“I suggest you fight the girl for a while and then concede. You could say that an Unsouled is not worthy to fight someone of the Mon family, which gives them face. They’ll accept, you’ll be embarrassed for a while, but in the end your reputation will improve. You will have handled the duel with grace and accepted defeat with dignity.”

“At the price of telling the Mon family that I’m worth less than they are.”

She nodded once. “Yes.” Kelsa never shied away from the truth.

Lindon didn’t think of himself as overly prideful, but he burned at the thought of humbling himself in front of all the other Wei families. For one thing, his Shi family would be seen as vulnerable if he publicly demonstrated his weakness. Their rivals would push them, seeking to exploit a perceived opening.

After watching his expression for a few seconds, Kelsa folded both hands on her knees. “But I’m sure you didn’t waste the day yesterday. What’s your plan?”

Sheepishly, Lindon reached into his sling, where he’d tucked the technique manual. “I found this technique in the archives. It’s not directly useful, but it might have given me an idea.”

She snatched the manual from his hand and glanced over the first page. “You want to split your core?” Her tone made it clear exactly what she thought of that idea.

“No, of course not.” While cycling according to the method described in the Heart of Twin Stars manual, he’d spent the night thinking. He suspected there were other uses for a split core rather than just defending against one specific technique, but they were too risky or difficult to test. “There’s a second technique in there.”

Kelsa looked back down at the book. “The Empty Palm.”

“It would be easier if I was Copper, I know, but in theory it’s just injecting your madra into a certain spot. It could be enough.”

She flipped through each page in the thin manual, paying special attention to the back. “It doesn’t describe the timing, or the energy flow, or the Foundation you’d need to pull it off. Only how to defend against it.” Kelsa snapped the pages shut. “But ultimately yes, I think there’s enough information here that we could develop a version of the Empty Palm. It’s simple enough anyway.”

Lindon leaned forward, eager. “Can you teach me?”

In the Wei clan, most sacred artists reached the Iron stage in their twenty-first or twenty-second year. For Kelsa to have reached the barrier between Copper and Iron at the age of sixteen meant that she was more than merely talented; she had the discipline and skill to match.

Abruptly, Kelsa rose to her feet. “That’s up to you. I have some ideas, but I need a living target with a functioning core if I want to try them out. That means you.”

“You can disable my spirit, but it won’t do much. I can hardly defend myself to begin with.”

Kelsa stretched first one arm, then the other. “That’s not what I mean. The manual mentions that he had to achieve purity for the technique to work. We don’t have time for that, so I’ll be pushing my madra into your core until I get a feel for the technique.”

As a sacred artist on the Path of the White Fox, Kelsa cultivated aspects of dreams and light, bent toward the purposes of deceiving enemies. Accepting it directly into his core meant…

“I have another idea,” Lindon said, with a half-step back. “I could try on you first, and we could work from there.”

“I need to understand the theory myself,” Kelsa said, dropping into a balanced stance on the balls of her feet. Her left hand was extended, her right held back, her whole body angled sideways. “First trial.”

Lindon tried to protest again, but Kelsa unfolded in a deceptively quick movement that left the heel of her palm against his core, just below the navel. She’d used hardly any force, and the strike came with no pain; it felt like a light slap, if anything.

But the world went mad.

The soft blue cloudbell flowers at his feet took flight, flapping around his eyes. Shadows in the bushes flickered and giggled, while the clouds zoomed around like zealous fish in the ocean of the sky. Grass tickled his feet through his shoes, and he tiptoed around to avoid it. The ground must not have liked that, because it finally had enough and slapped him in the back of the head.

He came to in a wrench of returning sensation, lying flat on his back in the garden and staring up into the sky. His arm had begun to ache again.

Over him, Kelsa was flexing her palm. “Too slow. The motion has to carry the madra, you can’t rely on transmission through contact. Stand up, I need to try again.”

Lindon crawled to his feet, still dizzy. “Wait. I think it’s worse on me, because I can’t—”

She hit him again.

After the garden stopped partying without him, he spoke from the ground. “I’m not standing up again. I’m not.”

Kelsa was moving at half-speed, stepping forward into a slow palm thrust. She repeated the first step a few times, working something out in her head. “Then you’ll be worthless for the rest of your life,” she said casually, but the words were like a spear to the ribs. “You don’t want to shame the family? Stand up.” She didn’t so much as glance at him, as though she didn’t care whether he stood or not. “I’ve almost worked it out…it has to transmit all at once. Not like a stream, but a gust of wind.”

Lindon stood up again. And again.

Eleven more times.

By the end, the earth never stopped spinning, even when the effects wore off. He tried to rise again, but up and sideways seemed to have swapped places, and he stumbled into the cloudbells. Their stalks were sharper than they looked.

Kelsa reached in and hauled him out with ease, steadying him with a grip on his shoulder. Ten breaths passed before he could take a step without swaying.

“Rally yourself,” she said. “Step forward and shove in one motion, focusing madra in your palm. Release it in one breath like a gust of wind, being sure to exhale and cycle to the rest of your body for stability. Understood?”

Lindon was trying to determine if his senses were back under control. Was that flickering shadow a sign of lingering madness, or a leaf blowing in the wind? “Please, I need…I need a moment.”

Kelsa rarely had the patience to wait around, and though she allowed him his rest, she did so reluctantly. She paced in the garden, studying Heart of Twin Stars as she did. “Let’s return to an earlier subject,” she said, without looking up from the book. “The fruit. Have you finished cycling it?”

“Almost all,” he said, sensing the tingling sparks that lingered in his core. “I haven’t noticed much of a change.”

She squinted at the page. “I can’t see clearly. Bring out your light.”

Lindon looked around at the bright morning light. “Do you need me to find a healer?”

She used the manual to point at his robes. “You’re my disciple for the day. Pull out your light.”

To his sister, Lindon would have protested. To his master, Lindon would have obeyed without a word. He spent a few seconds deciding which she was, and eventually reached into his pack to produce a palm-sized board.

The board was covered with an intricate three-layered script circle, and when he fed his madra into it, it burst into white light. The runelight was much stronger than from an ordinary script, and remarkably steady. That was this script’s only purpose: to produce light on command. It would last as long as the user’s spirit did.