The lobby never changed and that was somehow worse.

Kage stood on the obsidian and let the level-up chimes ripple across the party in a small staggered cascade. Lily got two. Jax got two. Valdrias, Zara, Finn, Zherdev, Julie, Ren—two each. Vami stayed where he was. So did Kage. The XP curve at twenty-five had teeth.

Around him, fingers flicked with the practiced motion of people who had done this enough times to stop celebrating. Stat allocations. Jax muttered something about hitting the next breakpoint on his sword's scaling and immediately regretted saying it out loud.

"Cool," Jax announced, to no one. "Cool cool cool. Three more wings. Easy."

Kage rolled his shoulder once. The biological whiplash had finally faded into a low, manageable burn. He looked at the marks.

Vami's droplet pointed back and high, toward a frame drifting past their upper periphery, slow and pale.

He pointed at it with his chin. "Closest first."

A Draft of Wind and Glasses.

The frame opened onto a sky.

That was the description and it kept being the description for the entire wing. There was no ground to speak of, only thin transparent platforms suspended in upper atmosphere, blue washing out into white at the unfinished horizon. The wind here had been drafted in long looping calligraphic strokes that the eye could see if Kage focused on the air itself, currents of half-shaped script flowing past the platforms in great slow rivers.

The mobs were Glass Sirens. Tall thin figures with throats of clear crystal, who sang and the air around them sharpened into shards. There were Aerie Couplets, paired wind-spirits that only died if you killed them in the same beat. There were Marginalia Hawks, and Finn took one look at them and said "oh, no," with the specific pitch of a man whose own pet had just been insulted by a dungeon.

Kage edited one of the Aerie Couplets out of a stanza early on, because killing two things in the same beat was the kind of mechanic that got people killed. The dungeon answered by spawning a single larger Couplet that rhymed with itself. He edited that one too. The dungeon answered by spawning a Glass Siren.

That stopped him from editing.

The wing read fast because the party read fast now. Julie's Sketch mark turned out to draw bridges across the empty air between platforms, and Vami abused the bridges so aggressively that Julie threatened him with something that no one else understood. The boss was a Concert Master, a thing of organ pipes and floating sheet music. Kage did not pay attention to most of the fight. Ren spent eight seconds standing inside a pipe that had been trying to crush him, and the pipe forgot how to be a pipe.

[Editor's Key Fragment 3/5 acquired.]

He took the loot ink. Aerodraft Vermilion. He logged it. He left.

The marks repointed in the lobby. Vami's now lay flat. Ren's still pointed toward the green-and-gold smear. Zherdev's still pointed down.

"Green," Kage said.

A Draft of Grass and Sun.

The frame opened onto a plain that was almost finished.

That was the part Kage noticed first. The grass was real grass for forty meters in every direction and then, at the edge of vision, smeared into long horizontal brushstrokes the artist had given up on. The sun overhead was a brass disk of hammered light that did not move and cast shadows in a single committed direction. There were small white flowers in the grass that, when crushed underfoot, released a faint puff of pale pigment instead of pollen.

The mobs were almost reasonable.

Stanza Stags. Antlered things with verses written in black down their flanks. They charged in lines of rhythm. Sonnet Wolves, in packs of fourteen, because the dungeon had a sense of humor. The Refrain, a single recurring threat that died and respawned and died and respawned somewhere else nearby until you killed it on the right beat.

Kage edited one Sonnet Wolf out of a pack that was overrunning Lily's flank, and the dungeon, generously, replaced it with nothing. He took the win and made a note.

The dungeon likes the cleaner ecosystems, he thought. It punishes you less when you respect the genre.

The boss was a Pastoral Caesura. Big stag, twelve-point antlers each engraved with a different couplet, eyes that read like full stops. Ren cut it down in the kind of unhurried way that Kage was now actively trying not to watch. Vami contributed a final-percent burst that was closer to a celebration than a kill. Valdrias stood between the boss and the party for ninety seconds and lost almost no health doing it, because Valdrias had been turning into something quietly terrifying for two zones now and Kage was starting to suspect the kid had learned more from the HUD-off lesson than Kage had originally intended to teach.

Kage and Vami leveled up there, at last.

[Editor's Key Fragment 4/5 acquired.]

Kage pocketed it. The fourth fragment was warmer than the third. The third had been warmer than the second. He filed that.

The marks repointed.

Only Zherdev's was still glowing. The droplet on his enormous gauntleted finger pointed straight down off the edge of the platform, into the void.

"It's me," Zherdev said, in the tone of a man being called on in class. "Right? It's me. I'm the one. The pointing one."

"You are the pointing one," Lily confirmed gently.

"OKAY." He drew himself up, which involved several pieces of armor shifting position dangerously. "OKAY. I would like to formally state that I have a very good feeling about this."

"You have never had a good feeling about anything in your life," Zara said.

"Wow. You've known me for… hours."

"You have never—"

"Down," Kage said. "We go down."

A Draft of Root and Hollow.

The frame opened onto a downward.

The wing was a single long descending corridor that the dungeon had not bothered to finish drawing the sides of. The walls were roots, vast and pale, and where the roots ended, the corridor ended too, opening into nothing on either side. The floor was packed earth that occasionally became script and occasionally became a hole. The light source was, for once, identifiable: pale blue bioluminescent fungi growing up the roots, pulsing in a rhythm that the dungeon had set deliberately too slow to sync with.

The mobs were Root Glosses, small clinging things that hung off the ceiling and dropped. Hollow Footnotes, very similar to the volcano variety, except that detonating in here also collapsed sections of root above the party and forced reroutes. Buried Stanzas, which Kage stopped editing after the first try, when removing one Buried Stanza from beneath the floor caused the dungeon to replace it with a Buried Refrain, a thing that died in a place and was then alive somewhere else also beneath the floor, perpetually.

The descent felt long. It was long. Two hours at minimum, and Kage stopped tracking somewhere in the second hour, because the corridor had a hypnotic quality to it that made distance into a soft suggestion.

The chamber at the bottom was a hollow.

A perfectly round chamber, hung in nothing, the roots of the entire draft above converging into a single vast trunk that descended through the chamber's center and disappeared into a pool of dark water at the floor. The boss rose out of the water as they entered.

[Hollow Cantor - Lvl 29]

A long, pale, blind thing. Eyeless face. Mouth that opened into a verse. It sang and the roots above the chamber flexed and sang back, and the entire wing started to harmonize.

The fight ran the rhythm everyone had learned by now. Valdrias planted on the trunk. Jax bracketed. Finn perched on the highest root and called the cantor's tells off the resonance pattern. Lily and Julie stitched the line. Ren took a position three meters off the boss's flank and stayed there with the patience of a man waiting for a kettle to boil.

Kage edited once. He removed an incoming chord that would have collapsed the floor under Zherdev. The dungeon compensated by extending the cantor's next breath by two counts, and Vami noticed before Kage had to call it, and Vami spent those two counts climbing the boss's spine and igniting a Lux peak inside its ribcage.

The Hollow Cantor died singing. The note hung in the chamber for several seconds after the body had stopped existing, looking for a throat.

[Hollow Cantor defeated.]

[Editor's Key Fragment 5/5 acquired.]

[+22,000 EXP. Loot rolls in progress.]

The fifth fragment, when Kage took it from the air, was hot. It pulsed against his palm in the same rhythm the fungi had been pulsing in, and then, once it sat against the other four in his inventory, the rhythm cooled and synchronized into something he could not feel anymore.

The party looted in the slow, unhurried way of people who had stopped being afraid of the dungeon and started being curious about it.

That was when Ren walked over to Lily.

Kage did not see it happen.

Kage was crouched five meters away at the edge of the dark pool, examining a thin stream of pale ink that was bleeding out of the cantor's residue and crawling, of its own accord, toward his hand. He let it climb. He pocketed it.

[Reagent Acquired: Hollow Lyric. (Pigment-Adjacent.)]

He did not turn around.

So he did not see Ren walk to where Lily was sitting on a low coil of root. He did not see Ren stand a precise two steps away, exactly out of striking range, the way Ren stood when Ren talked to anyone. He did not hear what Ren said.

But others did.

Vami had stopped on the far side of the trunk, not eavesdropping, exactly, but cataloging the room because cataloging the room was what Vami did between fights. Julie was beside Vami and saw Vami's face shift and looked where Vami was looking. Zara was three meters from Lily on the same coil of root, halfway through a stat panel, and did not move away when Ren approached because moving away would have been more conspicuous than staying. Jax was loitering, awkwardly, the way Jax loitered when there was nothing to hit. Finn had perched on a higher root with his hawk and a clean line of sight. Zherdev was nominally examining a piece of dropped armor.

Ren spoke quietly.

"Lily," he said. "I am going to be sure now. The footwork. The school. It is Master Jin's."

Lily looked up.

She had been folding a vial back into its loop. She finished folding it before she answered, because finishing whatever small task her hands had been doing first was, apparently, Lily's own thing.

"Ren," she said carefully. "You said before. That the school was Master Jin's specifically. You said it was specific to him and… his one disciple."

"Yes."

"If it's such a small number of people. How can you recognize it. Are you sure?"

Ren looked at her.

He looked at her the way a man looked at a question that had just lifted out of his own chest and walked across the room and asked itself out loud. He did not answer immediately. He sat down on the coil of root, two steps back, hands resting on his knees.

He sighed.

"I have to explain," he said. "Before that. I have to explain something."

Lily nodded. She was very still now. She had read the room earlier than anyone, because reading rooms was also what Lily did, and her stillness was the kind that other people in the room also went still around.

Vami, on the far side of the trunk, set down what he had been holding.

"In kendo," Ren said, "there are states. Levels of internal mastery. They are recognized across martial disciplines, not only kendo, but kendo formalized them earliest. There are three that matter. Zanshin. Mushin. Fudoshin."

"Okay."

"Zanshin. The lingering mind. Awareness past the strike. It is the first one and it is achievable. With work. With time. Anyone who fights at the championship level has it or is on the way to it. Most reach it in their mid-twenties. Some champions sit at zanshin for their entire career. It is a real achievement. It is also, to be honest, the floor of a serious practitioner."

Lily was watching his face.

"Mushin," Ren said. "No-mind. The body acts before thought. There are. Currently. Worldwide. Across every martial discipline. Maybe a dozen living practitioners who are at mushin."

Lily's eyes moved, fractionally. Not to Kage. Not yet. To the floor.

"It is not a state you reach with practice," Ren said. "Not really. You can practice your entire life and never approach it. People do. The vast majority do. It is something the body and the mind have to be capable of, and most of them aren't. Most champions are not. Those who reach it usually reach it in their mid-thirties. A late-career gift. Achieving mushin at all means you were a prodigy at zanshin. Achieving it young means you are the prodigy of your generation. There may be one or two of you in the same bracket, if your generation is lucky. That is what mushin is."

He paused.

"And then. There is fudoshin. The immovable mind. Three. Recorded. Occurrences. In all of recorded martial history."

Lily's lips parted very slightly. She did not say anything.

"One is ancient," Ren said. "A scroll. A record. A name. We do not even know if the record is accurate. The second is more recent. Ujihiro Sanjō, fifty-one years old when he reached it. He was the dominant figure of his generation. I trained under one of his students for a year. The third is. Master Jin."

He did not say the name with reverence. He said it with the flat plain weight of a man stating the location of a mountain.

"The general public knows Master Jin as the ten-time national champion. They know he retired at thirty-five because no one could stand against him. That is the public version. That is also a polite simplification. People do not understand how ahead he was. How ahead he is. Two records. Held by him. Personally. The earliest recorded mushin: nineteen years old. The earliest recorded fudoshin: thirty. Both of those records were thought, by serious practitioners of the art, to be unbreakable. The second one in particular. Fudoshin before forty. People did not even think about the question."

He breathed out.

"And of course. When Jin appeared. Everyone in his generation, and the generation after, and the one after that, studied him. Studied his footwork. Studied his cuts. Studied the specific way he carried his hips and the specific way his shoulders did not move when his hands moved. Schools were derived. Branches. Little side traditions trying to reverse-engineer what Jin was doing. I have trained, or sparred, with practitioners from at least four of those derivative schools. None of them can produce his results. They produce Jin-shaped results, but the shape and the substance are different things, and the substance is what makes him him. He took one disciple. One. Ever."

Lily was very still.

"Four years ago," Ren said, "the elder of those two records was broken."

Lily's hand had moved without her noticing, to the empty potion-loop on her belt, and she was holding it tightly.

"Mushin," Ren said. "The one held at nineteen. By Jin. Broken. By two years. By a seventeen-year-old. In a championship match that, by every reasonable assessment of the age gap and the opponent, was unwinnable. I was a child in the bleachers. I watched it happen. I have re-watched the footage probably eight hundred times since. The young man's name. Was Klaid."

Lily's eyes moved. Just once. Toward the pool, where Kage was still crouched, examining something the rest of them could not see from there.

She made the eyes come back. It cost her.

"You can imagine the frenzy," Ren said quietly. "You can imagine. The world does not get a Klaid often. Maybe once every few hundred years, if it is lucky. There were already promotional contracts being drafted. Sponsorships. Articles. Documentaries. He was the next Jin, except he was earlier than Jin had been. The implications were."

Ren shook his head. He did not finish.

"And then. He disappeared. After the tournament. The news of his parents' accident surfaced a few days later. He withdrew from the circuit. He was eighteen the next year. He did not return. He was nineteen the year after. He did not return. The community waited. The community is, in some ways, still waiting."

He looked at her then.

He looked at her with resentment. Not the resentment of a man toward another person. The resentment of a man toward a mirror that kept showing him a smaller version of himself than he wanted to see.

"That," Ren said. "Is what a true prodigy looks like."

Lily breathed in. She breathed out. She did not say anything for a long moment.

When she spoke, it was quiet.

"Ren," she said. "Are you saying that Kage. Is. Klaid."

Ren did not answer immediately.

He looked at the pool. He looked at the man crouched at its edge. He looked at the sword at the man's hip, which the man had not drawn during the cantor fight and had still, somehow, contributed more than half the damage attributable to direct keyword effect on the boss's weave.

"I do not know," he said finally. "I genuinely do not know. It is. Possible. That he is a very gifted player who watched the same footage I watched, and admired the same school I admired, and is doing his very best to copy a thing he has spent years copying. That is, statistically, the most likely explanation. There are, around the world, perhaps a few thousand serious practitioners who have studied Master Jin. Most of them are bad at it. Some of them are good at it. The very best of them, with the right gift and the right hours, could approximate the shape. Approximate. Not reach. Approximate. To the level we have seen Kage reach."

He paused.

"It also makes no sense. For Klaid. To be playing video games. Of all things. He would be twenty-one this year. He should be on the circuit. He should be. I can tell you exactly where he should be standing."

He looked at Lily.

"So I do not know," he said. "I am telling you what I see. Kage's footwork is Jin's school. Not derivative. Jin's. The actual one. He is also, in this game, doing things I have not seen anyone do, with timing windows I have personally tried, in this dungeon, and personally failed. So. I do not know."

Lily nodded slowly.

She did not say thank you for telling me. She did not say I won't tell anyone. She just nodded, and let her hand uncurl from the potion-loop on her belt, and looked at Kage at the pool's edge with a softness that had not been there ten minutes before.

Vami had not moved from the far side of the trunk.

His face was unreadable in the way Vami's face was unreadable when Vami was running numbers behind it. Julie was standing close enough to him to feel the moment his shoulders changed weight, and she did not say anything about it.

Zara had finished her stat panel ten seconds ago and had not closed it. She closed it now. She did not look at Lily. She looked at the place where Kage was crouched at the pool, and her brow drew together in the small, specific way it did when she had been carrying a question for a long time and a piece of evidence had just clicked into a slot she had been holding open.

Jax was very still. Jax was not often still. He was looking at Kage too, and the bombast of his face had drained out of it for the moment, leaving something quieter underneath. Something that remembered being saved on a mine floor by a player whose name he had not bothered to learn at the time.

Finn was up on his root with his hawk on his arm, and his eyes had gone a little wide, and his hawk had stopped its slow circling because Finn had stopped breathing for a second. That guy, Finn was thinking. That's the guy I asked to help me read the wind.

Zherdev was the strangest of them.

Zherdev had stopped moving. The piece of armor he had been examining was held in both gauntlets, and his fingers had not closed on it, and his face. For one full breath. Was the face of a man who was actually thinking about something. The big stupid grin and the gaming-slang were not there. He looked, briefly, like an adult. He looked, briefly, like a man who had paid five-figure transfers to a ghost in a ranking board for years and was, just now, doing the math on what kind of ghost that ghost might actually have been.

The expression lasted maybe two seconds.

Then he blinked, and the grin came back, and he made a small wordless sound of huh under his breath, and went back to fiddling with the armor as if nothing had happened.

But the math, once done, did not undo itself.

Kage stood up from the pool's edge.

He turned around. He brushed something off his palm. He did not register that the conversation behind him had been a conversation at all, because the room had been quiet enough to be a normal post-fight room, and people who had been talking were now not talking, and that was the natural state of post-fight rooms.

He walked back toward the party. The fragments in his inventory hummed a low even synchronized tone that he was fairly sure no one else could hear.

He stopped at the edge of the loose circle. He looked at Lily, who was looking at him with a face he did not have time to interpret. He looked at Ren, who was looking at the floor. He looked at Vami, who had a question in his eyes that was being very politely held in place.

He held up his hand. The fifth fragment had not yet faded out of his palm. He let them see it.

"That's five," Kage said.

The chamber was silent enough to hear the slow pulse of the fungi up in the roots above.

"What now?"