“Are you sure about this?”

Nyla looked away from her friend to stare down at the black medicinal pellets that she’d just withdrawn from her spatial bag. Both exuded auras with such incredible density that even a layman could tell that these medicines were immensely valuable. The reason she’d held off on using them was due to the underlying sense of malice that resided at their centres.

She and Lyra sat atop the uppermost branch of one of the only living trees that they’d seen since they had arrived in the Northern Wilderness. It had been a day since a powerful band of bandits had attacked the caravan that they had been travelling with, an incident that saw most of the men killed and the majority of the women enslaved. Although the medicinal pellets that they’d obtained from the Vespasian tomb had allowed them both to make several consecutive breakthroughs—Lyra to the first level of Integration and Nyla to the peak of Profound Entry—they still didn’t stand a chance against the force before them.

“Of course not. But if we don’t refine these then there’s no way we can do anything about those bastards.”

They’d barely managed to escape in the first place, since their enemies had numbered over five hundred strong not to mention that the majority of the rogues were in the later levels of Profound Entry. After witnessing the atrocities that their fellow travellers were subjected to neither she nor her friend could turn their backs on those that had been captured, not when they knew what sort of fate awaited them at the bandit lair.

“Even if we do make a breakthrough, what then?” Lyra’s golden eyes narrowed as she peered between a gap in the upper canopy, her long hair billowing like rippling sunshine. “These aren’t some simple bandits. Look at that! They’ve got a fortress. They’ve got a town. We’re talking about going against a community here.”

“What community? Where do you think all their wives and servants came from? If we leave them like this then this problem will only continue to grow.”

“But it’s not our problem.”

“Really? Then why did you insist on following them here?”

“Tsk.” Lyra snatched one of the pellets and considered it with hesitation. “After what happened in that valley, I…”

Nyla grew silent as well. After making it out of the Dreadstone Pass in one piece and cultivating quietly within the region, they’d braved countless dangers on the northward journey through the Dragon’s Tail. The amount of times that they had almost been eaten by rabid animals and demonic beasts was far too many to count, though everything took on an entirely different darkness once they arrived at a mountain community called Malben Valley.

They’d rented a room at a local inn before going out to find a decent place to have dinner, though they hadn’t gone far when they’d spotted several men in the midst of kidnapping a young girl. They’d saved her, of course, but as night fell and darkness gained dominion over the valley, they’d noticed more and more instances of attempted kidnapping. They’d done their best to prevent these crimes, though before long they were targeted as well. They barely managed to leave the valley with their lives, though the dangerous men continued to chase after them for many leagues before a heavy presence of demonic beasts helped them to shake off their pursuers.

They had stumbled upon dozens of similar situations throughout their northward journey, enough to fill them with unshakable disgust for any person clad in the matte black armour worn by all of the kidnappers that they encountered.

“You’re right,” said Nyla after a while. “I don’t trust the man that gave these to me, but I can tell that they’re potent medicine. At the very least they’ll be several times as effective as the pellets that that Rane boy gave to us.”

They considered the pellets in their hands with frustration, for the bloody aura that they gave off betrayed that they had likely been created through contemptable means. Yet at this current junction, what choice did they have?

“So,” said Lyra. “We’re taking them? It goes without saying that I’m only doing it if you do.”

“Let’s wait until nightfall. Then we can put some more distance between us and the town without being seen by anybody on the outer walls.”

They sat in silence for the rest of the evening, both girls lost in their thoughts as they continued to mull over what it was that they were about to do. They’d shared a canvassed wagon with a group of girls around their age, and in recent days had gotten to know them quite well. Two pairs of sisters and a handful of their friends, they had all grown up in the same town somewhere to the countryside south of Smolen, a great city where she and Lyra had tread carefully due to the heavy presence of black-armoured soldiers in the area.

The eldest, a young woman named Alicia, had the foresight to urge her friends to gather all of their valuables when the valley community that they lived in was invaded by a large host of said soldiers, their supposed protectors up until that point. She’d led the girls away while their parents and most other adults had held off the invaders, their frightened group joined by hundreds of others that fled northward alongside them. Only a handful of those that escaped managed to make it to Smolen, which, oddly enough, forbade abuse to all guests and citizens within the city limits, likely for commercial reasons. It was here that the caravan set off on its northward journey, and also where she and Lyra had met the gang of traumatized girls.

The bandit raid happened days before they would have arrived at their destination, the garrison town of Tallwood that served as a midway marker between the Dragon’s Tail and the northern coasts of the continent. After everything that the girls had been through, Nyla couldn’t just leave them to suffer a life of slavery at the hands of those disgusting men. So gentle and sweet were her friends, she knew that they wouldn’t survive it.

They relocated to a random section of barren landscape at the onset of nightfall, at which point she exchanged determined stares with Lyra and then tossed the pellet into her mouth. It tasted like an old coin, and sat heavily in her stomach as if its weight had increased by several fold. The moment that she swallowed it down, a terrifying energy began to wreak havoc throughout her body as if a firestorm had exploded into existence with her abdomen at its centre. Forget cultivation, simply clinging to her consciousness was an uphill battle. Alarmingly, the more she struggled to rein in the rampant energies, the more that they began to disrupt and, in some places destroy her inner essence channels.

Lyra cried out in pain from where she sat about a dozen paces away, streams of blood leaking from her eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

Just when it seemed like the encroaching blackness would steal away Nyla’s mind and leave her dead upon the dirt, the storm of energy began to calm, at least enough for her to begin filtering it in order to make it her own. Due to the nature of the Profound Soul-splitting Technique, she had two dantians instead of one, which doubled her filtration speed and subsequently the rate at which she was able to cultivate Origin Energy. Despite this, she had a difficult time converting the energies within the pellet into her own.

It wasn’t until an entire day later, when she collapsed to the ground covered in blood that had seeped out of her pores, that she gained the strength of mind to realize why the energy had taken such a toll on her body. What she’d refined hadn’t been Origin Energy, but inner essence. It was then that she realized that a person’s blood had been used to create these pellets, perhaps the blood of their creator.

Lyra had a more difficult time with the refinement process, though her suffering was rewarded with a substantial increase in strength. She’d climbed all the way to the peak of the third level of Integration, though her waning aura revealed that her cultivation base was extremely unstable.

As for Nyla, she had finally arrived at the Integration stage, at the middle phase of its first level, to be precise. Her body felt more powerful than ever before, not to mention that her dantians had more than doubled in capacity. As for her spiritual sensitivity, her range of perceptions had nearly doubled as well, which was far more than she had anticipated beforehand. Not only that, but when she closed her eyes and aligned her focus with the instinctual sensation that something new existed within her, she found her consciousness projected within a vast expanse of darkness lit only by the binary system of stars at its apparent centre. It took her a moment to realize that these were her dantians and the strange realm her spiritual space, just as Uncle Grey had foretold would happen once she broke through to the next stage. If what her master had told her was true, then this was the place where the human soul resided.

Finally, she thought warily. Now I can truly walk the path of an arrayment practitioner. Only, what’s this? Something about the energy within her felt off. It was almost as if a coarse grain of sand sat lodged within her chest, though she didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary.

Her head snapped back as she was jostled with heavy hands. “What the hell did you give me, Nyla?”

“I wasn’t expecting that either—”

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

Lyra’s beautiful features were twisted with anger.

“It hurt me just as much as it hurt you.”

“I’m not talking about the pain! I’m talking about the curse that just bound itself to my heart, you fool!”

“I…what curse?”

“Just who the hell gave you these pellets?” Lyra pushed her away and then smashed a fist into the ground with a rumbling thud of impact, the earth sinking waist-deep for several paces all around. “Only Genesis-staged arrayment practitioners can hide a curse on a pellet like this! Just before he passed away, the old patriarch of my father’s family forced my mom to take a similar medicine. That’s why she had no choice but to go through with her Condemning!”

Nyla was overtaken by panic. “I—I didn’t know that was possible!”

“Why’d you leave out the fact that the person that gave these to you was so powerful? I couldn’t sense any poison in them so I wasn’t worried, but if I’d have known… People that strong are one in ten million. They don’t just give things like that away!”

“What are you getting mad at me for? I told you I didn’t trust him and we agreed to take it together.”

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t hit you right now.”

“Because I’ll hit you back. You’re being a brat, Lyra. Just shut up and calm down, for what’s done is done.” Despite her efforts to remain collected, the more she focused on the out-of-place feeling in her chest the more she was overwhelmed by a growing sense of dread. How was she supposed to know that it was possible to place a curse on a medicinal pellet? She hadn’t even known that curses existed. Her mentor was an Arrayment Master, likely the most powerful one to ever exist. If such a thing was possible then wouldn’t he have told her? No, shouldn’t he have noticed the moment that Nolan received the pellets from that strange man?

Uncle Grey! Because you didn’t say anything, I didn’t think that…I didn’t think that something like this could… She tried to control her breathing. No, I can’t blame Uncle Grey for my mistake. The thought of her master gave her a slight ray of hope. If she could find Nolan then the old man would definitely be able to help her out, she was sure of it.

Her breath caught in her throat as she remembered the day that she and Nolan had been separated. Uncle Grey was the one that had possessed his body and abandoned her on that battlefield to begin with. Even if she found Nolan, would the old ghost be willing to help her? No, she had no guarantee that Nolan had ever reclaimed ownership of his body. The perceptive boy hadn’t trusted their master after their jaunt into the monochrome forests that surrounded the strange glade where the man’s spirit resided, and for good reason it seemed.