Yerin stopped with her hand on the door.

“It's a pill to make your madra easier to cycle, and it should help you raise your second core to Iron fairly quickly.”

Lindon itched to write the name of the pill down in his notes. He had to record every step of his advancement in The Path of Twin Stars manual. Which brought him a moment of panic, as he realized he didn’t have his pack with him.

He let out a breath of relief as he spotted his pack—with the manual inside—leaning up against the wall. A polished wood-and-jade chest leaked wisps of red from the closed lid, so he assumed his Thousand-Mile Cloud was inside.

“Use the pill together with your parasite ring,” Eithan said, pouring himself another drink. “The effects should complement one another, so that it feels like cycling normally, but you'll see twice the benefit. By the time we land, I hope to be able to take you straight to Jade.”

Lindon cradled the pill in both hands as though it was his key into the heavens. It smelled like honey and rainy days, and the only thing stopping Lindon from popping it into his mouth was his desire not to waste a single second of its effect.

Yerin had already turned from the door to look at Eithan. “How far did that lighten your wallet, would you say?”

Eithan shrugged, but Cassias called back, “About five thousand scales, the way they measure them out here.”

Fisher Gesha's eyes bulged.

“Well, that's a gem and a half,” Yerin said. “You got one for me?”

Eithan waved that away. “It's just a fundamental training pill. Lindon will be taking one of these every day, but I have some more interesting supplements for you. Right now, your best advancement material is your master's Remnant.”

Yerin grimaced, but accepted it. She would have preferred a pill of her own, Lindon knew, but at least Eithan’s reasons were good ones.

Lindon could barely pry his eyes away from the Four Corners Rotation Pill. This was worth more than every year's end gift he'd ever gotten from his parents, and he was supposed to take one every day. Eithan was like an endless treasure box.

Cassias stepped away from his controls, walking out of the glass room and toward the Underlord. “I would urge you to remember what happened when you took over the training of our family Coppers.”

“Oh, that's nothing to worry about.”

Cassias turned to Lindon. “I personally rescued a girl who ran from his training into a place called the Thousand Beast Forest. She survived by hiding from two-headed bears. I found her crouched in a cave, dirty and bleeding, but she begged me to leave her rather than take her back to train.”

Lindon moved his gaze from the pill to Eithan and back. “That does seem…harsh. Perhaps she may have been pushed a little too hard, don’t you think?”

“Don’t worry, I don’t train my students like that anymore,” Eithan said, holding up a bottle to the light. “I was far too lenient before. After weeks of my training, that girl should have been fighting those bears. With her fists.”

Yerin shrugged and opened the door. The wind grabbed the tattered edges of her outer robe, making them trail behind her like smoke. Her red rope-belt, tied in a broad bow behind her, was untouched by the wind.

“If you don't feel like you're going to die when you're training, then you're doing it wrong,” she said, and stepped outside.

Cassias nodded to her back as though acknowledging the point, Eithan laughed, and Fisher Gesha gave an approving grunt.

Lindon swallowed his own misgivings, pushing aside the sinking feeling in his stomach. This was the attitude of the strong. He had to focus on that, and not on what he imagined Eithan’s training had done to the poor Copper girl.

Popping the blue-and-white pill in his mouth, he followed Yerin.

Chapter 6

Jai Long entered his sister’s cabin to find her struggling into a set of sacred artist’s robes. She pushed her arm through one sleeve, trembling with effort, and cinched her robe with both hands as though the cloth belt was made of heavy chain.

She dipped her head when she saw him, though she had to grip her wardrobe to stand upright again.

He tried to sound cold, but instead his voice came out with a sigh. “What are you doing?”

“Going…with you.” She spoke as firmly as she could, but she was looking at the ground, unable to meet his eyes.

Even before the accident, she’d always been shy. And stubborn at inconvenient times.

“I have four Sandvipers staying behind to take care of you,” Jai Long said, gently taking her by the shoulder to lead her back to bed. “You’ll have to stay with the Purelake School for a while, in case anyone from the clan comes looking for you.”

She remained standing, and he was afraid to put too much pressure on her shoulder. Jai Chen glanced up at him like a guilty puppy.

“We don’t…have to…go,” she said, each breath drawn with difficulty.

He couldn’t move her without her cooperation, so he folded his arms. “I’ve already jumped off the cliff. Six Lowgolds and an elder came to the camp looking for me last night, and none of them left.”

She didn’t need to know that they’d been looking for him because he’d been killing Jai clansmen in their homes. There were no civilians in the Five Factions Alliance; everyone who had come to the Transcendent Ruins had done so to try and pull profit from the jaws of danger. Those were sacred artists and warriors that he’d killed.

Though most of them hadn’t died like it.

But he didn’t need to tell his sister exactly how dirty his hands were. That didn’t matter; she was staying out of it.

“We could…go west,” she suggested hopefully.

He started to tell her no, but hesitated. She was referring to a legend. In the mountains to the west of the Desolate Wilds, there was supposed to be a hidden valley that occasionally emerged to trade with the outside. The inhabitants were weak, but protected by a curse.

Jai Chen had been obsessed with the legend since she was a girl. It seemed ideal to her: a hidden safe place.

In his experience, there were no safe places. He immediately wondered what terrible dangers lurked in the valley no one entered.

But even if the valley didn’t exist, the mountains were at the very western edge of the Blackflame Empire, and no one had actively controlled that border for fifty years. It was so remote that even maps drawn in his father’s day hadn’t bothered to include it.

The lands west of the Wilds were unknown to him, but they certainly wouldn’t have a Jai clan.

“We can hurt the clan if we go east,” he said. “We can take revenge for Kral. Do you really want to go west instead?”

The day before, he wouldn’t have asked her such a question. He wasn’t as sure of his course as he had been yesterday.

He had burned to avenge himself on the Jai clan for years, but now that he had the means, he was starting to realize what a monumental task he’d begun. To abandon it now, before he’d gone too far, had a certain appeal.

If they left, this would end as one minor attack on a branch of the clan. No one would look into it too closely, and in five years, no one would remember he or his sister were ever here.