Sesako and Fitzuki stared from a high tower in the mountain above the once capital city of Yatamo upon the occupied city.

He still was not again on speaking terms with the Other, but he knew that he would be soon, since Hinete did not approve of their feud. Despite this, likely because they did in part share a brain and a mind, they had been cooperating extremely well in the practice of condensing the crimson power that was pulled from the fourth dantian and spreading it through the body.

The speed of the progression was far better than with any of his other dantians, which ordinarily would have completely shocked Sesako, as usually the difficulty grew by at least a factor of two with each new major stage reached.

But even at this pace it would take him several years to fully establish and mature the crimson foundation — let alone create a solid core, without which it would be impossible for him to project the celestial magic at any substantial distance from his own body in battle.

Even if he was as powerful personally as the emperor, the emperor had brought more than thirty profound cultivators with him, and he could call upon the craftsmen of an entire continent to supply his forces, and beyond that he had the canniness and wisdom gained with a thousand years of warfare and rulership.

In other words, the other had still destroyed the sole chance they had to save the Great Ones.

The emperor had shown an enormous respect to the city, having his golden cores, and the men with only a foundation that he’d brought with him, clean out the rubble, and cart it to what was now a large new hill on a cliff overlooking the sea a mile outside of the city.

They had at this point fully established themselves on the ley lines that ran underneath the river that bisected the city.

They’d also systematically begun constructing their own guard towers, and while they were field structures, quickly thrown up, the key stone enchantment pieces were heavy objects that would not have been out of place defending the imperial palace itself.

Should the emperor’s army somehow be defeated — impossible — they could retreat easily back to the city that had now become a fine defensive position for them.

As Fitzuki had said, the ceasefire benefited the emperor as well as them.

The emperor had kept the banners of the clans flying over the house of the clans, but he’d removed all of the heraldry of the united and independent clandom of Yatamo — the flag with nine dragons upon it. Nine dragons, for they would never forget the two that the emperor killed.

In its place, flying bigger than all the rest, was the emperor’s massive banner. It said in the language of the emperor’s court ‘Let the Holy Rule’. Beneath it was a field of crimson against which there was the silhouette of a gray village — symbolizing the common folk. There were golden flowers, symbolizing those who had opened the first dantian, a purple falcon for the purified cores, and a mighty stag in blue for the profound.

A pretty illustration of the point that he claimed to rule everyone.

Everyone except Sesako, since based on the symbolism of the flag, Sesako ought to be one of the rulers as well.

That murderous bastard.

Who had clearly not wished to kill Sesako, or Takue, and who had been still extremely fond of Kisiko, even as Kisiko desperately tried to kill him.

Sesako knew that a major part of Fitzuki’s early experience of war had been under the emperor. Naturally Fitzuki had sworn himself to his service as he’d been born in one of the lands that had been ruled from the imperial capital for longer than anyone but the emperor had been alive. And Fitzuki had taken it upon himself to train Sesako and give him experience in battle once Sesako had broken through and opened the third dantian.

A fundamental rule that Fitzuki always taught him was this: If you mean to kill your enemy, kill them.

He just wanted to mock us, or maybe he had some use for me once I’d surrendered, and I had no choice.

It did not change the basic point: The emperor had not wanted to kill him.

If he had wanted to kill Sesako, he would have struck hard when he abandoned his invisibility spell, and he would have almost certainly succeeded in terribly wounding Sesako, and in such conditions as they were fighting in, with little chance for Sesako to escape, he would have succeeded at killing him.

“Stop frowning. Frowns won’t do any good.”

Fitzuki punched Sesako in the arm. “Stop it, I say.”

Sesako turned to him. “Perhaps if we —”

Every idea was too stupid, and too hopeless to even say.

Fitzuki shrugged. “We’ve fortified positions around the aeries. And the army has stuck together, and we are ready to fight again — we’ll contest him as he moves forward consistently, it’ll take him three weeks to make it through the four hundred miles of mountains — and we’ll still have enough force at the end to throw up a proper battle. Unless something goes wrong, or he does something clever. He will. Attack a position we don’t expect. Build a set of fortifications somewhere weird because he figured out something I didn’t. Maybe he’ll send a large attack force around our side to attack the dragons directly while most of his men pin our attention here — I don’t expect that though. Too risky even for the old man.”

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“How can you not despise me for not saving them?”

“Honestly?” Fitzuki leaned forward against the marble wall around the top of the tower. “My honest answer? The more I hear about that young fellow you share your head with, the more I like him — he’s a soft soul. Not fit for battle at all. But a good man. He’s been going around getting all sorts of people to promise to give money to a scheme to help peasants in Diet Vinh to awaken their sparks — isn’t that kind of ridiculous? We are in the middle of a war which has destroyed a vast amount of that which we have built. Our trade has been enormously disrupted — when the emperor actually wins, everyone who stays here to submit will need to pay more taxes, and yet that other has gotten hundreds of people to promise to give away ‘a tenth of their wealth, or a hundredth part — a real amount and something proportional to how much better off you are than the people who are actually badly off’ — completely ridiculous.”

Fitzuki smiled as he spoke. “I don’t know. It is… somehow it makes people… less miserable. If nothing else his earnest-eyed insistence in arguing about how this is a good idea has been good for morale. It gives people an extra sense of purpose, and I’ll be damned if I’m not charmed by his vision of slowly creating a world in which everyone can awaken their fourth dantian.”

“That is nonsense.”

With a shrug Fitzuki laughed. “Probably. I’m still going to do something about what he is saying. You have no idea how much you can earn as a mercenary general. I mean helping everyone in the wars after the Rising to get away from him —” Fitzuki gestured at the giant banner hanging over the house of the clans. “Was a worthy goal. I’d have done it gratis. But when I spent those decades helping Diet Vinh beat back the Parelei, and then when the Parelei kingdom fell apart, I worked in sequence with three different sides in their civil war. I got paid for all of that.”

“You plan to help a bunch of peasants awaken their spark because a coward thinks it is a good idea?” Sesako asked scathingly.

“The coward does not know if it is a good idea or not. He happily admits that. That is what I like best about him. He knows what he doesn’t know… his conviction in his own ignorance appeals to me as an old military man. His idea is that there are lots and lots of good things to do, but that sometimes you might be able to find just one simple trick that will make everything work better. What I’m actually interested in is a different side of it, but something necessary to understand too: What exactly makes it so hard to become like us? We’ve tried to teach and apprentice promising cultivators with purified cores. You haven’t yet mentored as many of them as I did, but —”

“It is pointless. I will, when Hinete is ready to advance, I’ll try to help her, but…” Sesako shrugged.

It was a simple sad fact, no matter how he cared for Hinete, or anyone who hadn’t become a profound soul already, they were unlikely to live beyond an age of four or five hundred, while he might live forever.

“It never works. Why not? — We know certain things. But we also know that we don’t understand how we made the breakthrough. It makes obvious sense that someone like you would eventually succeed. You were dogged and obsessive. But even promising prodigies who spend a hundred years trying, at least ninety percent of them fail. Why? And I hadn’t been trying when I broke upon my third dantian. I’d given up at that point, but… I noticed something, something I could not explain to anyone else while practicing combat exercises. It was the same for Kisiko — he’d been working on a technique to improve the yields on his family farm, and just suddenly… he knew how to open the dantian.”

“It was like that for me. And perhaps what you just said, about paying attention to something else, was helpful. I mean it was related, trying to understand the patterns of my own magic, but… it just clicked. Suddenly.” Sesako had a sudden burst of excitement, “Perhaps that simply is the solution, to have someone sink deeply into just really paying attention to some magical task, and then…”

“No. There are too few of us, it might be necessary, and I doubt that everyone who achieves a purified core sinks into their magical attention like we did. But far, far more do occasionally than the one in five thousand who achieve a profound soul. Anyway, this could be an important cause.” Fitzuki laughed. “An important cause. I’m sounding like him too, I thought only you shared his brain — This is something I care about. Also, it would give us an incredible edge, because we are simply better at educating each other than any other nation — I’ve hired a couple of people to assemble all of the stories of ascension that we have, and then I’m going to be pay two or three dozen newly matured purified cores to do experiments on themselves, to just see if any of them break through. If even one of them does, that would be a giant signal, since that is so rare.”

“I’m pretty sure he’d tell you to look for something that is the most useful. And that it is unlikely for anything you personally find to be actually fun, fascinating, or beneficial for your own particular nation to be the best thing to do.”

Fitzuki nodded. “I know. I agree with him on that too — and I like how he put it, that you should be doing something that is purely focused on what it is like for other people, even if most of what you do is focused on your own projects. If you two survive, and I really hope you do, I’m going to give him a billion imperials to do anything he wants with. I trust him to at least do his best to focus purely on outcomes.”

“A billion — by the dragon, how —”

“A very well-paid mercenary general.” He laughed. “There are three different countries that are independent currently mainly because I led their armies. And the king of Parleia would not rest beneath his crown without my aid. A billion imperials is not more than three hundredths of my wealth.”

“That is more money than —”

“Yes, yes. Well don’t say it so loud. If everyone knew I had that kind of money, I’d constantly have to deal with people asking for some, and that would seriously annoy me.” Fitzuki twitched his nose and turned back to look at the hive of activity below. “I’ve no idea what to do though. To stop them. That blasted old man. And you said he had reasons. He said that to Kisiko — I wish I could know what they are. Obviously a prophecy. Any time anything completely unlikeable and unwantable happens, it is pretty much always a prophecy.”