She held out one palm, Forging a spear of red ice. From her vantage point among the clouds, she looked down on the great spider that crouched over her city, spreading its webs from building to building. She let soulfire bleed into the Forged spear, its gray fire tempering the technique, smoothing it, nourishing it.
Now, the spear shone like a polished shaft of diamond. This was the strongest technique she could conjure.
She only hoped there was anyone down there to survive this.
Meiyen Teia, Underlord on the Path of Glacier’s Birth: the Devastation of Whisperbark.
Lindon came out of the memory gasping, his last sight a storm of bloody ice shredding a great spider...and the city over which it lurked.
He sat down and focused on the vision, drinking down a vial of Dream Well water he’d brought with him.
“What do you call that feeling she was having?” Dross asked.
“Grief,” Lindon responded absently.
“I don’t like it,” the constructed decided. “It’s too heavy. Go back to the one with the man who had just cured his daughter’s disease.”
Lindon couldn’t spare the effort to reply, instead focusing on the Underlord’s memories. How her madra felt as it ran through her, the rhythm of her cycling technique, the feel of pulling soulfire from the center of her soul.
Buried in these memories was the key to developing his own Path.
The Path of Twin Stars needed a real Enforcer technique, he knew that. Over the last week, he’d checked dozens of dream tablets, and he’d discovered a greater variety of Enforcer techniques than he’d ever imagined. Full-body Enforcer techniques were the standard, but they were only one type. Many of the techniques he found were single palm-strikes or sword slashes, concentrating their Enforcement on a single blow. Those gave him the shadow of an idea to improve the Empty Palm, but they weren’t what he really needed.
He focused on another category: movement techniques. He needed something to close the gap between him and his opponent if he wanted to land an Empty Palm. Until this point, he’d been forced to rely on letting his opponent come to him.
Some of the memories contained single steps or leaps that ate the gap between opponents in one burst. Others held full-body Enforcer techniques focused entirely on speed, or Forger techniques that carried their users where they needed to go.
After viewing several of them, he’d started trying to apply the principles of the Burning Cloak to his pure core. The Blackflame Enforcer technique burned his flesh and spirit for a contained explosion of madra, which resulted in a burst of power.
What he learned was that pure madra was about as combustible as a snowbank. It felt like a still pond, only even less substantial.
So, since he’d found no records of anyone on a pure Path, he started looking up water artists.
These were almost all scenes of battles or intense training, so none of them were designed to explain the principles behind the techniques the subjects were using. He had to extrapolate based on the feeling of the technique.
His image of Ekeri helped as much as anything. He had a clear understanding of what her Enforcer technique looked like from the outside; when she had fought with it active, she had bent and flowed effortlessly, like a stream.
Blackflame was furious, and he had to match that fury and give it an outlet in order to control it. Pure madra, like water, had to be slowly guided and gathered until it had enough momentum to become a raging river.
Time fell away as Lindon focused on his madra, building it up and up to a rushing crescendo through his veins. When he thought it had reached its peak, he controlled it into a new pattern.
He had spent days theorizing this technique, based on adapting pure madra according to the principles of the Burning Cloak. But this was the closest he’d gotten to a real test.
Finally, something happened. Madra flooded through his body, giving him a sense of steady strength, and blue-white power flared in the air around him. His excitement soared along with it, until the madra dissipated a second later and his pure core returned to stillness. It had taken half of his Twin Stars madra to activate even that much, and it had only lasted a breath. He sighed and started stretching his legs—meditating on his madra so long was a good way to get cramps.
Only then did he notice Ziel sitting across the aisle from him, on the floor, back leaning against another shelf of dream tablets. His eyes were closed, his head tilted back, and his green horns glimmering in the light of the tablets.
“There’s no one around to see,” Ziel said. “You can take a break.”
Lindon looked down at his outstretched legs. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Ziel opened his eyes as though his eyelids were heavy. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. “You push yourself to the brink of collapse, then you drink your potion and you keep going. Almost two weeks now, and I’ve never seen you stop working.”
“This is a rare opportunity for me,” Lindon said. “I’d hate to miss it.”
“You’re killing yourself for nothing.”
He didn’t look any older than Lindon, but he spoke like he carried the burden of ages.
“The prize is an illusion,” he continued. “The mountain has no peak. You keep climbing and climbing until you fall off and break yourself at the bottom. Highgold is one step, Truegold is another step, but there’s no end to it. You could walk forever, but every Path ends in a fall.”
His bloodshot eyes pierced Lindon, who shifted uncomfortably.
“...two years ago, I started at the bottom,” he said at last. He told Ziel about his life in Sacred Valley as briefly as possible, skipping over Suriel and making it sound like they had a dream artist who had caught a glimpse of the future.
“Now, I have a chance I never had before. I would be a fool to waste even a second of it.”
Ziel watched the dream tablets shifting over Lindon’s head. “Just make sure you have something else to keep you going. Sacred arts are not enough to live for.”
With that, he pushed himself to his feet and started shuffling down the row of shelves. When he reached the end, he turned and looked back to Lindon.
“Keep up,” he said.
Lindon followed.
Dirty cloak fluttering behind him, Ziel paced down the shelves until he found the tablet he wanted.
The Script Lord, Archlord on the Path of Whispering Wind: the Creation of the Seven Principles.
Ziel nodded to it. “For you.”
Lindon hesitated. “Gratitude, but I am not advanced enough to tolerate the memories of an Archlord.”
“Try it.”
He had not been swayed at all, so Lindon took a swig of water from the Dream Well. His thoughts sharpened, and he braced himself, inserting a thread of pure madra.
He stroked his long, white beard, his body tender and aching in the chair. He would have to stand soon, but inspiration was upon him, his quill pen scratching feverishly on the scroll in front of him.
For too long, the Foundation children had used the same cycling techniques. Now, he had applied his long years of experience to revising his sect’s Foundation theory, and he had found it an unexpectedly rich area of research. No one with any knowledge had ever reevaluated the principles of pure madra; why would they? No one advanced without harvesting aura. As a result, the children used inefficient techniques.