A Masked Avatar. Of course. Rieren should have known one of those bastards was going to show up here at some point, determined on ruining her progress through the Enlightened realm and the rest of her life to boot.

The cloaked and hooded figure was only recognizable as an Avatar for the mask she wore. Rieren had to wonder what the point of it even was. If the idiotic Avatar had come down without the mask, Rieren would have crossed her off as just another person seeking to advance further in the Enlightened realm. There was no way she could ignore a ceramic-mask-wearing—

She swallowed. This could be bait. Or a trap of some sorts. A lure to pull in Rieren, or simply draw her attention away from a different direction where the real danger would present itself.

Batcat’s memory only showed the Avatar heading off in a specific direction. The kitten hadn’t followed the Avatar for far, but it appeared she wasn’t coming straight at Rieren.

“Do you know who she is going after, cat?” Rieren asked.

Batcat made another biting motion.

“Yes, fine, I will keep going through the memory.”

She supposed she ought not to have been so impatient, but it was difficult keeping herself reined in. Every muscle was burning to act. Every instinct was screaming at her to not waste a single moment lest she be caught in some kind of trap she hadn’t foreseen.

The memory didn’t last long. It turned out the Avatar was heading towards one of the other cultivators in the Enlightenment Locale, though slowly so, as though she wasn’t sure how to approach her target. Hmm, curious. The one other memory from Batcat Rieren had seen had revealed a different Avatar going all out in trying to apprehend a different woman.

This one was being more cautious. Maybe the one she intended to attack was more powerful than that hapless woman had been. Though, Rieren wondered who it could be that was giving a Masked Avatar pause. Curious indeed.

The memory ended soon after. Apparently, the Avatar’s caution took such root within her that she had to stop, so distant from her target that Batcat—and consequently, Rieren—had no way of seeing who it was. Which meant that Rieren had two options for herself. One, she could continue cultivating until the Avatar came to her.

Or two, she could sneak up behind the Avatar and stop whatever misdemeanour was about to be carried out.

Although, there was a third option available to her. Rieren looked at Batcat to her left. She was loathe to ask the kitten to continue its scouting, especially since it would be a great help here to keep an eye out for any approaching danger.

However, Batcat would be excellent at estimating the true potential of danger far ahead without giving itself away. Better than Rieren could ever be.

The cat meowed at her.

“I apologize, Batcat,” Rieren said. “But I require your assistance once more. Would you mind going on and checking what has become of the Avatar, and more importantly, who she intends to target?”

Batcat stared at her as though she had just asked it to dive headfirst into a pool of lava. Rieren just stared back. Eventually, the cat made a strange huffing noise before flying off. Rieren sent a quick thank you after it, but she doubted it heard.

While the cat was gone, she tried to see if there was anything wrong in her local area.

The prospect of battle shouldn’t have riddled her with anxiety. Her senses were tense as drawn string and her heart was one step away from pounding in her chest. Rieren couldn’t help it. Prepared as she was to fight when and where necessary, the prospect of meeting an enemy just around the corner fuelled her mind with overwrought imaginings.

Rieren found nothing untoward though. She went over a few hundred paces in almost every direction she could think of. All she found was the same liquid that flooded the entire region. No enemies, or hidden traps. The Avatar wasn’t trying to misdirect Rieren.

But if so, that meant the real person being targeted by the Avatar was in true danger.

Rieren didn’t return to her original position. Well, she did, but she had no intention of staying rotted to one spot. Batcat wouldn’t have trouble finding her once it flapped around some.

As she travelled, she did her best to keep cultivating. It wasn’t ideal. Channelling Essence was done best when one was stationary. When the cultivation wasn’t moving, the Essence being drawn in had a specific location to go. This became difficult when the cultivator was in motion.

Drawing in Essence wasn’t a continuous application of force until the Essence had entered the cultivator’s elixir field. Every iota of Essence received a singular application of momentum from the initial tug, following a straight line to the location it was draw towards.

This was why stationary elixir fields were easier for the iota of Essence to reach. If the cultivator was moving, then the Essence would fall short and come to a rest before being absorbed by said channeller. The natural energy of the world followed its natural laws and tended to slow to a stop due to the inherent resistance to all motion.

However, that didn’t mean there was no way to provide another input of momentum to the iota of Essence afterwards. Once a unit of Essence had stopped, it could once again be given a tug towards the elixir field. This posited that cultivators should always try their best to remain motionless while cultivating.

Only Essence in motion couldn’t be affected. That was one of the chief reasons why cultivators couldn’t draw away the Essence being used by another cultivator. It just didn’t work like that.

The closer the Essence, the easier it was to draw in, as it had to travel a shorter distance than Essence farther away. Cultivators in motion had to limit their mobility to slow movements. As such, Rieren was currently moving at an ambling pace that would have made snails tell her to get a move on.

She always tried her best to adhere to those rules, but certain situations like her current circumstance, made it difficult. The temptation to curse the Avatar’s presence was strong. She was making so much good progress before the Masked Avatar had thrown her off.

Thankfully, Batcat returned before she had gotten too far. Rieren couldn’t tell how many hours she spent circling around the spot where she estimated the Avatar was, but eventually, the cat returned. Just as she had suspected, the kitten had faced no trouble in its attempt to locate her.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

“O, cat with wings,” Rieren said. “What wisdom do you have for me?”

Batcat pounced on her and made biting motions again. Rieren quickly channelled some Essence through the cat to see what it had to tell her.

The memory began almost at the exact location she had left the last one. There was the Avatar crouching close to the liquid and shrouded by the mist. But upon closer inspection, it looked as though the woman in the Ceramic Mask had moved.

Mostly because there was now someone else close enough for Batcat to see.

Another girl was cultivating in the gloomy mist. A girl who looked like she was wearing robes not too dissimilar from Rieren’s own.

For a second, Rieren wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. Maybe these were Batcat’s memories from a good while ago. Maybe the Avatar was already here, had already been observing Rieren herself sitting and cultivating away. Maybe the cat was showing her something that had happened. So where would the—

But her panicky thoughts were dashed aside when the memory clarified what it was displaying. For whatever reason, the veil of mist shifted enough for Rieren to properly make out the other girl.

Silk.

Of course. That was why Rieren had dimly recognized the robes. Silk was still wearing a Sect disciple’s robes, the same kind that Rieren had on. So much for being a daughter of the Forborne Emperor.

Rieren’s mind clicked into the gear the next heartbeat. The Masked Avatar had never been after her. No, she was after a woman who had a claim to the throne of the Elderlands.

Batcat meowed insistently, breaking Rieren’s concentration.

“I do not know, cat,” she said. “We should warn her, but I do not understand what is happening.”

Rieren couldn’t tell who had given the Avatar identifying information about Silk. She couldn’t have always been hunted by the Avatars. Otherwise, Appraiser would have done something about her on Lionshard mountain, and Silk had never seemed to be a part of his concern.

So someone had provided the Avatars with information regarding Silk quite recently. That was the only reasonable explanation why the Avatars were coming after her now.

Could it be that someone in the chain of command who knew about her had betrayed her along the way? The only ones who possessed knowledge of her true identity were the Sect Elders, Amalyse, Rollo, Rieren herself, and her secret supporters at court.

A soft splash cut off Rieren’s thoughts. She looked up to see someone approaching, Batcat still meowing insistently on her head. Monkey’s balls, had the cat been trying to warn her?

Rieren pulled out her sword, but the figure paused and raised a hand.

“Put that thing away, Rieren,” Silk said. “It is only me.”

Silk emerged from the misty gloom, the shadows slowly giving way to make her form clear. Rieren didn’t put her sword away. She was losing track of the timing of Batcat’s memories. How long ago had the cat acquired the visions it had shown her, and since when had Silk been following it? Why had Batcat allowed her to follow it in the first place?

Silk sighed loudly, coming to a stop a few paces from her. “Stop glaring at the cat, Rieren. I am right here.”

Sighing, Rieren faced her fellow former disciple. “Why are you here?”

“Why are you having your cat-monster spying on me?”

“’Tis not a monster. A—”

“Spirit Beast. Yes, yes. But why?”

Rieren considered for a moment. Did Silk not know about the Avatar keeping an eye on her? Cursed Abyss, had the Avatar followed her too, and now Rieren herself was being watched?

She wanted to pick Silk up and throw her away. But restraint was always good.

“Batcat wanders where it will and brings me little tidbits of the surroundings,” Rieren said. “That you happened to be present in aforementioned surroundings is a terrible coincidence.”

Silk was sharp enough to read between the lines. “Oh, you go around spying over the whole area with your little cat friend, is it? Pray, tell me if you’ve seen something else of interest too.”

Rieren hesitated. It was hard to tell if the Avatar could hear them from this distance. At higher levels of cultivation, one’s senses tended to improve greatly. It wouldn’t be out of this world to imagine the Avatar could pick out words from almost a league away. And she was certainly less than a league from them now, watching through her little ceramic mask.

“Come with me,” Rieren said. “Batcat did find something rather interesting that I think we all should take a close look at.”

“What is it?”

“You can trust me.”

Silk huffed, but then fell into step behind Rieren. She wasn’t wholly certain which path she was supposed to take. There was just that one vision she had experienced to guide her. But eventually, Rieren received confirmation that her choice of direction had been correct.

“That sound,” Silk said, wondering and a little hushed. “That sounds like…”

Rieren smiled. After less than an hour of walking, they had come to the enormous rent that had pulled her into the Abyss itself.

The nice thing about their current location was all the water plunging into its depths. The churning and roar of the waterfall drowned out most other noise, including their own talking. As such, Rieren and Silk had to come much closer together to be heard over the water.

This had the nice effect that the Avatar was likely completely unable to hear anything they were saying. Whatever highly tuned senses she might possess, it wouldn’t be enough to work through the background noise and hear Rieren and Silk’s conversation.

“Do you intend to throw me in there?” Silk asked. She didn’t sound displeased at the prospect of being thrown into a lightless pit.

“Tempting,” Rieren said. “But fortunately for you, I was raised better.”

At that, Silk snorted. She walked dangerously close to the watery pit and peered into it. “It keeps going and going. I’ve been hearing it go on ceaselessly for a while now. But it can’t be truly depthless. The liquid level is constant. Unchanging. As such, one can purport that there might be a mechanism, if a natural one, that is causing the flow to rise back up elsewhere.”

Rieren cleared her throat.

Silk flushed. “Ah, apologies. I assume we came here so that we won’t be overheard.”

“So you know you were being watched?”

“And currently being watched too, yes. She’s not bothering me, though, so I didn’t think much of it.”

“You don’t think much of a Masked Avatar of the Forborne Emperor watching you like a degenerate watching a woman bathing?”

This time, Silk blinked at her. “That… is an interesting way of putting it. But no. I had more important things to take care of.”

“Such as getting to the Mid-Enlightened realm?”

“Yes.”

Well, at least Rieren’s guess had been spot-on.

“So why come and bother me?” she asked. “If you weren’t concerned about the Avatar, why seek me out?”

“I wished to greet a fellow disciple of Lionshard Sect. Is that so difficult to fathom?”

Rieren stared at her. Silk stared back. Batcat stared between the two of them, then meowed at them to get on with it.

Silk sighed. “Alright, fine. Your cursed little cat—sorry, Spirit Beast—led me here.”

“For what reason?” Rieren glared at Batcat, and the little kitten simply ignored her.

“I lied. I do want to do something about that monkey’s puss-eating Avatar.” She looked imploringly at Rieren. “Will you be able to assist me?”

“I have conditions.”

“Name them. I can try to make you First Queen-Consort when I take the throne, but I give no guarantees.”

Rieren wrenched her expression back to some semblance of normalcy. “No, not those kinds of conditions.”

“Then what?”

“Where are Amalyse and Rollo?”

“Oh. Still working on finishing up the Sect’s contract with the local Archnobles. If you want to meet them after you are done with your cultivation here, I can give you a guide as to where they might be.”

That was well and good, but not exactly beneficial to Rieren. Not materially, at least. She suspected she could just ask Batcat to find Amalyse and that would be good enough. No, Silk represented a different kind of opportunity, one she might need to take advantage of in due time.

“Actually,” Rieren said. “I want your previous favour.”

One eyebrow of Silk’s went up, as did a corner of her mouth. “You want to become First Queen-Consort?”

Rieren dragged a hand over her face to prevent the same expression as before arising again. It was annoying. “I may need your assistance when it comes time for me to enter the capital properly.”

“Very well, then. I promise I will do all I can to help you with… whatever it is you intend to do at the capital.”

“How do I trust you?”

“How can you be the First Queen-Consort if you can’t even have faith in your Empress?”

Rieren groaned. She was tempted to argue that she had never even admitted she wanted to be sitting next to Silk on her stuck-up little throne, but there was a deeper point here. Silk had nothing to offer but her words and her honour. Rieren would have to count on that being enough.

She was loathe to do so, but there wasn’t exactly any other option. It was better than nothing, at least.

“Fine then,” Rieren said. “Now stand back while I deal with the Avatar.”