“I’m sure that you’ll appreciate our efforts, dear disc—”

“Well, it’s been fun.” Nolan rushed over to the others, who were idling around the Divine Spirit Fountain just a few paces away. “If everything turns out okay then we should be seeing you guys pretty soon.”

“Hmm?” Jun looked a little let down. “You’re leaving just like that?”

Without any way to control the ring, Nolan anxiously drew his friends close with an adept expulsion of spiritual energy and lost himself to the twisted perceptions that dominated his being whenever he was ferried from one world to the next.

***

“How is this possible?”

May Asten’s face was a beautiful portrait of confusion as she stared at Nolan with an unwavering gaze. He had been the first to regain his wits after the Millennial Ring had forcefully sent him and his friends back to Venara. They had appeared just a few metres away from where the powerful woman was cultivating, her appearance quickly shifting from a wonderfully shaped statue to that of a medieval peasant that had just seen a space ship.

Nolan answered her with an ambiguous shrug as Nyla began to stir, the others following shortly after.

“You can’t simply shrug this off.” May stood up and crossed her slender arms, one hip more pronounced than the other. “You completely vanish into thin air, then show up almost eight days later with impossibly higher cultivations than you had when you left.”

“It’s a secret of the sect,” he said helplessly. “I already told you that I had a secret method for cultivating, but you refused my offer to use it.”

“You wanted to enslave me, though?” She approached Alicia and Aine, fascination written all across her face as she scanned their bodies with disbelieving eyes. “To advance nearly an entire stage in just eight days, surely this isn’t possible. Not only that, but you’ve also developed spiritual spaces, haven’t you? Judging by your auras, they’re not ordinary ones, either.”

“It wasn’t eight…” Aine began, but clamped her mouth shut when Alicia gave her a reminding look. “Um, sorry, it’s a secret.” The short-haired girl appeared increasingly uncomfortable as May’s inspection turned into a hands-on physical, with tracing fingers and experimental pinches.

“Will you leave her alone?” Nyla spoke up for the timid girl. “She clearly doesn’t like that.”

“You too,” said May, who shifted her focus towards Nyla. “Your aura has grown much more powerful.” She pursed her lips, which were glistening from the application of some ointment-based balm.

Nyla didn’t answer her, but gestured for her to release Aine’s hand.

May set her jaw and strolled over to face Nolan. “So long as I don’t need to sign a master-slave contract with you, I’ll reconsider joining your sect.”

Even though Nyla was at the eighth level of Integration, the amount of inner essence that she had in her body was closer to what somebody at the tenth level would have. Her strength was also more in line with somebody a level above her, a testament to the capabilities of her core cultivation method. Her spiritual space had developed considerably, and so too had her skills of designing and activating arrayment diagrams. While Nyla wasn’t the strongest person among those that had ventured away from Venara, she was definitely the most powerful. Evidently, her vast improvements didn’t escape May’s notice.

“Our teacher said you’d rethink it,” smiled Nolan, who called out in his mind to convey his surprise to the old spirit. When no answer came, he figured that his teacher had yet to activate whatever arrayment it was that allowed them to communicate in real time while residing on different worlds.

“Your teacher?”

“The grandmaster of our sect,” said Nyla. “That’s where we’ve been these past several days, paying him a little visit.”

“Visiting your master?” May’s expression went from slightly skeptical to one of delayed acceptance. “I’ll admit that it’s hard to ignore how much you’ve all grown since last I saw you.” Her hazel eyes trailed over Sean and Esteban, who were at the seventh and eighth levels of Profound Entry respectively. “None of you have ordinary auras, so I can’t dispute that you have some sort of incredible secret. Don’t forget, though, that you lot owe me a great debt. After how much I’ve helped you, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for you to wave the master-slave contract in the event that I actually join.”

While Nolan was always wary of sharing his secret methods with others, he didn’t exactly have a wealth of choices available to him at the moment. There were likely a good number of the Falling Rain Sect’s members waiting for them outside of the Desolate Spirit Tower, as the death of the elder that May had protected them from had surely erased any chances of those outside believing that the core disciples, Drasin, had been killed by the tower’s suppressive aura. Especially now that he and his friends had openly retreated to the tower’s upper floors after he, Nyla and May had made appearances on several floors in order to gather up the rest of the group.

“If you do join, then you’ll have to take on some responsibilities.” Nolan planned on making her a branch leader of the sect, the dual cultivation branch of the sect to be exact…

“I’ve been a great elder of a big sect for more than three years now. Do you think I just lay around and do nothing?”

Nolan cleared his throat. “As long as you know.” He produced the spatial bag that Uncle Grey had given him and tossed it over to her. “Like I said, our teacher figured you’d decide to join us once you saw how much potential we had, so he prepared a special uniform just for you.”

Nyla gave him a bland look, which raised a few question marks in his mind.

“This…” The seal around the spatial bag was lifted as soon as May made contact with it. The mixed look of incredulity and anticipation melted away, and was quickly replaced with an unimpressed frown. “You want me to wear this in public?”

Nolan wanted to cry as he and everyone else laid eyes on what might have been the skimpiest two-piece outfit that existed on Venara, which May had just summoned out from the bag. As far as Nolan was concerned, this ‘uniform’ was basically a set of sexy, pine-coloured lingerie, a patchwork of lace and string that simply outlined a woman’s sensitive areas rather than obscuring them. A momentary image of the gorgeous, curvy woman dressed in nothing but the ‘uniform’ blessed Nolan’s mind, but he quickly shook it out of his head.

Ian shot him a thumbs-up as everybody else visibly cringed, Alicia and Aine blushing as they directed their modest eyes to the floor. Nolan suddenly felt a strong desire to beat his teacher.

“Uh, what can I say? I guess out teacher’s a pervert.”

An odd fire lit up in May’s eyes, a sort that made Nolan slightly jealous. “Your master, is he handsome?”

“Nope.”

“No.”

“Not at all.”

Nolan, Sean, and Ian exchanged looks after they all spoke out at the same time.

Dear disciple, came a demoralized voice, how could you?

Nolan suppressed an eye roll and ignored his teacher.

“Hold on. I’ll make you the same uniform that we all have. In the meantime, Nyla will fill you in on how we plan to get out of here.”

“You’ve got a plan, do you?”

Nyla took out her treasured portrait, the blank canvas and golden, bejeweled frame drawing a curious look from their new companion. Her lightly tanned face was a bit pink as she stared at the lingerie that still floated in front of May, though she calmly cleared her throat and fixed the other woman with a serious stare. “Allow me to explain.”

***

“Are you sure?”

May expressed her doubt as she and the others crowded around the narrow staircase that led to the tower’s eighth floor. Nolan and Nyla were on the fifth and third steps respectively, and had just begun to ascend to the next level when May had spoken out.

“I told you,” said Nolan, “our teacher said we’d be fine.”

“Even if you say that, any resistance to the tower’s pressures is dependent on talent, not cultivation level. You only barely managed to make it to this floor, Nolan. How can you be sure that you won’t die the moment that you step foot on the landing at the top of this staircase?”