The hidden room within Sect Master Yuan's quarters looked exactly as it had the last two times I sat inside it, which meant it looked like nothing at all, four walls of plain grey stone, a single meditation mat in the center, and formations so far beyond my comprehension woven into every surface that even my Stellar Realm spiritual sense slid off them.
After having filled the Sect Master in on the new prophecy that Ignis had seen, I had asked him how many layers of protection surrounded this space, and he had answered with a smile and a question of his own about whether I truly wanted to spend the next three hours listening to the answer, which told me everything I needed to know.
I settled onto the mat and began adjusting my breathing, and that was when the Sect Master spoke.
"Ke Yin, you don't need to do this."
I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was seated across from me on the bare stone, his hands resting on his knees, and looking directly into my eyes.
"Master?"
"I want you to hear me fully before you answer," he said. "When you entered the Two Suns World the last time, you carried the Ethereal Anchor, and you carried a karmic reserve large enough that when you detonated it, the force was enough to destroy a world." He paused, letting that sit. "You spent all of it. Every accumulation from the Realm of the Chosen, from the Lithari, from every soul you pulled out of harm's reach, gone in a single detonation. And the entity lost an arm it almost certainly regenerated before you finished crossing back through the barrier." He spread his hands slightly, a small, tired gesture. "I have nothing in my treasury that replaces what you spent. The anchor is now just a simple anchor. There is no second karmic detonation. And if that thing reaches for you again, I do not know what stops it from taking you. The risk you are accepting this time is greater than the risk you accepted before, and the being now knows to expect you. I am telling you, as your master, that no one here would think less of you if you chose to stay."
That was the most I had ever heard the Sect Master speak for. Yuan usually was a man of few words, which told me how seriously he was taking this. Everything he said was true. I had run the same calculations myself over the past week, lying awake in my rebuilt pavilion, and the math came out ugly every single time.
The world most likely had only one loop remaining, there was an enemy that had been watching me across dimensions. I had no karma to protect me. The only thing I had was a prophecy from a half-dead seer that required me to find a man I had watched get consumed alive if I wanted a chance to save this world.
"I understand what you're saying," I said finally. "And you're right about all of it. But Master, I'm too far in now. I've lived in that world across more loops than I can cleanly count, and I've eaten at their tables, fought beside their soldiers and bled for them, and some of them have died protecting me without ever learning who I actually was. If I don't go back, no one goes back. There is no second world walker waiting in line behind me, and there is no army the Cultivation World is going to send. It's me or it's nobody, and if it's nobody, then Laelyn and Beric and Maya and everyone in that world gets devoured while I sit here refining qi and pretending I made a reasonable choice."
I paused, and then I said the part that I had only recently admitted to myself.
"And even if I could pretend, I don't think my cultivation would let me."
The Sect Master's eyes sharpened slightly at that, and I knew he understood what I meant, probably better than I did.
The World Tree Sutra was more than a cultivation method that ran on accumulated energy, it ran on connection, on the threads that stretched from my Genesis Seed into other worlds, on the act of walking between realms, and every realm I saved fed back into my foundation in some form, whether as karma or as energy or as the structural strengthening that came from the Seed doing what it was born to do.
If I abandoned the Two Suns World now while people I cared about still lived and died there, that wouldn't just stay in my memory as an unpleasant chapter, it would affect my Dao, whatever that actually might be. Every future breakthrough would have to climb over the corpse of that decision, every meditation would circle back to the thread I had cut, and sooner or later the doubt would calcify into something cultivators had a very specific name for.
A heart demon. A flaw in the foundation that grew alongside the cultivator, feeding on guilt and hesitation, until one day, at the worst possible moment, usually mid-tribulation or mid-breakthrough, it surfaced and shattered everything built on top of it. I had read enough webnovels to know that heart demons destroyed the future of high-realm cultivators more than their enemies ever did, and mine would have a continent's worth of faces.
Stagnation would be the gentle outcome. The harsh outcome didn't bear thinking about.
"I can see that you’ve thought about this properly," the Sect Master exhaled slowly through his nose, and some of the tension went out of his shoulders. "Then I understand, and I will not argue further. All I will ask of you is this. Be safe. Be smarter than you are brave, which given how brave you insist on being should still leave considerable room for intelligence. And if it becomes clear to you, truly clear, that the world can’t be saved, then you come home. Do not die with the world out of guilt or stubbornness or some misplaced belief that a captain must go down with a ship he never built. A world walker who survives can save other worlds. A world walker who dies saves nothing ever again. Promise me that."
"I promise," I said, and I meant it knowing that this wasn’t a fairy tale where everything worked out well at the end, I would do everything in my power to save the world, and that’s all I could do.
"Good." He looked at me for a few more seconds like he was making sure the promise was real, "one more piece of advice since you are collecting prophecies right now, the rhyme that Ignis brought back says four threads woven or none at all, which means this is not something you can do by yourself. Your instinct when something goes wrong is to take every piece of the burden onto yourself and keep the people around you away from the cost of it, I am asking you to resist that instinct, the Heavens of that world named your companions for a reason and there is no point in a thread being strong if it is never woven in with the others around it, find them, trust them, and let them carry the parts that are theirs to carry."
I bowed my head. "Thank you, Master. I'll make sure to do that." Then, because I remembered I still hadn’t taken the Lithari back to my inner world, I added, "And I promise I'll take the Lithari back the moment I return. I haven't forgotten. The jade philosophers are mine to deal with."
And for the first time since I had walked into this room the Sect Master actually looked relieved.
"I will hold you to that promise using the full weight of my Dao," he said, and he sounded like he completely meant it, "yesterday they concluded a debate that lasted six days on the subject of whether the rivers inside my inner world have free will, and then this morning they submitted a formal written request on a stone tablet asking for my personal position on the question."
"They carved it into stone?"
"They said paper lacked appropriate permanence for a question of such magnitude." He shook his head slowly. "Go save your world, Ke Yin. Some of us have philosophers to endure."
I laughed despite everything waiting on the other side of the dimensional barrier, and the laughter loosened something in my chest that had been wound tight for days, then I straightened my back on the meditation mat.
The Sect Master stood up and moved to the edge of the formation circle that surrounded where I was sitting.
"May the Heavens be with you," he whispered.
I closed my eyes, focusing inward. I found the Genesis Seed waiting at the center of my inner world, its roots spread across mountains, gardens, and a crimson lakeshore. From it, the three threads extended outward into the dark between realms, they were red and blue and gold, each one humming with the connection to a world that had one breath left. I gathered my soul, anchored it against the Ethereal Anchor's protection, and followed the threads outward.
The stone room, the sect, and the world around me dissolved.
For a moment there was nothing except the void between worlds pressing against my awareness from every direction, and then there was sky, and in that sky hung two suns, one red and low against the eastern horizon, one blue and climbing toward its midday height.
I was back in Porvale.
My body was already moving before my thoughts finished arriving, stepping left on pure trained reflex as the arrow hissed through the exact space my skull had occupied half a second earlier and buried itself in the wooden post behind me with a solid, familiar thunk that I had heard at this same spot more times than any person should ever hear anything.
And then a voice spoke, and everything I thought I knew about this loop shattered in an instant.
"Wh-what are you? Why are you controlling my body?"
The voice was young, and frightened, and it came from inside my own head, trembling up from underneath my consciousness where, for every single loop before this, there had been nothing except silence and empty space.
Maya's hand was still extended from where she'd reached for me, her fingers closing on empty air where I'd just been standing. "Has fear addled your wi—" The words stopped. Her eyes tracked from the post to my face and back again. "How did you move that fast?"
I didn't answer her. I couldn't answer her, because my entire mind was occupied by what that small, terrified voice meant.
Tomas was alive, which meant that someone had reached him before the raid claimed his life at the start of this loop, and there was exactly one person in this entire world who had ever made that promise to me.
Ignis's prophecy had been right. Kal was alive, and more than alive, he was free.
A/N
Have a nice weekend!