A small door opened in the air.
It was a square opening about four or five feet to a side, sitting on the ground like someone had opened a box without bothering with the actual box part. Without hesitation, Mercy rummaged around inside, pulling out fluffy padded blankets and a metal box that radiated fire aura. A heater.
“It won’t be comfortable,” Mercy said, voice downcast. “The tent is really meant for one person.”
“The tent,” Yerin repeated.
Mercy held up a palm-sized square of dark green Forged madra, which snapped into a pyramid-shaped tent. Scripts on the outside provided an extra veil and warded away spirits. Mercy stared at the shelter like she couldn’t imagine how they’d ever squeeze both people inside, but to Yerin it looked like a palace.
“If the heavens gave me one wish, I’d ask to be reborn as a Monarch’s kid.” Yerin still wasn’t sure how she felt about Mercy, but at least the Akura girl came with supplies.
Mercy’s brow furrowed. “It’s just a tent.”
Yerin was already climbing inside.
After a night in the tent, Yerin was certain that the journey would be easier than she had ever imagined. They started well-rested, they made good time that first morning, and they had a map. More than once, on her journeys with the Sword Sage, Yerin would have killed for convenience like this.
Their first delay came when they sensed a Redmoon Underlord a few miles ahead of them. They ended up having to stay in the tent, veiled, for a full day before they could confirm the enemy had withdrawn.
Then a flock of Truegold-level vultures caught their scent, forcing them off the path.
Then there was the mammoth that grazed on trees. They had to go around him.
A zone of shadow and darkness covered another hillside as Redmoon Hall skirmished with servants of the Akura family, and they had to sneak past.
Before she knew it, the days flowed like water and they still hadn’t reached their destination.
Their speed dropped to a crawl, and they were forced to wait for hours at a time. So Yerin did what she always did when the hours pressed in on her: she trained.
As he fell through the air, the Sword Sage continued to fight.
One of his opponents flew on currents of air, his Ruler technique commanding the wind aura as he soared with no wings. That one produced halfsilver darts, whipping them at the Sword Sage to try and disrupt his madra.
The other rode an eagle like a horse, carrying a long spear in one hand and a shield in the other. Her eyes blazed the same color as her sacred beasts, and sword aura gathered around the eagle’s claws.
Her lance-strike carried the putrid, sickly energy of death madra. The wind artist hammered him with gusts of wind madra to keep him off-balance, to knock him into the halfsilver darts.
He took a look at the deadly lance an inch from his skin, the furious eagle rearing to strike behind it. He sensed the bludgeon of wind madra from beneath him, the glimmer of sharp chaos as the halfsilver darts closed from behind.
With a tap of his madra, his sword rang like a bell.
As she advanced through the Highgold stage, Yerin had unlocked more memories that had been ingrained into her master’s spirit. Some of them were personal or too short to make anything out of them, but some contained the insights into the Path of the Endless Sword that he’d never been able to share with her. She chewed on these like a cow with a mouthful of grass, meditating on them morning and night.
In this case, the Sword Sage’s Endless Sword technique had met every attack at the same time. The eagle’s claws, the deadly lance, the halfsilver darts—they were all knocked aside at once as though deflected by invisible swords.
Only the green column of wind madra was unaffected, and the Sage sliced that in half with a wave of madra from one of the six sword-arms on his back.
The rest of the scene faded, leaving Yerin to replay it over in her mind.
The Endless Sword was the Ruler technique for which her whole Path was named. It was the root and branch of her master’s fighting style. But she hadn’t even used it in her fight against Bai Rou.
The truth was, hers was a pale shadow of her master’s. Her master could use the Endless Sword to cut one page from a closed book. She just hit the aura around her weapon as hard as she could with her madra. It spread out like ripples in a pond, cutting everything in its path, and when it passed through another source of sword aura, that aura burst too. Her master had called it aura resonance, and with enough madra behind it, it could start a cascading reaction that could tear a city to pieces.
But in her case, it didn’t pack enough punch. She could only use it effectively against enemies weaker than she was. And what good was a weapon that couldn’t be used against real opponents?
She’d focused on other pieces of her Path instead: advancement, her other techniques, physical swordplay. For too long, she had neglected the namesake of her Path. She had hoped that, as she grew in insight and experience, the Endless Sword would begin to make more sense to her.
Now Yerin was out of time. She needed more power...and her Blood Shadow was right there.
If she didn’t find a new weapon, she’d be forced to rely on the Shadow every time the battle became tough. It had tormented her for too long; she couldn’t lean on it. Frankly, it turned her stomach when she so much as thought about it for too long. If she never had to use it, that would be the real victory.
Which meant she needed to win without it.
In that vision, the Sword Sage had demonstrated the second level of Endless Sword mastery: sword like the wind. Yerin was stuck at the “storm” stage. Her aura exploded out from her weapon in a furious, uncontrolled storm.
But he’d revealed a much greater level of control. His sword-aura was quiet, invisible, and everywhere.
There were three higher levels of mastery.
He’d barely mentioned any of this to her before his death. She’d discovered most of it from the visions he’d left behind in his Remnant, paired with some of her own memories of him in combat. Technically, her skill in the technique wasn’t connected to advancement. She could reach Archlord if her Endless Storm still looked like a hurricane. With enough power behind it, it could do damage.
But her madra was already dense enough to cross the barrier to Truegold. A deeper connection to her master’s Remnant could give her that last nudge she needed to get there.
She hoped.
From the branches above her, a brown leaf drifted slowly to the ground. With a deep breath, she delicately tapped the sword in her lap with her madra. The dense silver aura around it flared, pushing out into one direction.
She could control that much, at least. Directing it one way or the other was an advancement for her. Now, her goal was to cut that falling leaf in two.
The leaf exploded into shreds. It fell to the ground as a fistful of dust.
After another hour, she gave up, stretching her legs and standing up. “We clear to move on yet?” she asked.
Then she saw that Mercy had begun training of her own.
The Akura girl was hanging upside-down from a limb at the top of a tree. She held a short wooden bow, arrow nocked, and her eyes were closed. Her breathing was even, and though Yerin was close, she couldn’t sense the girl’s presence at all.
After she had held that position for several minutes, three leaves fell from her tree at once.
Purple eyes snapped open, and she slipped her legs out of the branch.
She fell, arms blurring as she released the first arrow, pulling a second from the air, stringing it, and loosing it. Then a third.
Only then did the first arrow pierce the first leaf, pinning it to the ground several yards away. The second followed suit. The third arrow brushed by its target, sending the leaf spinning in the wind of its wake.