“…yes,” Yerin admitted.

If a Sage could afford the time to hold a baby rabbit, then she could.

When the bunny was sleeping peacefully in Yerin’s arms—and Yerin was staying very still to avoid jostling it—the Winter Sage got down to business.

“We only have a month, and we won’t find out your opponent until the last week, so that will be taken up by combat training. Meaning we have three weeks to help you do what even your master couldn’t do at your age.”

The Winter Sage reached onto a nearby shelf, filled with junk, and pulled out something that Yerin thought was a large book. It ended up being a wide board with a wooden edge and a black surface.

The Sage started writing on it with chalk. “Your Striker and Enforcer techniques are…fine. Not worth working on. But your Hidden Sword is abysmal. You don’t even use it in most fights, do you?”

“If you’ve got a better suggestion, I’ve got two ears.” Her Forger technique was brittle, weak, and its advantage of being invisible was useless against fighters with highly tuned spiritual senses.

Like any Underlord.

“Your master didn’t choose his techniques at random. The Hidden Sword has principles in common with my Path, so I can teach you that personally. Your Endless Sword has reached the stage of ‘sword like the wind,’ but if we can push that to the whisper stage, you’ll have more tactical options.”

Her brow was furrowed in concentration as she wrote furiously on the board, but Yerin couldn’t understand a word of it.

She watched the tiny sacred rabbit instead.

“Your foundation is adequate, but your master reached this point in the tournament using only the Path of the Endless Sword. You have made it so far using your other advantages.”

Now she was stabbing the chalk angrily, as though just talking about it made her furious.

But then she paused.

In a forced casual tone, she asked, “Right, it just occurred to me to ask, but…where did you get the idea to fight using only your spiritual sense? That…did that come from Adama’s Remnant?”

She had utterly failed to sound as though she didn’t care, but Yerin didn’t mind answering the question.

“Eithan. Perception training so I could keep up with an Arelius.”

The Winter Sage let out a breath that meant either disappointment or relief. “He got lucky, then, and so did you. Improving your perception helped you sense your master’s authority as a Sage. Between that and your Blood Shadow, you were able to cling to the tournament by your fingernails.”

Yerin bristled at the phrasing, but she remembered Eithan looking into her eyes and shaking his head. “I don’t see it in you yet,” he’d said.

If he had picked that training out of pure luck, she would eat her sword.

“Just have to push for advancement, true?” Yerin said. Technique training was good and useful, but there was no substitute for getting stronger.

The Winter Sage whirled the board around. “This will be your training schedule.”

It was a chalky mess of nonsense.

“Ambitious? Of course!” the Sage said proudly. “And you can see we’ve assigned plenty of time to your advancement.”

“Can’t read that.”

Shock slowly spread over the Winter Sage’s face. “He…he never taught you to read?”

“Don’t see how it hurts me.” At worst, it was an occasional inconvenience. Dream tablets were more common in leaving behind techniques than paper was, and signs in major cities used constructs or simple symbols that even she understood. Or sometimes pictures.

“It’s a basic skill! I’ll have to see if we have any literacy tablets left in the Foundation compound. We might not; even our earliest students can read.”

“We’ve got time for that, do we?” Yerin asked, running two fingers down the back of the sleeping rabbit.

“It will drive me insane if I see you advance to Overlord before you learn to read.”

Yerin was glad to hear that advancement was indeed on the menu, but she had her sights set beyond Overlord.

“How do I get to be a Sage?” she asked.

She didn’t fully understand what she’d done in the match against Lindon, but she had clearly tapped into the power of a Sage somehow.

That was her key to winning the tournament. And to the goal she’d held since she was a little girl: to succeed her master as the next Sage of the Endless Sword.

The Winter Sage’s eyes lit up, but she bit her lip and slumped her shoulders. “No…no, we can’t. We have to build you a solid foundation until Archlord. Then we can work on developing your authority.”

“Authority?” Yerin asked.

The Winter Sage squirmed in place for five entire seconds before her excitement won out and she gave in. “Okay! To become a Sage, you have to contact a greater power, a symbol of a greater concept of reality. We call that symbol an Icon.”

Tears welled up in her eyes and she gave Yerin a fond smile. “You have already touched the Sword Icon, which has guided you in battle.”

Yerin nodded along. “Okay. So you sense the Icon, that’s the first step. What’s the next one?”

The Sage laughed. “First step? That’s the last step.”

That should be encouraging, Yerin knew, but she didn’t like being laughed at. The softness of the rabbit’s fur helped soothe her irritation.

“The first step is you yourself becoming a symbol of swordsmanship. In my case…” She spread her hands wide, snowflakes drifting down from the ceiling above. “…I manifested the Winter Icon first. I became a symbol of ice, of cold, of all things that freeze and are frozen. Only later did I also reflect the Sword Icon.”

So you could have more than one Icon. That was good to know.

“And this Icon shows you how to win fights?”

The Winter Sage hefted the bottle she had used to feed the rabbit. She held it up so that Yerin could see it, then she tossed it into the air.

“Freeze,” the Sage commanded.

The bottle stopped in midair. It had been tumbling end-over-end as it fell, and now it was locked in place.

Yerin crept up. She sensed no madra or aura holding the bottle in place. She ran one hand over it and below it, but felt nothing. She even tapped the bottle with one finger. It was stone solid.

Min Shuei reached out a hand of her own. The bottle fell into her waiting palm.

“Sages and Monarchs can command reality directly, but as you can imagine, there are limitations. We can only affect the world in certain ways related to our Icons, and we call the scope of that power our authority.”

This was what Yerin wanted. She finally had a name for it.

This authority seemed like the goal of all the sacred arts: complete control. It was the power that the Sword Sage had mastered.

And Yerin could too.

“We will make you—” the Sage looked up in the middle of her sentence and walked over to open the door.

The Underlord from before stumbled in, balancing four boxes in his arms. “I got it!” he said triumphantly. “I made it!”

One of the boxes tipped and almost fell until he controlled wind aura to push it back.

Yerin sensed the power of the natural treasures and elixirs in those boxes…