The geological formation that concealed the Harvesting Facility's entrance was exactly what Ash Thornwood's transferred knowledge had described it as, which was to say it was unremarkable in the specific, deliberate way that things were unremarkable when someone had spent forty years ensuring they remained unremarkable.It was actually a rock formation.Dark stone, the specific iron-heavy composition of the Third Heaven's eastern boundary region, rising from the terrain in the irregular, organic shapes that geological processes produced without the deliberate geometry that would have communicated intentionality to a passing observer, Unremarkable.Except for the specific, microscopic wrongness that the Essence Reading found when it was looking for exactly this kind of wrongness, the faint, continuous formation energy signature of a dimensional gateway that had been operating in the same location for forty years and that had accumulated, in its operation, the specific, residual frequen

"I'll be on your left," Lian Veil immediately said. "When it happens. I know how to work around a full-release demonic cultivation deployment without being caught in the perimeter." She paused. "I've been briefed on it. As a threat scenario." Another pause, and the complicated expression was back briefly."The briefings that were supposed to help me counter people like you are, again, going to help me work alongside them instead.""The briefings are getting a lot of use today," Ryn Ashenfang immediately said, with the flat, dry quality that was her version of the thing that lived next to humor."They are," Lian Veil agreed, and something moved in her face that was, against the flat, professional register, a very small and entirely genuine thing that might have been the beginning of a smile.Kaelen Ashwright immediately stood at the facility's concealed entrance with his hands against the formation array's eastern face and the Essence Reading running at its maximum available depth, m

:"Who are you?" she said, and her voice had the rough, cautious quality of someone who had been alone and in pain for an unknown period and who was applying careful scrutiny to every new thing before accepting it."My name is Kaelen Ashwright," he said. "We're here to get you out." Kaelen Ashwright immediately said.She looked at him with those cautious eyes."You're real," she said, and the statement had the quality of someone speaking a conclusion they had worked hard to arrive at."Yes," he said."The Elder Council doesn't send young men in to tell me they're getting me out," she said. "So either you're not the Elder Council, or this is a new technique." She paused, and her eyes moved from him to Ash Thornwood behind him and to the formation-disrupted corridor beyond the open seal. "Who are you people?" The old woman asked again, her face was etched in shock and bewilderment."People who are ending this facility," Ash Thornwood said, with the flat, ancient certainty of someone

Immediately the corridor was very quiet."He knew," Ash said, with the flat, certain quality of something being confirmed that he had suspected but had not been certain of."He knew," Elder Cho confirmed. "He received the Devourers' message. He understood what they were. He established the sacrifice system anyway." He looked at Kaelen. "Not because he didn't understand them.”“Because he understood them and he was ashamed and the shame was larger than the forgiveness and he chose to continue rather than to stop and accept the forgiveness they were offering.""He chose the system over the forgiveness," Kaelen said slowly."Three thousand years ago," Elder Cho said. "And every year since. And every sacrifice since." He held Kaelen's gaze with the complete, direct quality of someone delivering the most important piece of information they have ever possessed. "The journal ends with a single line. Written after he had established the system and killed the first people in it and made hi

The extraction of the remaining eleven people actually took eleven minutes.Not because eleven minutes was the optimal extraction time for eleven prisoners in varying states of cultivation depletion from an Elder Council Harvesting Facility with five Elder-level practitioners being engaged in its southern corridor by a demon-blooded cultivator who had just experienced the full release of seven years of suppressed inheritance.Eleven minutes because that was what the eleven minutes contained, the specific, organized chaos of people who knew what they were doing working around people who were encountering the possibility of leaving for the first time in months and who were navigating that possibility with the specific, disoriented quality of people whose relationship with the door had, for a long time, been entirely theoretical.Dara Coldspring was practical about it.She had been in the facility for eleven months.Dara Coldspring had, across those eleven months, developed the specific,