A week of flight passed, stopping only when Fay needed a quick bath, or when Radeon decided she needed another lesson.

Stealth. Movement. The things she had admitted she lacked.

He made her repeat footwork until her calves burned, made her learn how to breathe without sound.

How to let the wind cover her steps, how to stop thinking of speed as rushing and start thinking of it as arriving unseen.

Then Radeon gave her a ghost art that made both stealth and movement possible. Ethereal Walk.

A set of techniques that let you slip through terrain, move with less resistance, and smother the sound of each step before it could be born.

Radeon chose it with care. No drawbacks hidden in the breath. No ugly incantations that rotted the mind.

He had his motives for keeping Fay around, but there was no profit in her dying on him because of a flawed technique.

Radeon taught it hands on. Fingers on her shoulders, her hips, the small hard knots in her calves.

He corrected each muscle by touch, guiding her into the posture the art demanded.

With every adjustment, with every quiet contact, they learned each other a little better.

Fay learned that Radeon simply would not open his mouth when a secret was too heavy.

He did not tease it. He did not half confess. He shut down like a door barred from the inside.

When she pushed, he did not get angry. He got quieter. He did explain one category to her.

Heavenly secrets. Ones that could shatter a dao heart and ruin a soul.

Not because they were violent, but because knowing them changed the shape of a person.

Other secrets, he said, were not even grand, only mundane truths revealed too early.

They still haunted you in daily life, making every ordinary choice feel like a trap.

Fay took the lesson. She did not like it, but she understood the intent.

Radeon was keeping a lot from her, and she began to believe he did it for her own good.

In the meantime her array work progressed, faster than she expected. She even developed one of her own, a small practical thing.

A way to collect water. Radeon watched her sketch the lines and set the nodes, then gave her a simple nod.

Approval without praise. It meant more than praise would have.

To Fay, it was not just a trick. It was a step toward the life she had never allowed herself to want.

A nonchalant, carefree life. A life where she did not have to beg for a bowl of water or kneel for permission to be useful.

She had never aspired before. Now she did.

When the sun set again, the horizon looked different.

Torches burned ahead. Thousands of them, scattered like fallen stars across the land.

Fay looked to Radeon and met his calm eyes. If he was not tense, it meant it was not immediate danger.

They drew closer and the source came into view.

A vast mining pit, terraced like an amphitheater, carved into spiraling shelves of dirt and stone that wound nearly half a mile down into the earth's crust.

From the overlook the air was thin. It carried a faint metallic scent of pulverized rock.

The walls of the pit were a geologic tapestry of oxidation, streaked with vibrant turquoise, deep ochre, and charcoal gray.

Radeon knew mineral veins had been exposed there, then scraped away by more than a century of excavation.

At the bottom, the pit narrowed to a dusty floor where mortal men kept mining without pause.

Their lights crawling across the darkness like ants that did not know how to stop.

Radeon slowed at the rim of the mining pit and let his senses sink past torchlight and noise.

He probed fortune and misfortune together, the way he had learned to do since the crystal made him an error that could still see patterns.

What he saw made his stomach tighten. Dark ropes, thick as ship line, clutched the workers by their ankles. Not one or two. Many.

They did not drag yet, but they held, like a promise waiting to be collected.

It meant either a disaster was coming to where these men were stepping, or something in this place would bring disaster with it when it finally rose.

Radeon looked again, pushing deeper. The ropes became chains. They ran underground in knotted bundles, disappearing into the earth.

Something was down there. Not a vein of ore. Not a simple corpse bed.

A piece of something slumbering, and the slumber felt thin, like a trained animal trying to sleep through shouting.

His mind went to old shelves and older dust. He had read the ancient texts in the libraries of the Archivist Court and the Necropolis Court.

Not a single record, not even a scrap of handwriting, of gu. Yet they knew gu. Radeon had even gotten threads from gu in the Necropolis.

No gu institution. No sect that established gu. No lineage, no rites, no catalog of insects and jars. For Radeon, that was impossible.

Insect cultivation was not a fashion. It was an inevitability. Man's evolution always found its hallmarks, and gu was one of them.

He had walked realms where entire civilizations wielded immortality through gu alone.

He had seen empires become eternal on the backs of worms and beetles.

So if this realm had none, it did not mean gu had never existed here.

It meant something in a past era had erased it. Not only from writing. Even from the hearts of the living.

Radeon's mind went first to the blight. The unknown enemy that lurked beyond realms, in the nothingness he had once traversed.

The thought tasted wrong here, like salt in tea. Why would it be in this place of all places.

He could chase that question until he starved. Radeon shelved it. Worry was a kind of vanity when you could not act on it.

"Are you alright, Master?" Fay asked, concerned.

Radeon simply hummed an affirmative. He guided the bison down and landed on the mining area's outskirts.

He made sure to set down where the torchlight thinned, and the ground stopped trembling with picks.

Dust coated the leather wings as they landed. He had a plan. In disaster, there was always an opposite weight.

Luck. Blessing. A chance that only existed because something else was about to break.

Radeon did not want to miss a heaven's child on a maybe, not when his gut told him this was the place.

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