With the spear, he would feed on whoever they sent. To him, every Jai clan enemy was a treasure chest of scales and elixirs.
“I won’t reach Underlord that way,” Jai Long said, though Gokren knew that better than he did. If advancing from Gold to the Lord realm was simply a matter of stockpiling power, no one would ever be stuck at Truegold.
“That’s true enough, but I think I can get you there.” Gokren watched the best of his sect saddling their mounts and preparing to leave their home. “Took me forty years to reach Truegold. I’ll never be an Underlord, not in my lifetime…but I understand some things. By the time Jai Daishou moves himself, you’ll either be Underlord or the next thing to it.”
That was Jai Long’s plan, though he had expected it to take years. He had meant to wage a long, secret war against the clan, stealing their madra and slowly advancing. Once he could face Jai Daishou as a fellow Underlord, the game would change.
With Gokren’s help, his chances improved dramatically, and his timeline shot up. He might reach the peak of Truegold before the end of the year.
“It’s still a roll of the dice for you,” Jai Long pointed out. He had to be honest with anyone willing to risk their life for him.
Gokren removed his pipe, gazing into the bowl as though it would tell him the future. “I might be gambling,” he said, “but I’d say I’m backing the favorite.”
***
On the fourth day after they left, Sky's Mercy had to duck down to the ground to let the constructs recharge. The house landed in an open field, the blue cloud slowly dying away until both Sky’s Mercy and the training barn had settled safely onto the grass.
The barn creaked and moaned as it came to a rest, but the main house remained solid and silent. Lindon was glad he’d taken Cassias’ advice and stayed out of the barn during the landing process, or he would have feared for his life.
The second they landed, everyone left the cloudship and returned to the wonderful embrace of solid ground.
Eithan allowed Gesha and Lindon to look at the scripts and constructs sustaining the giant Thousand-Mile Cloud. It was intriguingly simple. Only one circle on the bottom of the main house to guide levitation, and four pillars—one at each corner—to produce and control the cloud madra. The controls were more complicated than the actual mechanism for flight.
But the madra involved...
Both of Lindon’s cores added together would only add up to a normal Iron sacred artist, but compared to his old self, he was a powerhouse. Even so, he couldn’t activate any of the scripts involved if he drained all the madra in his body.
The house drew vital aura from the sky to keep itself powered, but it could only drain so much while in flight. Cassias activated the collection script, and ribbons of white and green aura—visible only in Lindon’s Copper sight—streamed into the four pillars of the house. The only script Lindon had ever seen consume more power was the one that had activated the Transcendent Ruins.
Lindon had peeked inside earlier, and besides the Forged madra devices that produced the cloud, each pillar held a crystal flask the size of his head. The aura ran inside those crystals, condensing and processing into the madra that powered the cloud.
It would take three days to fill up the crystals, Cassias said. He had made it to the Desolate Wilds in a month, but that had been carrying one person. Not five people and an extra building.
If they had to spend three days drawing aura for every three days flying, it would take them twice as long to return.
Eithan assured them that he intended to make it back in a month, but they would still spend one day grounded for every three in the air. No one asked him how he planned to recharge their power reserves—he was the Underlord, so he knew what he was doing.
He spread out a blanket and had a nap in the sun, but the rest of them were expected to spend the day doing chores. Lindon regarded the idea with dread: if he was hauling water or scrubbing floors, then he wasn’t training. He wasn’t getting any closer to defeating Jai Long.
But just because he wasn’t practicing sacred arts didn’t mean he couldn’t improve.
When he was sent to fill a man-sized wooden tub with water, and then bring it back to Sky’s Mercy to fill up their reservoir, he refused to Enforce himself with madra.
He didn’t know any real Enforcer techniques, but everyone used madra to reinforce their body to some degree. Cycling madra to tired limbs, focusing it to lift something heavy—Lindon had been doing that since he’d learned to walk.
This time, he kept the madra firmly in his core, relying solely on the strength of his Iron body.
Before he’d carried the tub downhill for two miles, filled it up with water, and carried it two miles back, he’d never appreciated just how heavy water could be. The tub was big enough that he could bathe in it comfortably, big enough that he looked like an ant carrying a grasshopper carcass as he made his way back. Without his Iron body, he would have collapsed halfway up, even using his madra.
He arrived red-faced and sweating, limbs shaking, and his breathing disordered. But after ten minutes of letting his Bloodforged Iron body restore his fatigue, he set off again.
This might not improve his sacred arts, but at least he could build his muscles. ‘A healthy spirit lives in a healthy body,’ as his clan used to say.
After four trips, the reservoir was full, and Gesha was impatiently waiting on him. They needed dead matter for his Soulsmith practice, so Lindon, Yerin, and Gesha went out to track and kill a wild Remnant.
Gesha found her prey within two hours, but Lindon stopped Yerin from killing it. Forcing his trembling hands to be still, he looked down on a giant frog that seemed to be made from blue-green blocks.
“Let me try first,” he said, affecting a casual tone.
Fisher Gesha’s eyebrows went up.
Yerin put her sword away. “Scream and bleed when you need help.”
Lindon learned some valuable lessons that day. First, he learned that the Empty Palm blasted a chunk out of Remnants, who were made of solid madra. That would surely come in useful later.
Second, he saw how strong Remnants were in the outside world.
Yerin was true to her word, blasting the frog into a pile of blocky dead matter the second he screamed and bled. She tied the pieces of the spirit’s corpse together and dragged the bundle back, while Fisher Gesha carried Lindon.
His Bloodforged Iron body had restored him enough that he could walk on his own by the time they reached Sky’s Mercy, though one of his cores was empty and the other only half-strength.
Back in Sacred Valley, an Iron would be enough to fight anything but a very advanced, intelligent, or strange Remnant. Those were children compared to these.