“It’s sexy. Sexy as hells! I get hard just looking at it!” chuckled Thon, the Artificing Head, as he marched down the hall. “Your Stick. I fuckin’ love it!”

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” said Dorian.

“Excuse me?” said Bin, reddening.

“He means the weapon I’m about to show you—my Wizard’s Stick,” said Dorian with a grin. He paused. “Or so I hope.”

It was Thon, him, and Bin going down a windowless hall made wholly of sheet metal. Two light-sources ran in thick white lines down its length. They were inside the Artificer’s Guild Headquarters once more, but today’s journey was special. Today the Guild Head was taking them deep into the heart of the Guild, where it stored its top-secret experiments and its most state-of-the-art forges.

Ever since they’d gotten models of Dorian’s Wizard Sticks, and detailed blueprints besides, the Sticks had been the talk of the Guild. It had sparked a fervor among its members—everywhere Dorian passed he heard chatter of modifying, adapting, upgrading the Sticks, talk of expanding their runesets, making rune-stacks—on and on. Walking by some of the forge stations, Dorian saw a huddle gray-bearded Artificers squinting at Stick prototypes with gazes fierce enough to melt steel.

These things tended to happen when you advance a civilization’s technology by centuries in a matter of days!

They arrived at the end of the hall, where two hunks of black, spiny metal were bolted together, making a locked door. Thon tapped his Interspatial Ring, extracting a hammer: a hunk of gleaming silver with a handle of worn leather, half the size of a man. But its weight was considerably more than a man’s, judging by the way the steel flexed and creaked under Thon’s feet when he brought the thing out. It was his personal hammer, engraved with his name—and more, his very Spirit. At a high enough Tier, Artificers formed tool-bonds much as fighters formed bonds with Spirit Weapons.

“Not just anyone can get in here!” said Thon, grinning two rows of chipped yellow teeth. “You’ll need more than a key! You’ve got to prove yourself a damned good Artificer too.”

He tapped the hammer to the lock. Instantly scalding heat bloomed at the door’s edges, and the lock began to deform. Strands of qi ran down its surface—the influence of an array. A puzzle. This door was made of blacksteel: the hardest steel known to Azcan Artificers. Most anyone under the mid-Earth Realm couldn’t dream of forging it. Even worse, the harder one tried to mold it, the harder it resisted. An Artificer’s paradox.

Thon began to forge. Dorian could feel the air warble with heat, with will, as he set his mind fully to the task. The metal was coaxed open, gently yet firmly, with the sort of precision one might expect from a sculptor or a painter, not a seven-foot-tall unkempt giant. The doors folded quietly open. It wasn’t that they moved. The arrays holding them in place seemed to explicitly prevent swiveling. They were simply unmade, then remade in an altered form. Dorian got the weird sense that they hadn’t even been forced by Thon’s will; he’d simply convinced the metals that they wanted to change, and they bent of their own accords. The thought seemed nonsensical, of course—

—unless you were of a high enough level. Then you knew exactly what just happened.

Dorian’s eyes flashed. That might be the first time in this run I’ve seen a man touch on a Law.

It was faint, to be sure, but unmistakable. A feat few managed until at least the Sky Realm. It was so obscure that Dorian bet they didn’t even have a name for its kind here—they probably knew it as just another technique! Albeit a very advanced one.

They couldn’t possibly know that what Thon just shown was the foundation for all Godhood. It was named the Gap Between Heaven and Earth: the thing that set the [Demigod] realm apart from the [Sky] realm, the most brutal bottleneck of all cultivation, save for the jump to Godking itself!

Thon finished up the forging with a satisfied grunt. “Come now, friends!” He waved them through. There was a flare of qi as the doors sealed behind them.

They came to a conelike room swathed in shadow, with one bright spot at its center. There was a pedestal under bright lights, and on the pedestal lay a Wizard’s Stick.

“Behold!” boomed Thon. “Our very own prototype!”

Amused, Dorian went up to it, taking it in from all angles. A few seconds went by as he squinted at it.

“Huh,” he said at last. “I’ve got a few notes, but all told—you’ve done pretty well! You’ve followed my blueprints nearly to the letter.”

“That we did,” said Thon proudly. “It’ll need some refining, mind you. We’ll have a few more goes at it. But we’re close ‘nuff that it’ll do just fine—we even remade one of those funky glyphs of yours! Try it out. Go on!”

He snapped his fingers, and a second set of spotlights flickered on, lighting up the far wall. They shone down on a firing range: an array of targets like an archery range. Each had on it a face of a plain-looking woman. “This is our testing range for all weaponry!” he said with a hearty grin. “It’s what we use to make sure the cannons we ship out actually hurt things well and good. To leave a mark on any of them targets is the same as penetrating the scales of an Earth-Realm drake!”

“What’s with the face?” asked Dorian.

Thon waved a breezy hand. “Oh, don’t you mind that. It’s the default we use for all our weapons tests.”

Bin squinted. “Isn’t that your ex-wife?”

“…” Thon coughed uncomfortably. Then he rounded at Dorian, suddenly impatient. “Say. Weren’t you about to demonstrate your Stick? What’s with the holdup?”

“On it!” Dorian snatched up the rune sitting on the pedestal and fitted it into the Wizard’s Stick replica. It lit up on the spot, buzzing electric-yellow—it’d been charged with Spirit Stones already, clearly. This was its one great advantage: it could draw qi from the user as fuel, true. But it could also take in Spirit Stones as batteries! Which meant even an Origin-Realm numbskull could down an Earth-Realm beast if they knew how to point and click.

Dorian pointed at the target, and clicked.

A mothball of electricity charged out of the staff and zoomed out at the target. When it struck its crackling reached a feverish pitch. There was a flash of blinding light—then it was all gone, leaving behind a field of sizzling black.

“Aha!” Thon cackled. “Never gets old! Take that, Petra, you dumb bitch! Who’s ‘immature’ and ‘unable to grapple with his feelings in a healthy way’ now, huh?!”

“… Hmm,” mused Bin, inspecting the target. “That is very nice.”

He glanced to Thon. “You and your artificers have given this weapon a rigorous assessment, I trust?

Thon nearly seemed offended. “‘Course! Who you think we are?! The whole guild’s been testing the thing for days! Hells—I couldn’t stop them from tinkering with it if I tried! It’s a tight, beautiful piece of machinery. Really is. It’s got my highest commend—commer—commanda—” He frowned. Then he tried again, backing up in the sentence as though he could break through the mental block with sheer verbal momentum. “It’s got my highest communication—no, that’s not right—shut up, don’t tell me, I’ve got it!” He scrunched his eyes shut. Then he grunted. “Fuck. Whatever. You get the gist.”

“Yes, I think I do.” Bin turned gaze on Dorian. But his stone demeanor twitched, betraying a little of the eagerness hidden beneath. He, more than anyone, could imagine the sort of damage a whole army’s worth of Stick wielders could do. “Very well! You were right. This is quite interesting. We’ll make a preliminary batch and reassess afterwards. This first batch should have enough to arm a squadron. Fifty Sticks, shall we say? Should they prove effective, the army will strongly consider ordering more en masse. Though… if they’re all as simple and potent as this, a bulk order is all but a guarantee.”

“Great!” Thus far Dorian was feeling very pleased with this whole thing. Things were going exactly as planned.

“Great!” echoed Thon. He rubbed his hands together. “I’ve prepped for just this moment, truth be told. Come on out, crew!”

A square of light slid open to their left, and in stepped a row of six Artificers dressed in thick flame-retardant coats. They all looked very serious.

“This is my crack team, at your service! These are six of our very best men—and I don’t say that lightly, you know! They’ll do you right.”

Dorian nodded, matching Thon’s grin. “So this is team one?”

“Eh?” Thon blinked. “What do you mean, team one? Is there ‘sposed to be more than one?”

Dorian paused. “…Yeah? I mean. How fast can they make these sticks?”

“Very fast, I’ll have you know! Five Sticks per week! We’ll have the order done in a mere three moons’ time!”

…Three moons?! Dorian gaped at him. This place won’t exist in three moons’ time!

“Ooookay. Wonderful presentation,” said Dorian. “Thank you, Guild Head. But you’ll notice I designed the Staff as a modular weapon, split in five distinct parts. They’re meant to be made separately, then put together at the end. You’ll find it’s much faster this way, I think.”

The Guild Head frowned. “You can’t mean… each Artificer’s only meant to make one part?”

“That’s the idea!”

“You would have us be rote laborers?” Thon gasped. “But… where’s the artistry? The mastery?! No, no. This won’t do, not at all!”

Dorian hesitated.

“If you had trouble swallowing that, you might not like this next bit. We’ll need a lot more than six high-Tier artificers.”

“How many you thinking?”

“Try… a hundred? Split in teams of twenty, one per part?”

“Huh?!” Thon had his hands on his head. “That’s half Guild’s best artificers!” He cried. “Impossible! I can’t just make ‘em drop their projects and take this on! They wouldn’t stand for it!”

“Wait. That’s only half ? Thirty per team, then.”

“WHAT?!”

As Thon gaped at him, Dorian turned to Bin with a frown. “Wait. I see what’s going on here. You haven’t told him, have you?”

The General had the decency to look embarrassed. He looked down at his feet. Dorian pinched the bridge of his nose. Really?

“Say,” he said to Thon. “How would you say the Heilong Patriarch and his army—the same army that makes up the bulk of our defenses against the Ugoc invasion sweeping the Desert and toppling Oases—how would you say they’re faring, right about now?”

“Damned well!” said Thon, puffing out his chest. “Smashing those savages back to the North, they are! And good riddance, too!”

“…I see,” said Dorian. “Boy, do I have some news for you…”

***

Five minutes later, an unusually disheveled-looking Guild Head Thon burst out with a thunderous BANG into the main chamber of the higher-Tier artificers, eyes wild and bloodshot.

Nearly all the room looked up, stupefied.

“LISTEN UP, FUCKOS!” Thon roared. “DROP WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU’RE DOING THIS SECOND! YOU’VE GOT A NEW JOB!”

From the corridor behind him, Dorian looked on with a sly grin. So it begins.