Making our way out of the library felt like a trip through one of the hells. Though we did have the assistance of our armed clothing guards on the way back, I was forced to continually repair them with greater mending and re-cast the spell. Without more spellglyphs to maintain the perimeter of summoned guardians around us, we weren't able to truly stop for a break longer than an hour, and having to bounce between people staying awake was even more annoying when I was forced to keep re-creating the hidden hideaway every hour.

I'd forgotten about the human need for a lot of water, and if it weren't for the fact that I was able to use lifeberries to sustain them, then things could have gotten dire when Salem and Jackson's canteens ran dry.

When we finally made it back in sight of the reading room, we were tired, hungry, and covered in barely-healed wounds. The library wasn't done with us yet, however, as it dropped a massive gorilla-like monster, with four mouths on its stomach and two angry eyes on either one of its shoulders in front of us. I let Jackson take the offense. He couldn't use fire, but he was still plenty competent with blasts of force, earth, and ice. Salem peppered the monster with wind blades, while I layered curses over the creature and allowed my summoned air elementals to amplify Salem's attacks.

It was bulky, and either Jackson or I had to use abjure shadows to drive off some choking shadow monsters a few times during the fight, but finally the cumulative damage and suffering curses caused the monster to bleed out. It wasn't even a particularly dramatic ending, it simply was getting slower and slower until it collapsed into a puddle of smoke.

Finally free, we raced into the reading room, and then out, before turning and heading right to the mess hall. With the solstice so close, we were treated to a massive crown roast, with potatoes, green beans, jellied cranberries, and a baked pumpkin marshmallow mash, and we tore through the feast like we hadn't eaten anything in three days. To be fair, apart from trail food and lifeberries, we hadn't.

After demolishing the feast, reluctantly getting up to walk back to our dorm, and slumping down into chairs around the fireplace, Jackson started to say something, but I barely heard him. I didn't even realize that I'd drifted off to sleep until I was awake again, popping my back and shaking out my limbs to bring some energy back into them. I headed into my room, where the drink cart was, and wheeled it out. With the time of year, it produced a large hot coffee that had been mixed with a bit of chocolate and leaves of fresh peppermint while brewing. I started drinking it and retrieved the letters from my locker, then started to skim through them.

I was the only one of our group capable of speaking Hua Long, so I was going to be annoyingly needed for the task. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the correspondences were fairly innocuous, which did make sense. Secret or not, it wasn't like every single letter that the Shé family elders sent between one another was actually going to be full of 'here are our evil plans', or anything of that sort. Frankly, the vast majority of the secret letters were the kind of thing that I expected from a cultivator clan – bags of millet sent to their various compounds under the guise of 'donations' in order to dodge paying the higher grain taxes of Shen Long, shipments of beast cores that had been smuggled across borders to evade the cultivation based taxes, requests for specific extraplanar or otherwise magical ingredients for the purposes of pill refining without having to pay the high market taxes.

It was fascinating stuff, at least to me. The taxation system of Shen Long was one of the oldest and most well-entrenched in the world, and people could make a small fortune just by learning to manage taxes for other people. The system was also in constant flux, as it opened new loopholes faster than old ones could be closed, re-opened old ones, and closed ones that hadn't even been written yet. If I understood things right, tax evasion wasn't even a crime, so long as the loophole used hadn't been closed yet. It was radically different from Dreki's previously heinous tax system, where if someone had tried to evade their taxes based solely on the letter of the law, someone would have murdered them.

While I did find it interesting, none of it was horribly incriminating. Oh, sure, I could probably find a few cases where their tax dodging had violated the laws at the time, and might be able to get them a slap on the wrist, but the family of demon-god worshipers hadn't survived for this long by being sloppy. I did feel like there were patterns to be learned in the letters, but I didn't know what they were yet. I'd try and work them out when I could, but the patterns could easily be the patterns that all large organizations had, rather than anything useful.

A useful piece of information that I was able to glean was on the family's elders. There were apparently four of them, though there had once been six. If Shé Rui could add at least another layer, preferably two, to his perpetual core, he'd be able to be raised up as another member. He was repeatedly addressed as the most likely to be raised to the station, which implied to me that they didn't have many other perpetual core cultivators.

The four they did have were trouble though. The matriarch of the clan was a nascent immortal on a path known as the Towering Mountain, which was effectively a blend of earth and metal chi. She was stuck in the first stage of the nascent immortal realm, but that was still dangerous. As a group, our team had been able to match a single peak core cultivator with eight or nine layers. A nascent soul would be well beyond us. Worse, I couldn't discern from their letters what the matriarch's dao was, though she did have a 'secondary foundation' of a depths tortoise. I assumed that meant she'd fused her bloodline into her cultivation, making her even more dangerous.

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The next two elders were a married couple of dual cultivators who had made their love for one another into their dao. One of them used ice chi, and the other used wood chi. I wasn't quite sure I could see the duality of that, but I wasn't a cultivation expert, and it clearly worked for them. Gauging their level of power was difficult, in part due to their intertwined cultivation base. Both of them were perpetual cores with eight layers on their soul, but while alone, they were significantly weaker than that. They might even be weaker than I was, when they were alone. But when they fought together, the opposite effect was true: they were far more powerful than any perpetual core cultivator should be, rivaling or even exceeding the matriarch. As if that wasn't enough, they both were destiny marked, with the destiny of dual unity. I didn't know enough about destiny magic to say what that could do for sure, but I'd bet a lot of money that it improved their dao.

It was the final elder that had me the most worried, though it wasn't for reasons of power. She was the weakest elder by far, with poison chi, a spatial dao, and seven layers to her core. She did have third circle wizardry, and apparently had an artifice affinity, and used it in conjunction with her dao to create spatial rings. But it wasn't her power that I was worried about: it was her influence.

Because Yushin was the daughter of the final elder.

Really, I should have expected it. I knew that Yushin's mother had been able to slip into the realm of the Traitor Wyrm, and had borne his child. She had to be a clever and powerful person to pull that off. For some reason, I'd never expected her to be an elder of the clan.

It added a lot of complications, both good and bad. If the mother had some sort of spatial dao, and was going to be participating in the ritual, it did alleviate some of my concerns about Yushin simply being turned into an avatar. Though the bloodline didn't have any spatial elements, at least someone using poison and space might be participating. Of course, that was hardly definitive proof. It would still be much easier to summon the power into Yushin, rather than using Yushin as a bridge. But it gave me a little bit of hope that I'd been wrong. Even if I suspected that I wasn't.

It also explained Yushin's absolute certainty that she understood the ritual, and that she was safe. The woman who had laid my egg was a terrible example, but I did understand that many people did at least listen to their mothers in a general sense. If she had been raised in the court as she'd implied, hiding her bloodline, being part of clandestine meetings worshiping the Traitor Wyrm, and guided to venerate the Wyrm? It wasn't exactly brainwashing, but it wasn't exactly not brainwashing either. It could be very hard to unravel that sort of foundational belief, and I didn't think that I'd be able to manage it.

No, the best thing I could do for Yushin was share any damning evidence I found, and let the rest go. I'd have to make copies of the letters and search for cyphers and hidden meanings later, but for right now…

I flicked my hands and began a low, rumbling chant. I didn't have this spell built into my wand, since I didn't want to spend the energy on it, and as such the spell took me a while to complete. When I finished, a soft blue-gray flame lit itself in my palm, and I dropped it atop the pile of ashes. Slowly, the ash began to fuse together, the blackened particles forming into large flakes. Those flakes grew, and in the center, specks of white formed. The white grew as ink appeared. It continued to work its way out, until the ashes were assembling the edge of the paper where it had been lit.

Then it was done, and I lifted the paper to read it, my fingers trembling slightly as I did. The letter was short and sweet, and disappointingly vague.

Dear Matriarch,

I have received an important message detailing the specifics of the advancement ritual that will propel our clan to one of the Five Great Clans. I have taken the liberty of explaining the broad strokes of the ritual to my daughter and my fellow elders, but the full details are for your eyes alone.

Your humble servant,

Elder Shé Ying

Following that, a massively complex diagram was scrawled over the back of the paper, and even as I studied it, I realized that it was utterly and completely nonsensical to me. It wasn't that I thought it was fake. On the contrary, I thought it would work fine. It was simply advanced beyond anything that I'd ever seen before.

I could see portions of the ritual that looked like wizardry without a doubt. I spotted certain symbols that were commonly used in the contract portions of spells. That really could go either way: having conjuration there was good, but the contract usually utilized the power of a person's ether pool and used it to strengthen the creature's bloodline. That could support the idea of sacrificing Yushin's core to give the Traitor Wyrm the strength and ability to summon an avatar, but it could also support the idea of sacrificing her to allow the power of the avatar to flow into her.

If this had been a purely wizard-based ritual, I thought I'd be able to make a solid guess, even if it used the strange affinity ritual magic that the grimoire had used. But the spell portions flowed directly into what looked like chi formations. The chi made up the bulk of the ritual, but there were other things: written orisons, specific monster parts, and pools of… something. I didn't even recognize the last one, but I was guessing that it had something to do with destiny magic. That only made sense, given that it would match to each of their elders. The wizardry for Yushin's mom, the monster components in line with the Matriarch's bloodline, and the pools of destiny – or whatever they were – for the dual cultivators.

I leaned back and closed my eyes, thinking. This was not going to be an easy spell to unravel. Well. Wasn't that just great?

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