Together, it was like trying to fight with someone else’s hands. Some days it felt like she couldn’t take two steps without her own body betraying her.

She could tap into the silver Remnant in her core, and sometimes she was tempted. But even when he was stealing her madra, ruining her chance at passing the Trial, it was still another chance at hearing his voice.

She couldn’t give that up. And any insight into the Path of the Endless Sword was rarer than diamonds for her; without her master’s voice, she would be the only expert remaining on her Path.

She’d cross over to Highgold eventually, even without silencing her master again, she was sure of it.

Every day, the gong seemed to grow louder.

***

Lindon knelt, driving an Empty Palm deep into the ground. He’d raised his pure core to Jade, and the technique penetrated deeper than he’d dared to hope, almost disrupting the script that powered the Trial. If he could break it, that would disrupt the function of the Trial long enough for them to pass through.

But it wasn’t enough. The soldiers swarmed him, beating him until he dropped the crystal. He screamed as the gong sounded.

The cool winter breeze that had once flowed into the valley had long since grown hot. Lindon and Yerin gathered food with wordless efficiency now, choking down the oily, gritty crab meat and retiring to their own caves to cycle.

Lindon cycled Blackflame for two hours every night, drawing aura of heat and destruction into his endlessly grinding stone wheel.

It would burn everything, that aura. Lindon came to think of it as a hungry power: the blazing drive for more, more, more. It filled him as he cycled, until he wanted to tear the Enforcer Trial apart with his teeth.

The dragon advances. That was what the Enforcer tablet had said, and those seemed like the words of the Blackflame madra itself. It wanted to advance like a furious dragon, tearing apart everything before it.

If only he could.

The parasite ring weighed down his spirit. He knew that in the long run it would help his training, but every day he almost threw it into the pool.

The Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel made his breath so heavy and long that it burned his lungs, every cycle of madra so torturously slow that his spirit ached like muscles cramped and trapped. Whenever he caught a normal breath, free of the technique, he almost sobbed with relief.

His own Blackflame madra ate away at his madra channels, leaving black residue like soot in his spirit. If he didn’t cleanse it, he’d be leaving injuries and blockages in his soul, harming his future development. After using Blackflame too much, he had to spend several hours cycling pure madra to clean out his madra channels. It was hard to sit there all afternoon, cleaning his spirit, and not feel like he was wasting time.

Real Blackflames probably had a method to deal with that problem, but he had no one to ask. Orthos had kept his distance, circling through the mountain but never intruding on their Trial grounds. Sometimes Lindon felt him in the distance, his spirit burning with madness, and other times he was calm as a dying fire. In both states, he stayed away.

The Sylvan Riverseed’s appetite had increased since her transformation. She begged him for pure madra even when he was exhausted and could barely push his spirit through a single cycle.

The Burning Cloak had cost him weeks of training before he could use it naturally. The explosive bursts of strength and speed it provided meant he had to learn to do everything over again: run without hurling himself into a tree, throw a punch without breaking his own elbow, cut food without slicing off his own fingers. Yerin had even set him up with a juggling routine until he could keep three stones in the air without losing the Burning Cloak, dropping a stone, or hurling one of the pebbles out of the valley. Every day they spent perfecting his precision felt like a day lost; a day when he could have been challenging the Trial.

Even his body betrayed him, leeching his core every time he was wounded, draining him dry and leaving him limp and powerless on the ground. The Bloodforged Iron body was the only reason they could challenge the course as often as they did, but it also crippled him after every failure.

Over it all, Jai Long loomed like a specter. This Trial was supposed to be the first step to defeating him, but Lindon had tripped and fallen at the first stair.

…though as painful as each day was, as miserable as he felt in those nights when he wept alone in his damp cave, he couldn’t deny the results.

After months of work, his Burning Cloak covered him in a thick blaze of red and black. He could keep it active for twenty minutes, so long as nothing cut him and activated his Iron body, and he could drive his fist straight through a Forged soldier.

His cores felt like a pair of lakes now, where they’d once been buckets. They didn’t look any larger than before, but they felt deeper, like the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel had drilled down to profound depths. He spent more madra in a single Trial attempt now than his entire spirit could have contained only months before.

The improvement kept him going, got him out of his cave in the morning, kept him from abandoning his breathing technique as a trap, made him pick up the Trial’s activation crystal again and again even though he’d sooner embrace a venomous snake.

Continuing meant taking another step forward. Giving up meant accepting death at Jai Long’s spear.

Between them, he and Yerin were now destroying fifteen or sixteen soldiers every run, getting closer and closer to the end of the Trial.

But they never made it.

He’d tried every answer he could think of: hurling the crystal, digging to break the script, building a simple construct out of half-formed soldier parts, running straight through the columns without stopping, altering the script that ran the Trial. Nothing worked. It seemed the Soulsmiths who built this course had thought of everything.

Time blurred and faded away. Only the endless cycle of day and night mattered, because the Trial only worked during the day.

He stopped hearing the gong. When the soldiers caught him or his Burning Cloak flagged, he simply walked away.

***

It had been four months since Eithan had first opened the temple at the top of the mountain, and Cassias had grown used to his duties.

Since Yerin and Lindon usually needed two or three days of rest between attempts, he could bring his work with him. He’d moved a table up to this peak, writing letters and reading reports while keeping half of his detection web on the children. After sixteen weeks, this hidden temple looked more like an office than his actual office did.

Cassias spent most of his time alone with paperwork or his own training. He found he enjoyed it; letting Eithan handle the bulk of Arelius affairs suited him. He’d needed a break.

In contrast, the children were having the most stressful experience of their lives.

He sipped tea as he watched the children cycle in the morning, through the scripted window. He no longer expected they would give up—if they hadn’t done so by this point, they likely never would. They would die in an accident during the Trials before they surrendered.

Cassias had given himself over to that prospect with weary acceptance. In four months, you could grow used to almost anything.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he still hoped that today would be the day Eithan would grow tired of this project and pull him away. Almost half of the allotted time to Jai Long’s duel had passed, and even a blind Copper could see that Lindon wasn’t ready.