The emerald light of the Snake Talisman flickered twice on the back of Shengu Xuan's hand. Threads of perception passed through the atmosphere and slipped into cracks in the crust, spreading a vast net over every corner of the planet.
"A white Kāma." He chewed the grass stem in his mouth, his chaos-colored eyes narrowing slightly, as though searching for the last missing piece of an enormous puzzle.
The threads of perception swept through the Land of Fire. Clear. They passed through the sand in the Land of Wind. Clear. They burrowed beneath the seabed in the Land of Water. Still clear.
Then his perception penetrated the rock three hundred meters beneath a forest of perpetual rain at the southernmost tip of the Land of Rain.
A wedge-shaped mark of white energy lay embedded in a living body, pulsing quietly.
"Found you."
When Shengu Xuan vanished, Jigen's corpse still lay on the flagstone road outside the tavern. Moonlight shone on his pale face, drained of all vitality, like an old garment discarded by its owner.
Chaos-colored teleportation light bloomed above the forest in the southern Land of Rain. Shengu Xuan's boots landed atop the wet canopy. Rain struck his shoulders, only to bounce off some invisible force field without leaving a single drop on him.
He looked down at the point pulsing with white light three hundred meters beneath his feet.
"You've hidden yourself pretty deep."
He neither stamped his foot nor blasted the ground. He simply raised his right hand and made a grasping motion downward. Emerald threads from the Snake Talisman burrowed underground, slipping down cracks in the rock like a nimble snake.
Three hundred meters underground, an artificially excavated cavern lay dimly lit. Dense formulas and data charts covered its walls, and crates of Scientific Ninja Tool