Fay pointed to a section in the espionage manual, the page about habits. It was about timing how long people indulged themselves, whether it was eating, drinking, gambling, or other private comforts.

Radeon answered without hesitation, giving the estimates he already carried in his head. Fay added her own notes with a stick of charred wood, neat marks on scrap paper.

Radeon sighed inside. He wished he could build a digital system here, something clean and repeatable, the way he had done in places too backward to climb on their own.

If it was only for him, Fay, and whatever disciples came after, it would be convenient.

Then his mind ran ahead to the limits. Systems had holes. People exploited holes. Higher cultivation exploited them faster.

Eldritch anomalies did not even need holes. They warped the board itself. For now he would settle for a messaging device.

It was not urgent yet, but once he had the resources, Radeon was sure it would be first on his list.

When he finished answering her questions, Fay nudged Campion away and went back to reading, brows drawn in, attention tight.

Another day of travel passed. They paused again.

Radeon went to the nearby woods and started shaping another cart. No one asked why anymore.

Fay vanished from sight.

She tucked her hair under cloth, wrapped her hands in gloves, and moved low and quiet through the camp.

Her first stop was Biscuit's tent. She watched him and his family set their things in order, and she listened.

"Do you think Master Radeon would just up and abandon us," a young man asked. He looked too much like Biscuit to be anyone else.

"I do not think so," Biscuit said. "Practitioners worry about two things. Their arts, and their reputation."

They went back and forth, circling cultivators, fear, and opportunity. Fay listened for slander and heard none.

When their voices turned away, she scanned the camp and spotted Biscuit's largest carriage.

She slipped in and found papers tucked where a careful hand would keep them.

Her mind drank the contents at once.

Not what Radeon had asked for, but important all the same.

Plans. Contingencies. A line item that made her jaw go tight.

They planned to sell of the orphans and unaffiliated miners as slaves to raise coin.

"How is this fair?" she muttered, the words tasting like bitter.

Radeon did not treat her like a tool. He gave her work, yes, but he never tried to grind her down into obedience.

These people spoke of children like spare rations. Fay forced her breathing steady, forced her hands not to shake.

Footsteps came. Someone entered the carriage. Biscuit.

Fay pulled herself up and hung above the rafters, hidden beneath the emergency cloak she kept folded close.

Biscuit paused over the papers. He frowned, as if he sensed something was not quite aligned.

He sniffed once, then twice. Nothing. He gathered the papers anyway, sighed, and left with them.

Fay slid out after he was gone and moved on to Crust. Crust kept no papers. He kept ores, sorted and guarded like they were children.

Fay did not know what they were for, and Radeon had not told her to steal. So she kept moving.

Tent after tent. Tools. Spirit stones. A few unfamiliar pills that hummed faintly with spiritual presence.

She passed them all. She was here to investigate, not to loot.

Her thirteenth target stood larger than the rest, embroidered with intricate patterns.

As Fay neared, she heard moaning. For a heartbeat she thought it was torture.

Curious and wary, she turned invisible and slipped inside.

The tent rocked softly. Fay froze.

A woman was straddling a man, bodies tangled in heat and breath.

"More! Give it to me," the woman moaned.

Fay's cheeks went hot. The image branded itself into her mind in an instant. Obscene. Real. Something private she had never seen.

The man groaned. The woman shuddered, then collapsed against his chest.

Fay forced herself to move, to remember why she was here. Her eyes swept the tent.

Papers. Books. Ledgers. A window of opportunity, exactly as the manual had described, when attention was drowned in pleasure.

The woman was Challah, once a manager in the mines. She handled salaries and mine output, and they said she had studied under a scholar.

Fay flipped through what she could without making sound. Then she saw a book marked with a list, the most talented, a careful tally of people that mattered.

Fay slipped it inside her robe and retreated. At the tent flap she hesitated one breath too long, her eyes catching the scene again before she tore herself away.

Then she was outside, moving through the dark with her pulse loud in her ears.

When she returned to Radeon, her breath was ragged for reasons she refused to name.

She kept her face steady, but the red at the tips of her ears betrayed her. She wanted to know more about how men and women engaged in such pleasurable actions.

Radeon knew that look the moment he saw it. A woman flushed red, breath coming out hot and fast, eyes a fraction too bright.

He did not make a fuss. Fay had no experience with worldly pleasures, and he had no intention of feeding that fire.

Indulge it and she would start acting coy, then vulnerable, then one day she would blink and realize she had traded cultivation for daydreams.

He pressed his index finger to her forehead. Cool qi sank in. The heat bled out of her cheeks, but Challah's face still flashed behind Fay's eyes, uninvited and vivid.

Fay swallowed, mind snagging on the thought anyway. What if she was that woman, mounted on a man, making those sounds.

Radeon flicked her on the forehead.

"Ouch. I. I wasn't thinking about anything," Fay said, flatly denying it.

"Get out of your stupor," he said. "Did you want to feel such ecstasy that badly?"

Radeon knew he could not brush her off forever. This was not a passing mood. It was a bodily need.

He knew not everyone had trained their will to the extreme the way he had.

Now he found himself caught in a strange dilemma.

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