He walked through the remainder of the cycle with the fifth fragment settled in the Emperor's Pouch and the conversation with Keeper present in his mind not as something to resolve but as something to hold alongside everything else the Middle Domain had given him that did not fit a clean category.
The encounter had produced a useful adjustment to his working picture of the realm.
He had entered the Middle Domain with a model built from Xu Ling's explanation in the white room and the Ninth Gate's passage and the early acclimation days' observation: the inheritance was scattered, he was the designated recipient, the path would involve finding the pieces. The model had been correct as far as it went. What it had not accounted for was the Middle Domain's own population of actors, each with their own purposes and their own relationships to the same events that had scattered the Emperor's legacy.
