Dorian would’ve never dreamed he’d get a Bloodline piece this early.

As he sprinted into the chamber proper, heartbeat thundering in his ears, he thought of his original plan: Get to Profound. Establish a base of strength via Artificery and Alchemy. Win whatever resources the Tournament offered. Then screw off before Nijo and his gang got here—at which point he’d go hunt for Bloodline Relics to further his powers.

Away with all that chaff! Now it was like he’d skipped straight to the last step.

At Vigor, the body could only store about 1% Bloodline capacity; that teensy percent was nestled in the dantian. Absorbing more Bloodline at this stage was useless to him.

But at Profound, where the Spirit Sea opened, things got intriguing. The Spirit Sea would be his very own store of qi. It’d let him fire off Techniques powered by vastly more qi than Vigor, true, but it would also be a space where he’d store another nine percent Bloodline capacity! Which meant at peak Profound, he’d wield up to ten times the Bloodline power as he had in Vigor.

If he could snag up enough Bloodline relics to fill that capacity…

He would be a monster untouchable in the Oasis.

He squeezed the ring, felt its comforting heft nestled in the grooves of his palm, and his grin turned feral. How much Bloodline was the pearl on this ring worth? One? One-point-five? Two, even?

He was looking at—at the very least—a doubling of his Bloodline powers.

On top of the obvious benefits of ascending to Profound, of course. Oh, my…

He skidded to a stop before the doors to the cultivation chambers, still hanging ajar, tufts of watery purplish smoke billowing from the entrance. Then, without pausing, strolled in.

He was greeted with what seemed to be the main chamber, but in miniature: a foyer of clean-cut stone with carved doors along its sides, but made for men rather than giants. A thick layer of that purplish smoke nuzzled the floor, winding and flowing like a lazy river. It was a smoke of smokes—made of wispy vapors of sky-blue and rose-pink and midnight-black and forest-fire-orange streaming out from each of the doors, all mingled together. The sky-blue smoke streamed from a door with a feather symbol. Rose-pink came from a flower-door. And so on. Each of these doors led to a cultivation chamber with its own aspect.

But Dorian already knew which one he’d choose. One door taller than all the rest stood at the very center, marked with a curious symbol: a lonely moon in a twilight sky. More qi gushed from it than any other. Of course the Heilongs build the best of the rooms for their cultivation aspect.

He smirked. This little coincidence of Bloodlines is paying dividends ten times over.

He stepped up to the door and sank his thumb into the indent. With a grumble of gears, it slid open.

It was as though he’d opened a portal into a midnight forest in some eerie faerie realm. There was no ceiling, just a starscape canopy—white pinpricks against a satin gloom. Before him stood a grove of crooked trees with bone-white trunks slender as as man’s thighs. Their boughs bore strange fruit: leafless, shiny, orbs colored a purple so dark it verged on black. From these fruits flowed vast torrents of that purplish smoke-qi which settled over Dorian like a thick summer wind. A pebbled path wound through this grove, ending at a shrine at its center.

The shrine was simple white wood, and a single bamboo mat lay at its center. There was an array carved on this mat. Its job was simple: to marshall all the billowing, soupy fog of qi in this room, and pour it on a single point. And it sat there, idle, just waiting for someone to use it.

As Dorian stood there, at the threshold of the shrine, he felt himself, too, standing at the threshold of the Profound. It was right there. Within reach. But such an endeavor was not to be taken lightly; there was a gravity to a bottleneck as monumental as this. This threshold would not admit a dilettante. It demanded full-hearted conviction, a single-minded focus. So he took one last inventory of his status. All the preparations were made. All the materials were there. What of the state of his mind? He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then another, in-out, in-out, until his heartbeat had slowed to the steady beat of a war-drum, until each muscle in his body unwound its tensions in turn, until he was cool as a crystal-clear freshwater lake atop a wintry mountain’s peak. There was not a ripple on the surface of his mind.

Then he opened his eyes, and they shone with frigid bright light. He knew what had to be done. He knew he had the power to do it. He entered.

***

A boy in a shrine, legs crossed, eyes closed, breathing heavy.

The air was heavy with quiet.

And then the ground underneath him erupted with light. Brilliant light which drilled into the sky, cutting pale holes in the stark black. One by one, the stars went out.

There was a rumbling. Like an earthquake, but in reverse, for this did not begin deep within the earth. It came from up there, in the heavens, streaming down: a pulse, a wave, a surge. And then it was like every little particle of air was vibrating, hissing with energy.

Then the mist began to move. As though blown by heady winds they drifted in, coiling around the shrine. Dorian felt them seeping into his body, coursing down his meridians the way thawed glacier-water rushes down dry riverbeds. Still they kept coming, drenching him, running faster and faster until he sat cross-legged, eyes scrunched at the center of this gathering storm, struggling to carry its weight. Sweat beaded his temple as he tried to rein it all in, but it was like trying to hold down a stable of bucking stallions. Excess qi was thrown out from his body, then swept back into the storm again. He felt like the weight of a universe was crashing upon his shoulders, all at once, and he felt himself compressing, folding in, hunching over, every muscle in his body crying out, veins straining against his skin. He screamed, and a blast of excess qi rushed out his open lips.

Dorian sat on a standard gathering array in a cultivation chamber. The only thing was, such an array was meant for Earth-level cultivators. Dorian took it on at Vigor. And it was crushing him like a tinfoil can. All this qi had no outlet, and so it chose his body.

Dorian had to give it new direction.

He locked his mind on a single point. A little dot right above the dantian—the dormant node of the Spirit Sea.

And he formed one thought.

Open.

***

Tan Heilong hummed merrily as he clackled down the corridors of the Heilong estate. The day was going splendidly! Soon his new, dear friend Io would be at Profound, and they’d go out shopping and spear-fishing—whatever it was friends did. Tan frowned. He wasn’t really sure? He didn’t have very many friends. Really just the one, now that he thought of it. The other times were just his older brother’s friends pretending to be his friends, then shoving him into mud-pits, and pointing, and laughing, which wasn’t really the same thing as having a friend at all. Smiley, happy men simply didn’t approach waifish dwarves like him, he guessed. He sniffled.

Speaking of his brother and his friends, those horrible cretins were still out there in the front yard, doing their brutish dueling-practice. He curled a dainty lip. Uncouth things, and not the least bit aesthetic. Tan never got the appeal of muscles. Veiny, lumpy things, bulging out of male bodies—ugh! He much preferred the slender, agile forms of the girls on the field. There was that girl, Lin, that gorgeous sprite of the air, weaving across the skies like a ribbon of light, loosing bolts of crackling qi. His eyes glittered. Oh, how Tan wished he were like that…

Then Tan frowned. A great ugly shadow had fallen across the field. What the heck? It was thick, and misshapen, and had an unpleasant sense of familiarity to it…

He looked up. And his blood ran cold.

A battleship, a hulking, blocky monstrosity of bolted metal streaming with red flags, disgorging thick plumes of smoke. But it was not an enemy ship, come to attack. That would’ve made Tan less nervous.

This ship was the Heilong’s own.

He recognized this ship. It belonged to his uncle. The one-and-only Great Elder Bin Heilong, major-general of all of the Oasis’ aerial forces. A man who could put the fear of the Dweller in Tan with but a twitch of his arrow-straight brow.

A man who was not supposed to be here. He should’ve been in the far reaches, putting down those bothersome Ugoc savages!

Not good. Not good at all. Very not good. Tan swallowed. He’d been under the impression all the adults had gone out, and he could let his little friend play around in the manor.

But if any senior knew he’d let a foreigner into the Heilong family’s most restricted zone?

A droplet of sweat dribbled down Tan’s nose.

Very very very very not good. Not only for him, but for Io. Tan didn’t even want to think about the things Bin Heilong would do to his friend if he found out. That man had a gaping hole where his heart should be. He’d killed for far, far less.

There they were. A swarm of black dots in the sky, exiting the hull of the ship. And at their head, dressed in flaming silks, was Bin Heilong himself, a clean-shaven, gray-haired man whose thin physique belied monstrous strength. Tan had seen the man drop an Earth-Realm drake with a flicker of his fist. And now he was not thirty feet away, frowning severely—his default expression, but it chilled Tan to his bones nonetheless.

Tan dashed out onto the field. His brother and his friends were already there. Most were bowing their heads in deference.

“Welcome home, uncle,” said Yu Heilong, chin held high, looking the very definition of a Young Master. “I must apologize for the sordid reception! We were not expecting you for weeks.”

“No need for an apology. Or a reception,” snapped Bin with a flourish of his sleeve. “The business in the North is more dire than we’d thought. By far. I’ve come back for reinforcements.”

“Those savages? The Ugoc?” Yu frowned. “I’d surmised that with you and father’s combined might, one campaign would be enough—“

“You’ve surmised wrong.” Bin swept past him without a second word. “Attendants!” He roared. Silence. He cursed. “Does no-one in this household possess a smidge of competence?!”

A servant burst out a nearby door like a headless chicken. “S-sir!” he yelped.

“Prepare the cultivation chambers,” Bin growled. “Load them with one-hundred high-grade Spirit Stones. Before I return, I shall break through to late-Earth Realm.”

“Yes, sir!” The servant dashed off.

Tan felt faint. Or, rather—he was about to faint. He was sure of it. His heart had sank to his stomach. There was a voice coming from his dry-as-desert throat, but it didn’t sound like hiss. It was quivering, and shrill, and squeaky—the type of voice a death-row inmate might have before his execution.

“U-uncle!” He yelped, nearly tripping over himself as he ran over to the man. “Uncle! Wait!”

Bin stopped like a stuck gear. Then he turned his head and fixed Tan with a gaze so black and so forceful Tan’s mind went utterly blank. For a second he was certain he was already dead.

“What.” One hard syllable, hissed out of thin gray lips. Tan swallowed again.

“I… may have let my foreigner friend borrow the chambers…?”

There was a pause, a pause which seemed to hold within it an eternity.

Then Bin Heilong’s Earth-Realm aura erupted out of him, flattening the field like a heat-wave, and it contained a rage so pure it knocked Tan clean off his feet.

“You. Did. WHAT?!”