Twin Shadows
The Stone-Patterned Lizard's Soul Ring had resided in Yu Jin's dantian for three days before it finally meshed completely with his core.
On the first day, it had still been a thin shell floating over the core's surface, translucent and tinged grayish white. On the second, the shell had begun to seep inward, its markings interweaving and entwining with the core's rootlike threads. By the evening of the third day, when Yu Jin finished cultivating, the Soul Ring was firmly embedded around the core, enveloping it like a halo around a fruit pit. The markings on its inner wall joined with the core's channels one by one, forming a complete circuit.
The moment Yu Jin fully released his Martial Soul, the little gold-and-black dragon was a size thicker than before and swam faster. The Soul Ring encircling its body left grayish-white afterimages in its wake as it darted through the air. He had the little dragon circle once at low altitude around the stone house, then slam into a patch of frozen-hard earth in the open space out front. The ground caved in, its edges streaked with gold-and-black scorch marks and traces of frost. He had kept the force light, but the effect of the two attributes emerging together was unmistakable.
Long Tian watched from the side and nodded. "Your first ring's effect is better than I imagined. Its force is about the same as my first ring's, but when you use it, there's almost no interval needed to build up power. I think that's because you don't need to channel it through the Soul Ring at all. Your origin itself is already fused, and the Soul Ring just amplifies the fused force another level."
Yu Jin crouched beside the crater and poked a finger at the mingled scorch and frost marks. When he looked up, the gold-and-black embers in his eyes flared for an instant. "Shall we try it together again?"
Over the past few days, the two had developed a simple way of working together. Long Tian used the Origin Return Pearl's Qi as an anchor, and Yu Jin fed his Power of Origin through the Qi-Merging Circuit. Their Soul Power fused at the connection point into a Power of Chaos steadier and more substantial than either could produce alone. They had tried blasting a mountain rock with that combined power, and a crack had split it right through the middle. The edges of the crack were smooth and even, like a block of wax cut by a red-hot knife.
Long Tian looked at the rock split in two, then at Yu Jin. Yu Jin was looking at the crack too, with something hard to describe in his gaze, as though he had personally confirmed a possibility he had thought existed only in dreams.
As they sat resting on the stone house's threshold, Yu Jin suddenly took a small cloth bundle from his robes. He unwrapped it to reveal a palm-sized pottery shard, its surface scratched with extremely crude lines that looked like a fragment of some design. He handed it to Long Tian. "I scratched it into the wall with my nails when I was in the dark room. I broke a piece off before I left."
Long Tian took the shard and turned it over in his hands. The rough, hasty lines sketched a simple composition across one corner: a human figure lay curled up, with two curved lines entwined into a ring above its head and a tiny dot at the center of the ring. The composition was crooked, yet it had a stubborn sense of wholeness all its own.
"The walls of that dark room were covered in drawings like this," Yu Jin said softly, his gaze resting on the shard. "The people in the other cages drew a lot of them. Some drew doors, some drew windows, and some drew the mountains and trees outside. I drew dreams. Every time I dreamed of that gray river and the light at its bottom, I scratched another line."
Long Tian turned the shard over and examined the back. The clay had been worn smooth and shiny, and there were several nail marks near the edges. He handed it back to Yu Jin. "Keep it. Carry it with you from now on."
Yu Jin wrapped the shard back up and tucked it into his robes without saying anything more.
Snow fell twice more, and the Heavenly Wolf Mountain Range lay cloaked in winter's silent white. The two spent each day in the same rhythm of cultivation and practice together. As they merged their Qi, the circulation between the Origin Return Pearl and the core grew ever smoother. Long Tian could feel the markings on the inner walls of his four Soul Rings becoming more supple as Yu Jin's pure Power of Origin permeated them during their Qi merging. Nourished in turn by the markings on Long Tian's Soul Rings, Yu Jin's core grew more rootlike threads at an accelerated pace. Their Qi flowed between them through the circuit, settling and accumulating. Long Tian's Origin Return Pearl grew a size larger, and the golden markings on its surface spread across the entire pearl, like the crackled glaze on a piece of thin-bodied porcelain. The outline of a second ring of markings had also faintly emerged around Yu Jin's core, as fine as spider silk but undeniably there.
One morning, as the snow melted under a newly clear sky, Long Tian stepped out of the stone house to stretch his limbs as usual and found something in the snowy mud beneath the threshold: a slender wooden tally, planted in the earth with a gray thread wrapped around its exposed end. A single tiny character had been written on its surface in charcoal: "Ten."
Long Tian pulled up the tally and examined it, but found no other markings. Ten. Ten days? Ten steps? The tenth of something? He crouched by the threshold, thinking for a long time, until he suddenly remembered something Shen Mo had said early on: there was a hidden compartment beneath the third mooring post at the southern docks, where a letter could be left if there was something to report. The "ten" on the tally might be some kind of timing mark, meaning he needed to go to the docks to collect a letter in ten days.
He snapped the tally in two and threw it into the firebox to burn, watching the gray smoke rise through the flue and disperse into the sky. Yu Jin came out of the house and saw him staring absently at the firebox. Without asking, he crouched beside him and added a few sticks of firewood.
"In ten days, I'm going down the mountain," Long Tian said. "I'm going to the southern docks to pick up a letter. Wait for me here. I'll be gone a day at most."
Yu Jin nodded without asking further. He stirred the coals in the firebox, and the flames leaped up, lighting his thin profile, its sharp outline traced by the light reflected off the snow. He had grown a little taller than when he had first left the city. Though still thin, the gaunt gray pall had completely faded from his face.
"Then let's practice merging our Qi a few more times over the next few days," Yu Jin said. "Polish those four rings of yours a little more."
Long Tian stirred the ashes of the wooden tally in the firebox. Sparks flickered deep in the ash and dimmed again. He watched the tiny sparks slowly die out, then raised his head and glanced at the horizon above the mountain ridge, where the snow was melting. Winter was nearly over.
Beneath a pine tree deep in the Heavenly Wolf Mountain Range, freshly melted snow was seeping into the soil along its roots. The meltwater soaked through old pine needles and decaying leaves, gathering into a thin trickle at the deepest roots. It seeped down through gaps in the soil, down and down, until it finally dripped onto the ceiling of a long-forgotten underground chamber, leaving a narrow wet trail as it slowly ran down the stone wall.
The residue on the inside of the iron door had been sampled and cleared away, and the grayish-white traces where the thick iron bars had broken had also been scraped clean. But a faint impression remained on the stone floor, left by someone who had lain curled up there. Dust covered it, and no one had swept it away. The door had been fitted with a new lock, a thicker iron one with stronger restrictions. A ring of Soul Power-sensing runes was embedded around the edge of its clasp, glowing quietly in the darkness.