The heavy brass gates of the third-floor library vault opened with a gentle, pneumatic hiss. On the crowded public floors below, where students were arguing about tactical texts and basic cultivation manuals, this restricted section was instead surrounded by a silence that could almost be described as reverent. The high, arched ceilings, made of dark polished oak, were inlaid with luminous spirit stones which filled the private sanctum with cool, pale azure light.
I descended the carpeted aisle, my boots making no noise on the thick velvet runner, and the spirit energy was dense—rich, clean, and buzzing with a quiet vitality that easily penetrated the skin.
I placed my thumb on the biometric reader next to the reinforced ironwood door while standing in front of Chamber 301.
Click.
The runes woven into the door frame faded, which enabled the door to open inwards silently.
The room was spacious inside. In the middle of the complex spirit-gathering arrangement, which had been carved directly into the stone floor, there was a meditation platform made of white jade. Lina was sitting on it with her legs crossed.
She had shut her eyes tightly and brought her brows together in a show of deep concentration. Instead of wearing her burgundy academy blazer, she was only dressed in her neat white silk shirt and her charcoal skirt. Sweat shone on her pale forehead, so that small locks of her pink hair stuck to her cheeks.
The air danced around her slim frame, and thin, otherworldly strands of golden vapour—shapes that looked like the scales and serpent-like outlines of a small dragon—drifted through the air, winding themselves around her arms and legs before being drawn back into the pores of her skin. The unrefined, original pressure still remaining in the room was different from ordinary martial qi; it was ancient, wild, and clearly sovereign.
Inside her mind, on the other hand, a completely different conversation was going on.
POV: Lina
What a silly girl! Stand up straight! How many times do I have to tell you this?
A delicate female voice echoed in Lina's head, sharp and aristocratic, just as if it were a bronze chime hung in the void.
The way you are standing is restricting the Third Heavenly Meridian; the True Dragon bloodline doesn't move through the channels like the crude qi of ordinary worms. It surges! It burns! Broaden your sea of consciousness and picture the primordial ocean beneath a stormy sky!
Lina clenched her teeth and her breath shook as a sharp, needle-like heat rushed through the base of her spine.
'Senior,' Lina thought to herself and gasped as her fingers painfully pressed into her thighs, 'my meridians seem as if they're being ripped apart from the inside!'
"Pain is nothing but the casting off of mortal flesh!" scoffed the female immortal, although a slight amount of reluctant admiration tempered her superior tone. "For ten thousand years the Sovereign Dragon Palace has held supremacy over the highest planes. Surely your techniques were not meant for delicate flowers? The 'True Dragon Nine Transformations' involves shattering the ordinary limits of the human meridians and replacing them with divine dragon tendon. If you can't stand this initial purification, how on earth do you think you'll make it through the academy tournament that boy mentioned?"
Lina concentrated on her determination and managed to push her shaking shoulders back into a firm position. In her mind she saw the image which the immortal had impressed upon her—a golden, celestial dragon soaring through thunderclouds and being able to command lightning by simply moving its tail.
The intense pain she had been feeling in her meridians gradually changed. The burning heat turned into a steady, pulsing warmth that spread out from her heart and flowed through her blood as if it were molten gold. The slight outline of dragon scales underneath her skin faded away, after which she felt a deep sense of lightness and a dormant power.
The immortal said, "Not bad," and seemed only slightly surprised. "You took longer to adjust your breathing than I had expected; it appears that the dormant potential in your lineage is purer than even your mother was aware of."
Before Lina had even managed to take a deep breath and sigh in relief, the immortal's tone suddenly became colder.
"He is here."
Lina's eyes snapped open.
Amar was standing just within the arched doorway, leaning casually against the polished wall and having his hands in the pockets of his dark uniform coat.
The morning sunlight streaming through the tall clerestory windows highlighted the sharp edges of his platinum-white hair and threw long shadows over his attractive but expressionless face. His dark eyes, like an abyss, were completely focused on her and emitted a intensity that caused her pulse to flutter wildly.
Lina breathed, 'Amar,' as she struggled to free her legs from the lotus position.
"Slow down a bit," I said softly and took a few steady, graceful steps forward. "You've just finished a meridian cycle; if you stay standing too suddenly, the rush of blood will cause a rebound."
Lina remained perfectly still, sitting on the jade dais as I came near, her cheeks flushed due to the effort and her breathing still a bit shallow.
"Look at him," the immortal's voice hissed in Lina's mind, full of deep suspicion. "Since this morning his physical body has obviously changed. The latent energy in his muscles has become more concentrated and his breathing pattern is the same as that of someone who has reached the Peak of the Apprentice realm. Yet how has an unawakened mortal managed to pass through that stage in less than three hours?"
Lina's heart gave a sudden leap. "Peak Apprentice? But Amar only woke up his dormant memories yesterday..."
"More importantly, little girl... look under his skin," the immortal warned, her voice growing colder. "My divine senses detect a strange, cold shroud tightly wrapped around his cellular core; it is an unseen legion. Take care."
Lina swallowed the dry lump in her throat and looked up at my face as I came to a stop right at the edge of the jade platform.
"How do you feel?" I asked. I knelt on one knee so my eyes were level with hers.
"I... I am feeling a bit odd," Lina admitted honestly, her voice soft in the quiet room. "It's light now, and it's stronger; it's as if something which had been asleep inside me for sixteen years has just opened its eyes."
"Because it did," I replied, a gentle smile relieving the stiffness in my face.
I stretched out my hand, took the soft velvet towel from the side table and held it over towards her; she accepted it with a quiet thank-you and then gently wiped the beads of sweat from her neck and brow.
I casually remarked that Thorne was rerouting twelve crates of Grade-2 Blood Condensation grass straight to this vault, resting an arm on my knee, and that they should arrive by noon so you can use them to nourish your foundation and prevent your meridians from drying out.
Lina stopped for a moment, put down the towel, and her amber eyes expanded with surprise. "Twelve crates of Blood Condensation grass?! Amar, won't that be... won't that be the main medicinal herb assigned to the Vance family's training halls?"
"It was," I said in a smooth voice, with no sign of hesitation in my eyes. "It is now yours."
Sure you... sure you cut off their supply? Lina's voice became a bit more alarmed. "Arthur was already angry with the tribunal! If you take away the cultivation resources from his family's dojos, they'll see this as a full-scale blood feud!"
I said to Lina, lowering my voice to that low, magnetic tone which at once stopped her panic.
I extended my hand and my fingers lightly touched the silver pendant which was lying against her collarbone. For a brief moment, a tiny surge of ancient azure-gold energy shot out from the metal and reacted against my touch.
Inside my bloodstream there were fifty thousand clones of bacteriophage which surged with a cold, predatory hunger and quickly eliminated the ancient shockwave before it had time to spread through my hand.
'What?!'
The female immortal gasped in complete disbelief within the sea that made up her consciousness.
He used his ordinary human body to touch the Celestial Dragon Core... and yet the defensive soul-ward didn't even scorch his skin? The ward was entirely consumed at the point of contact!
Lina's eyes kept moving from my face to the pendant and she caught her breath. She had felt the invisible collision of energy—a micro-second of complete freezing emptiness meeting ancient celestial heat—right against her chest.
"Let them regard it as a blood feud," I whispered, pulling my hand away and gazing deeply into her eyes. "In this city the Vance family believe that they have power since they have a captain in the garrison and a few dozen rough men wielding swords. They fail to realise that genuine power does not consist in shouting in the tribunals or in parading through the streets."
I rose and directed my eyes towards the tall stained-glass window which gave a view of the extensive martial arenas of Golden Star Academy.
"I said quietly that true power lies in controlling the air people breathe, the medicine they swallow, and the ground they walk upon, a chilling and faint smirk touching the corner of my lips."
Inside my chest, the status panel hummed quietly in the dark:
Plaintext
=====================================================
SWARM STATUS PANEL
=====================================================
[Active Bacteriophage Clones]: 1,120,000 / 1,000,000,000
[Target: Arthur Vance]: 4,200 Clones Replicated (Bronchial)
[New Contact Detected]: Unknown Ancient Soul Core (Lina's Pendant)
[Phage Sample Acquired]: 0.001% Celestial Qi left
=====================================================
When I touched her pendant my microscopic army had not only protected me but a single phage clone had skimmed a microscopic trace of the ancient immortal's soul energy and had drawn the foreign celestial data directly into my biological matrix for the purpose of analysis.
I turned back to Lina, offering her my hand with an easy, gentle smile.
"Combat Theory class begins in twenty minutes," I said softly. "Let's go watch Arthur find out that his dojo's medicine has been canceled."