Land of Magic

by Kirill Klevanski

  Einen, stepping closer, pointed at the entrance to the Forest of Shadows.

  “I noticed her following us as soon as we entered the forest.”

  “So she lied,” Hadjar said. “She didn’t follow us all the way from the city, only when we got to the forest.”

  “Which means,” Einen continued, “that she knew we were going to be there.”

  “Yes, she knew we were going to be here.” Hadjar put down the map, crouched down, and rubbed his nose wearily. “By the High Heavens, my friend, we’re in trouble again.”

  The islander went over to the wall and leaned his shoulder against it. The truth was that they’d known someone had been watching them, but they hadn’t known who it had been. Einen’s special eyes allowed him to see and understand much more than ordinary people and even elves. He’d detected Dora’s presence the moment she’d made her first move in their direction. It could be said that the friends had used themselves as bait to catch a predator on their trail.

  “She’s a strange girl, isn’t she?” Einen’s smile was rather… unusual.

  “I even gave her my spatial ring to help her out,” Hadjar said, slapping his hand on the floor in frustration. “But she didn’t really deceive us... or did she?”

  “No one else followed us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Einen frowned.

  “My eyes see many things, my barbarian friend,” the islander replied dryly. “To escape them, our pursuer would’ve needed to be at the Lord level, at least. Have you ever pissed off a Lord?”

  “What about Rahaim?”

  “Apart from him.”

  “Then you know my answer.”

  The friends went silent. They didn’t like this situation, not because of the danger, but rather, because they didn’t understand what was happening around them. However, they knew one thing for sure — it was time to deal with all this junk.

  Half an hour later, carrying two bags each, they went to the Hall of Fame.

  Chapter 448

  As usual, a large number of people had gathered at the entrance to the Hall of Fame. It was rare for anyone to go questing for Glory points on their own. Usually, groups ranging from two people to an unlimited number of participants would come together first. The one who’d gotten the task took a quarter of the reward and loot, and the rest was divided equally. That was why fights sometimes erupted over the best spots.

  Passing through the crowd, the friends entered a special room reserved for trading. Here, at a dozen different tables, sat the school’s Mentors. They weren’t very enthusiastic and seemed to be hating every second.

  “You’re only offering seventy points for a hundred-year-old Five-bloomed leaf?” An ordinary disciple raged.

  Given how pitiful he looked — covered in wounds, his clothes ragged, and his sword bent — it had been a difficult task.

  “The leaves are crumpled,” the Mentor said in a bored tone. “The juice is almost entirely gone. They were collected inappropriately.”

  “I searched the Lake of Dreams to find this! I was almost eaten!”

  “The leaves are crumpled,” the Mentor didn’t change his argument or even his tone. “The juice-”

  “Damn it!” The disciple shouted. “Give me my points and, by the gods, I hope we trade places one day!”

  Without responding to the threat, the Mentor touched the token that was held out toward him. Cursing, the disciple turned on his heel and stormed out of the hall. The same scene repeated over and over. None of the disciples who came to the trading area left satisfied.

  Many of the young disciples threatened to tell the Rector himself about the Mentors’ behavior. Hadjar and Einen knew very well that nothing was free in the world of martial arts. ‘The Holy Sky’ School wasn’t going to share their accumulated knowledge with everyone just to be nice. So, the fact that they were trying to rob everyone and earn a profit wasn’t something unfair or shameful. Knowing he lacked knowledge, Hadjar was ready to pay a lot to attain it.

  “Good afternoon, honorable Mentor,” he said, bowing to the man in the gray robes. “The ordinary disciple, Hadjar Darkhan, greets you. I hope we can come to an agreement.”

  “Lay out your stuff,” the Mentor said, his head propped up by his hand, his tone bored and indifferent.

  Many of the young ‘geniuses’, had they been in Hadjar’s shoes, would’ve been offended by such an attitude, but he just bowed and emptied the contents of the bags onto the table. The Mentor, without even touching the artifacts, glanced at them with the same indifferent look.

  “I’ll give you 58 Glory points for everything.” He said. “You’re new, so I’ll warn you right away: don’t try to bargain. If you don’t think my offer is fair, you can try to sell this to the other disciples.”

  “I can do that?” Hadjar asked.

  “Glory points can be freely passed from one token to another. The trades are easily made, but I would advise you not to try it. You can guess why.”

  Hadjar could. Recently, he and Einen had killed a lot of cultivators. Each of them probably had friends... Friends who could pop out and, under the pretext of getting revenge, try to take the loot. 'Grab all the loot, live in luxury’ — that had been a saying among the guards during the reign of Primus.

  “I agree,” Hadjar said and held out his token.

  The Mentor touched it and, without even wishing him a good day, called for the next disciple to step forward. Hadjar was pushed aside by a short, fat boy whose bag reeked of rot and mustiness. Without watching the next bargain happen, Hadjar headed for the exit. Einen was waiting for him there.

  “How much?” He asked.

  Hadjar told him.

  “I got a little more — 72.”

  “You got more than that guy with the flower.”

  “He was just unlucky,” Einen said with a shrug. “If he’d had the undamaged petals of a hundred-year-old Seven-bloomed flower, he could’ve gotten at least four hundred points for them.”

  Hadjar chuckled and headed for the Hall of Fame. They urgently needed to find another task to do.

  “I’d hoped we would be able to get a lot of points without gold tokens.”

  “If it were that simple, my barbarian friend, everyone here would be a fully-fledged disciple.”

  The room was once again crowded. Sometimes, the lucky ones who broke through the crowd would tear off the first sheet of paper with a task on it and would then immediately run to the exit.

  Nine disciples out of ten were ordinary disciples. There were far fewer fully-fledged disciples, and no inner circle ones.

  “They are given their tasks by Masters personally assigned to their groups,” Einen answered his unspoken question. “Everyone who earns an emerald token also gets a place in such a group. Each group has a Master to act as a curator for them. They give them tasks, and sometimes even teach them. Without charging them any Glory points.”

  “How lucky they are.” Hadjar said with a grimace.

  “You’re not wrong, my friend.”

  Regardless of how strong the cultivators of ‘The Holy Sky’ School were, most of them were under twenty years old. They also had no real combat experience. This fact gave Hadjar and Einen an advantage, not in terms of power, but in another way, one invisible to the naked eye. The rest of the disciples acted like animals that had never seen a human, but would still instinctively hide from experienced hunters. If the others had had to fight their way through the crowd to get to the board, Hadjar and Einen just... walked. Like two massive ships, they cut through the sea of humanity, calmly approaching the boards. The disciples didn’t really notice them. They certainly weren’t consciously afraid of the friends. They just instinctively tried to get out of the way of a potential threat. They couldn’t see it, but they could feel that it wasn’t just the friends’ hands that were covered in blood… They were drenched in it from head to toe.

  When they reached the boards, Hadjar and Einen look at them calmly and read through the task
s.

  “I don’t think we should go back to the Forest of Shadows, my friend.”

  “That’s right,” Einen said, “the local spirit obviously didn’t like you very much.”

  “That leaves the Valley of Swamps.”

  There were two of them, so they could each take a task. It was similar to the task they’d went to the Forest of Shadows to do, only instead of the leaves of the Night Shrub, they now needed to collect two hundred pounds of the Yellow Grass of Pagani. Neither of the friends knew what that was, but the task sheets were covered in drawings done in full color and detailed descriptions.

  “Do you have a scythe?” Hadjar smiled.

  “We have your sword,” Einen responded with a shrug. “I think we can manage with that.”

  The friends left the Hall of Fame and went back to their hut. They weren’t in a hurry to descend from ‘The Holy Sky’ School and go on another adventure just yet. Last time, they’d barely overcome twenty or so cultivators. And now they were being targeted by fifty of them. All of them were at least Heaven Soldiers at the initial stage. This meant that they urgently needed to use the insights and inspirations they’d received in their latest battle, as well as to engage in deep meditation. The friends needed to get stronger quickly, and each of them had his own Techniques for this.

  For example, Hadjar had eight and a half liters of the Primordial Water. So, it was time for him to utilize a little bit of the ‘Path through the Clouds’ meditation Technique.

  Chapter 449

  The two friends weren’t surprised when Einen managed to sense several ‘spies’ while they approached their hill in the Forest of Knowledge. They weren’t even trying to hide. They weren’t using Stealth Techniques, just sitting in the branches of the many trees. At least they weren’t throwing their feces at the duo like oasis monkeys. Then again, who knew what the future held...

  The two friends entered their house after getting past their own traps. Now that they’d sold the artifacts they had obtained from the cultivators they’d defeated in battle, the place seemed empty and uninhabited.

  “When do we set out again?” Hadjar asked.

  “In three days,” Einen replied and walked into his room.

  They each had their own room where they were going to meditate. They could go outside if they needed to train with weapons, as they weren’t core disciples and thus didn’t have private halls with special equipment they could use.

  Hadjar watched Einen leave, then went inside his own room and closed the door. After prying up a floorboard, he fished out a waterskin. He needed seven liters of Primordial Water to train in the dragon meditation Technique that was available to him thanks to Traves’ heart. With Dora’s help, he’d been able to get the Water for a relatively small price. On their way back to ‘The Holy Sky’ School, they’d passed by a variety of shops and stores. In one of them, he’d seen a bowl of Primordial Water in the shop’s window. A liter of the resource cost three and a half thousand Imperial coins. So, Hadjar had definitely been compensated well.

  Especially if he managed to only spend seven liters during training. Then, the remaining one and a half liter would make his and Einen’s lives much easier.

  Sitting down in a lotus position, Hadjar closed his eyes and steadied his breathing. Gradually he sank deeper into the World River. While he’d been just a simple practitioner, he’d perceived it as a dark river of energy. Now he realized that it was more akin to the night sky. He saw the multicolored lights produced by myriads of spirits pouring their powers into the general flow of energy. Among all of them, the Sword Spirit shone the brightest to Hadjar. Its steely light seemed to caress him. He no longer needed, as he had years ago, to break through barriers in order to absorb the mysteries of the spirit to which he’d dedicated his path and life.

  However, Hadjar wasn’t going to absorb the power of the Sword Spirit and the World River. He needed something different this time. Opening his ‘eyes’, he looked at the physical world. Viewed through the World River, reality was greatly distorted. It was like looking at the world through a vortex held within a transparent flask — everything was blurry, indistinct, devoid of any clear outlines. The waterskin full of Primordial Water that Hadjar had unscrewed beforehand looked like a calm monolith of blue energy, dense like a rock and as viscous as olive oil.

  In the physical world, Hadjar covered the neck of the waterskin with his hand. With each breath he took, strands of thick, blue energy separated from the Primordial Water. They pierced his palm, flowing into his body, and whirlwinds of his own power raged around Hadjar. Sweat rolled down his forehead. It rolled down his cheeks, leaving blue streaks behind. It seemed that all the fluid in his body, except for his blood, was being replaced with the Primordial Water.

  This was only the first stage described in the ‘Path through the Clouds’ meditation Technique. A long time ago, back when Hadjar had first read the contents of Traves’ manuscript, he hadn’t understood how it was possible to make a person’s meridians wider. After forgetting about this mystery for many years, Hadjar had never thought about it until he’d seen Tom Dinos and Anise. Their meridians were much wider than those of ordinary people. What did this mean for their path of cultivation? They could use a lot more energy than others. In practical terms, they had about as much energy in their cores as others at their level did. The only difference was how much energy they could use at once, how quickly they were able to do this, and how much energy was wasted when using a Technique. The wider their meridians, the less waste there was.

  How much energy would it take to fly? Hadjar didn’t even want to think about that right now. So far, he’d been enduring the terrible pain and just soaking up the Primordial Water in his body. It poured into his physical body, starting to make fundamental changes to it. With each breath he took, the energy it provided was drawn into his meridians. It made hundreds of thousands of miniature incisions in them, and then filled them before solidifying. Since it was both a solid and a liquid, the Primordial Water could easily integrate with Hadjar’s energy system. However, the pain that he had to go through for this cultivation surpassed not only the torture of living as a freak, but also the agony of the cultivation he’d done with the help of monster cores.

  They said that only a madman or a fool used monster cores as resources. The pain that came with using such a method could make even the God of War, Derger, cry with pity. Hadjar had already done so three times in his life. Despite that, however, his current agony overshadowed all the pain he’d endured thus far. In the physical world, blood flowed from Hadjar’s eyes and ears. His skin was pale, and when it cracked in several places, it began to bleed as well.

  His normally calm vortex of power lost its stability. It grew by several feet and tore through the roof off the hut, then disappeared in a flash of energy invisible to the eye of a mere mortal. Hadjar’s meridians gradually grew larger as he shook from the pain.

  One liter after another evaporated. Unfortunately, Hadjar wasn’t able to use the Technique designed for dragons without making a mistake. In the end, instead of seven liters, he ended up spending seven and a half. This margin of error showed just how incredibly strong his will was.

  Most cultivators couldn’t have endured even an hour of this training, while Hadjar had been sitting in the lotus position for nine hours, immersed in an ocean of terrible pain. He’d absorbed seven and a half liters of Primordial Water and increased the size of his meridians. Their total size had increased by half, and was now akin to what Anise had. He was still a long way from Dora or Tom, but the first step had been taken…

  Hadjar opened his eyes and looked at the waterskin. There was a liter of water left inside. In other words, three and a half thousand Imperial coins. That was a lot of money, even by the capital’s standards. He would definitely put it to good use.

  “I’m not a dragon, am I?” Hadjar whispered thoughtfully. “My Master keeps reminding me of this. I’m not a dragon and I’m not a... human, either. After
all, I did just use a dragon Technique in a human body.”

  Suddenly, Hadjar thought of a wild, almost insane idea. What if he could use the remaining liter for more than just profit? Not to further expand his meridians. He felt that if he tried to do so, he would simply tear them apart, as they’d reached their peak. However, if they couldn’t be expanded, then perhaps they could be... extended. What would that do for him? Hadjar had no idea, but he doubted that such a change would hurt him. The longer the meridians, the more energy could pass through them, surely. Maybe it would improve his ability to meditate, maybe it would make his Techniques a little more powerful, or maybe it would do nothing at all. Compared to growing more powerful, what was money? Only the road dust that stuck to a traveler’s feet.

  Once again sinking into the World River, Hadjar continued his training.

  Chapter 450

  Just as he’d expected, it was much easier to follow a detailed set of instructions regarding a Technique passed down and perfected by the dragons over many generations than it was to make his own way through the thorns of the unknown.

  The method used in expanding the channels of energy (meridians) had been described in great detail, but Hadjar had no idea how to make his channels longer. At first, taking a risk, he tore a part of the thinnest and shortest of the channels, the one that ran from his central meridian over his left shoulder and then down to his fingers. It was these tiny threads, responsible for transporting energy to the fingers, that became the subject of Hadjar’s experiments. As a test sample, he chose the channel that went to the little finger of his left hand.

  With an effort of will, using his energy like a cleaver, he cut off this channel. The pain that swept through his body was even greater than the one he’d experienced a few minutes ago. It was no wonder that Glen, whose channels had been torn to shreds, had lost consciousness from the pain and almost died.