The Nursery, as it turned out, was a second Shattered Mountain Clan compound, located only blocks away from the main compound. The layout was similar to the first — a practical fortification buried in the middle of the city.

The guards let me through, one of them seeming to recognize me, and I stepped into the compound. It was absolutely overrun with goat and human hybrid children. There was maybe one caretaker to every twenty kids, running around causing general havoc, grinding the nubs of their horns against stone.

The entire place was in a state of packing.

I found Nalaar with Mora running circles around him.

“Nalaar!” I said.

The goat man looked despondent, sitting on a stack of packed crates. He sighed as I approached, resting his long muzzle on his leathered black fingers.

“Hey! You got your first trophy!” I said, flicking the tiny shiny fragment hanging from one of his horns.

“And they still won’t help me cultivate.” He said. “I have too much human blood. My spirit roots don’t align with the clans techniques. No one even knows what I’m to cultivate.”

Mora climbed up behind Nalaar, giggling, and grabbed two of his horns, pulling on his head. I looked around. They were clearly getting ready to move out of this place. From what I understood, Nalaar had fought to defend the compound, and the clan still wouldn’t train him in their techniques.

“Why won’t they help you more? Couldn’t the Matriarch do that?”

“The Matriarch wouldn’t waste time on me.” Nalaar sighed. “Besides, they don’t want me to get my hopes up just to flounder into the Second Realm. Every cultivation realm starts to require more and more resources. The First Realm is mostly training and the ambient qi of the world. It would be a waste to raise me past that. I know it.”

I hesitated.

“Why do you want to cultivate anyway? Do you want power?”

“Yes.” Nalaar said. His eyes were burning.

“Turning yourself into a weapon for no other purpose isn’t worth it.” I replied, sitting down on a crate across from it. It creaked a warning. The wood looked decades old; it had probably been used dozens of times.

“It’s not for no purpose.” Nalaar said, resolute. He whipped his head forward. Mora giggled as she was flung off of him, and he caught her in midair, pulling her onto his lap. “It’s for her.”

“To protect her?” I asked.

“Sort of. And to find her father.”

I blinked.

“Is he here?”

Nalaar sighed.

“No. He… he left the prison through the Celestial Scar.”

I didn’t even realize that was possible.

“Doesn’t the Celestial Scar lead into a barren wasteland?”

“Yes… but he… he turned out to be a foreign cultivator. He stayed with us here for years, recovering from a deep spiritual wound. Once he started to heal, he couldn’t stay here anymore. It would bring down the wrath of the prison on us.”

“You want to find him?” I asked.

Nalaar looked down.

“He told me where to search for him.” He said, staring at the ground. “But that I’d have to reach at least the Fourth Realm to reach him. I am not Warrior Caste. Too much mortal and not enough Celestial in me. No one will train me.”

“I’ll train with you.” I said.

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“What?” Nalaar asked.

“Yeah! The captain has me fighting the other guards all the time so I have to be worth something. Teaching them to fight dirty. Or defend against dirty, I guess.”

“I’d still need to find a technique that will work for me.” He said.

“Interface…” I asked aloud. Nalaar already knew that it existed — he thought it was a mind spirit. But he squinted at me as I said its name. “Can you tell what cultivation techniques will work for Nalaar?”

[Oooh. Maybe! Tell him to try using his new technique.]

Nalaar looked at me expectantly.

“Can you demonstrate your new technique?” I asked.

Nalaar hesitated.

“Alright.” He said, standing. He set Mora down, and she ran off to play with the other children.

Two large goat-people slide by us, picking up crates and pulling them away into the street.

Nalaar pulled back an arm and punch. Qi flowed through the technique. Interface highlighted its colored. Earthy browns and vibrant, glowing green life. Nalaar winced as the earthy colored qi seemed to grow fuzzy. He made a soft noise of pain and grabbed at his arm. The earth qi fell away.

[No good at manipulating earth qi. Odd, he was perfectly able to manipulate the qi when he used Scale the Mountain. Is there an issue with his technique, or… maybe this is the affinity with different cultivation techniques. Is his biology different? The qi patterns seem to map the same. I need him to perfrom the next technique as carefully and intentionally as possible.]

“Can you do Scale the Mountain but slow?”

[Yeah, that works.]

Nalaar flappd his hand, waving away a bit of pain.

“I don’t see how it will help.” He said. “But okay.”

Nalaar leaned forward, earthy colored qi circling up his legs along with bright green life. The rest of the qi rejoined the ambient swirl in the air, tinting it almost black as it was stripped of its earth and life elements.

Then the earth qi fell away too. Nalar hopped in place, jumping up just a couple feet and kicking up the packed earth. Water and life qi swirled in their legs.

“Hey! No techniques in here!” Someone shouted. “Nalaar? What the hell.”

The guard-goat shook their head disapprovingly before picking up a box themselves.

[Did you see that? He used the technique entirely with water! That’s the wrong element.]

“You used water to do that.” I said.

“What?” Nalaar asked. Then he blinked. “You can see my technique?”

I pointed at the halo around my neck,

“Interface can.”

“That is a really strange power.” Nalaar said. “We’ll go back to the compound. I’ll try it… if they have a water technique I’ll exchange and try it, if they let me. Help us bring these boxes back to the compound before the Iron Gut attacks again.”

The nursery was already growing much quieter, children and goods being ported out to the safety of the compound. Nalaar turned back, finding Mora and a group of her friends. He brought all of them with him.

Mora stumbled, but stood and walked up right. She was growing incredibly quickly — I wondered if that was a goat person thing. If it was, then how old was she? Maybe they just developed the ability to walk quickly. She was still tiny after all.

I didn’t see any of the children who couldn’t walk at all.

“Why the urgency to move?” I asked, picking up a stack of two crates and following after Nalaar.

“The Iron Gut’s scouting mission yesterday was likely a prelude to a rapid second attack. It could come any moment now, and it will be a lot worse. They’ll send out their enforces to drag a body or two back for revenge. Then we will send our men in to fight them… it will get ugly. The fighting will probably last until the next Bleeding.”

“Moving all the kids to protect them” I nodded. Kids were still soft and squishy, even if they were goats.

I peeked around the crates I carried, looking into the roads. They were bustling. People were blocking doors and windows, barricading themselves in their homes. It seemed like they were taking this upcoming fight seriously.

We returned to the Shattered Mountain clan without incident, dropping off our goods. Children absolutely swarmed the compound, running in and out of the main building and climbing on it. There must have been hundreds of them. Goat people carrying weapons and armor stood in the yard. The children ran off to play.

I shifted my weight, knees bending as I set the crates into the soft earth. The grass was still wet. My fingers brushed against it.

[What the hell was that?] Interface asked.

“What?” I replied.

The yard outside the Shattered Mountain clan was full of people, hundreds of them swarming. The so called Warrior Caste — goats that more closely resembled their Celestial Matriarch than humans, stood and looked toward the central building. Some of them sported huge, spiralling horns, and four or even six eyes.

The Matriarch shot out of the front hallway of the compound with the whoomph of compressed air, shooting into the air. She was the size of a small void ship, almost as large as the compound itself as she unfurled, black wings unfurling like a dark cloud, casting a shadow on us below.

She bleated, the noise nothing like a goat but entirely like the noise of shattering glass tinkling against a stone floor, her eldritch origin all too clear as her snake like body coiled in the sky above us.

The compound erupted into chaos.

“We need to get inside!” Nalaar said, grabbing my shoulder.

“What’s — ” I winced, interrupted as the Matriarch bleated again. “ — happening? Is Iron Gut attacking?”

Around us, the court yard was a mess of panic as noncombatants rushed inside and guards equipped themselves with weapons, grouping up with each other.

“No.” Nalaar said, eyes trailing the shadow in the sky. I heard similar, terrible noises from the other parts of the city, distant horrible sounds that shook the world. “The Celestial Scar opens. The Bleeding has begun.”

I looked into the distant sky. Above the city, below the wall, the purple holes in the world began to expand. Hundreds of dark shapes poured out like smoke leaking from a fire.