Kai walked ahead, his silhouette softened by mist, tail low in a relaxed sway as droplets rolled off it. Nico followed a few paces behind, tail held protectively up, knowing he’d hate for it to brush against mud or wet.
Kai had asked to tag along after hearing about the rift, revealed to them by a fortune teller, saying he also had some rifty business in the western valley. Nico welcomed the company, since something about this rift felt wrong. He couldn’t explain it, but instinctively he knew there was something related to core mana here.
His ears tilted side to side as he turned the thought over. The lead had come from a psychic’s prediction, which sounded worse the more clearly he phrased it in his head. Had he really said that out loud to Kai, and Kai had just accepted it?
What unsettled him more was that this hadn’t even been the deciding factor. Zhou had given a fixed time, date, and location to meet, which alone felt statistically impossible. Maybe he should have bought a lottery ticket that day. Then again, he was technically a government contractor on assignment, and gambling on the job felt like—
Was he really this easy to convince?
He looked at the wolf ahead of him. Kai would have said yes, absolutely. But Kai was in the top one percent of devious people he knew, so that opinion hardly counted. Zhou, on the other hand, was an ancient being who kept inviting him on maybe-dates.
Maybe he was easy to convince. It wasn't even a full moon.
The fog thickened as they reached the riverbank. The bridge came into view as a pale stretch of stone broken at its center, rubble jutting from the slow water below. The opposite bank was half lost to mist. The place was beautiful in a damp, uninviting way, the rolling hills alive with insect buzz and the pungent smell of peat.
Kai stopped at the edge and scanned the water. The current looked gentle enough, though the rocks were slick with algae. It was passable if they were careful, but when he yawned and stood idly in place, Nico doubted he had any intention of testing it.
Nico pulled a base inscription circle from his inventory and set it near the bridge’s foot. They were early anyway, and fixing it counted as civil service, so he’d get the inscription base reimbursed. He linked it to an earth mana battery, then knelt to mark the outer ring with chalk. Maybe it was from studying all the glyphwork in the Tulen files—that he finally read almost a month after Effie provided them to him—but he felt like doing this one by hand. Chalk dust clung to his fingers as he drew the lines and glyphs. When the inscription closed, he pressed a pulse of mana through to activate it.
Gold light threaded through the stones below, filling gaps and cracks, lifting the rubble. The fragments rotated until they found the configuration that set them back into place. The bridge looked just somewhat restored from how worn and uneven the base material was, but it was solid enough to hold. Kai gave it a cautious test step.
Nico’s ears flicked up. Another step sounded from the other side of the bridge, almost in rhythm with Kai’s. Through the fog, a figure taller than the average local moved, horns catching the faint light. Kai continued forward, unphased by the approaching stranger. At the midpoint, he passed Zhou in silence; neither acknowledged the other. Kai kept walking west until he disappeared into the mist on the far bank. Apparently, that was how they were splitting paths today.
Silver hair swung in a ponytail to the rhythm of an unhurried gait. The amethyst of his horns and eyes were softened beneath the fog, but pulsed in resonance with the riverstone as he came to stand beside Nico.
“It’s on this side of the bank,” he said, eyes cutting into crescents.
Nico’s eyes cut in a different way. “Why didn’t you fix it?”
“What, just because I have an earth affinity?”
“Yes.”
Zhou laughed and kept walking, hands tucked behind his back, offering no explanation for the bridge or for where he was headed, as usual. Nico glanced back at the newly restored bridge, then sighed and followed Zhou down the bank. He didn’t even get to use it.
* * *
Nico followed the sage toward a wide opening carved into the hill’s slope. Hanging roots and vines framed the low mouth of the cave, swaying with every draft of wind. From outside, it looked like an ordinary cave that might shelter wild animals from rain. But the air rolling out crept low across the valley, carrying the acrid smell of ozone and peat.
He slowed at the threshold, not exactly feeling invited. Inside, the floor was slick and shallowly flooded with an inch or two of stagnant water. It felt like the sort of place where dumb tourists, namely himself, vanished because they had not checked a tide schedule. Portalling out carried the usual risks; unstable terrain and rift interference never mixed well. The sheer mana cost of activation made it impractical for most rescue or escape scenarios, given that depletion alone risked permanent eye damage. In the worst case, excessive draw could cause blackout and leave the user at random coordinates, possibly inside a rift, possibly waking up blind.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Zhou, naturally, invited himself in without much forethought, violet light rippling out from his steps. Water rumbled and parted as stone blocks rose from the floor to form a path through the narrow passage. When deeper pools appeared, he shaped thin bridges of compacted clay across them.
The tunnel opened into a vast hollow, too high and bright to be called a cave. The walls climbed far beyond any natural cavern, fading into haze where sunlight poured through a colossal rupture in the earth above. The light fell in slow shafts, catching on drifting mist and the fine spray of water that fell from the rim.
The floor widened into a basin ringed by steep stone walls. Rainwater had pooled there for years, turning the bottom into a shallow bog heavy with peat and a raw tang of metal. At its center rose the decayed stump of a massive tree, about two stories tall where it broke free of the muck. From their vantage point, its diameter was impossible to estimate. The ceiling curved into a broad circular hollow, hinting at a trunk far larger than what remained visible, while the bog swallowed everything below the surface.
The remains of structures surrounded it: broken stone arches, rusted steel, and waterlogged timber. Pieces of staircases protruded from the muck at strange angles, ending abruptly.
Nico stepped closer, his boots sinking slightly into the softened ground. He brushed his fingers against one of the collapsed structures, then stopped himself, making a mental note to check how often a tetanus shot needed boosting.
The grain of whatever wood hadn't completely rotted away was ancient, etched with glyphs just visible beneath the lichen, echoing the inscriptions from the observatory and the manasteel restorations found in the market.
Zhou kept shaping the path ahead, raising firm steps through the flooded terrain. Each pulse of his mana concentrated and hardened mud stepping stones, dissipating in fine purple lines once the earth manipulation settled.
It was practical, but before their arrival the basin had been largely untouched, preserved by the sheer difficulty of reaching it. The farther they walked, the more it felt like they were leaving irreversible marks on a historical site.
Nico tried not to dwell on it, his tail flicking in discomfort despite himself. Rift sites were already warped, detached from the world, which usually made them fair game for fieldwork. Still, as his ears flattened at the surrounding silence, a thought from the observatory surfaced again. This felt like disturbing something sacred. He shook his head slightly, as if he could scatter the ethics out of it.
Zhou seemed intent on walking the entire perimeter of the trunk, drawing stone from the cave walls and fallen masonry to form a clean path around it and over the bog. Nico gave in to curiosity.
|| Skill Activated || [Lycanthropy]
He hopped up the toppled pillars and landed on the stump with light, sure footing. The wood was damp but steady beneath his paws, cool with the faint give of compressed soil. Moss and flowering vine spread thick across the surface, soft enough to leave shallow prints, but not dense enough to hide the rings that split across the trunk like a male of age.
He padded along the outer ring, tail flicking to steady himself as he circled. It took him roughly thirteen minutes to make a full loop, which put the circumference somewhere around two to three kilometers. All things considered, it was quite pleasant. Up close the bark smelled earthy, warm, and faintly smoky, like a campfire or burning peat. His ears twitched. Burning?
That wasn’t right. The air above the bog was wet and clean, no steam rising from it even accounting for the decomposition below; nothing here should have been burning. He sniffed again. The scent came from the wood itself. He trotted toward the center ring, following the smell. Where it grew strongest, he dug through the moss, scattering small white flowers until his paws hit carved grooves. A sigil pulsed faintly in the ring. Curious, he focused his mana into it. The response was immediate, a neat rejection as gold light sparked outward.
He made his way back to the edge and hopped down to the stone walkway.
The fox was a quiet walker, so Zhou hadn’t noticed, or was pretending not to, despite his Arcanite resonance being pretty attuned to every vibration in the earth until now. Or maybe his hearing bad because he was so old.
Nico hesitated, suddenly too self-conscious to bark or call his name, aware that either would echo. He settled for nudging Zhou’s leg instead, tail meekly brushing the ground. Zhou turned with a bright hum and a knowing look.
“Found something for you to nullify,” Nico said, turning quickly to bound back up the trunk, retreating from the moment he’d just made awkward.
Zhou gave a soft laugh, then pressed his palms to a fallen column. Stone shifted and reformed under his mana, shaping into a short stairway for him to climb. He joined Nico at the top, and the fox pawed away the remaining moss to reveal the mark beneath. The sigil burned deep into the grain, its lines warped outward like scar tissue.
“Can you nullify it?”
The Sage leaned in for a closer look. Upon recognition, his lips pressed into a tight line, eyes hardening with a look that didn’t suit him. The fox’s tail swished in uneasy reflex. Seeing Zhou tense, it struck Nico that he’d never seen the sage’s expression settle into something so disdainful. If not lost in thought, he mostly saw Zhou smiling at him—or, at worst, indifferent.
“It’s an Ashmark,” Zhou said, voice low. “From Aster.”
Nico’s ears flicked back at the name. Ashmark was Sage Aster’s S-grade skill. The pattern severed mana flow in living matter, spreading outward from a single point until nothing remained but ash. People were included in that.
The mark must have been eating through the wood for centuries, petrifying it ring by ring as it drained the mana stored within, converting height and mass into ash. Whether it had been placed deliberately or had simply failed to finish its work, he couldn’t tell. The result was the same slow, endless corrosion.
Zhou stood with eyes fixed on it for a long moment, eventually lowering to a kneel with a long exhale.
He set a hand over the sigil and activated his own S-grade skill. Violet mana flared between his fingers as he injected it into the mark. The light traced the Ashmark and sank deeper.
“…That’s different,” Zhou murmured as the glow wove into the wood grain.
Nico tilted his head. Nullification should have dimmed the sigil and dispersed it into ambient mana. Instead, the pulse ran outward, brightening the rings of the tree stump one by one.
“Uh. You’re still injecting mana into it,” Nico observed, staying where he sat, watching the light spiral upward from the surface into the air.
“Well, yeah. I wanna know.”
Nico, not doing much as the hum deepened, couldn’t deny he felt the same curiosity.
The rift engulfed them both.