Chapter 116: Four Months

Seven days passed without Zhì Yuǎn descending from the fifth floor.

The study tables of that level remained empty most of the time, lit by the pale light that descended from the upper canopies. On the surrounding shelves, the great majority of the niches held rows of jade plaques engraved with the clan’s advanced techniques. Since he had neither Qi nor Divine Sense to activate any of those records, Zhì Yuǎn had not even touched the main racks.

Even with that limitation, what remained in leather scrolls and ancient books already served what he sought. Most of the jade plaques held only combat or cultivation techniques, while the pure theory and the studies on the Law of Nature, adjacent Laws, and methods of energy absorption had been written by hand throughout the ages.

In the center of the table lay the journals that had held his attention the most.

They were notes written by Mū’en himself many millennia earlier, when the old man still walked the Immortal Establishment. While almost all the masters of the clan sought to strengthen their meridians to withstand the dense Qi of the forest, the methods created by Mū’en did the opposite. They used the balance between body and environment to make the energy flow inward on its own, without friction and with an efficiency far superior to that of the basic manuals.

While turning a page of one of the archivist’s journals, Zhì Yuǎn heard a light step at the top of the ramp.

He did not turn his face, but through the corner of the mask’s slit he saw the hem of a pale-green skirt stop at the entrance of the fifth level.

Lī’ya did not walk to where he was.

With her chin raised, she entered the side corridor and stopped before a shelf. Her fingers pulled a jade plaque from its holder, then another right beside it, but the stones remained completely dark in her hands.

Every three breaths she stopped moving at the shelf and stole a glance over her shoulder toward the bench where Zhì Yuǎn sat.

When she saw that he remained with his head lowered over the journal, she released her breath slowly, shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and pulled a third plaque without even looking at the shelf.

"How much longer are you going to keep staring at me?" Zhì Yuǎn asked, turning another page without raising his face.

Lī’ya’s shoulders stiffened.

She slotted the plaque back into its holder with a quick motion and turned toward the gallery with a scowl, a faint pink rising across her cheeks.

"I wasn’t staring at anyone," she shot back, marching to the table with heavy steps. "I came to fetch some records that Elder Vhōl asked for and decided to check if my guest was still alive, since Hāi’na said you don’t even come down to eat properly anymore."

She stopped two steps from him, hands clasped behind her back. It had been more than a week since they had exchanged more than half a dozen words at the door of the room. The moment she looked at him up close, the tense line of her shoulders eased a little.

Lī’ya lowered her eyes to the open scrolls and journals.

"Usually we study the manuals and not just notes. What are you reading so intently over there?" she asked, tilting her neck lightly to peek at the drawings on the wood.

Zhì Yuǎn closed the journal he held and rested his forearm on the leather cover.

"The plaques are almost all techniques, so I have no need for them right now," Zhì Yuǎn answered, looking at her. "But Elder Mū’en left handwritten notes up here that are worth more than the rest of the floor. I spent the week studying how the Law of Nature keeps the other forces of this world in harmony."

Lī’ya took half a step closer to the table.

"And did it help at all with that seal in your body?" she asked, voice coming out lower.

"It helped," Zhì Yuǎn said. "Reading these ancient studies, I realized that what my cultivation lacked was balance. I already know how to adjust my body to the flow of the local Laws, but starting from zero with only circulation techniques would still take years to gather enough strength to break the blockage in my Dantian."

In the first instant, her green eyes shone and a small smile began to appear at the corners of her mouth.

But the smile did not last long.

The ears atop her head lowered a fraction. Lī’ya crossed her arms beneath her chest, looking away toward the ramp as she nodded slowly.

"That’s good," she murmured. "That way you can return soon to your women."

In the silence that followed, Lī’ya bit the inside of her lip. Her fingers tightened on the fabric of her own sleeve and she half-opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

Behind the mask, Zhì Yuǎn observed her hunched shoulders and let a faint smile curve his lips.

"And you?" he asked. "Are you going to participate in this competition of young talents?"

Lī’ya blinked and turned her face back to him.

Her fingers slowly released the sleeve. She uncrossed her arms and rested one hand on the edge of the table.

"Of course I am," Lī’ya answered, voice gaining strength. "At first I thought of giving some excuse to stay out of it, because I hate all that commotion. But I changed my mind."

Zhì Yuǎn inclined his head lightly, listening to her in silence.

"The leaders up in the dome finished defining the rules yesterday," she recounted, drawing a little closer to the bench. "The competition will be in four months, at the Terrace of Ascension, right in the center of the continent. All five Hegemonies of Beasts and the clans of the human alliance will send the strongest of the young generation."

"Terrace of Ascension?" Zhì Yuǎn repeated.

"It is the place where the space of this world is thinnest and where the ancients used to ascend to the higher realm above ours," Lī’ya explained. "Well, my older sister did not even bother going there and opened the sky from the tree itself when she decided to leave, but during the competition the Terrace serves another purpose."

She rested her hip against the side of the table, growing more at ease in the conversation.

"The great powers from the world above that have ties to our realm usually watch the main fights through the Terrace," she continued. "Besides the prizes that the clans here themselves give to the highest-ranked and their families, those higher powers choose a few youths every century and open the passage to take them straight up."

"And do you have any interest in ascending with them?" Zhì Yuǎn asked.

Lī’ya wrinkled her nose at once, waving a dismissive hand.

"Over my dead body," she said. "That kind of invitation only serves the youths of secondary branches or of the human clans who want to try their luck serving people from outside. None of the great clans hand over their own principal heir to become a disciple of others up there, nor do I have the slightest reason to leave my home."

The fluffy tail struck hard against the side of her skirt.

"I am only entering this contest because of that unbearable Léi Hǔ," Lī’ya added, raising her chin. "He has already gone around telling everyone that he is going to win this century’s tournament so he can ask my father for my hand in front of all the chiefs. So I am going up into that arena even if it is only to smash that disgusting tiger’s ugly face into the ground and make his clan shut its mouth for the next five hundred years."

Zhì Yuǎn gave a low laugh behind the mask.

"Just to beat him?" Zhì Yuǎn asked. "I thought it would take a very good prize to make you leave the formation workshop."

"But the prize this century is absurd!" Lī’ya said at once, leaning her torso forward and gesturing with her free hand. "Since this time the organization fell to our clan, the leaders of the five lineages had to open their vaults to place a real treasure at the top of the contest. The prize for first place is a Stone of the Law of Nature."

Zhì Yuǎn’s hand, resting on the cover of Mū’en’s journal, twitched.

"A Stone of the Law of Nature?" he repeated.

"Yes!" Lī’ya nodded. "It is not a common spiritual stone, nor something refined by alchemists. It is a crystal that forms on its own in the deepest veins of the continent once every tens of thousands of years, where the Law of Nature itself condenses until it becomes pure rock. If I can get one of those to use as a core in my formations, I will be able to tell even Elder Vhōl to retire."

She stopped mid-gesture upon noticing that Zhì Yuǎn had fallen silent, and that his eyes behind the mask had dropped to the diagrams of the Law of Nature spread across the table.

Lī’ya blinked twice, looking from the diagrams to him.

Her cheeks colored slowly. She turned her face toward the side wall, pulling the tip of her own tail forward and winding the soft fur between her free fingers.

"I mean... a stone like that has far too much energy for a single array," Lī’ya murmured, raising her chin. "I only need a small shard for what I want to do in the workshop. The rest would probably just sit in a corner of my room gathering dust anyway."

She stole a quick glance from the corner of her eye at his mask.

"So, if you stop skipping meals downstairs and don’t give me trouble these four months... when I bring back first place, maybe I will let you keep the part that is left over," she added, the words coming out in a single breath. "Just so you don’t spend years occupying my bed for free, of course."

Zhì Yuǎn rested his chin on the hand he had placed on the table, looking at her.

"Then I shall pray my hostess gives that tiger a sound beating," he said, tone low and calm.

The red rose up Lī’ya’s neck at once. The corners of her mouth pulled upward, but she cleared her throat quickly and resumed speaking without pause about how she intended to set up her arrays in the arena to lock down Léi Hǔ, leaning farther and farther over the table.

It was only when she paused to draw breath and realized she was less than a palm’s width from his face—having spoken for nearly the time of two incense sticks, with her tail waving freely behind her skirt—that her voice cut off in the middle of a word.

The heat reached the tips of her ears. She straightened with a jump, pulling her hand back as if the wood had caught fire.

"A-anyway, that’s it," Lī’ya said in a rush, grabbing a random scroll from the edge of the table without even looking at the title and pressing it against her chest. "I only came up to fetch this record for Elder Vhōl and I have already wasted too much time with you. See that you don’t forget to come down and eat today, or Hāi’na will be whining in my ear again."

Without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and descended the ramp with quick steps, her tail swinging in a light rhythm as she disappeared toward the fourth floor.

Alone in the silence of the fifth level, Zhì Yuǎn continued looking at the empty ramp for a moment before returning his attention to the notes on the table.

A Stone of the Law of Nature.

Throughout that entire week of study, he had realized that the greatest obstacle to the method he had designed was time. To create the necessary balance between his collapsed Inner Universe and the Qi of that realm without spending years accumulating strength from nothing, he needed an external source that already carried the condensed Law of Nature itself.

Lī’ya was willing to win the stone in the arena and place it in his hands. But Zhì Yuǎn had never been the type of man who sat in a corner waiting for someone else to solve his problems for him—much less in a tournament where the five greatest lineages of the continent would have their eyes on her.

And in four months, exactly what he needed would be at stake on the Terrace of Ascension.

Zhì Yuǎn pulled Mū’en’s journal back and reopened the diagram on the first page. Four months was not much time for someone who needed to start over from scratch, but it would have to be enough.