“Of course, my ancestors were among those left behind. It is said that people were creative and still fled, using hidden paths. Each ceiling is known to have several Mon, some hidden far away from the Pillar. But the Great Clans had accounted for this. Not long after their flight, one of the Patriarchs journeyed down to cast a great working on the floor above. They say his Ki ran like rivers across the land, before turning to solid stone. With that grand feat, the seal was complete.

  With all the most powerful cultivators having fled, the fight was lost, so my ancestors had no choice but to hide. The Cupola had been working on hiding places for their students, which were quickly expanded to cover as many people as possible. This was one of the largest, and as far as I know, the only one to remain untouched by parasites until this day.

  Our population shrank with each generation that was born and died in these sealed places. Inevitably, there were those who no longer wanted to live like worms and would venture above. Most would never return, but a rare few brought back news and sometimes even prisoners, which were studied. That is how we learned.

  Limited resources dwindled even further throughout the years. By the time I was born here, there were only a few dozen of us. We had no food but what little we could grow, no water but what we could dig up and filter, no beasts to train. It was a blessing that we did have at least the scrolls and memories capturing our people’s teachings.

  Emotional control was trained from childhood. We taught our children to fear intense emotion, to always remain firmly in control, for those emotions are what the strongest of the parasites preyed on. I excelled at this from an early age. Some hidden talent within me allowed me to distance myself from my own thoughts and feelings, to investigate them without bias. After seeing my surface desire for the deceit that it was, I spoke my truth and managed to advance to Talc, a feat none of my generation had accomplished.”

  Dario sat up straight, eyes widening. What had he said? Surface desire? Nika shifted as well, but Saigo went on.

  “Like some generations before us, there came a time where we made a critical error: we dared to hope. Hope that finally, enough time had passed, that the parasites would at long last have all starved to death. So we sent out a scout and when he returned, free of infection, we celebrated. After all, Hisomeru had brought good news: he’d investigated the surroundings thoroughly and not a single infected beast had been spotted.

  The next step, then, was to venture out with a larger team, one which I was part of. We journeyed further through the abandoned ruins of Kanjoushi, breathing sighs of relief each time we turned a corner and did not come face to face with an infected beast.

  Until we found him. Somewhere on the outskirts of the city lay what we first thought to be a withered corpse. But there was still a spark of life left. We should have burned it, then and there. The beast had taken the body of a famous old leader of our city, one whose face we knew from the memories of our ancestors.

  It tricked us. Told such sweet lies, so convincingly. Only a few of us returned, uninfected, but somehow, I suspect it followed us. Because after that-”

  The voice turned into a screech as the image skewed, then both suddenly stopped.

  Dario gave it a few thumps, tried feeding more light into the batteries, but it didn’t work.

  “Damn it. This one’s dead. But there might be other crystals left by him. There’s piles of them to go through,” he said, but instead of digging through the container, he sat back down, looking thoughtful.

  “What do you think he meant? When he was going on about his breakthrough.”

  “Surface desire…” she mumbled absently, head hanging down as she stared at the dusty floor. “That, at least, should be clear. Everything that we’ve learned so far has been pointing us in the same direction. The inevitable conclusion is that our stated desires are, if not outright false, then at least not deeply true enough to qualify.”

  “But it is true!” Dario said, getting to his feet and beginning to pace, the indignant anger at being called a liar flaring back up. “Tenjin can spit in my eye if it isn’t! What’s wrong with wanting your mother to be happy, anyway?”

  Nika didn’t react, didn’t even look up from the floor. When she spoke, it was again in that same quiet, defeated tone.

  “Perhaps it’s only part of it, and not all of it. I don’t know. I don’t have the answer for you, Dario. In fact, I don’t have any answers at all. For the first time in my life, I don’t know what’s right or true anymore. My clansmen, the elders, my books… Who can I still trust? What truths are there still to rely on?”

  “Part of it? For my mother to be happy is all I’ve ever-”

  He swallowed his words as that tightness in his stomach returned. Clearly, Nika had enough problems of her own, but the anger was still running hot in his chest.

  “Bah!” he spat, marching angrily towards the container of memory crystals, wincing with every step. “Screw this! I don’t have time for more of these damn riddles. There have to be more crystals.”

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  He tried one crystal after another, but they were either cracked and faded or carried irrelevant memories of their old culture and way of life. With each failed attempt, he let out a curse and tossed the crystal aside.

  When he’d mostly emptied the container, he stalked off angrily to the old training room, grabbing a staff and taking his frustrations out on one of the old training dummies. Everything hurt, but that feeling of tightness stayed in his stomach all the while, like a nagging voice that kept feeding the flames of his anger.

  Everything in this damned floor seemed keen on telling him he was full of trogshit. If you asked him, it was this whole revelation business that smelled off. There were a hundred different things he wanted, but somehow none of them counted as deep enough? What was up with that?

  An overhead blow with the staff landed with a loud thwack. Dario grunted as he kicked the doll for good measure, before sweeping the staff around again for another satisfying blow.

  He wanted to relax in his hammock after a good meal. He wanted to go to the tavern and sing songs with the drunkards. He definitely wanted to go and find more treasures. Those were all desires that he had, but this stupid floor didn’t want to accept them. So he’d dug even deeper and come up with something that felt almost painfully true: he wanted his mother to be happy. How was that not enough? What more did it need?

  He was sweating and growling as he kept whacking at the training dummy, the old material beginning to come apart and spill out something that looked like grain.

  What else could possibly be deep and true enough to count as a damn revelation? He wanted so many things! To go on adventures, to meet different people, to see different sights. He paused when the tightness in his stomach relaxed, but then he resumed his assault on the poor training dummy with even more vigor.

  It didn’t even fucking matter what he wanted, did it? Because he wasn’t about to go running off to chase some important dream and leave his mother behind to soak the kitchen table in her tears. That was what selfish assholes did.

  “I’m. Not. Fucking. Like. Them!” Each word came out as an angry grunt, accompanied by a heavy hit of the staff against what was now nothing more than a torn sack of grain.

  He stood there with an angry frown, soaked in sweat as he sucked in heavy breaths. His palms burned where the coarse wood had ground against them. The contents of the training dummy stank of mold and decay, just like everything else in this cursed basement.

  The staff clattered to the ground and he went back to reading through the scroll that wrote of the art of splicing. What he really needed was to get out of this dead place and for that, there was one thing he'd need for certain: better weapons.

  But he quickly ran into another problem: this old art of splicing required a certain instrument that he didn’t have. That device apparently performed two critical functions: first, it provided a larger, more detailed view of the tiny seeds so that whoever was doing the splicing could see what was going on, and second, it allowed for extremely fine manipulation of Ki.

  From what he could glean from the scroll, the idea was that by taking out only the aspect one was looking for and feeding it into another seed, the new combined seed should grow into a different plant. There were, however, a bunch of complicated rules to take into account, mainly about the limitations of aspects, but also about patterns that needed to be used. You couldn’t just shove one aspect into another seed, they had to be somehow woven together or it wouldn’t remain stable.

  But when he looked over the patterns of meshing the aspects together, he got to thinking. Why use a big, fancy artefact if you can just do it yourself? After all, you should never go the long way when you could be taking a shortcut.

  So after pulling some seeds from the growth room, Dario bent over the tiny things, using the point of his dagger to cut them open. It was easy enough for him to use light Ki to create an enlarged image in front of him, but that still just showed the inside of the seed. There was a little white core with specks of brown hiding inside the black seed. That didn’t help him much.

  He had to cycle a good bit of Ki through his eyes before he was able to see the minuscule bits of aura that clung to the seed. Even in the enlarged image, it was hard to make out the subtle differences in color that represented different aspects of it.

  Once he got to trying to pull out those tiny bits of aura, he quickly realized why people used an instrument. The strands and bulbs of aura that existed within the seeds were as fragile as they were small. Each attempt to grasp them with his mind resulted in them dispersing under the pressure, like picking up a little worm with his fingers, if the worm was made of foam.

  He’d often practiced manipulating thin wires of light Ki when doing his puzzles, but this was a level of magnitude smaller still. It didn’t help that he already had a headache and his brain felt foggy, like he’d just woken up to a bad hangover.

  Still, he knew that his mother was waiting and he’d need better weapons to get out of here alive. By themselves, the seeds and cuttings he had available now were alright, but none of them were quite good enough to help him win fights. The vines had a strong growth aspect, but they grew without direction and were not thick and strong enough to stand up to real attacks. With the core it was the other way around; it was hard as a rock and had sharp thorns, but even with all of his plant Ki dumped into it, it would never grow fast enough to matter in a fight. The combination of those two, on the other hand…

  Hours passed as he sat bent over tiny seeds, cursing each time he squished the mushy aura instead of guiding it out. He kept going until the exhaustion built to a point where he fell asleep in the middle of it, head hanging forward.

  But even a short nap brought a nightmare, each one a variation of the first, of sinking ever deeper and never being able to return to his crying mother. Though his wounds slowly healed, every time he woke, his arms and legs felt even heavier, his thoughts coming sluggishly as if he had to drag them through mud. He ate and drank before returning to the splicing, beating his head against the problem without making much progress, each nap draining him further, leaving him feeling worse.

  That was the shape of Dario's downward spiral, which kept on going until he would reach an inevitable breaking point.