Dao of the World Walker (Xianxia) Book 2

Lord Ardeth spoke first.

”I had hoped seeing all of this would change your mind.” He looked around the glowing chamber with the expression of a man gesturing at an argument he considered unanswerable. ”Feel it, Lucien. Feel what your soul feels here. We are meant to use it. The highest levels of card inscriptions are waiting on the other side of the one choice you refuse to make. You have already used vitality inscription. You have seen the magnitude of difference between that and energy stone work. Imagine what soul inscription produces.”

”I can imagine it well enough,” Yang said. ”I simply do not believe it is worth any amount of money.”

Lord Ardeth let out a short breath that was almost a laugh. ”You have never been tempted by wealth. That is one of your most admirable qualities.” A pause. ”And one of your most irritating ones.”

”It makes me difficult to control?”

”Immensely.”

They looked at each other across the green-lit chamber. Yang felt the shift in the air between them as they stopped pretending the conversation they were having was something other than what it was.

”I am still not going to use my soul to inscribe for you or for anyone else,” Yang said. ”And if you genuinely believed it was as safe as you suggest, you would have no difficulty inscribing as many soul cards as you liked yourself.”

Lord Ardeth gave him a rueful smile and said nothing.

Yang smiled back.

Then Lord Ardeth’s expression changed. The rueful quality remained, but something else came that had been waiting behind the pleasantness for a long time.

”You really had the potential to be the greatest of us all,” he said, and the regret in his voice sounded genuine. ”But family must come first. The Ardeths have worked too hard and invested too much to not recoup it.”

Yang felt his eyes go cold. ”I have more than paid for that investment with the cards I have made for you. Do not mistake my quiet for ignorance. I may not be the highest grade Cardwright or the most experienced, but I more than compensated for it in the innovation I brought to every commission.”

”Ah yes,” Lord Ardeth said, and now the regret was mixed with something that looked like real admiration. ”All your custom work has been beyond exception. Sometimes you even surprised me with your execution, so far outside what I would have considered possible, so quickly adapted to each client’s specific need. I have always been curious about how your mind moves to reach those solutions. It is my greatest regret that you are not of my bloodline.”

He continued without pausing. ”All my support, all the years of cultivating you into the Cardwright you are today, it was for this day. I need someone to create soul inscription cards.”

”So you can sell them,” Yang said.

”Of course not.” Lord Ardeth shook his head. ”Only a fool would sell such a card.”

Yang was quiet for a moment.

”Soul inscription cards are insurance for my family,” Lord Ardeth continued. ”A trump card held in reserve for the moment it is needed. Not for sale. For survival, when survival requires an advantage no one else possesses.”

”I see.”

”Do not look so disappointed, Lucien. We all want to survive. We all want to thrive and climb higher. I am but one of many powers with access to a source mine. In a position like mine, you often have to make difficult decisions if you want to achieve something. You must understand why I have to do this.”

”I do not,” Yang said. ”I would never use power over a person to force them into harming themselves. I would never betray someone who had worked with me in good faith.”

Lord Ardeth let out a laugh. It was not unkind, but pointed. ”Stop with the act. You did not turn once toward your own mother after you became a Cardwright. She died in the same poverty she was born into, abandoned by her only child, alone. I will not be lectured on loyalty and betrayal by a man who could not manage basic decency toward the woman who birthed and raised him.”

The words landed.

Yang stood very still.

In fifteen years, he had not once thought of Lucien’s mother. Not once. The memories that had come with this body were fragmentary things, impressions and images rather than a lived life, and Lucien himself had not seen her in months before his death. She had not known his address in the city. There were no ways to find a person here, the way there had been in his first life, no phones or records that a young man’s mother could consult to locate a son who had stopped writing. She would have waited. She would have wondered. She would have gone from wondering to knowing, the way mothers know, that something had gone wrong and her son was not coming back.

The shame came up fast and hot, and Yang pressed it down with deliberate force. He could not afford it right now. He carved the fact of it into a deep place inside himself where it would not fade, where it would be waiting for him when there was time to sit with what he had failed to do, and he turned his attention back to the immediate problem.

His voice came out cold. ”Then you should know that a man capable of abandoning his own mother would have very little loyalty to a business partner.”

Lord Ardeth did not flinch. ”Lucien. You must know you have no choice. Work for me, create what I need, and I can assure you everything you have had until now continues unchanged. More, even. We can set aside this unpleasant conversation entirely and return to what we were. Partners.”

”You must already know what soul inscription does to the Cardwright who performs it,” Yang said. ”Otherwise, you would not be so determined to have someone else do it rather than doing it yourself. A quick death is preferable to a slow one.”

Lord Ardeth was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was level and something in it had dropped its last pretense. ”You are right. Soul inscription produces the greatest cards that exist. The price is that the Cardwright loses their feeling, their emotion, everything that makes them who they are, piece by piece, until what remains is functional but empty. A shell that can still inscribe but has nothing left of the person it once was.”

He looked at Yang steadily. ”I had high hopes for you. A boy from nowhere, no family connections, no training, appearing out of nothing to create a perfect card. I kept watch for you even during the year you disappeared before your second grade certification, and when you returned I knew you were exactly what I had been looking for. Though I admit you advanced faster than even I expected. I had thought it would take at least two more decades before you were ready.”

”I need only two or three cards from you,” Lord Ardeth continued, and his tone became almost reasonable. ”After that, you would spend the rest of your life in whatever comfort you chose. Travel. Research. Pursue whatever questions about card theory interest you. Only two or three cards, and it would all be over.”

”No,” Yang said.

Lord Ardeth sighed. It was the sigh of a man who had tried every approach available to him and arrived at the last one. He raised one hand, and the guards came in.

They came from the corridor behind them and from alcoves, a dozen men filing into the chamber with the practiced movement of people who had done this before. Every one of them held a card.

”I will give you time to think more carefully about this,” Lord Ardeth said. ”After some rest, you may find the right decision easier to reach.”

One of the guards came forward. ”Mr. Valemore, please follow me.”

Yang did not move.

The guard activated the card in his hand.

Nothing happened.

The man looked down at the card with a dumbfounded expression and activated it again. Still nothing. Around the chamber, the other guards watched and calculated a problem they had not anticipated. A few more tried their cards. The same result from each of them. Cards activating and producing no effect, the energy spending itself against something the activation could not reach.

Lord Ardeth’s eyes moved to Yang. ”What have you done?”

”I came prepared,” Yang said, and allowed himself a small smile.

The guards began trying different cards, a wider range, restraint designs, mild attack designs, and things that should have worked on any unprotected person in the room. One of the guards said quietly to the others to be careful, not to use volatile cards near the source. The guards formed a loose ring, and the attacks continued, each one meeting the same result.

Yang backed up slowly, moving deeper into the chamber, putting space between himself and the corridor mouth. The guards followed at the edge of their range, maintaining the ring.

”Lucien, do not be foolish. Step away from the formation.”

Yang turned and placed his palm flat against the crystal column.

The effect was immediate and total. The chamber around him went distant, the guards and Lord Ardeth and the sound of cards activating and failing all reduced to background noise while he fell inward. His Sea of Consciousness opened, and the energy flooded in, the formation pouring itself in with a steady pressure.

He found the bar and watched it.

Ninety-five. The number was already climbing before he had fully oriented himself inside his own consciousness. Ninety-six. Ninety-six. The attacks against his shield were a distant sensation, a rhythm he could feel through the barrier without it touching him, the guards working through their cards methodically and accomplishing nothing. Ninety-seven.

He was aware of Lord Ardeth’s voice at the far edge of his attention, urgent and controlled, telling the guards to hold, to wait, to not use volatile cards near the source.

Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.

He held the contact and watched the last fraction close.

One hundred.

The bar filled. The luminescence in his Sea of Consciousness surged once, bright and complete, and Yang felt something he had been waiting fifteen years to feel. The bar smoothed out. The number disappeared. In the space where it had been, words appeared in the deep interior of his awareness, as clear as if written in light.

Cardwright World.

And then nothing.

Yang waited.

The formation hummed against his palm. His Sea of Consciousness held the words steady. He waited for what came next, for whatever mechanism the bar had been building toward across fifteen years of painstaking accumulation, for the transport or the signal or the door that he had assumed was waiting on the other side of one hundred percent.

Nothing came.

The words faded. The bar was gone. The space where it had lived in his consciousness for fifteen years was simply empty now, smooth and featureless, and there was no instruction attached to its completion and no transition beginning and no sense of imminent change. Just the glow of the source formation against his palm and the distant sound of men with cards waiting for him to stop being pressed against a crystal column.

Yang stood very still inside himself for a long moment.

Fifteen years. He had spent fifteen years in this body, in this city, in this world that was not his, building toward a number that he had believed was the mechanism of his return. He had rationed hope carefully, had made peace with the slowness of the progress, had told himself that patience was the price of going home. He had been alone in a borrowed body, and he had kept working because the bar was there and the bar was moving, and when it reached one hundred, he would go home.

It had reached one hundred.

He was still here.

The grief was enormous and he had nowhere to put it. He pressed it down the same way he had pressed down the shame about Lucien’s mother minutes ago, with the same deliberate force, into the same deep place where things waited until there was time to properly fall apart. He was becoming very full in that place.

He opened his eyes.

Lord Ardeth came a few steps forward, ”That is an impressive shield, Lucien. I have not seen anything like it.”

”Thank you,” Yang said. ”Coming from you, that is a great compliment.”

”But you cannot leave this chamber. You would need food eventually. Rest. I have enough men here to maintain a continuous presence around you for as long as necessary. Even the most perfect defensive inscription does not solve the problem of simple endurance.”

Yang looked at him. The men were forming a closer circle now, understanding they had time and their opponent did not.

He reached into his coat and took out a card.

Lord Ardeth’s eyes went to it immediately, and Yang watched the colour shift in the older man’s face, the rapid calculation of an expert Cardwright looking at something and reading in its inscription the shape of what it would likely do.

It was an explosion card. What made it not an ordinary explosion card was the seventeen modifications Yang had worked into the design over the years it had taken him to build it, modifications drawn from principles he had brought with him from a world that had spent decades becoming extremely efficient at large-scale destruction. He had hoped he would never need to use it. He had made it anyway because hope and preparation were two different things, and he had never been willing to rely on only one of them.

Lord Ardeth raised both hands slowly, palms outward, the gesture of a man showing that he was choosing reason. He said something sharp and quiet to the guards, and the attacks stopped.

”Lucien.” His voice was careful now, each word placed with attention. ”Any significant detonation in the presence of the source formations would be catastrophic. You must understand that.”

”Would it?” Yang said.

The empty space in his Sea of Consciousness where the bar had been was still there. Still smooth. Still waiting for something that was not coming.

Lord Ardeth watched him as one might watch a fire that had escaped the hearth

”I am afraid you have caught me at a poor time, Lord Ardeth,” Yang said. ”Right now I am in a mood for destruction.”

He looked at the man who had, in his own way, been the closest thing to a connection Yang had found in this world. He felt the weight of that. He felt the fifteen years of work and the grief sitting in that empty space in his Sea of Consciousness, and the shame about Lucien’s mother pressed into the same deep place.

Then he activated the card.

A blaze, vast and instantaneous. Someone screaming. The deep green light of the source formations flaring white at the edges.

Then darkness took everything.

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