We didn’t have to go very far. The arcane runework mechanism that activated the Deathstorm Ward was conveniently located right behind the Magistrate’s desk, hidden behind a panel that opened up for me when I tapped it with the Master Key ring.

Traetorius begged me not to crank the Defence Ward all the way to its maximum because then the castle would be dangerously exposed during the actual Deathstorm Convergence and I told him to go suck a pinecone.

“I need protection and power now, Magistrate. Now. Not in five days time!” I asserted. “Firstly, this is the only way we will survive the day. Our enemies need to be crushed before they strike against us. Secondly - I have absolutely no desire to hide behind the walls of this Citadel when the Stormweavers come! I will be at the front, facing the bastards that killed my family thirteen years ago!”

Arianna looked a bit concerned at that.

“Are you afraid, Kittyanne? Do you not believe that I can change the world in six days?” I entreated, turning the runematrix to its maximum output with the Master Key. One by one, all of the runes on the wall lit up. The panel started to hum ominously.

"Urmm…" Arianna said. "I do trust you but... I am pretty scared. To tell you the truth, I've never been out of this castle during the Deathstorm."

“And I usually hide in the dead city,” I beamed at my fiancee. Somehow, over the duration of three days I’ve managed to make an honest companion out of my worst nemesis.

“I’m not afraid of the Stormweavers,” I alleged. “I know how they set the city on fire. Based on that alone, I can figure out how to stop them.”

“Really?”

“Really,” I tapped the enormous stone panel with the ring and the control mechanism closed up once again.

“I was told there would be many servitors? Where are the servitors?” I looked around.

“The Deathstorm Ward takes five thousand heartbeats to activate. The Runes have to establish a connection with every servitor in the castle,” the Magistrate explained. He looked dejected.

“Cheer up, grandpaw. Smell the air! You get to live another day! Get used to living like an urchin at the edge of your feet, one day at a time, just one melon away from death!” I cajoled with a scowl.

Then I looked at him with a serious face. "I want the entire garrison disarmed and assembled down in the armory in 4800 heartbeats, Magistrate. Arianna and I will be there in approximately 5000 heartbeats for the... evaluation."

"Evaluation?"

"Yes. We need to weed out the traitors." I nodded.

"Should we not interview and force the oaths out of each of them in private like we did with the servants?" Arianna suggested.

"No time," I shook my head. "We will do them as a group."

"Don't we have an hour until the ward activates?" Arianna inquired. "That's more than enough…"

"I've already made that sort of a mistake with you and almost died for it. I'm going in, guns full blazing!"

"What?" The highborn blinked.

"You will see soon enough," I smirked. "Let's go hang out in the drawing room till then. Go find me that Ward book. I’d like to know what sorta nasties I can summon to my aid. We have 5000 heartbeats to kill."

Arianna nodded, departing to the library.

"Avidius, you’re with me. Do not get out of my sight.”

“Um?” Avidius stepped right in front of me.

“God, I don’t mean it literally. What I meant is - from now on you are my very visible bodyguard. Look important and imposing."

The Reaper nodded.

As I returned back to the drawing room, I noticed a 6 meter-wide crystalline clock hanging above the arched entryway. There was a silver, ghostly snail-like creature inside the clock, ever so slowly and meticulously moving the central mechanism. The creature had a ghostly pearlescent shell from which tentacles extruded. The tentacles pulled a single gear. Crystal gears slowly shifted, spinning a long, celesteel arrow that clicked out the local time in “heartbeats”.

It was a beautiful work of art, if a little eerie. Each “day” in the Gold city started and ended approximately in “the darkest hour of the night” and was exactly one hundred thousand heartbeats long. There were twenty “hours” in each day, or high-cultivator meditation heartbeats, aka HC-heartbeats. Supposedly it was because master high-cultivators could slow their heart to beat only twenty times a day during meditation. Each HC-beat contained five thousand mundane heartbeats. It was a pretty neat system.

Lowborn nobodies like myself who couldn't afford such fanciful clocks went by the temple gongs which announced sunrise, breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight. I stared at the intricate mechanism and its eternal gear-driver for about 50 heartbeats and then walked to the couch occupied by Celes.

A gold eye opened as I approached her.

“Hey, how are you doing?” I asked, staring down at her. She didn’t look good. Her skin was a pale-gray shade and she was trembling. Her terrified, hurt expression tugged at my heart.

“Still… hurting,” she whimpered softly.

I sat down next to her.

“Ashy… you… smell different.” She inhaled. “What’s going on?”

I pulled back the celesteel mesh, shoving my left arm into her face.

“W-what?”

“Eat up. You hurting like this is breaking my heart.”

“N-no. I’m n-not a monster. I… I’m so hungry though… Gods…” Celes started to cry.

“Celly, you’re not a monster.”

“I am. You don’t know anything, Ash. Things like me eat people to grow stronger.”

“Celes Rada. Bite my damn arm and listen!” I slid even closer to her, waving my exposed arm under her nose. She was shaking, fighting the creature living inside her that needed to eat life to repair her ‘shell’.

“I don’t want to hurt you…” She whimpered, drooling a little from the smell of my arm. “You’re a good p-person. You need to get stronger to help p-people.” She kept her eyes shut, trying not to look at my arm in front of her face.

“Celes. I eat people too now.”

“W-what?” My bewildering comment made her open her eyes.

“Just got a new class. Dantian Devourer.”

“What?! I… I don’t understand…”

“Well, it started out quite innocently. I got engaged to Arianna Manning to change my Dantian and hide from Clint’s beast core firebombs. It didn’t just change it. It healed the holes caused by the Celesteel Kiss and I became a lot stronger. I thought that the engagement would be enough for her highborn grandfather to respect me. I was an idiot. It wasn’t enough and I nearly lost you. So, I became something else. I became a monster too… because I don’t want to lose you. Because time is running out and I need to be a lot stronger... a lot faster.”

Celes licked my arm.

“Just bloody take a bite, damn it! Eat all the Dantian you need to get yourself healed! You can’t hurt me anymore! Do you not smell it? There’s eight people worth of Dantian in me now and I am twenty times as strong! I will be a hundred times stronger by the end of this day!”

Foxy teeth bit into my arm and I felt the numbness and tingling again as she started to drain my Qi.

“There you go!” I laughed.

“How?” She mumbled, not letting go.

“You might be the oldest beastie in this castle, Celes… but I’m the most dangerous one here.”

Celes winced at the word ‘beastie’.

“Hey, don’t take it personally. You’re a cute Tardigrada. Accept what you are. People don’t see the real me when they look at this scrawny girly body either. I’m a monstrous amalgamation of two souls, one of which is an ancient ghost, fractured, worn away by a thousand years of passed time. Perhaps Lord Boundless took a hearty bite of my memories too. You saw the Pharmacists’ ghost have you not? It’s full of spooky holes.”

The Kitsune Tardigrada nodded.

“People like the Magistrate and the Head of the Barbers called me ‘cursed’. In a way, they’re right, you know,” I talked as the fox-vampire slobbered on my wrist. “I get it now. I am cursed because the knowledge I possess is extremely dangerous. The locals aren’t taught to think the way I do. They don’t understand chemistry, biology or mathematics as well as I can.

“It’s not even the fact that I know the natural sciences that matters. Yes, I can probably make a cannon or a bomb and it would probably be very dangerous for the local mortals. My most dangerous skill isn’t my arcane knowledge of biology or chemistry - that’s not what makes me a true monster. Thinking outside of the box. Lateral problem solving. Optimization. Algorithmic maximization. Exponential growth. That’s what the Immortals like Clint and the cult truly fear!”

“That’s a lot of ancient words, for my little Tardigrada brain, Ashy,” Celes mumbled with a small smile. Color started to return to her face.

“Let me try and simplify it for you. People get mired in their culture, imprisoned in their daily lives by the need to make money repetitively day after day, get stuck in their job bubbles, especially so in the Gold city with all of its various classes and servitors. The bakers barely interact with highborns, the highborns disregard the ideas of lowborns. The lowborns can never make contracts with merchants. Everyone is disconnected from everyone by their status. The Gold city citizenry is fractured, divided. The cult hoards knowledge. The Guilds conceal secrets. Everyone here strives to maintain expertise and power, passing it down only to their apprentices or their kids.”

“I get it. As a geisha I don’t know much about the job of a baker. Was the Pharmacist a good… uhh… Lateral problem solver?”

“Yes and no. The Pharmacist also existed in one culture, worked one job solving one type of problems dealing with drug production, often mired in local culture and rules.”

“Um. So it’s the combination of the Pharmacist and Sparky that makes you…” Celes mulled. I liked the way she said ‘Sparky’. It sounded extra affectionate.

“Dangerous. Cursed. Unstable. Unpredictable. Manic. Lateral.” I booped my kitsune on her dark nose.

“Hrm,” Celes blushed, wiggling her ears adorably. I giggled.

“Before I got my shit together, mostly thanks to you… I was an absolute loner and a bit of a sociopath at times. When I was young I was a victim of what we ancients called ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. I desperately sought to serve the Thieves guild and Lady Lillian with my entire heart, until Arianna pulled me away and taught me cultivation. Using the knowledge she gave me, I discovered that I could escape into the dead city. As time went on, I hid down there from Arianna and the Hand gang as they became my new abusers.”

The kitsune bit my arm again, seeing that I wasn’t stopping her.

“I felt no guilt or remorse for the people I robbed. I made no friends in the Gold city and didn’t bother to help anyone. And why would I? In cold winters I kept myself warm by making campfires in the dead city, setting old scraps on fire with my Qi. Nobody helped me with anything! I didn’t evolve, didn’t grow, didn’t connect with anyone… until I ran into you and awakened the Pharmacist.”

Celes curled into me. I hugged her and she hugged me back.

“The Gold city is an incredible place, filled with people and opportunity. As a little thief, trapped by a prison of my own mental patterns I simply didn’t see them. Now thanks to an outsider from a thousand years ago living in my head, I do. All I needed was to see the world from another angle so that I could weaponise the mundane and begin to break everyone’s chains.”

Celes nodded.

“The Immortals fear me because I’m their Abaddon - their worst demonic nightmare, far worse than the things from the depths of Lord Boundless. I am a clever human that doesn’t play by their rules. If I’m allowed to live, I can shatter the entire system of the Gold city classes from within by showing the people that there’s a better way to live via a shared system of knowledge and power.”

Arianna’s footsteps approached us. I looked up at her emerald eyes. She looked as grumpy as ever, carrying a large leather-bound tome.

“Yeah, this Qi-ssing bitch weaponised the engagement ritual to make Dantian-harvesting-oaths!” She dumped the oversized book onto the short table and huffed. “She’s even declared herself a Baroness and made my grandfather swear an oath of allegiance to her. Can you believe it?”

Celes squinted at Arianna.

“Don’t give me that deadly fox-glare! I can call her what I want. She’s my fiancee,” Arianna rolled her eyes, sitting next to us. “Mine and soon everybody else’s in this bloody castle! Have you seen her Dantian? It’s absurd, is what it is!”

“You are jealous!” I laughed.

“Screw you and screw your insinuations, Sparks!”

I wiggled my silver-blue eyebrows at her.

“No. Put down those eyebrows,” Arianna commanded.

I started to laugh even harder.

“Kittyanne's jealous,” I whispered to Celes. “I bet she wants a hug too, but is too pansy to ask for one.”

"I am not!" Arianna huffed.

"Your blushing face says otherwise," I noted. "As your august Baroness I should command you to give me a hug."

"W-what?! No. That’s… You're… I… ugh..."

I wiggled my eyebrows again. "You are very easily flustered, you know. At least give this poor, fourteen-thousand-years old foxcub a hug. How can you resist this adorable face?" I presented Celes's mug to her. "Just look at these ears! They're so big and fluffy."

The highborn squinted at us.

"So flufffffyy," I wiggled the kitsune ears at Ariana with my hands.

Celes snorted.

I saw the faintest hint of a smile on the face of the seventh scion of the Manning house.