The wind tugged at Kael's hair and the house boards groaned around them. None of it caught his attention.
"You're suppressing your rank." The man said, pouring tea into a cup. "No. That's not it, is it?"
He sat down on his knees beside a low table.
"Every instinct tells me you're rank one. Everything except the fact that you have four hundred thousand Thoughts in your inner realm." He placed the cup down. "It's been a long time since someone fooled me with simple suppression, so it can't be as straightforward as that. Mind pathway? No, that isn't it either."
Kael tilted his head slightly and walked over to sit across from him.
"You're obviously from the western continent and you're wearing a crest." The man continued, more to himself than to Kael. "The Odysseus family? They're exceptional at concealment. But no, they relied on the shadow pathway, didn't they?"
Kael sat in silence and watched the man sink deeper into his own thoughts, his tea completely forgotten.
Kael picked it up and took a sip. A gentle warmth. Faint cinnamon and something else he couldn't place, something he had never tasted before. A faint bitterness pushed through at the end.
'He used water that was too hot...'
He stole glances at the man as he thought.
How impressive must he be? If his appearance reflected his actual age he was a prodigy by any measure. By the time Taric and Vael had reached rank five they had been decades older than this man appeared to be.
"I'm Valerian Eireindaile."
The man's head, which had fallen back in thought, snapped forward.
"One of the noble families wiped out by Claymore?" He said. "How clever of them. Pretending to be mortals all that time, only to eliminate the family heads and take their lands."
Kael suppressed the expression threatening to form on his face.
So that was the story the outside world had been given.
How was this man so informed from down here?
"Ah. I'm Jian." He waved a hand. "But that still doesn't explain why I can't sense your true rank. You should be rank three based on your Thoughts alone..."
Kael closed his eyes and took another sip when Jian resumed his musing.
'Jian seems reasonable. But dangerous.'
Every time he looked at Kael it felt like something else got peeled back. He had even managed to identify Kael's Thought reserves, which pointed toward a pathway Kael wasn't immediately familiar with. Or was it? His understanding of pathways had grown considerably deeper as time passed.
At rank one, pathways had seemed clearly distinct from each other. Blade pathway cut things. Mind pathway controlled things. Refinement pathway refined things. But the higher in rank one climbed, the more those distinctions seemed to blur and drift toward each other. A mind pathway Luminaire couldn't cut a city in half with the same ease as a blade pathway, and a blade pathway couldn't control a person, but the end results of certain motes began to look remarkably similar. If a mind pathway could stop a thread of thought from forming, a blade pathway could cut the thought entirely. Different methods, identical outcome.
This was a stretch, of course. It wasn't that simple. But it made things harder to assess.
Take Jian. Kael could assume mind pathway based on the Thought reading alone, but that wasn't solid logic. At his level the definitions themselves seemed to play with the concept, sitting somewhere between categories rather than cleanly inside one. A blade pathway mote that yielded the same result as a mind pathway one wasn't impossible. So the assumption wasn't valid. And yet Kael felt some truth in it regardless.
Which raised another question.
Was there a rank above five? Considering Paragons existed, there had to be. He hadn't been able to sense the woman with the pillar's rank when she appeared, and she had dissolved Vael with a single word. Something that effortless didn't belong to rank five. So how did one advance beyond it?
He had no idea. He suspected many rank fives didn't either.
If advancement followed the same principle throughout, deepening one's understanding of a pathway until the heavens considered it sufficient, then moving past rank five would require something closer to a complete mastery. Not proficiency or expertise, but a level of understanding so thorough it was difficult to even conceive of from where he currently stood.
What would people do when they reached that limit?
Most likely they wouldn't stand still. They would begin cultivating a second pathway entirely. Which made guessing Jian's pathway almost impossible. At his apparent level he could have started anywhere and arrived somewhere completely different.
Kael himself wasn't obligated to stay within refinement. He had chosen it because it was where he had awakened, where his natural talent lay. But he could cultivate another pathway. It would take more work. The progress would be slower. But the potential ceiling was the same. There was no rule that said a person was bound to the path they started on.
"What defines if a mote is from said pathway then?"
Kael thought out loud.
Jian didn't hear a thing.
This was supposed to be where the two exchanged words, but somewhere along the way they had both lost the plot. By now they sat opposite each other, each lost entirely in their own thoughts.
Kael tapped a finger against his thigh.
From rank one you gained something closest to intuition about your own motes. When a mote entered your inner realm, filled with your own Will, you gained a sense of its capabilities. But he had started to see how shallow that understanding actually was. The Stern mote, for example, had been inside his inner realm, completely saturated with his Will, and yet his initial understanding of it had been surface level at best. Only after deliberate study had the full picture emerged. The same could almost be said about the primordial eye. Some understanding had come when it became his. But it had felt like nothing more than the first step of a mountain to be climbed.
Which raised the question. What actually defined a mote's pathway? Or was the concept of motes belonging to pathways fundamentally flawed? That was difficult to accept, given that the entire Luminaire system operated on that principle.
Just as Kael felt like he was reaching something, Jian's hand came down on the table.
"I can't figure you out!"
His head fell back with a throaty laugh.
"Tell me." He looked at Kael with something close to obsession. "Tell me how you're suppressing your rank."
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
Jian laughed again.
"Are you rank three? Tell me that at least."
Kael shook his head.
"I can't. I hope you understand."
Jian rolled his neck and pressed a hand against it.
"Ahh." He groaned. "What if I healed your arm?"
His eyes locked onto Kael's, burning with something that went past curiosity.
"I can—"
The words died in Kael's throat.
'My arm.'
He had searched every market he had access to, hoping to find a mote capable of it, without success. That search had eventually led him to the sewers, to auctions and potential sellers, but every option he found was too low ranked to regenerate a full limb. The more he looked the less likely it seemed that he would find what he needed without going deeper into the city than he currently could.
"I could just lie."
He said it after a moment.
Jian shook his head.
"Don't bother. I'll know."
He said it with quiet expectation rather than threat.
Kael scoffed inwardly.
"No. I'm not telling you. And I'll need to keep moving before long."
It wasn't that he didn't want his arm back. He did. But he valued his life more than he valued the arm, and that calculation was simple. If Jian could genuinely detect a lie, telling one wasn't an option. Which meant telling the truth was the only alternative. And the truth included a primordial mote. Consumable or not, if Jian understood what that meant, Kael wouldn't be walking away from this house in the roots.
Greed was a bottomless pit, and he had no interest in being dropped into someone else's.
"Could you take me down? I appreciate your understanding."
Kael said, brushing his shirt.
"I know!" Jian rose from the floor. "Let's make a deal. You're heading out of here anyway, yes? Travel with me."
Kael was mildly taken aback.
"Here's the arrangement. If we reach the exit and I still haven't worked out how you suppress your rank, I'll give you whatever you want. Information, a mote, your arm back if that's what you're after. Your choice."
Kael fell into thought.
What would happen if he refused? More importantly, why did Jian want this so badly? There was no obvious malicious intent. The deal was clearly designed with Kael in mind, generous to the point of being suspicious. Traveling together would cut weeks from the journey, but that wasn't what Kael was after.
"One condition." Kael raised a finger. "We take our time. And as we go, you tell me everything you know about this place."
Jian's eyes lit up.
"Ahaha. A junior explorer with an interest in the Depths? Of course. Of course."
He didn't seem to place much weight on Kael's noble status. Understandable, given his rank.