“Come quick please! The warehouse. It-It’s gone up. It’s everywhere,” the man was saying.

“Speak clearly, man. What are you saying about the warehouse?” Cohen asked him.

The man kept speaking in gibberish but it only took a few seconds for Cohen and Kai to make out the words, “warehouse” and “burning.”

It had been a week since Kai’s skirmish with the muggers in the dark. He’d come back to the Wandering Spirits with his cloak covered in blood, which he’d had to tell Cohen multiple times that none of it was his.

It had surprised Kai how much the other guardsmen had been concerned for him. They’d been ready to search the streets for him before he’d finally made it back to the inn at night. And, they’d also been extremely worried after he’d told his story to them.

Kai couldn’t figure out for the life of him why they’d all looked so sad or alarmed after he’d told them everything, but then, while he had been lying in bed that night, it had come to him.

For the first time in his life, he’d killed a human.

However, contrary to what the guards had been expecting, Kai didn’t feel much of anything, which might just have been more alarming than if he’d felt sick about it. He knew that those three men had been lowlifes that had schemed to rob a lone girl and maybe had even been thinking of doing something much worse.

He was glad he’d caught the situation in time and had had the strength to stop them. It didn’t bother him that he’d killed three men, and that indifference about his killings also didn’t bother him.

Nevertheless, the guards had still been a little more careful around him. Yet, Kai had assured them, most especially Cohen, many times that he was fine.

Normally, it took the merchant’s caravan approximately a week to restock their wares. That day, the guards had been told that the caravan would leave the city in a couple of days and so they had started to get ready to leave.

However, just hours after they had gotten that information, one of the merchants had ran in, yelling about the warehouse. Cohen and Kai had taken the man aside to make sense of his words.

After learning that the man had come to them because the warehouse was on fire, Cohen yelled at the guards to call the captain and get to the warehouse as quickly as possible, and then Kai and he ran out of the Wandering Spirits and pushed their way through the crowd.

It took them a quarter of a bell to get there, which was relatively quick, but the guards had bought rooms at an inn close to the warehouse for these types of unexpected situations.

Cohen and Kai had caught sight of the smoke and the flames only a few minutes after leaving the inn and by the time they had arrived, the entire building was in flames and it was almost impossible for them to even get close to it.

They found Corinne and her father, Havar, staring in horror at the burning warehouse, with even tears running down Havar’s eyes. Kai was surprised as it was the most emotion he’d ever seen the man express.

“Havar,” Cohen called out. “What happened?”

The man’s head snapped to them and it was clear he was in shock over the ordeal.

“I-It was an accident, I think,” he started saying. “I’m not sure how but one of the assistants smelled the smoke first and started alerting the rest of us. We were honestly lucky to get out in one piece. Unfortunately, our wares…”

Corinne laid a hand on her father’s arm, sympathizing with his plight. Kai thought for a second before he came to a realization with a shock.

“Wait, but that means…” he started to say.

“Yes, young man,” Havar answered. “The caravan will not be able to make their trip to any of the villages for at least another eight months, maybe even a year.”

And then his face hardened just as Kai’s fell, as if talking out the issue had woken him up. He started to bark orders at the men around him but Kai had already tuned him and the rest of the men out.

I promised Mera and Hunter that I would be back in six months, he started thinking to himself. Neither of them will be happy, especially Mera. I know she’ll be angry at me.

It was of no use for him to think about that though, because he couldn’t do anything about it. Not only was the caravan now unable to travel without its wares, he would never dare to go home alone. The Dorinthian Forest was home to many beasts after all and most only feared attacking large groups. A lone boy like him, especially one who wasn’t even a Cultivator yet would prove easy pickings to the weakest of beasts.

He sighed heavily, which earned a sympathetic look from both Cohen and Corinne who had guessed his thoughts easily.

Suddenly, two figures appeared from the crowd that had formed behind the merchants. They were both wearing sky blue robes with the crest of a circular snake swallowing its own tail. Both were young, maybe in their late teens or early twenties and were obviously Cultivators from their ethereal looks.

Whispers started up as they pushed to the front of the crowd, but paying them no mind, the two young men kept walking towards the burning warehouse. They both stopped only a few yards from the nearest flames. One of them reached out a hand and pulled back as if a rope was clenched in it. As he made that motion, a slight wind picked up, pushing the smoke away from the rising crowd, and somehow also lowering the height of the flames.

The other man put one of his hands underneath his robes, gripping something and then threw his other arm out, splaying his palm out towards the fire. Suddenly some of the fire started to turn to ice, but the heat of the burning building quickly melted that ice. However, this didn’t deter the determined Cultivator as he kept going.

More ice started to form and though the heat was melting it, more started to branch from the initial formation. The combination of the wind and ice helped stop the fire in less than half a bell, but even after the flames had been put out and the Cultivators had started to get cheers from the crowd, the burned husk of the warehouse behind them had dampened the mood of the hopeful merchants. It was obvious that they hadn’t been able to stop the fire in time. Their wares had still been burned to a crisp and their’s and Kai’s hopes had come crashing to the ground once again.

However, through that disappointment, Kai still looked at the Cultivators in awe because that was what he had aspired to be for many years. He had always wanted to have that power to help himself and the people around him.

The Cultivators bathed in the applause for a few minutes, smiling and waving at the crowd before finally leaving.

“Who were they? Why were they wearing those blue robes? What was that symbol on them? Oh, and did you see how cool their Techniques were? That wind and ice combination is deadly but how did that ice stop the fire?”

Cohen physically flinched as Kai assaulted him with a series of questions. He shook his head ruefully before answering.

“Ok, one at a time Kai. First of all, they were Cultivators from the Uroboros School of Cultivators, situated in the city of, well, Uroboros. The blue robes represent the fact that they’re disciples of the School. The symbol on their robes was the symbol of Uroboros, which is a snake swallowing its own tail. It symbolizes infinity. Uh what else? Oh yeah, I’m not exactly sure how the ice was able to stop the fire, but I could feel some type of Formation Technique around the first ice formation, which could’ve helped.”

It took Kai a couple of minutes to sort all of that information and in the meanwhile, the merchants had started to approach the warehouse to check its husk, fruitlessly searching for at least something that could’ve survived.

The sun had started to make its way towards the line of the horizon and the crowd of people had started to disperse. The merchants and the families that were there all held long faces as they realized that much of their stock had been burned up in the fire. Many of them would no longer have the coin to travel and would never financially recover from the damage that the fire had caused.

Others would recover but they knew that the next time a caravan went out would be at least a year from now. Yet, even though the young boy known as Kai knew that he wouldn’t be able to go home for a year, he was happy at the fact that he’d found an opportunity to become even stronger and maybe even join a place that would help him grow as a Cultivator in the future.

Kai finally looked up at Cohen and said with conviction, “One day, I’m gonna be a disciple of the Uroboros School of Cultivators.”