“Don’t fall,” she said, and Lindon took her advice, hugging the cloud to his body.
Her madra filled the construct, and it lurched back into the air. It didn’t seem to want to rise, but she forced it up, jumping it back to the cliff in a series of awkward jerks. Finally, it slid through the gap in the Tomb wall and they both spilled out onto solid ground.
“Gratitude,” Lindon said between breaths.
She raised a hand in acknowledgement…and a steel limb lifted along with it. It looked exactly like one of the six blades on the back of the Sword Sage’s Remnant, and now it dangled from Yerin’s back like the single leg of a spider.
“Is that what Gold looks like?” he asked.
Yerin began to fumble around in her robes, searching pockets. “If my memory’s true, master left me…” An instant later, her hand emerged with a badge of solid gold. In the center, there was a simple picture of a sword. She slipped the ribbon over her neck and held the badge, examining it.
He collapsed onto his back, wallowing in pleasant relief. He hadn’t wasted his life yet. And now he had a Gold on his side.
“Do you trust me now?” he asked.
“More than none,” she responded. She heaved herself into a seated position, and the new limb on her back bobbed with her. “Real test hasn’t even arrived yet.”
Lindon craned his neck, looking out the door, and he almost cried. Three other rusty clouds had come to a stop, carrying men and women in white robes. “Oh look,” he said. “There it is now.”
Yerin didn’t seem to hear him. She was kneeling in the corner of the Tomb, next to something he hadn’t noticed before: the body of a man in black robes. The stone around him was charred in a long, black line, and a sword lay bare beside him. Its blade seemed unnaturally white.
She bowed so deep that her forehead touched the ground. Three times she bowed, as the first man from Heaven’s Glory ran through the door. His hands were glowing golden, and his Jade badge marked him as an Enforcer. Enraged eyes fell first on Lindon.
“Disciple, report!” he demanded.
Then Yerin rose from beside her master’s body. She had left her own sword with him, and was sliding the white-bladed one into a sheath at her side. The silver blade on her back rose like a scorpion’s tail, and she turned her scarred face toward the Heaven’s Glory elder. A gold badge dangled from her neck.
The Jade scrambled backward so fast that it looked like someone had kicked him. He screamed for the others to stop, to back up, to surround the tomb.
Lindon had discovered that he could only stay tense and afraid for so long before his body just grew numb. Yerin could frighten Heaven’s Glory away from the Tomb on her own, and if she couldn’t, it wasn’t as though he would be a great help.
So he was free to pursue an idle theory that had bothered him for some time.
From his pack, he withdrew the Starlotus bud. It was pale white with streaks of pink, the sort of pure color that he normally associated with Remnants, and its petals were curled into a half-bloom, as though it had frozen in the act of opening completely. It was a natural work of art.
He bit it in half.
It tasted like sweet grass with a slightly bitter undercurrent, but it dissolved like sugar on his tongue. He swallowed it in seconds, crossing his legs and straightening his back into a cycling position.
“They have to pull the tiger’s tail, don’t they?” Yerin said. “If they want their share sooner rather than later, I’ll…what are you doing?”
The energy of the spirit-fruit—was it still a spirit-fruit if it was an edible flower? He assumed so—showed in his mind’s eye as a bright pink-tinged white. It dispersed in his stomach, flowing around his spiritual veins in a river of lights that tickled as they traveled. When they had traveled around his body, they tried to enter his core.
Or rather, his cores.
When he had first read the Heart of Twin Stars, he’d theorized a few uses for the technique besides defense. He hadn’t been able to test them without ripping his core in half, but now he had his chance.
While keeping one core tightly closed, he directed the Starlotus madra into the other.
The right-hand core grew brighter, stronger, immediately nourished by the spirit-fruit. It had a small effect immediately, but many of the pale pink dots stayed in the core, tickling him from the inside out. They would be digested over the next days and weeks.
When he’d finished gathering the Starlotus energy into one core, he inspected the other. It was totally clear.
He emerged from cycling with a bright smile on his face. Yerin laughed at him. “You look like you just tore that elder apart with your teeth.”
He rubbed at his front teeth, and his finger came back sticky with blood. He spat out a mouthful, but his enthusiasm was undimmed. “I took half the Starlotus.”
A lance of gold shot through the door, and she dodged to one side, baring the white blade in her hand. “You thought now was the opportune moment to fuzz up your core?”
Lindon climbed onto the Thousand-Mile Cloud, beckoning her to join him. “We’re not fighting, and I wanted to test a theory.”
“If Heaven’s Glory wants me to spill some more blood, I’m not telling them no.” Yerin strode over to the open door, her master’s pale blade to one side.
Even to Lindon’s numb heart, some feeling returned. Panic. “We have to leave now. They won’t follow us outside the valley.” She wasn’t listening to him, so he added, “What would your master say about throwing your life away here?”
She deflected another lance of light, but she didn’t leave the Tomb. “He’d say if I killed one of them for each of my fingers, I could die proud.”
Of course he would.
Lindon considered a number of approaches. His first instinct was to shout at her, reminding her of her oath. He considered begging, bargaining, even leaving her and taking his chances outside the valley.
Quietly, he said, “Please don’t leave me to die.”
She flinched visibly, even as a trio of Heaven’s Glory enforcers came up the stairs, their hands shining gold. The grip on her sword shifted. She leaned forward, then back.
With a growl, Yerin swept her white blade across the doorway to the Tomb. The colorless sword energy hung in the air at neck-height, frozen in place even as she turned and ran toward him.
“You can go rot,” she said, shoving him to the back of the cloud and hopping in front herself. “But bleed me if I’m leaving anybody. Not even you.”
On their way out, Yerin sliced another pillar. The Ancestor’s Tomb groaned, cracked, slowly crumbling under a lack of support. As they flew out the hole in the wall, the ceiling tilted and collapsed into a landslide of rubble, delaying Heaven’s Glory.
And interring the Sword Sage forever in his killer’s tomb.
They slid down the other side of Mount Samara on the Thousand-Mile Cloud, and as Yerin steered them down the slopes, Lindon kept his eyes on the scenery at the bottom. It was a rolling ocean of green, and every once in a while something stuck its head up over the treetops like a fish breaking the water’s surface.
He drank in the sight, because it was one no one in the Wei clan had ever seen. This was the land beyond Sacred Valley.
“If you’re through with the other half of that flower,” Yerin called back, “I’ll give it a home myself. It’ll do anybody’s spirit some good.”
“Apologies, but I still need it. The other half only went to one of my cores.”
“…you’ve got two short breaths to explain that before I push you off and let you roll down.”
So Lindon explained the Heart of Twin Stars. It turned into something of a winding story, as he had to explain the orus spirit-fruit, his fight with the Mon family, the Empty Palm technique, and eventually the Seven-Year Festival.