperor had done four hundred years before, not long after Kisiko had fully developed his own profound soul. The emperor had always desired to better understand the world, and he had dug pits many miles deep, going as far down as it was possible for his power to safely manage the heat of the world’s insides.

This vast source of heat must be what allowed him to keep an entire island that was miles across floating. It produced the ley lines which the attacking cultivators used to absorb the magical recoil as they hurled their stones.

If they destroyed the power source, the island would drop to the bottom of the bay, and they would have won.

The emperor could eventually come back — but now their spies would carefully study all his domains to see if any new floating islands were being built, and they would prepare for a serious siege even if they could not see any such signs. Maybe they would lose that next war as well, but the balance of forces would be much closer, and if Yatamo could find or buy allies from amongst the other nations who challenged the emperor, the odds might even be in their favor.

This was the battle in which the emperor seemed nearly certain of victory.

This was the brilliant stroke of battle he had prepared for thirty years.

This was the brutal scheme of battle he’d pondered as his wounds burnt after the rising.

But the emperor’s flying warriors knew that the island had to be defended. Unless the commander was a fool, he kept at least ten thousand cultivators with purified cores and a dozen profound souls on the island at all times.

They would need to use subterfuge to sneak themselves through those watchers, but even that would fail, if the island were fully defended in every point. They needed to pull as much of the army away from the island as possible.

And that meant they had to offer the emperor and the fates who governed battle a great sacrifice.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Once a dantian was opened the cultivator needed to develop their ability to concentrate the power into dense packets, rather than the diffuse wisps that at first were produced by the dantian.

Learning to concentrate the power of the first dantian, the golden dantian, was a wholly separate stage in the development of the cultivator, because it was only after the power was sufficiently concentrated that a neophyte cultivator could press the power into their bodies and establish the physical foundation that would allow them to form their first core.

One who had simply awakened their spark was barely magical.

With the later dantians it was generally the case that from the very start the cultivator could concentrate the power sufficiently that they could enhance their body.

For each dantian that physical enhancement involved ten stages, layered one after another into the body of the cultivator. Each stage took more concentration, skill, time, and power to complete than the previous one.

The majority of those who awakened their spark amongst the Yatamo eventually completed their foundation, and a third of them developed their golden core. But many who lacked both talent and dedication took decades to succeed at working through each stage.

A talented cultivator like Hinete formed the golden core in her early twenties, and then spent most of that decade maturing it. She would usually reach the point where she would decide whether to risk breaking open the second dantian in her late thirties.

Sesako had been a prodigy. He formed his golden core when he was sixteen, and he ripped open the second dantian, under the guard of Takue and the Great One herself when he was nineteen.

He then sped through the far longer and harder development of his purified core, cycling the purple power through his body repeatedly. Hour after hour. Day after day. Month after month.

His sole goal had been to complete the process, and then to break through to a profound soul.

He’d been changed when he saw his father die. He’d been changed further when he returned to Kyit to find his mother dead, his sister a bloody paste, and his little, sweet little brother gone from the world.

Dedication combined with a talent that stunned those who mentored him, and that for many years made him a poor teacher to those he’d chosen to mentor, allowed him to develop the nascent soul into a firm soul foundation in only six years. After that he formed the purple core of a purified core.

And then a further five years of effort to fully develop that core.

He’d achieved that mark when he was thirty, and afterwards he had continued to spend every waking moment trying to find the trick, to overcome the barrier, to see the way through the conceptual fog to open the third dantian. Every waking moment except those that were required by his duties to the Great Ones and to the island he loved.

It was only after another thirty years of unrelenting attempts that Sesako finally broke through when he was sixty-three years old.

Once he did, it had taken nearly thirty years for him to fully develop his third foundation and core — though he could have completed that task faster if he had not turned much of his studies to the question of trying to understand how.

Fully developing the profound soul faster would not let him achieve his true goal: To become a celestial who could rival the emperor, and then defeat him, and overthrow him and his reign forever.

Many had tried, but only one had succeeded at opening their fourth dantian.

The progress that Sesako had made in opening the fourth dantian, being able to use the power, and being able to diffuse it through his body was astonishing. He was advancing far more quickly than he had ever had with any of his other dantians, even the first.

That is to say they were advancing.

The key to this rapid progress was that somehow the other could think through problems that Sesako could barely understand and see the solutions. He was good at a sort of systematic testing that was different from the focus upon meditation which was usual amongst cultivators.

And because the other was disembodied while he worked on this, he had a special sort of focus upon the task that even a master of focus and meditation such as Sesako was unable to match.

This speed was not sufficient to make him already a rival to the emperor.

However, Sesako had been able to infuse his power into the cloak that Fitzuki would wear during his giant distraction raid.

But there simply was not enough time to become the equal of the emperor in the use of celestial power.

That would take decades, or maybe centuries.

Probably centuries. The emperor had not been idle over his long thousand years of life.

They had two more days before there would be too few towers to defend the city at all, and without the defensive runes, the heavy crossbows armed with enchanted bolts, the focusing crystals to enhance deadly spells, and the circles of power to draw upon in the towers, the whole defense of the city would collapse.

Then the badly outnumbered defenders of Yatamo would be destroyed if they stayed to fight by the horde of cultivators which the emperor had brought against them.

So instead of fighting, the defenders would retreat into the mountains, through tunnels and to positions where the ley lines were protected by additional fortified towers.

Once the emperor’s forces established themselves on the island in the ruins of the city, they would be able to advance towards those defensive points.

It would be easy for them to conduct another bombardment to blast away the towers protecting the passes into the mountain, as they were far less numerous and with smaller circles containing chi than those in the city.

When the emperor’s army controlled those passes, they would be able to step by step progress deeper into the high mountains, until they reached the perches of the Great Ones.

Their victory would then be, by every reckoning, wholly inevitable.

The emperor had to be stopped now.

The current plan was to draw most of the defenders out of the island by providing an even more appealing target: The new celestial, and the whole of the gathered mature cultivators of Yatamo.

There were nearly fifteen thousand cultivators with a purple core with Yatamo blood, and seven thousands of them had agreed to take flight high into the air and attack the firing clusters of the besiegers.

What this scheme, prepared by Fitzuki himself, risked was a vast slaughter.

If these forces became entrapped behind nets that would be spread out by the forces coming up from the island below, like had happened to the force Sesako had led three days before, then the flower of the clans might be massacred —not everyone would die in the battle. It would be impossible for them to all be trapped, but in developing this plan, they expected that many, many of their countrymen might die.

The population of Yatamo was one and a half million, against more than a hundred million persons who lived in the domains yet controlled by the emperor.

Yet Yatamo ranked far above its natural weight in the numbers of grand cultivators.

More than half the adults, more than eight hundred thousand humans, had awakened their spark. And against the ordinary odds, four fifths of that number had successfully developed their foundations. There were nearly seven hundred thousand with a foundation in Yatamo. This was a far higher fraction than in any other nation.

The blessing of the Great One, whose presence caused power to bubble up freely on the island,

Also, as she had commanded, they nurtured everyone born on the island, even the poorest peasants, and the most worthless of persons.

Everyone among the Yatamo was assigned five mentors, who were of varying levels of ability, and who would be judged by their peers upon how well their students progressed, and everyone in turn, before they had even fully developed their first foundation, was assigned five students from amongst those who were less skilled than them to tutor and help.

And in turn, their reputation was based in part upon how successful their students were.

Those who were the most successful at progressing were expected to have at least one student who was amongst the least successful in their progression.

The golden core was more difficult to forge than a foundation, though it was correspondingly more valuable. Only two hundred thousand amongst the cultivators of Yatamo had developed it.

Once a student forged their golden core, if they wished to one day break open their second dantian, they would become the apprentice of someone who'd completely developed their purified core, and whose duty was to guide them through maturing of the golden core, and to give them tips and information that would help them succeed when they tried to break through..

Hinete was Sesako’s apprentice, and even after he had achieved his profound soul, he always continued to take an apprentice, since he believed firmly in the importance of these practices. However, it was not required by custom or law for him to do so. Everywhere, those who opened their third dantian were considered a law unto themselves, as they could not be bound and forced by anyone— not even the Celestial Emperor — to act against their own will and wishes.

To choose to break open the second dantian was always a fraught choice. Many died in the attempt. Those who were unprepared and who had insufficient control over their golden cores, or who had not given their cores enough time to mature, or who had become so old that their core had begun to lose its flexibility often died.

Brilliant prodigies sometimes died as well.

Just bad luck.

It was rare for Yatamo cultivators to die in the attempt. From ancient times a duty — sanctified by custom, but not by law — of those who had achieved the profound soul was to aid and watch over those who were breaking open their second dantian.

The blue power could stabilize the patterns of the body and reduce the odds of death to a tenth of what they would be otherwise.

Additionally, the profound soul could question and examine the aspiring nascent core closely before he made the attempt. Often unprepared cultivators were discovered this way, and they would be instructed to prepare further, or told that it would be too dangerous for them to make the attempt.

Still, despite all of this, out of the seven hundred times that Sesako had overseen a cultivator breaking through, eleven times that cultivator had died.

Due to these varied difficulties only a tenth of the cultivators with a golden core made the effort to break through, and then survived.

However, once a cultivator had broken through, they gained the potential for enormously more power.

They could fly three times as fast, they could survive extremely high where the air was too thin to allow breath, they could swim hundreds of feet deep in the oceans, and they gained the ability to power the great hurlers that were used for sieges of cities.

It took time to fully develop these abilities.

The additional speed and physical toughness came very quickly, but the ability to project power, and to become fully deadly in battle often took decades, as the foundation needed to be layered repeatedly before the purified core could be formed. And likewise, the new core had to be developed step by step before it reached its full power and maturity.

At any given time about a quarter of those who broke open their second dantian had not yet formed their core.

In other countries only a tiny fraction of the peasantry ever awakened their spark. As a result, despite the empire having more than sixty times the population of Yatamo, it only had about seven times as many purified cores.

But seven times as many was more than ample number to win this war.

Each could fly across continents within the course of a week or two without tiring themselves.

There were many, many such cultivators in the army assembled, the bulk of the power in the force they faced.

A core difficulty which the emperor faced every time he sought to conquer a land, was that while he could force the native cultivators out of any land he was determined to take, he simply did not have the ability to kill very many of them.

It usually was simply too easy for a man who could fly at a hundred miles per hour while under the influence of a powerful invisibility spell to get away from a losing battle.

The emperor could take any given city or mountain, but the whole population of the Yatamo cultivators could then sit on a different mountain and wait for him to make a mistake.

And then they could come back with all of their numbers as soon as he’d withdrawn his own occupying army — an army he would need elsewhere.

Conquering a land generally involved convincing the cultivators who had the closest ties to it to submit to their conqueror and swear fealty to him. It rarely involved displacing or replacing them permanently.

And when that was tried, it often led to feuds that ran for centuries, with few deaths amongst the cultivators, but the endless destruction of mines and mills, fields and farms, palaces, and ports.

Sesako did not know which of the emperor’s council of generals had been given the baton of command for this campaign, but each of the five great generals was an old canny warrior, who had spent hundreds of years in bloody battle for the emperor, and who had chosen to remain loyal to him when many of those with profound souls had attempted to form their own nations during the cracking time after the emperor was wounded.

He would find it impossible to resist an opportunity to kill thousands of the cultivators of Yatamo — to permanently hack a limb from the body of the great warriors of Yatamo.

The general would know there was some trap, some dagger hidden in this offering. But he’d still strike with most of his forces.

Especially since he wanted to kill the new celestial who might grow in time to truly threaten his great master, the celestial emperor.

The chance would become irresistible.