A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3k chapter, enjoy!
Chapter 787: A Saint Turned Servant
The days that came after this were something I hadn't really felt in a long time, which was nobody caring about who I was, and it was great.
Lately I had been receiving too much attention no matter where I went, whether that was the disciples back at the Azure Peak Sect whispering behind my back about the new Stellar Realm elder, or whether it was a world needing a saviour, the latter was a lot more stressful.
But for the last few days none of that mattered, there was no stress because nobody at the Blue Sun Academy even glanced twice at some village kid that Lady Laelyn's household had taken in out of pity.
Even though I preferred it like that because it let me relax, Azure thought this whole situation was hilarious for some reason.
"Master, you went from being a Saint of the Blue Sun Academy to hauling buckets of water for kitchen staff."
He said this around the second day I think, while I was dragging two full buckets up three sets of stairs because the lift formation on the east wing had been reserved for "important deliveries" which apparently did not include drinking water for guest servants.
"I like this," I told him.
The weird part was that was the honest truth.
The jobs themselves weren’t anything special and that was the whole point.
All I had to do was carry trays of food and water, do some laundry, polish a bunch of boots, and refill oil lamps down hallways that I was pretty sure nobody had walked through in weeks, maybe longer. The most stressful part was when twice a day I'd stand in line with the other servants from the visiting households to grab meals from the kitchens.
None of it took any cultivation or mental effort at all which was a relief, because for the first time in longer than I could even remember, nobody expected anything out of me other than just showing up and not breaking stuff, though the latter was more difficult than one would expect.
As nice as the downtime was, the main reason I'd agreed to the role of a servant was because it let me move through the Academy without anyone wondering why I kept showing up in places where I had no business being in, and that mattered a lot, because I needed to find Kal.
I kept my ears open everywhere I went, and for a servant that meant a lot of places, because servants hear things that nobles never even think about. Kitchen staff gossip about everything, guards complain to each other whenever they think nobody important is around, and disciples talk freely in front of the people bringing them their meals because most of them have never once stopped to consider that the person setting down their tea might actually understand what they're saying.
I listened to all of that and I still heard nothing, not one single comment about a newly ascended Rank 8. The longer that silence went on for, the more it started bothering me, because in every single one of the loops before this one, a new Rank 8 Lightweaver was not something that stayed quiet for even one day.
In a world like this, cultivators measure out their entire lives in decades and centuries of grinding progress, where most people are lucky if they manage to advance even a single rank over that time, and breakthroughs that happen ahead of schedule turn stories that sect legends get built around.
A breakthrough to Rank 8 would reshape the entire political landscape of an academy overnight, elders would be recalculating alliances on the spot, and younger disciples would be name dropping that achievement in every single conversation for months afterward.
And yet, there was nothing.
I would have just asked Lady Laelyn outright, because if anyone in this Academy would know and be bothered to tell a servant like me, it would be her. She came from a noble house with connections that ran through the entire Order, and even if she hadn’t heard about Kal specifically, she'd at least be able to tell me whether something that big had happened recently.
Problem was, I couldn’t get two minutes alone with her, not even close.
The days leading up to the Selection had swallowed her whole, which was to be expected.
She was stuck in meditation sessions with the elders from dawn all the way until past midday, working through breathing patterns and energy circulation techniques meant to prep her for the absorption. Then in the afternoons there were lectures from senior Lightweavers about what to expect and how to spot the signs of pushing too far, plus about a dozen variations of the same warning about candidates who'd burned themselves out during previous Selections. And then in the evenings there were lessons about the different blue sun cultivation paths and which one suited which type of disciple.
And on top of all of that, there was Beric. I respected Beric, I really did.
He was just doing exactly what a good captain of the guard is supposed to do, which meant keeping an eye on every single person that came anywhere near the woman he was sworn to protect, and a village boy asking pointed questions definitely counted as suspicious in his book.
So Beric made sure I never got any time with Laelyn alone.
Most of the time he did it pretty subtly, like if I happened to be carrying a tray toward her chambers at the same exact moment she was walking back from a lesson, Beric would suddenly "remember" some errand on the complete opposite side of the Academy that would take me twenty minutes there and twenty minutes back, conveniently.
Or if I got assigned to help with the evening meal in her quarters, Beric would find a reason to just be there the entire time, standing by the door with his arms crossed staring directly into my soul. There was even this one time, Laelyn asked me a simple question about how I was settling in and Beric answered for me before I even opened my mouth, then dismissed me, all in one breath, like it was nothing.
It all came to a head on the third evening, I'd been sent to deliver a sealed letter to Laelyn's chambers and found Beric waiting for me halfway down the corridor instead, arms crossed, blocking the path like I figured he would.
"Give me the letter."
"I was told to deliver it directly to the lady."
This was technically true, but also an excuse to keep walking toward her door.
"I'll deliver it."
He put his hand out, so I handed it over because there wasn’t really a version of this where I came out on top, and Beric tucked it into his robes without breaking eye contact with me. As I turned to leave, he said something that froze me in my tracks.
"Tomas," he said, and his voice went weirdly soft, "I've seen the way you look at her."
"I don't know what you mean," I said.
That was probably the least convincing sentence that came out of my mouth.
"You're a good kid," he said. "And look, I get it, I’ve watched young men fall for noble ladies before, more times than I can count at this point, and I know it feels like the realest thing in the world when it’s happening to you." He shifted his weight a bit, and for just a second he looked less like a soldier and more like a guy trying to find the gentlest way possible to say something hard. "But Lady Laelyn is a candidate for Sainthood. Her family name goes back generations. Whatever it is you're feeling, whatever this is, it's not going anywhere, and the kindest thing I can do for you is tell you that now, before it turns into something that hurts a lot more later."
There it was. I stood there a moment, then looked down at my own hands, the hands of some coward village boy, and let my shoulders drop like they were supposed to.
"I know," I whispered, letting my voice catch just a little on the words. "I know she's... I know what she is and that I'm nothing. I get it. I do."
Beric's face softened even more after that, and he reached out and gave my shoulder this awkward, fatherly pat like he felt bad about having to say any of it.
"Listen here, boy. You're not nothing," he said. "But you're also not what she needs. Keep your head down, do good work, and in a few years you'll look back on all this and laugh."
Having succeeded in lowering his suspicions, I nodded as if I had given up.
Beric gave me one more pat as I left.
"Master," Azure said while I walked back toward the servant quarters, "was that an act?"
"Yes," I said immediately.
"Was it though?"
I ignored him the rest of the night, which he thought was hilarious for some reason.
But underneath all of it, underneath the acting and the deflecting and the carefully maintained image of some heartbroken village boy, there was a part of me that wished I could just sit Beric down and tell him the truth.
I wish I could tell him there were stakes on the line bigger than some minor infatuation that would fade with time, that the entire fate of this world and possibly several others depended on things Beric couldn’t even begin to imagine.
And I wish I could tell him that every minute he spent keeping me at arm’s length from Laelyn was a minute I wasn’t spending getting closer to information that might be the difference between this loop actually working and this loop ending like the previous one had, or worse.
But there was just no way to say any of that without sounding like a guy who'd cracked under the experience of watching his village get raided, and Beric, decent as he was, would've had me removed from the household for my own good before I even finished the second sentence.
So I kept smiling, kept carrying trays, and kept waiting for an opening.
And tonight, finally, I got one.
The night before the Selection, Lady Laelyn had been given the evening off from lessons, which was apparently a single concession from the elders, who I guess understood that even the most disciplined cultivator needed some rest before something as big as tomorrow.
Lucky for me, someone in the household kitchens decided the evening called for a pot of calming tea to be sent up to her chambers, something with chamomile and some blue flowering herb I didn’t recognize, meant to settle her nerves before sleep.
I volunteered for the delivery before anyone else could even open their mouth.
The corridor leading to the Aspirants Quarter was quiet at that hour, my footsteps echoing faintly off the stone floor as I carried the tray with both hands, careful not to let the teapot rattle against the cups.
I could actually hear my own heartbeat going a little faster than it should have, which was ridiculous given everything Id already been through across the previous loops, and then I turned the corner, and there was Beric.
He was standing right outside her door exactly where I’d expected him to be, posture rigid, one hand resting near his sword in that relaxed but ready way that a man has when he fully expects one of the other candidates to try something the night before the Selection. I couldn't really tell if he actually thought that was likely or if he just treated every night like it was, but either way the sight of him guarding her chambers at this hour wasn’t a surprise at all.
His eyes found me right away and narrowed.
"What are you doing here at this hour, boy? I thought you got my message"
"I did, I’m just here to deliver the tea," I said, lifting the tray up a bit so he could see it. "Kitchen sent it up to help her nerves before the big day."
Beric studied the tray for a long moment, then studied me for an even longer one, and I kept my expression as tired looking as I could manage, like all I wanted was to finish my job so I could go to bed.
"Fine," he said eventually, stepping aside just enough to let me through. "In and out. She needs her rest."
The door slid open at my touch and the room beyond was warm and dim, lit by a scattering of small lanterns.
The chamber simple but elegant, a low bed against one wall draped in pale fabric, a writing desk near the window stacked with notes and half-finished letters, and a meditation mat laid out in the middle of the floor where Laelyn was sitting cross legged with her eyes closed.
She opened her eyes the moment I stepped in, and a smile showed up on her face right away.
"Tomas," she said. "I didn't expect they'd send you up this late."
"Tea," I said again, holding up the tray like an idiot, and she laughed softly and waved toward the small table by the window.
I set the tray down and started pouring, mostly just to give my hands something to do while I figured out how to approach this whole thing.
"How are you feeling about tomorrow?" I asked, handing her a cup.
"Nervous," she admitted, taking a sip. "Which apparently isn’t what I'm supposed to say. Lady Mara told me this morning that a true candidate of House Vareyn faces the Selection with composure befitting her bloodline." She rolled her eyes a little. "I told her that her bloodline was welcome to face it instead of me, if it’s so composed."
I smiled, and for a moment it didn’t even feel like an act.
"What are you actually nervous of?" I asked. "If you don’t mind me asking. Is it failing?"
She actually thought about the question for a second, which I appreciated because most people in her position would have just brushed it off with something polished and meaningless.
"Not failing," she said slowly. "Or, not just that. I think I’m more scared of what happens if I succeed." She looked over toward the window again, toward the Cerulean Spire rising out there in the distance, its upper reaches glowing faintly even at this hour. "Being chosen means becoming someone the whole Order looks to. Someone who's supposed to have answers. And I don’t feel like I have answers, Tomas. I feel like I have questions, and most of them are questions nobody at this Academy wants asked."
I thought about her grandmother’s journal and everything that was in it.
"For what it’s worth," I said, "I think you'd handle it better than you’re giving yourself credit for."
"You’re very kind for someone who’s known me less than a week," she said, but she was smiling when she said it.
We kept talking a bit more, about nothing important really, about the weird food in the Academy’s dining halls, about how Lady Mara had nearly fainted when she found out the bathing chambers were shared by gender instead of by House, about how the gardens here seemed to glow faintly after dark for some reason.
It was easy because it didn’t feel like it took any effort at all.
Then, from outside the door, came a cough.
A cough that was basically telling me to get out of there before I got dragged out.
"Can I ask something?" I said, keeping my tone as casual as possible. "Once you’re chosen, do you get to pick which elder takes you on as their personal disciple? I keep hearing the senior Lightweavers talk about their own teachers like it’s the most important thing that ever happened to them."
“I have a few names in mind,” she replied, looking surprised that a villager like me would be interested in who she wanted to take as a master, but then a look of understanding crossed her face, and I could only assume, with the pity that accompanied it, she assumed that a villager had hopes of being chosen by an elder. “Elders can be picky so I am not sure who will be interested.”
We both knew that wasn’t true.
Even if she didn’t become the Saintess, there would be many elders who would be interested in taking the Vareyn heir as a disciple, but I could tell she was trying to curb my enthusiasm without being too harsh about it.
“Maybe Elder Kal will be interested,” I said as though the thought had suddenly come to me.
"Who's Elder Kal?" Lady Laelyn blinked.
"I thought I heard there was a new Rank 8," I said. "Someone named Kal."
She laughed and shook her head.
"I haven’t heard anything like that," she said. "And believe me, if there was a new Rank 8 at this Academy, it wouldn’t be something you'd just hear about by accident. Everyone would be talking about it. The elders, the servants, the candidates, the gardeners, probably even the fish in the ponds." She tilted her head a little, studying me with this mild amused look. "Where did you even hear that name from?"
"I’m not sure," I said, trying not to let the confusion show on my face. "Maybe I misheard something. Have you heard of any Lightweaver called Kal at all? Maybe I’m getting mixed up with them."
"I haven’t," she shook her head. "But there are thousands of disciples at this Academy, Tomas. I’m sure at least one of them is called Kal." She smiled and reached for her tea, unaware of what her words were doing to me right then, and probably assuming that some servant had played some prank on me making up some mythical elder. "But a Rank 8 Kal? No. That doesn’t exist."
She continued speaking but none of the words registered.
All I could think of was one thing, and that was that in this loop, there was no Rank 8 Kal…
A/N
Comment below what you think happened to Kal