Taking it was almost worse than the beating. He swallowed it and began cycling, and only seconds later, it felt as though needles were pricking the inside of his skin. He broke into a sweat, cycling faster, focusing his madra on the areas that needed healing. In only two or three breaths’ time, he wanted to quit.

The girl next to him looked on with sympathy. “I had one of those already. All the more reason not to go after her again, because I’m not taking a second one.” She watched longer before adding, “It helps if you cycle it a little at a time. Takes a day or two longer, but it’s not as much of a torture.”

Lindon appreciated the advice, but he couldn’t answer. He forced the pill’s energy through his veins, pushing his spirit to the limit and holding it there through sheer force of will. His earlier melancholy had evaporated.

Before, finding the Sword Sage’s disciple had been a distant thing. Now, it was right in front of his eyes. She could take him away from Sacred Valley, and that was his only hope. As long as he stayed here, there would always be another Kazan Ma Deret. He would never be anything more than Unsouled.

All day and into the night, Lindon cycled. It never stopped prickling him from the inside out, but he let the pain wash through him. If this was all he had to endure to escape his life, he would consider it a small price to pay.

***

Whitehall stood before the other elders of the Heaven’s Glory School. It was rare enough that they would all gather at once, even the elders from the various halls, but the Sage’s Disciple was a disaster big enough to warrant their full attention.

The room was humble enough, with reed mats on the floor and unadorned walls of orus wood, and each elder knelt on a flat cushion and sipped tea from a mug. This was meant to be a civilized meeting, held in an atmosphere of peace and equality.

Elder Whitehall stood in the center, having accepted neither cushion nor tea. Peace did not fit his agenda here. “Every Jade left in the Heaven’s Glory School is in this room. We can march on the tomb right now, together! Even if the Sword Sage had been a Gold, his Remnant would be no match for all of us combined.”

Several of the elders exchanged glances, and many others simply sipped their tea in silence. They didn’t take him seriously, he knew. How could they, when he spoke with the squeaky lilt of an eight-year-old throwing a tantrum?

“We would not lightly disturb the Ancestor’s rest,” the Grand Elder said. The Grand Elder served a role in the school not unlike that of a Patriarch or Matriarch of a clan, and the Grand Elder of the Heaven’s Glory School was perhaps the most powerful Jade he’d ever personally seen in action. Even the Sword Sage, that strange wanderer from outside, had expressed admiration for their Grand Elder’s accomplishments.

“Is the Ancestor’s rest not disturbed by the presence of another corpse? Or the wild Remnant accompanying it?” Whitehall countered. “I do not understand why you haven’t cleared the tomb already!”

“You were not here,” Elder Rahm said, sounding as though his voice might crumble to dust. “We acted against the Sage for the good of the school, but he was far more powerful than we expected. I still have not recovered from the injury he left to my spirit, and I was luckier than some of our brothers and sisters.”

Whitehall had not missed that. There were three or four gaps around the room, places where Jades had not survived their ambush of the Sword Sage. And as Whitehall understood it, they had attacked full-force while the man slept. Even so, the Sage had left a number of casualties.

Their tragedy could be Whitehall’s great fortune, if he placed his pieces just right. “I wasn’t there, and that’s why I am all the more eager to do my part. If only a few of you accompany me, or even allow me to bring a group of Irons, I will survey the tomb and return. Together, we can devise a way to retrieve the stranger’s treasures. And his sword.”

Whitehall was far more interested in the rare sacred herbs the Sword Sage always carried on his person, but he knew that many of the other elders coveted the man’s sword. The Sage had performed miracles with that blade, and they believed that an artifact of such power could form the cornerstone of their entire school.

So it baffled Whitehall that they had simply left the weapon where it lay.

Elder Anses rubbed a hand along his short beard, as though to emphasize that Whitehall could no longer grow one. “That’s more complicated than you perhaps think. The Remnant has the sword.”

Whitehall stared at him, searching for any signs of a joke. Remnants did not use weapons. Even the Remnant of such a powerful warrior, made up entirely of sword-aspect madra, would grow its own blade rather than picking one up. Remnants could advance over time, just like humans and sacred beasts, but it was a joke to think that one could advance so far, so fast.

“It’s that stable?” he asked, looking to the Grand Elder for confirmation.

The Grand Elder was at least as old as Elder Rahm, but age had not diminished him. He was a mountain of a man, a huge slab of muscle that took up twice the space of anyone else. “We tried to lay a boundary formation to force it out,” the Grand Elder said. “It used the sword to destroy the first banner. Every time we tried to lay a script, it either broke the script…or broke the one laying it.”

Remnants could speak and reason and make deals, but they were very narrow in scope. They had only fragments of their memories from life, and could understand nothing outside of those memories. They were shadows, nothing more, even if they did gain more detail over time.

But this one had proven itself capable of understanding script, planning action against it, and striking its enemy’s weak points. It was thinking strategically.

“Is it even a Remnant?” Whitehall asked.

“It is,” one of the other elders responded. “Its appearance is very clear, but we had a Soulsmith scan it anyway, in case the Sword Sage had simply used a technique to somehow imitate a Remnant. We’re confident this isn’t the case. It has simply left a Remnant that is far, far beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

Whitehall’s mind staggered at the thought. To leave such a Remnant…the Sword Sage might actually have reached the Gold stage. His desire for those sacred herbs redoubled. Anything a Gold carried on his person would be a priceless treasure.

“I now understand,” Whitehall said, and he did. A Gold’s Remnant was the stuff of legends and nightmares. The elders would have to tread cautiously, in case the spirit had the ability to destroy their entire school. “You were wise to treat the situation with such care, and I spoke from ignorance.” He bowed to the Grand Elder in apology. “But what about that girl, his disciple? If the Remnant remembers her, we might lure it away from the corpse.”

He had very little impression of the Sword Sage’s disciple. She had always followed him around, but at the time, Whitehall had thought of the Sage as nothing more than a wandering Jade. As such, his disciple wouldn’t be anything special. But if he was a Gold expert, the picture changed.

Another elder, an old woman with a completely shaven head, sighed. “We have sent practically every combat-capable Iron in the school against her for weeks now. She sends them back dead or wounded. We planned on exhausting her spirit, pressuring her until she broke, but our disciples might be the ones to break first. Now that we know how powerful the Sword Sage was, it makes some sense; a Gold’s disciple must be extraordinary.”