“I’m sorry, but what do you need us for then,” Willow asked. “You opened a portal to the tournament grounds—”

“And I possess the knowledge required to close the doorway. Or at least I hope I do. It is for this reason alone: while my portal to the tournament might have impressed everyone else there had they been alive, it did not impress you. Why?”

Was this a trap? Willow considered for a moment before deciding that if it was, they were already so deep there was no way out.

“Your portal was unstable,” she said, and chose her next word carefully. “Shoddy.”

“That portal represents the climax of my understanding of your people’s magic. It barely reached a thousand li and even I could tell that it was toeing the line to crossing over entirely to become another doorway. I suppose if it failed I’d be able to test my hypothesis about disabling the resulting doorway, but I’d rather not in my own country. You see, they seem to come with uninvited guests just waiting to break through.”

“The essence,” Jeremy said. “Or qi. Where did you get it all? I thought your people generated it within their bodies to improve their strength. I can’t imagine them shunting it out into storage tanks.”

“Yes, you are correct. Our sacred arts are unsuitable for qi storage, although it seems your people have made quite a lot of progress in that avenue. I couldn’t believe it myself when I saw the first images of your artificial sacred beasts.”

“You mean the warbeasts,” Willow asked.

The emperor shrugged. “As to your question, I’m burning vast fortunes of sacred herbs, beasts, and artifacts in great furnaces under his very building. The qi is shunted, instead of inward to create a pill, upward toward my machinery. Opening that portal was a test, but it also consumed fully half of my accumulated horde.”

“You have no way to open a portal to America,” Willow realized. “If we’d just left, you couldn’t have followed us.”

“Correct. It seems I have Jeremy to thank for that. His undying lust for revenge has removed your ability for a quick conclusion to your little doorway problem, and has opened the opportunity to me to step through this portal and travel across the sea.”

“Is it really such a hurdle for you,” Jeremy asked. “With all of your power?”

“What good is a punch, a kick, in the middle of the ocean? I could paddle a canoe for a month or year and try to get there, but in the end there would be no guarantee I’d reach my destination. The winds are a fickle mistress. Much easier if we tear a permanent hole between our countries.”

Permanent?

“You said you had no interest in conquest,” Willow said. “That America wasn’t an interest of yours anymore.”

“Conquest isn’t,” the emperor said. “But you do seem to have so many interesting things over there. I’ve already conscripted several youths for the role of preliminary mages. We’ll see if exposing them to your arts before ours allows them to channel qi as you do.”

“Trade,” Leopold said. Willow could hear the tint of disbelief in his voice. “You’re talking about trade.”

“Yes. A corridor between our nations for the betterment of both. We already have preliminary contracts with Albion, although the terrain certainly makes such journeys difficult at the best of times. With a network of portals anchored between our nations, we could both catch the rising tide. Imagine a whole host of cultivators as powerful as either of you.”

Willow could imagine it, and it didn’t bode well. Maybe the citizens of the Celestial Empire were used to being treated like shit by their mages, but Willow didn’t want that kind of thing spreading to her country. Faults and all, she preferred it the way it was.

“You truly are a visionary,” Willow said, and smiled. “I trust this will be only the beginning in the great cultural exchange between our nations.”

The emperor gave the slightest smile, then nodded.

🜛

After their small meal of tea and tiny pastries, the emperor led them out to a courtyard ringed with cultivators standing as still as statues. They were all garbed with gilded, ornamental gi, and all of them were more powerful than the cultivators at the tournament had been.

“Why the tournament,” Willow asked as the emperor approached an inscribed circle which had several painted lines running off it in the same direction. Characters Willow couldn’t understand had been painted beside the lines.

“Excuse me,” the emperor asked as he studied the characters.

“Jeremy said that a tournament is only held prior to an invasion—for you to pick the best cultivators in the land for your army.”

“Jeremy lied,” the emperor said. “Or at least was misinformed. Living in a cave for two hundred years will do that to you. The tournament you so magnificently crashed was an annual event. Yes, I do recruit from the tournament winners, if they’re strong enough, for my personal guard, but that’s not the purpose of them. They’re really to keep the sects from going to war with each other. It used to happen more often than you’d think.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Bureaucracy,” Jeremy said.

“Exactly. You can’t hold a grudge if there are hundreds of pages of regulations between you and revenge. Ah, it appears all of the relevant calculations have been denoted for us.”

The emperor stood in the circle and aligned his arm with the lines radiating outward. “This is the direction of the doorway. Seventeen thousand, five hundred and twenty three li should get us close enough.”

“That means almost nothing to me,” Willow said. “I don’t have the relevant conversions for that number.”

“Luckily from our trade with Albion, we’ve picked up on your English mile and they’ve done it for you,” the emperor said. “Eight thousand, three hundred and twenty three miles. Can you do it?”

“I can,” Willow said, then took a breath and blew out. “Leopold?”

“Just over twenty three thousand em,” Leopold said.

“As if I can count that out,” Willow said under her breath. “Whatever, I’ll get close enough.”

She glanced at Leopold and he gave a small nod. Willow raised her hands and began to form the portal spell, concepting multiple layers at once to try to throw the emperor off. He was paying entirely too much attention to just how she moved and what she said, no doubt filing the information away for his own portal project.

Willow felt the other side of the portal and found it was in the woods, although where she had no clue. Was it possible to even find the doorway by touch? She didn’t want to find out, as she didn’t want to get too close to the thing. She was at least pretty sure she was at around twenty thousand-ish em, so they should be in the vicinity.

Willow opened the portal to find pines laden with snow on the other side. She’d opened in the forest somewhere. Before she even got the portal completely stabilized, the emperor jumped through.

Willow’s jaw dropped and she barely held onto the spell as it tried to buck her control, but she eventually wrangled it back into an ellipsoid shape. Finally securing the edges, it seemed as stable as it could get given its extreme length. It might only last a few seconds at best.

The emperor stepped back through.

“I don’t see the doorway on this side,” he said. “You may have been quite a ways off.”

“Not that far off,” Willow said. “Maybe fifty miles in any direction? We might be able to get our bearings on the other side.”

“Very well,” he said, and stepped through again. Willow shot a look at Leopold and they both stepped through the portal as well before she consciously broke the connection. It winked back down into nothing and they were back in America with the most dangerous man in the world.

🜛

Willow cast half a dozen more portals from those woods, all exiting high in the sky for maximum sightline. It wasn’t until the seventh portal that she saw a ridge of hard black over the shoulder of a far away mountain, then she recast a couple miles closer at altitude and saw the looming doorway again.

Even through the portal it made her tremble. The doorway hadn’t changed at all, although the other two portals had long since closed. The door still stood there, dark as pitch and impossibly straight. Snow covered the churned earth which had been the last stand of her attempt to save the enslaved magical creatures.

It was strange seeing the battleground again, but even stranger when the emperor leaned over her shoulder for a better look at the doorway.

“A truly fearsome portal. I can see now how it is affecting my instrumentation from so far away. I didn’t expect it to be so big.”

“You can still disable it, right,” Leopold asked.

“I might be able to. If Sun Geon did, then the theory stands, although this doorway is much larger than the one he had to deal with. We’ll see when I get closer.”

Willow sighed and closed the portal, then prepared to cast another. Between all the portal casts and the initial journey over she was nearly spent, and she felt it in her bones.

One more portal. She wove it almost effortlessly and it irised open just ahead of them. This one was on ground level and the black doorway yawned open across the churned battlefield. The emperor immediately strode through, then stopped.

He looked around and when he turned back to the portal, he wore a quizzical expression.

“I don’t suppose you—”

The emperor turned before finishing and jumped away hard enough to crater the earth and send a spray of frozen soil back through the portal at them. Just at the same moment something moved across the portal’s field of view. It wasn’t something Willow could see, but she felt its presence nonetheless. It gave her an uncomfortable sense of dread.

“What in the seven hells was that,” Leopold said and backed up from the portal. Willow backed up too—this one wasn’t so unstable that she had to be in contact with it for it to remain open for more than a few moments.

A green slash of energy ripped a gout of dirt and they saw the emperor land farther away, closer to the door. He adjusted his stance and struck out again, releasing another scythe of power.

Trees on the bordering mountain fell in a line at his attack, but with a distinct break in the center of the swipe. Something was there, something they couldn’t see, and it had taken the brunt of the green energy.

The emperor dodged left, then right, moving so fast that even at such a distance Willow could barely keep track of him. In her second sight she barely saw something come after the emperor just as quickly. It wasn’t made up of essence in any way she could tell. More like a… vacuum of essence.

The emperor took a stance at the treeline, then dodged as the thing barreled past him. It’s body was solid enough, whatever it was, because it blew down rows of pine like a tornado. It halted its momentum then reversed course.

“Should we… help him,” Leopold asked.

“He’s going to stab us in the back the first moment he gets,” Willow said.

“I know, but he needs a portal back to the Celestial Kingdom, and he knows you’re the only one powerful enough to make one.”

“Maybe,” Willow said. “Or maybe he’ll just make another one of me himself. Or steal a few essence tanks and go about it. He’s centuries old, how can we know what he’s thinking?”

“He’s the only one we know who can close that doorway,” Leopold said. “And I’m getting the distinct impression that whatever it is he’s fighting came through it. What chance do any of us have against something like that.”

Willow sighed. “Let’s go find out.”