Blake didn’t have any special words of wisdom for the recruits this morning. As soon as they were all in the officer, he checked to make sure they were presentable, then led them to a taxi longboat.

  Since they were only travelling to Iron Hide Central, he didn’t need to pay a fare. They travelled to the Grand Lodge, where Stone Moon was waiting for them. He greeted them with a smile and asked Blake, “Are they ready?”

  “You’re going pretty fast, but yes, they’re ready,” Blake replied.

  “They all have experience. And you picked them.” Stone Moon gave a fake smile, and Blake wasn’t sure what to make of the man anymore. At first, he’d taken Stone Moon for the dutiful deputy sect leader, but if what Dust Broom said was true, there was a high chance Stone Moon was more nefarious than Blake had originally thought.

  “That I did,” Blake replied. He tried not to take Stone Moon’s words as a threat. For now, he had bigger problems. Like someone sending a snake after him, like progressing through the tournament, like taking a client on a hunting mission. He asked, “Who do we have lined up for today?”

  “A Nord Mercenary-Lord named Winterbeard.” Stone Moon replied. “Technically, he’s no Jarl, but he holds enough sway due to his immense fighting prowess. He’ll be looking for something powerful.” Stone Moon glanced down at the sheet of paper he held and said, “Yes, Winterbeard. They say he’s the first stage of Nascent Soul.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “And for your second group, we have a Steerman’s daughter…not our Steerman, mind you. She’d from a long-colonized integration world. It’s practically indistinguishable from any other Nord world.”

  Blake nodded. “Her name?”

  “Lady Algja, and her retainers.”

  Blake turned to his recruits and said, “Jared and I will take Winterbeard. You three are with Lady Algja. Got it?”

  Sara, Grímur, and Cedrick nodded.

  They waited in the lobby for a few minutes. As they waited, Blake continued his experimentations with his senses. He needed to reforge his soul, sure, but first, he needed to figure out the baseline of where he was and how far he needed to go—plus what it felt like to use them properly to begin with.

  If it was truly a ‘sixth sense,’ then his current theory was that it worked better with people he deemed to be threats. For the moment, he tested it on Stone Moon. He turned his back to the man, closed his eyes, and tried pushing his awareness out, sensing where Stone Moon was. That sense of danger, of someone sneaking up behind you and staring at you…

  It was quiet for a few seconds, then Stone Moon must have shifted his gaze. A node at the top of his neck flared up in warning—his soul. It was hard to explain, but it was as if there was a weight in his neck and it was screaming at him to look.

  A moment later, footsteps sounded on the Grand Lodge’s main stairs, and the same sensation erupted from in front of him. He opened his eyes.

  A massive man—he had to be at least seven feet tall, and his shoulders were probably a foot wider than Blake’s—walked down the stairs. He carried a massive battle axe in-hand and wore a round shield on his back. It was a normal shield, but he made it look like a dinner plate. That had to be Winterbeard.

  His white beard wagged as he stepped down the stairs, and his hair was made of frost. Nothing but frost.

  Blake approached him, holding out a hand. “Winterbeard, correct?”

  “That is correct!” the man exclaimed. He took Blake’s hand and clasped his forearm, then gave a good shake. “I take it you are my guide?”

  Blake dipped his head. “Me and Jared over here.” He motioned back at the boy, and Jared stepped forward, bowing his head.

  “This one is honoured to meet you, sir,” Jared said.

  “Not sir,” Winterbeard replied. He gave them both a grin and whispered, “Don’t spread the word, but I’m just a freeman. Not a lord.”

  It sounded like he was more than willing to spread the word himself, considering how many people seemed to know that he was a freeman. Perhaps that was part of the legend he was trying to create for himself.

  Regardless, Blake said, “Let’s get started, then.”

  ~ ~ ~

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Winterbeard had a longboat of his own, and they took it down to the surface. Blake directed them to a patch of the merge mists he hadn’t spent much time in recently, but just because Winterbeard was powerful didn’t mean that Blake was going to take the man to a spiker immediately.

  But sure enough, Winterbeard was a Nascent Soul cultivator. The most powerful cultivator Blake had ever seen with his own eyes. His rank seal displayed a spiral with a single arm, and Blake guessed that meant he was at the first stage of Nascent Soul.

  “What are you looking for?” Blake asked.

  “I am seeking a true challenge,” Winterbeard replied. “Your world is one of the last true wilds, is it not? All my other foes have crumbled too easily, and the hunting enclosures are too safe. Too…maintained.”

  “Let’s see, then…” Blake said. He led the way into the mists, tasting the air and searching for any signs of monsters.

  When he picked up on a howler’s scent, he began following it with his physical senses. He tried picking up on it with his spiritual senses, but the howler didn’t seem to exert any sort of threat. Perhaps that was a good thing, considering it meant that a howler didn’t even concern Blake at all, but he didn’t want to only sense dangerous things.

  It only took a few minutes to track the beast down, and when he did find it, he pretended he hadn’t been leading Winterbeard toward it. There was no sense in going after something stronger if Winterbeard couldn’t handle a single bog-wolf. Or, of course, if he didn’t fill Blake with confidence.

  “Ah, a pest,” Winterbeard said. He reached for his axe, and, without breaking stride, he slammed it down into the howler’s head, cracking its skull and killing it in a single blow.

  “He’s strong…” Jared whispered.

  Blake held up a finger to his lips. Winterbeard would hear them talking, no matter how quiet Blake made his voice.

  They continued onward. Blake didn’t have Ethbin with him to help track, but he knew what to look for. When he found a spiker’s footprints and its trail of destruction, he turned to follow it.

  “If you’re willing, may we pick up the pace?” Blake asked. “These tracks are hours old, by my guess.” He couldn’t tell by looking, but the smell of the spiker was beginning to fade. He tried extending his spiritual senses again. It didn’t pick up on anything, not even a rodent—despite the fact that he could hear one.

  There was only an overwhelming presence and sense of danger from Winterbeard.

  Blake narrowed his eyes. Perhaps that was why cultivators trained themselves to be so aggressive and sensitive to offenses. If they saw everyone as their enemy, if they recognized the threat everything posed, then they could sense it.

  But he wasn’t going to be like them. He wasn’t going to rely on crutches like that.

  “Let us,” Winterbeard replied. “Have the boy set the pace.” He motioned to Jared.

  Jared gulped, then triggered his Augmentation technique. Flame-aspect mana spread around his legs, wrapping in orange coils, enhancing his limbs. He took off at a sprint, zipping away faster than any normal human could run. Blake triggered the Serpent’s Cloak, leaping along after Jared, and Winterbeard activated a frost-based technique. It enveloped his limbs in a thin layer of icy dust, and he kept up with ease.

  As they travelled, Blake concentrated his other senses. Sure, the weird ‘sixth sense’ might have been a danger sense of sorts, but there had to be other aspects. He wanted a picture of his surroundings.

  He didn’t have to look down whenever he took a step. With a quick glance, his mind constructed an invisible model of his surroundings. His mind had done that for as long as he could remember. If he was walking on a forest path, he would know how high he had to lift his foot to step over a root.

  But could his mind do the same thing without first seeing it? Could his soul?

  He shut his eyes as he ran, concentrating on the location of the soul and the feeling the danger sense had given, then let it spread as far and wide as it would go. It created a resonance in his soul, and it pulsed outward, almost like a bat’s sonar, creating an understanding of his most immediate surroundings. He saw Jared and Winterbeard, and he picked up on the trail of destruction.

  There was a greater weight to Jared, though, and an even greater weight to Winterbeard. It wasn’t just the force of his mana, but rather, an impact he made on the world. How he interacted with his surroundings and his capacity to change them.

  Blake’s eyes popped open, but the sense didn’t fade. He could ignore it, but now that he knew what it felt like…

  Instead of just resonating his echo with the Way, he’d touched it with his soul. To see the impact of others had to be something you had to look into the Way to accomplish.

  It didn’t tell him exactly how strong his companions were, but he figured with enough practice, and once he found a way to reforge his soul, it would become far more clear. He’d be able to pick out the finer differences between the stages.

  And when they drew closer to the Spiker, Blake didn’t even need his physical senses to pick up on it. He knew it was waiting in the mists ahead.

  He skittered to a halt, and signalled for both Jared and Winterbeard to slow down, too. “What is it?” Winterbeard demanded. He turned to Blake, his eyes narrowed. “Is there a problem, lad? You scanned my spirit earlier, did you not? What is it, are you looking to claim my echo?”

  “Claim…your echo?” Blake tilted his head. “No, I just meant that we were close to the spiker.”

  Winterbeard’s gaze softened slightly. “Lad, I take it that you’re quite new to the Foundation stages, and it’s tempting to mess with your own senses. But you never scan another man’s spirit unless you’re looking to fight. It’ll be taken as a massive threat.”

  Blake dipped his head, and he quickly said, “Apologies. I didn’t mean it like that, not at all. But we should be careful. There is a monster nearby.”

  He cursed Dust Broom for not telling him that, but everyone must have thought it was already self-evident. Blake said, “Can you feel when someone scans your spirit?”

  “I can. When you focus on me, it creates a clash of souls and a faint resonance in my spine. I know exactly when you’ve tried to size me up.”

  “Once again, apologies.” Blake pointed to the mists ahead. “It is getting closer to us. It’s picked up on us.”

  “Ah, yes.” Winterbeard pulled his shield off his back. “Allow me to handle this.”