Chapter 3

Life in Sacred Valley hadn’t been easy as an Unsouled, but it had at least been comfortable. He had his own home, all the food he could eat, a cozy bed…and a safe place to stay, which he’d once taken for granted. He was embarrassed by his own ignorance. If he had known how frightening the wilderness was, he’d have blessed the Shi family every night for the roof over his head.

After running from the venomous Remnants, he slid down a sloping hill on the Thousand-Mile Cloud until he’d run out of every drop of madra. Exhausting his spirit left him with a dull ache inside of him, an emptiness, as though he were made less by its absence. And no madra to circulate in his limbs meant that he ran out of strength quickly, hauling his pack over one shoulder and Yerin over the other.

Worse, the piping whistles of the Remnants followed them as they made it down the hill and into the black, blighted trees. Their constant presence pressed down on his mind, keeping him perched on the edge of terror. In hours, he felt as though a fire had passed through his spirit, leaving only a burnt-out husk.

When he could move no longer, he found a tree with a thick trunk and a gnarled hollow at its base. He dumped Yerin into it, too tired to be gentle. She made no sound of complaint, only curled up among the roots with her eyes closed and breathing even. Probably cycling to improve her wounds.

Now that he thought of it, she had an Iron body. He might not have even hurt her by dumping her there. Her steel arm hung limp on her shoulder, blade dangling next to her cheek.

Lindon only wanted to collapse next to her, but the distant whistles continued. He forced his legs to carry him forward, scratching script into the dirt with the end of a stick. He extended the script all the way around the tree until Yerin was in the center of a warding circle at least fifteen feet across. Only then did he fall into the hollow next to her, digging into his pack for a stoppered clay bottle of water.

Yerin didn’t open her eyes to take a drink, she simply plucked the bottle from his hand, guzzled half of its contents, and handed it back. By the time they had both drunk, only a few drops sloshed around at the bottom.

He’d resolved to find a source of fresh water when sleep took him. Even with Yerin’s elbow shoving into his ribs on one side and a half-buried rock on the other, his body simply couldn’t stay awake anymore.

When he woke, three rotten dogs snarled at the edge of his circle.

He jerked back against the tree, swallowing a scream. It took him a few breaths to realize that he wasn’t trapped in a nightmare.

The skin of the dogs was raw, bloody red with spots of diseased black. It was stretched tight over a visible rack of ribs, and their stench soaked the air. Their eyes were scarlet as swollen blisters, and they bared shredded lips in snarls that revealed blood-caked teeth.

Like a child seeking the protection of his mother, Lindon shook Yerin’s shoulder. One eye snapped open immediately, though she had to scrape dried blood away from the other with her fingernails.

Once she could fully see, she surveyed the dogs. “I called Heaven’s Glory a pack of rotten dogs, but I’d never conceived they’d be quite that ugly.”

As though they understood the insult, the dogs hissed through teeth, lunging over the warding circle. Fear stabbed Lindon’s heart and he cycled madra on instinct, for whatever good it would do them.

They stopped with only their front paws over the circle, yowling and shuffling backwards. They lifted their claws to avoid stepping on any of the symbols. They didn’t make the whimpering sounds of an injured dog; their howls seemed to contain rage and resentment, as though the pain infuriated them.

Lindon shivered, staring at the dirt just in front of their paws. The script was written on nothing more solid than loose forest soil, and though the dogs were avoiding direct contact with the script, it wouldn’t hold long. The dogs didn’t have to touch the symbols to scrape dirt over them, and even the dirt might obscure the script before long.

Besides, the warding circle was meant to protect against Remnants. Since the script had affected them more like a screen than a fence, they must be sacred beasts…though they looked hideous and diseased, unlike any sacred beasts Lindon had ever heard of. Based on everything he’d been taught, sacred beasts refined vital aura into madra inside their bodies, and the advancement process perfected their bodies. It made them stronger, smarter, more beautiful.

Whatever aura these beasts cultivated had corrupted them, and he had no doubt that they would tear him to pieces. Even if he could use his Empty Palm, he had no idea where a canine’s core was located.

“I don’t want to rush you,” Lindon said, eyeing the spearheads these creatures had for teeth, “but have you recovered at all?”

She cracked one eye. “Not gonna bleed out, but scrubbing out a couple of pups might get…sticky.”

“Sticky? What makes it so sticky?” He was trying to stay calm—the last thing he needed was to irritate the Gold at his side—but these rotting dogs were prowling around the tree now, and he was sure they were looking for a weak point in the script. If he’d spaced one rune too far out, they’d rush in and pull him apart.

“You scowl when you’re fearful,” she observed. “Makes you look like you’re gearing up for a fight.”

He took deep breaths, trying to slow his heart and keep his voice from leaping up an octave. “I’d fight them if I could, but can you?” Despite his preparation, his voice still broke on the last word.

“Well, I’d observed that sacred beasts have been a little light on the ground the last handful of days. Spied a couple of Remnants, but nothing else. Weak and wounded as we were, we should have been hip-deep in predators before we took two steps out of the valley.”

One of the dogs swept a claw at the air over the script as thought scraping at something invisible. Through his Copper sight, Lindon saw the aura the script had gathered: a circle formed from thin, tall rectangles that reminded him of paper doors. When he looked at the aura, he thought of force, impact, solidity…but rigid and thin, as though ready to break at any second. It was a pathetically thin protection against the beasts dripping blood-tinged saliva only a few feet away.

“Why weren’t we, do you think?” Lindon asked, holding his tone steady.

“If we were with my master, I’d say they were scared off by his presence. But these things see me as prey for a pack. You’re more like a bite they’d feed to their pups.”

Lindon cleared his throat, unsure how to respond.

“Point is, they weren’t scared off by us. Something drew them away.”

Something impacted the tree behind them with a meaty thud, and the tree shook like a thick drum. A dog howled, but blackened leaves drifted down on top of them.

“They were drawn away,” Lindon repeated, trying to focus on Yerin’s words instead of the monstrous fangs. “Does that mean you can’t kill them?”

She pointed with her finger and her sword-arm together. “It means they’re all bunched up.”

Lindon stared after her finger, where the gray pre-dawn haze was clustered thickly. He could see nothing but misty shadows beneath the trees.

But after watching for a second, he saw something move. It barely shifted, just giving him the impression of motion, but it was the size of a house.

He wasn’t sure if the light finally improved enough or if his eyes finally picked out a pattern, but after a few more minutes of squinting into the haze, he saw it. Not one giant beast—an army.

The distance seethed with creatures, scurrying like ants in the grass. He could only make out their shapes; many of them looked like the rotten dogs, but others were the size of bears, or even trees. Leathery wings fluttered in the sky as something passed over the tree.

Black-stained teeth snapped shut two feet from his face, and the hound hissed out a putrid breath, but a cold weight had already settled into Lindon’s gut. They weren’t surrounded by three rotten beasts, but by hundreds.

After a moment of dizzy panic that felt like staring over the edge of an impossibly high cliff, Lindon’s mind snapped into focus. They were safe here, at least for now. He had his pack and the treasures he’d stolen from the Heaven’s Glory School, and he had a Gold on his side. There had to be some way to escape.

Yerin lifted an edge of her outer robe and scrubbed dried blood away from her scarred skin. “Don’t fuss about it. Should be a way out, once I’m full up and ready to use the cloud. You should cycle too, it’ll do you good.”

The Thousand-Mile Cloud was actually outside the script-circle, a dense red cloud with wisps of essence drifting away from it. It would dissolve in a few days without maintenance; Lindon had been sustaining it on pure madra over the past week, just as he had with his mother’s constructs back home.

He was grateful that the rotten dogs hadn’t so much as glanced at the Thousand-Mile Cloud, but the unfortunate reality remained. They would have to breach the warding circle to get to the cloud, and they needed the cloud to leave.

“I’ll rely on you, then,” Lindon said. “If I may ask, how long will you need?”

Yerin closed her eyes again and steadied her breath before answering. “A day or thereabouts. My madra’s in better shape than my body, but I should have everything stitched together come tomorrow’s dawn.” The loops of her red rope-belt squirmed away from the roots.

The dogs hissed again, just far enough away that he couldn’t quite touch them if he extended his arm. One of them lay down on its paws, staring at him with fever-bright red eyes.

On a sudden impulse, Lindon looked past the dog to try and see its aura. It was easier the more he did it, but this time he didn’t know what to make of the vital aura gathered around this monster. If identifying other types of aura was like reading simple characters, this was like trying to read a page that had been sliced to pieces and glued back together in a random order.

The aura gathered around the creature’s shoulder swelled like a blister, slick and crawling black. This aura felt like death and decay, like a maggot’s corpse. The deep purple aura around the dog’s ribs was stringy and muscular, like roots or snakes, and it somehow gave off the impression of chains held in powerful tension. Deep red aura dripped from the hound’s mouth, and Lindon could practically smell the coppery tang of blood.

He let the vision fade, thinking. He'd heard of blood madra, which supposedly held all sorts of sinister powers over living bodies, so he assumed that's what was running from the dog's jaws. But what was the rest? If he had to give a name to the bulb over the shoulder, he'd call it “death aura,” but that was based solely on the feeling it gave him. He'd never heard of death madra or any aura of death, and he wasn't entirely sure what such a power would do. Likewise, he had no clue what his mother would call the tight aura chains. Connection aura? Binding aura?

There were more aspects of vital aura surrounding the dog than just those, and the unity of all those different powers in one body meant something significant. He just wasn't sure what.

But it might be the clue that let them out of here, so he meditated on it. Cycling didn't take much of his attention, as he didn't have to pull aura from the atmosphere and could focus solely on his own madra. He retrieved the parasite ring from his pocket, slipping the scripted circle of twisted halfsilver onto his finger.

Instantly, his madra turned sluggish, as though his madra channels had all halved in width. He had to force his madra to cycle, pushing it through the pattern described in his Heart of Twin Stars manual as though forcing syrup through a narrow tube.

It was twice as hard to cycle with the parasite ring on, but the exercise was supposed to strengthen his spirit twice as fast. He had just reached Copper, but that didn't mean he had time to rest. It was the opposite, as he saw it. He was years behind every sacred artist in his clan, so he had to work harder than anyone else to catch up.

Though it was harder now, cycling still didn't take much of his attention. It was a difficult task, but not a complicated one. His mind was free to ponder the mystery of the hideous sacred beasts with twisted auras.

As the day crept on, with dogs snapping and growling every few minutes, a new concern revealed itself: thirst. By late afternoon, he and Yerin had finished the last of the pathetic handful of water remaining in his bottle, and he had become painfully thirsty.

It was there that he missed his home so much that it hurt. He hadn't slept a full night since leaving Sacred Valley, he was only feet away from monsters held back by nothing more than a flimsy, invisible barrier, his entire body was cramped by a night crammed between rocks and roots, and the stress was wearing on his mind. Back home, no matter how badly the other members of his clan thought of him, at least he had all the water he could drink. And tea at every major meal. He could taste the flowery scent of his mother's tea, could even hear the whistle of the kettle...

His eyes snapped open at the same time as Yerin's, and this time the revolting appearance of the dogs didn't catch his attention. He craned his neck to the left, ignoring the dark shapes slithering through the bushes, until he saw it. A bright green shadow appeared under the afternoon sunlight, waving the claws of a centipede in the air and undulating like a snake.

The Remnants had found them.

Yerin braced herself on the trunk as she wobbled to her feet.

“It's nothing to worry about,” Lindon said, trying to reassure them both. “The circle is intended to protect us from Remnants, so it should work even better against them than against the dogs.”

Yerin limbered up her right shoulder, wincing as though it pained her. “Yep. They're not so strong as the dogs.” She drew her pale white blade, and this time Lindon noticed the icy, razor-edged aura that clustered around the weapon so dense that he could barely see the sword itself. “But they're smarter.”

He understood in an instant why she was concerned. The dogs hadn't left them alone because they couldn't break the circle, but because they didn't know how. These were the Remnants of a couple of Lowgolds—they would be stronger and smarter than any spirits Lindon had seen in Sacred Valley.

The circle might stop them for a while, but after enough time, the Remnants would toss some dirt over it. Lindon pushed himself, slipping off the parasite ring and gripping his halfsilver dagger instead. He'd withdrawn the weapon hours before, comforting himself with the thought that he could protect himself if the dogs managed to break through.

He looked past Yerin, deeper into the scene, trying to catch a glimpse of the vital aura around the Remnants. But he was sidetracked, staring at Yerin's waist. Or, more accurately, at her belt.

He'd known it was some sort of construct Forged from red madra, and had wondered if she wore it as some kind of fashion on the outside. Maybe sacred artists in the rest of the world distinguished themselves with clothes made of Forged madra, instead of the badges.

But looking at it now...it was a dense rope of congealed red power, identical to the aura dripping from the dog's mouth but a thousand times more potent. He could practically taste the blood coming off of it, and it made him want to vomit. Visions of slaughter, of an army's worth of corpses, filled his vision.

How could she wear that? It was like having a river of blood wrapped around yourself.

Lindon retched, as suddenly as though someone had punched him in the gut, but nothing came up. He was glad for that, not only because he didn't have the water to spare, but because the sudden impact of the motion knocked him out of his Copper vision.

Yerin watched him from beneath her straight black hair, eyes understanding. “Knew we'd come to this bridge eventually, but let's cross it later. Agree?”

Lindon refocused and steadied his knife and his breathing both. “No, that's not necessary. It's none of my concern, and I apologize if I've given offense.”

She watched him for a second longer, then hefted her white sword and turned back to the advancing Remnants. “We'll talk,” she said.

Then the acidic green Remnants were there, pulling themselves along on their centipede legs. The rotten dogs turned their tails to Lindon and hissed, lowering themselves as though preparing to leap and attack.

In response, the two Remnants made the motion of snapping their jaws open and shut, but there was no sound. They might as well have been the shadows of serpents biting at nothing. Afterwards, they did make a cry: the same whistling teakettle noise that had pursued Yerin and Lindon since their camp.

Lindon's spirits rose. This was something he hadn't considered; for some reason, he'd assumed the Remnants and the dogs would work together to breach the circle and devour the humans.

Only then did he realize how ridiculous that would be. One pack of predators didn't share prey with another. They would fight each other first, and in the chaos the humans might escape.

Some of the rotten beasts haunting the distant forest let out a chorus of growls. Another pair of corrupted dogs padded out of the underbrush, then another.

His optimism vanished, and Yerin's grip tightened on her sword. If the beasts joined together, it wouldn't be a fight with the Remnants so much as a brief extermination.

Turning from Yerin, he focused on aura again. “Allow me to break the circle,” he said. “When I do, you can keep them off us, and I'll get to the cloud.”

Her back was pressed against his, and he felt her nod. The area in front of him was clear, and he kept one eye on the impending battle between Remnants and rotten dogs. As he did, he slid closer to the script.

There was no reason they couldn't leap over the circle, leaving it intact—it wouldn't stop them. But it would affect any madra from Yerin used while it was active. If she tried to use a Striker technique from within the script, its power would be weakened. Maybe to the point of complete uselessness. And if she drew power into herself as an Enforcer, that power would be dispersed as she stepped over the circle.

In all, it was better to disperse the script before it became a trap for them. But he still felt like he was cutting a hole in his own boat as he slid even closer.

When the vital aura around the rotten beasts flared up like dark fire suddenly fed dry timber, he grew sick. Their auras swelled, growing twice as dense and two or three times as large. Somehow, they were growing more powerful.

Then he realized that every aura had inflated in the same way.

The world was awash in a chaos of color beneath his Copper vision, as the veins of yellow in the earth and the flows of green in the grass flared brighter...and then bent, like tree branches pressed down by a strong wind. The vital aura drained off in a phantom river, pouring away from its source, streaming deeper into the forest.

The flow looked like a rainbow river, and it left the world feeling dry and empty in its wake.

Every monster bolted. The Remnants left first, burbling and whistling as they followed the flow of the vital aura. The rotten dogs had an instant of confusion, in which they turned from their trapped prey to the rushing light, visibly torn. Finally, one of them gave a guttural bark, and all of them tore off. Even the dogs farther away from the warding circle followed, quickly overtaking the Remnants.

In the background, amidst the trees and undergrowth, the bigger rotten beasts left. They ran from the warded tree like they were fleeing a burning building, and in three breaths Lindon and Yerin were alone.

Lindon watched the physical world again, trading glances with Yerin. “You don't happen to know what that was, do you?” Lindon asked hesitantly.

“You're asking me, but who am I supposed to ask?” She stood with her white sword held forgotten in one hand, staring into the distance.

Now that the danger was over, Lindon's whole body went slack, and he leaned against the tree, panting. “Were they scared away? Is there something worse coming?”

Yerin gave him a look of surprise. “What? No, it's plain to see what happened to the beasts. They follow vital aura, so they followed it away. Stone simple. But I'm coming up empty on what makes aura do that. Like it gathered together and then rushed off in a blink. Look; I don't know that I've ever seen vital aura so thin on the ground.”

Lindon looked and found that she was right, though that came as no surprise. The world in his Copper vision was dim, as though the scene had been painted in washed-out colors. “How is that possible?” As he'd been taught, vital aura was like the madra of the natural world. It took on different aspects as it moved through the heavens and the earth, though it was all connected. Even when you harvested aura and cycled it into your madra, that was like taking a cup of water from the ocean. Sooner or later, it would return to the source.

Lindon had never seen the ocean, but he'd read stories. This struck him as though the tide had left completely, leaving the shore bare and dry.

Yerin sheathed her sword and walked casually across his warding circle, not bothering to push the day's worth of dirt away from her tattered outer robe. “Scripts can gather up a bunch of vital aura, not considering aspects. Or push it away, sometimes. But if a script is doing this...I'd contend it's ten miles across, engraved in bedrock, and powered by ten thousand Remnants.”

Lindon didn't question it further. Whatever the event had been, it had saved them from having to fight their way out of an army of monsters. He seized his pack and hurried over to the Thousand-Mile Cloud. There hadn't been time for him to recover much madra, and he wasn't confident of his ability to fly it for any length of time or at any great speed.

“How has your spirit recovered?” Lindon asked, hoping she'd be able to feed power to the cloud.

She hopped up and straddled the front of the cloud as though mounting a horse. “I'm not bursting at the seams, but I'm well enough to ride this pony.” She patted the cloud behind her. “Come on up.”

Lindon knelt first, running his hand along the side of the cloud. As he'd expected, the cloud was slightly smaller than it had been the previous day, its sides wispier. One day of missed maintenance wouldn't affect its performance much, but one weed wouldn't overrun a garden either. It was better to take care of the problem while it was small than let it grow larger.

He let his pure madra flow into the construct, feeling it seized by the script at the cloud's center. Madra pulled from his weaker core, and there was a slight delay as the construct processed the pure madra and used it to nourish its Forged cloud madra.

Like a plant growing a thousand times faster, the cloud grew thicker and perhaps half an inch larger. He even thought it may have bobbed higher, though that could have been his imagination.

The effort drained that core dry, as it had been mostly exhausted already, but he switched to the other and climbed up behind Yerin.

“You're a fussy one,” she noted.

“I've always found that a little work up front makes things easier later on,” he said, climbing onto the cloud and securing his pack between them.

He hadn't quite finished when she kicked the cloud up to speed, sending him lurching back and grabbing onto her shoulders for support.

“I think you may have seen hard work sometime in the past,” Yerin called back, “but you never came close enough to shake its hand.”

She blasted through the forest, faster than they had usually gone on their way down from Mount Samara, black-leaved tree branches whipping by Lindon's ear. He leaned down behind Yerin so her Iron body could protect him, though her small back offered little shelter.

Only once he'd adapted to the speed did he recognize their direction. “Apologies, but...are we chasing the monsters?”

Branches whipped her as they passed by, but she ignored him as though they were nothing more than a gentle breeze. “Aura's heading this way for a reason. May as well find out where that is.”

“We know one thing about where it's headed: there's an army of monsters there. That we know.”

He felt her laugh. “Where did we leave the guy who spilled blood to leave the only home he'd ever known? You're weak, but I didn't suppose you were a coward.”

That prickled his pride, and he straightened. A foolish move, as he immediately took a branch to the face.

Spitting out leaves that tasted of copper and rotten vegetables, he responded. “I'm not saying I won't go, I'm saying I'd like to be somewhat cautious.”

“Oh, I'll be cautious.” She steered the cloud to leap over a bush, rolling down a small hill as he clung to her arms for support. “Somewhat.”