Aeolus Vane.
Sitting alone in the garden where just a few short days ago Gwen had broken through to the Foundation realm, Calvin turned the name over in his mind, trying to remember anything he could about the individual and his clan but finding little more than scraps. He certainly recognized the name, but in terms of real, actionable details?
Nothing.
The Vane were one of the old families of the Eight Peak Sect, their name recorded on the very first registry of the sect, but that didn’t necessarily mean much. In the modern day, many of the old families were gone entirely. Others had been absorbed, lost much of their status and legacy, or departed from the sect entirely. And some, of course, were still the movers and shakers of the sect.
Judging from Ariadne’s reaction to the name, Calvin pessimistically guessed the Vane fell in that last category. After shaking down Yunfei, the two of them had temporarily gone their separate ways with a plan to meet back up the following day. Ariadne had wanted time to look into things, and Calvin had decided to oblige her. At least for the moment, Gwen was simply beyond his reach.
And he had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
He sorely hoped that Ariadne would have more information for him tomorrow. Real, actionable information.
In any case, there were a few more details he could track down even with his limited means. It took some digging, but eventually he unearthed one of the newsletters from Internal Affairs Hall that mentioned Aeolus Vane by name. It was an old printing, one from only a few weeks after he’d first joined the sect, and it congratulated the young master on his advancement to the Core realm.
There weren’t too many other details, but the fact that the newsletter called him a ‘Young Master of the Eight Peaks’ meant that the Vanes probably hadn’t lost any of their power and prestige. They were just quieter about it than a family like the Redflowers with their many businesses in the Outer sect.
Less encouragingly, he also found a few other stories referencing disciples with the same family name. Only a few months ago, a Kael Vane had advanced to the Soul realm. A year earlier, one Theron Vane, a Core realm cultivator as well, was mentioned as one of the Eight Peaks disciples who’d placed highly in some important tournament outside the province. A fluff piece from the same timeframe also referenced a potential budding romance between a ‘member of the reclusive Vane family’ and an Inner sect Hall Master.
In the back of his mind, Calvin found it darkly amusing that he needed to spend time shifting through years of skimmed newsletters. Had she been in his place, Gwen could have probably quoted the relevant articles verbatim.
He tried his best to ignore that nagging thought. It didn’t help.
All in all it painted a grim picture. His foe had advanced to the Core realm when Calvin himself had only just begun his journey as a cultivator. His family included many powerful cultivators—no doubt at least a handful of Soul realm cultivators and perhaps several at the fifth step, as well as numerous Core realm cultivators. His family included powerful fighters and had close, personal ties to other influential figures within the Sect.
Hells, if he was really unlucky, the Vanes were old enough that one of their elders might be a Sect Ancestor. That would be…he didn’t even know how bad that would be. He didn’t even really know what a Sect Ancestor was beyond the obvious––a really old, really powerful Elder. He’d looked into the term during his first weeks at the sect due to how the Scroll seemed to place the position as being somehow even more significant than that of Sect Master, and had found very few details other than confirmation that it was, in fact, a position that officially existed.
Calvin’s shoulders slumped and he practically collapsed back onto the floor. His head bumped one of the jade statuettes arranged inactively around him and sent it skidding away. Thankfully the little figures were heavily reinforced by qi. A little bump or fall wouldn’t so much as scuff them.
Accidentally damaging one of his most versatile and useful treasures before he’d even really had a chance to make use of it would be just what he needed right about now.
He lay there for several long minutes, silently watching the darkening sky through the room’s skylight. The hardness of the floor barely registered and the air was rich with the perfume of flowers, earth, and growing things. When his mind began to wander in…unproductive directions, he distracted himself with a murmured, “Codex,” the scroll unfurling before his eyes.
He stared blankly up at it, more looking through the ancient-looking yellowed parchment than at it. Despite seeming to obstruct his view, he found that he sort of could see through the parchment, though it looked utterly opaque when he was focusing on it directly. If he let his eyes drift he could see both the Scroll and the window behind, though only for a moment at a time. Everything behind the Scroll looked almost insubstantial, like a simple trick of the light, while the Scroll itself practically seemed to shout its existence directly into his eyes.
More out of idle impulse than any sort of curiosity, he tried to focus on the sky above without ignoring the Scroll such that it vanished. Usually he liked to summon the Scroll with his eyes closed––he’d found that becoming too engrossed in its text with his eyes open made his head start hurting faster––and he’d never really tried to––
For a single instant, the world beyond the scroll seemed to fall away. The walls and ceiling vanished, the sky fading from the orange-violet of dusk to an endless expanse of writhing color and darkness. Waves taller than mountains battered against a glittering curtain of golden stars, and something impossibly large and bright glimmered in the corner of his eye. He almost thought he could see shapes in the heavens, shadows lurking in the chaos and profound patterns hiding amongst the sea of stars.
The only thing that remained the same was the scroll, still the mundane off-white yellow marked with lines of black ink obstructing his view of the world beyond. No, wait. It too looked different. He could almost see––
A blinding, all-consuming pain stabbed through his head like someone had driven a pickaxe straight into both his eyes simultaneously and then twisted. His spirit lurched and on reflex he snapped his eyes shut, the Scroll vanishing back into the depths of his mind and blessed darkness replacing the incomprehensible kaleidoscope he’d briefly glimpsed.
The pain instantly began to recede and he gasped, his muscles loosening all at once and the back of his head thunking against the ground. His whole body ached like he’d been struck repeatedly, and warm trails of blood ran from his eyes and nose to drip onto the ground beneath him. Eight stinging crescents on his palms marked where his fingernails had dug into his skin hard enough to pierce through it and draw blood.
His spirit too felt like it had been clipped by something impossibly vast, but the actual damage seemed minimal. The outermost layer felt like it had been partially torn away by a single pass of a spiritual cheese grater, or perhaps flayed irregularly, but the damage was extremely shallow and did not touch any critical parts of his spirit or Foundation.
What the hell was that?!
For several minutes all Calvin did was lie there and breathe, not daring to move or open his eyes. When he finally did, he peeked momentarily through one eye before squeezing it shut once again, verifying that he was still lying on the floor of his personal garden and hadn’t been transported to some strange, twisted place. Only then did he finally open both eyes and sit up, leaning forward to cradle his still-aching head in his hands.
Well. He certainly wasn’t going to be doing that again anytime soon. He tried to picture what he’d seen and the pain behind his eyes flared like a bonfire in a stiff breeze.
Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
He waited for several more minutes, eyes closed and, as an added precaution, covered by the heels of his palms. Eventually, he cautiously called the Scroll up once again, prepared to disperse it at a moment’s notice. “Codex.”
The scroll appeared as it always did. He very conspicuously made sure to keep his eyes closed as he focused on it, relieved to see it looked utterly unchanged. What the hells would he have done if he’d somehow managed to damage it?
Well. If nothing else he felt thoroughly distracted from the dark places his mind had been drifting before he’d thought to call up the Scroll!
Doing his best to not think about that…experiment, he did what he’d been intending to do from the start and called up the quest he’d received in the wake of Gwen’s disappearance. He’d felt the Scroll update several times since then, but hadn’t checked on it since before his meeting with Ariadne
He finished reading, then stared blankly at the Scroll for several long moments. His head twinged and he hurriedly dismissed it, wondering if he hadn’t damaged something in his skull with his stupid experiment after all. After considering things for several minutes, he resummoned the Scroll and read through the new objectives and rewards once again, more slowly this time.
They remained unchanged.
He waved the Scroll away once again and carefully lay back down on the ground, rubbing his face with his hands and no doubt smearing blood all over his skin.
That was…a lot. He wasn’t used to the Scroll making quite so many changes so quickly. It had only been a day and one objective had turned into five, two of them already completed. He’d had a few quests like that at the very beginning, ones that had rewarded him extremely generously for simple things like getting enough food to eat and making good time on the road. It had been a long, long time since then, and most of his current quests he’d had for years with only minimal progress.
It seemed like a significant change, though he could only guess at why. He appreciated it however, even if getting Gwen back was worth more than whatever treasures the Scroll rewarded him with for doing so. He blinked as that thought slowly made its way across his sluggish thoughts. Huh. Go figure.
He set that realization aside till he could consider it properly.
And then there were the oddities. He’d received Knowledge Tokens before––he was starting to suspect they were some of the most valuable rewards he’d been blessed with––but never a random Knowledge token. And the way the reward was phrased made little sense to him. It had no quality rating, nor any real descriptor beyond calling it a Foundation Knowledge token. Did that mean it would provide him with knowledge of a random Foundation? That didn’t seem right.
More likely, it would be random knowledge suitable for one in the Foundation realm, the way his Random Foundation Elixir Token had awarded him with an Elixir most useful to one in the Foundation realm.
And of course that wasn’t even mentioning the elephant in the room. The high quality reward the Scroll was promising for the ultimate success of the quest. He had no idea what a Spirit-Soul Shard was, but it sounded important. Powerful. Did it have something to do with the Soul realm? Did the Scroll expect that he’d need to be in the Soul realm to have any chance to reunite with his stolen-away junior sister? That wasn’t encouraging.
The fact that it was High quality was disturbing in and of itself. He’d found that the quality of a reward tended to scale with the difficulty of an objective, at least in a general sense. What then did it mean for the reward for an objective to be of High quality when before the highest he’d seen offered was multiple levels lower at Above Average.
Nothing good, probably.
He expected the dread and hopelessness he’d been feeling before to return full force, but strangely he felt…rather calm, all things considered. Thinking too hard about things was rather unpleasant at that moment, but as his thoughts slowly coalesced into something meaningful he realized why.
Before, the issue had seemed almost unaddressable. It had been a mountain of unknown height and littered with obstacles he could neither see nor fight. Now, it was just…a very, very tall mountain. A mountain covered in spikes and fire and cultivators older and stronger than he was, but still just a mountain.
And how did one move a mountain? One stone at a time.
Calvin could move a stone. Given enough time, he could move a lot of stones. Perhaps even enough stones.
And he wasn’t alone.
Ariadne hadn’t just told him to go away when they’d discovered the identity of their opposition. She’d just said she needed some time to look into things. She’d told him to come back. She’d seen the height of the mountain and judged it worth the climb. Or well, at least worth helping him climb.
Lulu and Wallis…he was loath to involve just anyone in this, but them? If he could trust anyone to have his back, it was them.
And it seemed like the Scroll also had his back. So many rewards just for asking a few questions and making a plan? It was practically spoiling him, showering him in gifts like an elder comforting some young master! Maybe it too had grown fond of his adorable junior sister. Or perhaps he was ascribing too much intelligence and emotionality to the ancient artifact.
Despite the treacherous road before him, despite the still-blinding pain in his skull, and despite the empty ache in his heart, Calvin found a smile spreading across his lips. Just a small one––moving his facial muscles too much hurt like crawling over broken glass––but a smile nonetheless.
Moving as little as possible, he claimed the two tokens. They fell onto his stomach one after another. He picked up one at random and, not even really looking at it, snapped it in half.
He regretted it immediately, of course. Even barely watching the spinning wheel exacerbated the burning in his skull and made him feel nauseous like he’d eaten something that had gone off. It was not a sensation he’d felt in a number of years, and he hadn’t missed it. Plus, it meant he didn’t get a chance to see what other options had potentially been available to him.
Then the reward hit him, a wave of dense knowledge flooding into his poor, overtaxed mind. He caught a passing glimpse of its name—Three-Blossom Gaze, Average quality—and concluded that he must have chosen the Random Sensory Technique Token. Probably the wrong token, all things considered. Why had he thought this was a good idea? Oh, that’s right. He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought about it at all because his head felt like he’d spent a week splitting wood with his nose.
A moment later, mercifully, he blacked out.