The arm stiffened, like a dog catching a new scent.
Lindon threw more at it. His feelings as he looked over the Heaven's Glory School's treasures: he wanted it all, but even that wouldn't be enough. He remembered the sensation of Blackflame, the desire of a dragon to conquer and to destroy.
Then he shoved the end of the arm onto his stump.
The construct didn't resist him, but pain blacked out his memory for a moment. When he came back to himself, he was on the floor, his back propped up against a cool wall. Fisher Gesha was muttering, her hook on the ground next to her, holding her wrinkled hands over his elbow.
Where flesh met pure white madra.
“Dangerous,” she muttered. “Too dangerous. Could have devoured you, you know that? Hm? And you made me Forge it on, so that will hurt your compatibility. An impulsive Soulsmith is a dead Soulsmith, I can say that much for certain.”
He forced a smile. “Forgiveness, and thank you. I can only tell you that I thought it would work. I felt...like it would,” he finished, though it sounded limp when he put it that way.
She grunted and thwacked him on the forehead with her knuckles. “You have to stay open to your instincts when you're Forging a construct. That's important. But don't go sticking things on your body just because you feel like it, hm?”
Full of expectation, Lindon flexed his new white arm.
It twisted backwards, fingers twitching, reaching for Fisher Gesha's face.
She stepped back, sighing. “It will take you some time to adjust so that you can control it naturally. Scripts could speed the process up, but they would eventually restrict you, so it's better to adapt over time.”
Lindon nodded, focusing on his spirit. The arm's madra wasn't flowing into his body, but his power was flowing into it, and it was quite a burden. It took more madra to maintain his arm than to Enforce the rest of his body together.
“Don't try to use the binding yet,” she warned him, sticking a finger in his face. “Lindon? I could not be more serious. Your madra channels are having enough trouble with the load of a Remnant's arm. If you try to use the binding, your spirit might tear itself apart. You have to get used to your new arm, and preferably strengthen your channels, yes? You should really wait as long as possible before you try to use the technique. At least four to six weeks.”
Lindon nodded attentively, but his mind was focused on controlling his new arm. Finally, he got it to run its white fingers over the floor.
Sensation was...odd, through the new limb...as though the arm were talking directly to his brain and spirit instead of his body. Like he knew the floor was rough and cold, rather than feeling it as he would through a hand of flesh and blood.
But at least he could tell if something was hot or cold, smooth or rough. He would take it.
Forcing the arm to move as he wanted it to was stressing his spirit, and Little Blue seemed to react to that. She reached up from his collar, slapping her tiny hand on his chin. A cold spark traveled through him, soothing his channels and giving relief to his spirit. When the spark reached his arm, it shuddered and stilled for a moment.
“That's better, thank you,” he said, smiling down at little blue. She dipped her head in respect and then gave him a broad grin. Where had she learned that?
No matter how much trouble it caused him, he had an arm. He could be careful for a few weeks if it meant having two hands again.
He leaned his head back against the wall, exhausted, and met Fisher Gesha's face. She seemed concerned.
“Gratitude, Fisher Gesha. I'm excited to see what I can do with this.”
Gesha watched him quietly for a few seconds before folding her arms and addressing him with the look of a strict grandmother. “What is wrong with you, boy?”
That wasn't the first thing he had expected her to say. “Honored Fisher, I humbly apologize for anything that I—”
“You've been running at a full sprint for more than a year. Well, I guess I can understand it at first, considering your fight with the Jai boy. Afterwards, I thought you'd settle into a routine, hm? No, it's adventure after adventure with you. You're going to burn yourself down to ash if you keep this up.”
Lindon held his hands out in a pacifying gesture, trying to reassure her. Well, he held one hand out. The other squeezed into a fist and shook itself aggressively.
“I have a lot farther to go,” Lindon said reasonably. “If my goal was only Jai Long, then certainly, I could have given up and gone home by now.”
“You think you hike up a mountain by sprinting all the way, do you?” she snapped. “You need a place to rest as much as anyone, if you don't want to crack like bad steel.”
“I can't afford a break yet. I started too late; only last year, I was still Copper. If I don't try as hard as I can, I can't catch up.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Catch up? Who exactly are you trying to catch up to, hm?”
Only two names flashed through his mind, but he was embarrassed to say them out loud.
“They call you the twenty-fourth ranked Lowgold on the combat charts,” she said. “You know what that means?”
“That there are twenty-three Lowgolds stronger than I am,” he said immediately.
“That you're ranked higher than three quarters of the Empire! If you settled down and lived in the Arelius family, you'd be Highgold by twenty-five. Considering it's you, probably Truegold ten years later. You could be an Underlord in your fifties. And that's living peacefully! You could settle down, rest, find a nice young lady, raise a family. You don't have to live every day like you're looking to die!”
She was shouting by the end, and Lindon winced as every word landed.
Because they hit him too close to home.
Since leaving Sacred Valley, he had risked his life almost daily. He'd given everything to move forward. He didn't regret it—if anything, his only regret was that he'd advanced too slowly.
But it was scraping him raw.
He felt like a man who had started to run down a hill, going faster and faster until he couldn't stop. Now he had to keep accelerating or stumble and fall.
The problem was, he really couldn't stop. As enticing as that vision was, he could never return to his homeland as an Underlord. Not if it took him more than thirty more years.
His home would be gone by then.
Lindon started to speak, and was surprised to find his voice rough. His vision had blurred—were those tears? Fisher Gesha looked down on him sympathetically.
There came a single knock at the door, and then Yerin pushed her way in. “They said you'd be fussing around with constructs in here,” she said, glancing around the room. “Didn't want to bump your sword-hand, so I knocked.” She saw the white arm and brightened.
“Skeleton arm! Scarier than a tiger's teeth, I love it. With your black eyes, that'll have them messing themselves before you ever throw a punch.”
That hadn't been Lindon's actual goal, but he was glad she was pleased. And it did remind him of another issue: he had to test the arm with Blackflame. All of the tests performed on samples by Fisher Gesha's drudge had suggested the two types of madra wouldn't interfere with each other, certainly not after his soul acclimated to the limb, but there was no way to be sure without testing.
“I'll take any advantage I can get, in a fight,” Lindon said, surreptitiously swiping at his eyes and rising to his feet.
Yerin straightened her back, the silver Goldsigns over her shoulders rising. “That wasn't why I came. I have news for you, and the sand's running down.” She met his eyes with a firm gaze. “Skysworn are going sword-to-sword with Redmoon Hall. I'm joining them.”
Lindon's new arm twitched as he lost control of his breathing technique. He had known she’d spoken with the Skysworn, but not how it had turned out. She hadn’t told him, and he’d been afraid to ask.