Wood cracked against wood across the training ground, the sound echoing off stone and dead trees.

Five undead pressed in on a woman from all sides, their bones the color of old ash, their joints clicking with every hungry step.

They came at once. Skeleton arms rose and fell.

Four strikes she met clean, whip handles and forearms taking the force, her feet sliding in quick half circles to keep the ring from closing.

The fifth slipped through. A clean blow. The wooden sword the skeleton wielded met skin.

Blood beaded and ran into wheat blond hair, turning it darker in a thin line. A bruise blossomed under it, purple and quick.

Radeon flicked a pill toward her.

Fay caught it without looking and swallowed, throat working once.

No complaint. No pause. The fight did not wait for pain.

It was the third week of their training, and Radeon could not deny she had progressed.

The first ten days he had made her try everything. Staff. Blade. Bow. Short spear. Hook.

Radeon had let her feel the weight, the balance, the way each weapon demanded.

In the end, Fay chose a whip and a shield.

Radeon let her. Choice mattered more than pride. He gave her the basics and nothing else.

Crack. Strike. Flick. Cutback. Enough to live if she remembered to keep moving.

She had asked about special techniques. He had told her those were optional.

To Radeon, a technique was not a scroll you memorized. It was a habit you earned.

It was how a weapon fit the hand and the heart.

People often had no choice in their martial arts, so they chased whatever the world called strongest.

The strongest sword style. The strongest shooting art. Strength borrowed from someone else's shape.

Radeon had walked too many realms in his past life to keep believing that lie.

Fighting style should follow what the heart says, and who you are when the fervor of battle steals your breath.

To Radeon, Fay was confused and lonely, but brave enough.

She had been picked up by an elder, but never accepted as a disciple.

Only a garden tender. A useful girl. A quiet one.

She had spent her life around other people's power and never been invited to touch it.

Her only habit had been telling stories pulled from the library, and even that had made her strange to others.

They had kept their distance. That was why Radeon had no trouble molding her. There had been almost nothing solid to resist him.

But now she could cultivate, and it had changed her fast. Almost instantly.

Like a gambler who had finally won big and started to believe luck loved them.

She was energetic. Willing to learn. Hungry for an adventure she did not yet understand.

The undead pressed again. Fay snapped her whips and met them with teeth bared and eyes bright.

Radeon used the thread again and another hand shot up from below. A wooden sword slashed her the bridge of her nose. Blood poured out but she simply snorted it out and spit out the rest.

"That's enough," Radeon said. "We don't have much ration left and the Necropolis does not have any."

Fay did not ask why. She wiped the blood from her hair, gathered her whips, and turned to leave.

Radeon did not let her walk off empty handed. He flicked another healing pill after her. It struck her palm with a soft tap.

Sure, there were herbs in the sect that could be brewed into elixirs, but what they needed was food.

Radeon did not want to waste the rest of his stone on them chewing herbs like snacks.

At least he had reached the peak of breath tempering. While Fay reached the middle stages.

The other problem was his cultivation method. He was still tinkering with his own path, and the fault line in it was clear.

He could not balance luck. Not properly. Luck did not sit still like qi. It was illusory. If he wanted it, he would need to plunder it.

He had tried skimming from Fay with devour arts. A thin draw, careful enough that she would not feel it as theft.

It seemed to work for now. Causality did not coil and knot like qi. It did not rush back in clean cycles.

He had another goal now, sharper than survival. This was a samsara realm. A place that could still be nudged.

If he could not belong to it, he could still shape it. Heroes. Not saints. Not legends carved by bards.

Heroes made the hard way, with scars and debts and people who remembered their names.

Whether those heroes stayed under him or turned on him would be up to fate. He did not need loyalty forever.

He needed a following. In the later stages of cultivation, faith mattered. The weight of the masses. The belief of strangers.

So Radeon decided he would take Fay to see all seven continents the books in the Everwritten Archivists Court had described.

Along the way, he would find heaven's chosen and test them, mold them, or break them, depending on what they proved to be.

Right now he had only a vague location for one of heaven's children, and vague was not enough.

He looked up toward the sect master peak, letting his eyes rest there as if he could measure the mountain's temper through stone.

Claudius appeared beside him as if he had stepped out of the air.

"If you come across the sect master outside in the next couple of hundred years, give him this."

A letter lay in Claudius's hand. Plain paper. Plain seal. Yet the space around it felt compressed, as if the world itself leaned away.

Radeon felt immense power threaded through it. He was certain it could not be opened, not even by Spirit Transfiguration experts.

He took it without asking what it contained. Some questions were safer unanswered until the right door was in front of you.

To be certain, Radeon looked Claudius, his gaze asking where. Claudius simply looked up the sky and sighed.

"Heaven listens where it does not look. Wisdom may be grown from men even without sight. Some secrets ask for silence, until strength reveals their nature."

Radeon simply nodded. He knew someone was tuning in, listening. He had the power of heaven's curse in his bones to avoid the scry.

Claudius needed to hold up a literal mountain worth of sky just to say those few simple lines.

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