by Will Wight
He came up for air, gasping. “Jars. We need jars.”
Chapter 12
The Spirit Well was Lindon's greatest dream made real.
It was like a heavenly feast set before him; an endless spring of power from which he could literally drink. Cycling had never been so rewarding or so effortless. He and Orthos moved into another room that was filled with garbage—the wreckage of long-abandoned crates and barrels that smelled like vinegar and had been smashed years if not decades before. They set the garbage on fire, leaving Dross to open the vents and get rid of the smoke. It became their cycling room for Blackflame. After a mouthful of Spirit Well water, each revolution of madra produced twice the result for half the effort. Lindon missed his parasite ring; the scripted halfsilver ring would have filtered his madra even further, resulting in even faster growth.
But the water was just as much of a boon for Blackflame as it was for his pure core. After the first few hours, he was pushing the barriers of Lowgold. If Lindon ever met Northstrider face-to-face, he was going to prostrate himself at the Monarch's feet in gratitude for building this place.
Ziel left the well room for an hour or two at a time, but always returned to sit in his corner. When he came back, he would dip his bowl into the Spirit Well, take one halfhearted sip, and then dump the rest over his head so that it washed the blood away in finger-thin rivulets.
Lindon almost choked at the waste.
“Forgiveness, but why don’t you drink more?”
Ziel didn’t open his eyes, but gestured at his abdomen. “Take a look, then tell me if you think it’ll do any good.”
Lindon opened his Copper sight. A venomous, toxic green ravaged his body, dimming the aura of his blood and life. He extended his perception, scanning the man’s spirit; he didn’t resist at all.
His core, a hazy green light, had been destroyed. Something had deliberately sliced it into pieces, then stitched the pieces back together. Half his madra channels were dark, and the other half were twisted and knotted into chaotic patterns.
Lindon closed off his perception, horrified. A Truegold with that much damage to their spirit should either be dead or Unsouled. But he had the power of a Truegold now.
How powerful had he been before?
Lindon bowed to him in silent apology and turned back to the pool. Little Blue’s touch could cleanse and reinforce madra channels, but the Spirit Well had a similar effect. If it wasn’t helping Ziel, neither could she.
At this point, Lindon wasn’t sure if a team of spirit healers could help the man. He was ashamed to have looked.
Outwardly, Orthos wasn't as thrilled with the well as Lindon was, but he went back and guzzled deeply whenever he could. Slowly, Lindon felt the turtle's spirit improving, like a knot unraveling or a stain shrinking.
Little Blue was hesitant to leave Lindon's side at first, staring warily at the newcomer and the Dreamseeds overhead. But after she dipped a hand into the Spirit Well, she cooed in wonder and then dove in headfirst. She had taken to it like a fish, swimming around happily and growing deeper in color with every passing minute. A night in there, and she would be back to normal.
Dross had returned to his vessel and demanded to be dropped into the pool, just as he had been in the Dream Well for over fifty years. Lindon didn't spare any more thought for him until the first night—which was what they had chosen to call the half of the day when the overhead scripts dimmed. The water outside the habitat was just as black as always, and of course the dream tablets and Spirit Well glowed constantly.
Lindon was just starting to wonder if he should drink a vial of Dream Well water to shake off sleep when he heard a loud sigh from the azure pool. Dross' spirit-form drifted up from the water, an ethereal ball of slowly turning gears and spinning violet lights.
“It's great in there, it really is, but uh...I don't know that I want to spend fifty years in there again. Do you know what I mean? I wasn't conscious for most of that time, but once I was, it got very boring very quickly. Not sure I want to do the whole thing wide awake.”
Lindon rubbed his chin, looking at the Spirit Well. “What do you think this will do for you?”
Dross made a coughing sound. “That’s the question. The Soulsmiths who made me tried to make a construct that could work alongside a person's brain, but they failed, didn't they? Ended up just making better memory constructs.
“Well, this facility was run by a collection of scholars after the same goal. They theorized that they could create a kind of super-spirit, an advanced hive of Dreamseeds that would handle thoughts so that Northstrider didn't have to. It would make it so that he wouldn't have to think to solve a problem, but he would always know the answer, bam, just like that. The Dreamseeds would do the mental work for him.”
“And it failed,” Lindon said. That wasn't a guess; if it had succeeded, Northstrider would never have abandoned Ghostwater in the first place.
“Like a snow fort in the desert,” Dross said sadly. “Turns out, when they pumped power into a Dreamseed, what they got was a more powerful Dreamseed. Not sure how else they expected that to go, really.” He waited a breath before continuing. “I may have been born a little differently than these little guys, but surely a construct that's come to life can't be too different than a natural spirit.”
That made sense to Lindon. And he wanted to see what Dross was becoming; it might end up useful. This was the chance to learn something that even Northstrider’s expert Soulsmiths hadn’t understood.
“We could try and come up with a script that might focus the power on you,” Lindon said doubtfully. If he was a more knowledgeable scriptor, it might work, but he had never done much research on that front. “It's a pity you can't just drink it.”
Dross glowed brighter. “That's it! I can borrow your body!” He saw the look on Lindon's face and hastened to add, “Don't worry, I'll share.”
“You can do that?” Lindon asked. That was intriguing. Could he send Dross to take over other people’s bodies?
“Don't see why not. There's a Remnant inside you right now, or at least all the ingredients to make one when you die. Plenty of room inside your spirit, so I'll just squeeze in there.” He pushed into Lindon's chest, but bounced off the madra running through Lindon's skin. “Excuse me, you have to move aside. Just for a minute. Don't worry, it shouldn't hurt. Me. I don't know what it will feel like to you.”
Orthos pushed past Lindon on the way to the Spirit Well. “There are some sacred artists who take in the power of natural spirits as part of their Path. It is safe.”
“See! Perfectly safe, he says.” Dross tried to push into Lindon's head this time, but slid off.
Lindon wanted to see what Dross would become, but he was still uncomfortable with the idea of letting a self-aware construct inside his soul. “Is this the only option we have?”
“Don't worry,” Orthos said. “If the tiny spirit tries some mischief, I will burn him out of your body.”
Now Lindon had more worries, but his curiosity won out.
Lindon extended a hand to Dross. “I'll still my madra as much as I can until you're inside.”
Dross whooped in excitement and zipped into his palm almost before Lindon had withdrawn his spirit.
It felt like something swimming up his left arm, and Lindon instinctively recoiled. He focused his spiritual sense on his own body, and in the blue-white loops that normally represented his spirit, now a purple ball slid around his madra channels and settled into the center of his pure core.
“Wow,” Dross said in his head. “Roomy in here. Were you born with two extra-large cores? I'm sorry, that sounds rude. But do feel free to answer.”
Since Lindon had used the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel to advance, it still had an influence on his cores even when he wasn't actively practicing it. His madra recovery was slow, but he had much more madra than he would have otherwise. And a good thing, too; his Iron body and his techniques took a lot of power. If Eithan was any indication, his
cores would only get deeper as he advanced, until he had a truly ridiculous amount of madra.
But he suppressed the Purification Wheel as much as he could, with Dross inside. It was inconvenient, but Eithan's warning still made him hesitant to let the technique's existence leak.
Orthos eyed him. “Seems like it worked.”
“It’s messy in here,” Dross sent to him. “You’re so…squishy.”
Lindon walked over to the pool, scooping up some shining blue water in a cracked teacup. He drank it and cycled it straight to the construct, who instantly let out an excited whoop.
“It's working! My memories have so many connections I didn't see before; this must be what having a brain feels like! Only, you know, less...mushy.”
Lindon had cycled all the power to Dross, leaving none for his own channels or core.
He spoke aloud, because he wasn't sure if thinking the words would get through to the construct. “How is it? You need more?”
“I’ll chew on this for the rest of the day,” Dross said. “At that rate, maybe…two more weeks? Three? Compared to fifty years, it's like a drop of water in the ocean, isn't it?”
“Three weeks? Do we even have that long?” Lindon gave an aching glance at the Spirit Well; he wanted to take as much time in this room as he could, and didn't want to waste a minute of it on Dross' advancement. Yerin would kill him if she knew he'd found an inexhaustible source of power without her, and would kill him twice as hard if he didn't take advantage of every second.
A weary voice spoke up from the corner of the room. “If nothing else accelerates the decay in the pocket world's structure, we have at least a month.” Ziel spoke from his position leaning against the wall, eyes shut. “Could be longer.”
Lindon didn't have any reason to believe a Truegold's word about the structure of a pocket world, but he spoke with the utter confidence of an expert, so Lindon thanked him.
“There you have it,” Dross said, relaxing himself into a more comfortable position within Lindon's core.
And so Lindon settled in. He was looking forward to seeing Dross’ transformation, but he couldn’t deny a little bitterness about having to share the power of the Spirit Well. How much would this delay his advancement? A week? A month?
Lindon reached Highgold on the Path of Black Flame in two days.
Surrounded by burning trash, he was cycling fire and destruction aura as usual, regretting that he couldn't use the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel with Dross sitting in his soul. Without warning, his madra started running back from the rest of his body into his core like he'd opened a plug and it was starting to drain out.
“Hey, would you look at that!” Dross said, from his vantage inside Lindon's pure core. “Are you trying out a new cycling technique?”
Lindon couldn't open his eyes, struggling as he was to focus on his madra, but he heard Orthos rise to his feet nearby. Suddenly, madra poured into him from outside, guiding his power and easing the burden on his spirit.
All of his madra pushed together, squeezing to occupy the same space, and it seemed to shrink together. After several minutes passed, he had only a third of the madra he'd started with, but it was more dense and potent. If his madra before had been water, now it felt like syrup.
When it finished, all of his Blackflame madra concentrated into a thick drop at the center of his core, a pulse of uncontrolled power rippled out from him and activated the aura. Fires flared up all around the cycling room, consuming their fuel in an instant, creating a cloud of smoke.
Lindon let his new Highgold madra run through his veins. At last, he was on the same level as Yerin.
She had years of practice and experience he didn't have, but finally, they were standing on the same ground.
“Highgold,” Orthos announced. “It is the role of a Highgold to think more deeply on the purpose and nature of your Path. At this stage, sacred artists that have bonded Remnants often begin to inherit insights from their predecessors.”
“There's no need for insight before Underlord,” Ziel said. He stopped in the doorway on his way down the hall, as though he were a construct that had simply run out of power. Green horns were cast in shadow—his Goldsign was so condensed as to look completely real. “Highgold only indicates a certain density of madra. You could go from Lowgold to the peak of Truegold with two pills.”
“Shortcuts are for the weak,” Orthos said. “You walk a Path one step at a time, and this is the step of a Highgold.”
Ziel raised two fingers as though holding something very small. “I used to have those pills. They were this big. They smelled like fresh berries and summer leaves...”
He cast his glance down at the floor and dragged himself down the hallway.
“Really brings down the mood, doesn't he?” Dross observed.
Not Lindon's. After reaching Highgold, his smile was iron-plated. He didn’t care what the stage meant, just that he had taken another step.
And there was plenty of water left in the blue well.
Orthos and Ziel carved every meal from the corpse of the Diamondscale Sea Drake, but one bite of the cooked meat had knocked Lindon out for six hours. It nourished his body even more than the Silverfang Carp had, but it was at the brink of what his body could tolerate. After eating it, his Iron body had consumed so much madra that it delayed his training, even with the Spirit Well’s help.
After reaching Highgold, he could keep himself conscious while cycling one bite of the Drake's meat to his body, but it took everything he had. He couldn't afford to have more than one bite a day, so the rest of his meals came from Carp steaks stored in his void key. He was clearly reaching the limit of what that meat could do for his physical condition, but food was food.
Other than spending his time in the corner of the Spirit Well room, Ziel wandered the shelves of dream tablets. Each of the shining, multicolored stones was labeled with a name, a stage of advancement, a Path, and a subject.
After a few days, Lindon began following him. He touched six dream tablets while Lindon watched, and all of them belonged to Archlords. Those were the most advanced subjects in the library, and Ziel seemed to have no interest in anything beneath them.
For Lindon's part, he didn't try anything above Underlord after a single touch of an Overlord tablet had left him flat on his back and sweating, with no memory of what he'd seen.
When he activated a dream tablet with his spirit, he was taken into a memory of a particular scene, as though he were living it. The devices were less useful for recording information than he had imagined, but they were ideal for containing experiences. He had heard of portable dream tablets before, but these were either of a different sort, or were secured to prevent thievery: each dream tablet was sealed to the stone around it.
She held out one palm, Forging a spear of red ice. From her vantage point among the clouds, she looked down on the great spider that crouched over her city, spreading its webs from building to building. She let soulfire bleed into the Forged spear, its gray fire tempering the technique, smoothing it, nourishing it.
Now, the spear shone like a polished shaft of diamond. This was the strongest technique she could conjure.
She only hoped there was anyone down there to survive this.
Meiyen Teia, Underlord on the Path of Glacier’s Birth: the Devastation of Whisperbark.
Lindon came out of the memory gasping, his last sight a storm of bloody ice shredding a great spider...and the city over which it lurked.
He sat down and focused on the vision, drinking down a vial of Dream Well water he'd brought with him.
“What do you call that feeling she was having?” Dross asked.
“Grief,” Lindon responded absently.
“I don’t like it,” the constructed decided. “It’s too heavy. Go back to the one with the man who had just cured his daughter’s disease.”
Lindon couldn't spare the effort to reply, instead focusing on the Underlord's memories. How her madra felt as it ran through h
er, the rhythm of her cycling technique, the feel of pulling soulfire from the center of her soul.
Buried in these memories was the key to developing his own Path.
The Path of Twin Stars needed a real Enforcer technique, he knew that. Over the last week, he'd checked dozens of dream tablets, and he'd discovered a greater variety of Enforcer techniques than he'd ever imagined. Full-body Enforcer techniques were the standard, but they were only one type. Many of the techniques he found were single palm-strikes or sword slashes, concentrating their Enforcement on a single blow. Those gave him the shadow of an idea to improve the Empty Palm, but they weren't what he really needed.
He focused on another category: movement techniques. He needed something to close the gap between him and his opponent if he wanted to land an Empty Palm. Until this point, he'd been forced to rely on letting his opponent come to him.
Some of the memories contained single steps or leaps that ate the gap between opponents in one burst. Others held full-body Enforcer techniques focused entirely on speed, or Forger techniques that carried their users where they needed to go.
After viewing several of them, he'd started trying to apply the principles of the Burning Cloak to his pure core. The Blackflame Enforcer technique burned his flesh and spirit for a contained explosion of madra, which resulted in a burst of power.
What he learned was that pure madra was about as combustible as a snowbank. It felt like a still pond, only even less substantial.
So, since he’d found no records of anyone on a pure Path, he started looking up water artists.
These were almost all scenes of battles or intense training, so none of them were designed to explain the principles behind the techniques the subjects were using. He had to extrapolate based on the feeling of the technique.
His image of Ekeri helped as much as anything. He had a clear understanding of what her Enforcer technique looked like from the outside; when she had fought with it active, she had bent and flowed effortlessly, like a stream.
