“Let's not inflict my company upon them,” Jai Long said dryly. “They're having fun.”

If Kral's companions could have cheered that statement without losing face, Jai Long was sure they would have.

Kral's smile sharpened. “They won't say a word about it, that I can promise you. They know the hand that feeds them.”

They wouldn't need words to express their displeasure, Jai Long knew. No one did, really. When he'd returned to his family with his sister's bloody and broken body in his arms, his parents were more horrified by his face than by the fate of their daughter. What have you done to yourself? they didn't ask him. Was it worth it? they didn't say.

When the Jai Patriarch banished him to the Wilds, the words were hollow and empty, forms without substance. The old man's disappointment oozed across the room, so tangible that it might as well have been vital aura taken form. The star that would have guided the clan into the future had stepped off the Path, ruining his future advancement. And he was hideous...how could he represent the Jai like that?

Nothing truly important needed to be said. When he returned to the clan, unseated the Patriarch, and forced the rest of the family to bow before him, he wouldn't need any speeches either. Above all else, sacred artists respected strength.

Jai Long intended to use his.

“Can you imagine me saying yes?” he asked Kral, and the young chief gave a bitter laugh.

“In truth, no. But what sort of host would I be if I didn't ask?”

Kral had his faults. He pursued sacred arts with admirable dedication, but at every other sort of work he balked. He was lazy, irritable, quick to anger, slow to apologize, arrogant, and even occasionally cruel.

But he'd treated Jai Long well, and it would not be forgotten.

Jai Long said none of this, because he didn't need to. He waved his hand. “You're letting out the heat. Call for me when you need more wine.”

Kral sighed again, but headed back inside. The laughs started up again almost immediately.

Jai Long looked down at the papers beneath him, conjuring a tiny star on the tip of one finger so that he had enough light to see. Four piles of papers sat on the desk, divided roughly into quadrants. Each page was a map. The maps were rough, sketched by many different hands, and incomplete. Jai Long was making notes of his own on the many blank spaces, filling in from other maps and from his own inferences, slowly and steadily building a complete diagram.

There were still many riddles to solve, but he could feel the information gathering into a whole. In another week, maybe two, he'd have an advantage beyond any of the other Five Factions: a map of the Transcendent Ruins.

The stories passed down about the ancient Jai spear were more myth than fact, but two things remained true to a reasonable degree of certainty. For one thing, it was almost absolutely true that the spear remained somewhere in the Ruins. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the Jai Matriarch's entrance, and while popular stories said she'd died within, her closest advisors recorded that she emerged from the Ruins weak and battered. She told those advisors that she'd left the spear within, and died days afterward.

He had enough information to consider that story true. But there was a second fact he'd verified, and it was equally important: the spear really had devoured the strength of Remnants and added their strength to that of the Matriarch's. One of her advisors had observed the process, even noting down possible methods and some runes on the spear's shaft that might have been some form of script. The early Jai clan had tried to reproduce the spear, but had ultimately failed.

No one else had considered the nature of that ability, except that it was a powerful way to advance quickly. The others, he was sure, sought the spear for one reason alone: with it, they might be able to break through the bonds of Truegold. There was only one Underlord in the Desolate Wilds, and only a handful in the Blackflame Empire. Advancing past Truegold meant advancing beyond the realms of common sense, to rise from the earth to the heavens in one leap.

They all thought so small.

More accurately, their vision was narrow. Jai Long's competitors, including the Sandviper sect, were so focused on advancement that they neglected to consider what it meant to consume someone else's power.

No one could gather madra that was too different from their own. That was a fundamental law, and one that Jai Long had no reason to believe the spear could break. If he, whose madra carried aspects of light and the sword, tried to absorb a Sandviper Remnant, the spear might allow him to do it. His madra would gain a toxic aspect, and he would have a harder time finding the right aura to cycle, but he should be able to do it.

But then, if he took a Fisher's Remnant, what would happen?

There was a point beyond which the absorption would fail. Even if it didn't, the different types of madra could mix in violent or chaotic ways. It might even damage his core, or the madra could rebound on him and tear his body apart.

No, though everyone envisioned taking the spear and gathering the powers of their enemies into one body, that was just a childish fantasy. It would never work.

The spear would be at its best when devouring compatible madra. In other words, madra from sacred artists on the same Path.

If Jai Long held the spear, he could advance by doing nothing more than cutting down others on the Path of the Stellar Spear—blood members of the Jai clan—and gutting their Remnants.

The spear's nature aligned so closely with his own desires that he almost considered it the will of the heavens.

Even better, the other Factions were considering this a contest of strength. Which was how they considered most things, now that he thought of it. They pushed into the Ruins, fighting the dreadbeasts sealed within as well as the other competitors, with the understanding that the most powerful would come out on top.

Jai Long didn't think of himself as an arrogant man, but sometimes it seemed that he was the only one with eyes in a crowd of the blind.

Couldn't they see that the strongest weren't always the victors?

So he worked on his map even as the young servants returned, carrying jars of water bigger than their whole bodies. As they ran back out, one of them stopped at Jai Long's table and bowed with fists pressed together.

He stayed that way until Jai Long noticed and raised his head. “What is it?”

“I ran into Grenn on the way back,” the boy said. “His mother called him in to cycle, so he couldn't deliver messages to you tonight, so he passed them on to me.”

Jai Long held back a sigh. He'd wondered what was taking his usual messenger so long, and once again he lamented the lack of discipline among the Sandvipers. There was so much he despised about the Jai family, but there was a reason they were a first-class clan in the Blackflame Empire while the Sandvipers remained nothing more than a second-rate sect in the Wilds. Without organization and control, strength meant nothing.

He gestured impatiently, and the boy’s spine straightened like a broomstick. “Sir. Grenn said that the foreman said that the miners can’t go into the southwest corner of the fourth floor. Too many beasts.”

Jai Long scribbled a note. In the four floors closest to the entrance of the Transcendent Ruins, he had accurate maps of virtually the entire area. Only a few spots remained blank, so he’d ordered the mining crews to move their operations.