Iris slowly moved between the kitchen and upstairs, the specific movement of someone who was managing the situation by managing everything around the situation, because managing everything around the situation was what was available while the situation itself was being addressed by someone else.At one point she brought Kaelen tea, setting it beside him with the same matter-of-fact efficiency she applied to everything, and he looked up from the manual and she looked at him with those direct dark eyes and neither of them said anything for a moment."If you can't do it," she said, "tell me. Don't try and fail. The trying and failing would..." She stopped. "She believes you. Since you said yes, she believes you. If you try and it doesn't work...""I won't try and fail," Kaelen said."You sound certain," Iris said."I am certain," Kaelen said. "About what the technique requires and whether I understand the technique." He paused. "I'm not certain about everything. But about this, yes."She

.Old Moth had been walking northeast for three hours still looking for Kaelen Ashwright or Zain as she knew who he was.The City of Dust in its morning expression was not the same city it had been in its nighttime expression, but it was not a different city either. The same streets, the same buildings, the same accumulated poverty and persistence and the specific quality of a place that had decided its relationship with difficulty a long time ago and had been maintaining that relationship consistently ever since.The patrols were different in the morning.At night, the Mortal Coil Enforcement Authority ran the standard patrol rotations, the predictable circuits that experienced street residents knew and navigated around without thought. In the morning, post-incident, post-fire-at-the-northeastern-administrative-building, post-the-specific-sequence-of-events-that-had-resulted-in-three-senior-officers-losing-their-hands-and-arriving-at-the-medical-facility-approximately-forty-minutes

The second morning at The Traveler's Den arrived differently from the first.Kaelen Ashwright immediately noticed the difference before he was fully awake, in the transitional space between sleep and consciousness where impressions arrived before the analytical mind had fully resumed its duties.The difference was not in the sounds or the light or the smell of the kitchen fire building below, though all of those were present and accounted for. The difference was in the quality of the space itself, in what the previous day had done to the atmosphere of the building and the people in it.Something had settled.He lay on the sleeping mat and let consciousness arrive and took his inventory and found that the inventory was better than yesterday's better, which was to say that the trend was continuing in the direction that trends needed to continue if he was going to arrive at the tournament in any condition to matter.The Forbidden Essence devouring manual was beside him. He'd read another

Kaelen Ashwright immediately looked at her. At this small, sharp, book-reading girl who'd been asking him questions for twenty minutes with the precision and directness of someone who'd learned that good questions were the most reliable path to understanding, and who'd received every answer he'd given, including the incomplete ones, with the genuine consideration they deserved."Eventually," he said. "Yes. I think so.""The tournament," she said. "You're going for the pill. To fix your cultivation channels.""Yes," Kaelen said."And then what?""And then I climb back to where I came from," Kaelen said. "And make sure the people who did what they did to me answer for it.""Is that the only reason?" she said. "Revenge?"Kaelen Ashwright was quiet."There's someone I need to rescue," he said. "Someone who's been imprisoned for a long time. That's the more important reason."Mira absorbed this. "I hope you get there," she said, and the simplicity of it, the complete, uncomplicated sinceri

Kaelen Ashwright slowly stared at her before deciding to speak."It allows someone who can't cultivate through conventional means to absorb cultivation power directly from other cultivators," he said. "Bypassing the meridian system. Building power directly into the soul rather than through the body's physical channels."Iris absorbed this. "You can't cultivate through conventional means," she said."No," Kaelen said. "The meridians in this body are destroyed.""So this is your only option," she said."Yes," Kaelen said. "Someone I trust, or trusted, told me that before I started reading the manual. I didn't believe her immediately. I read everything I could think of that might be an alternative." He paused. "She was right.""The person who told you," Iris said. "Old Moth. The one the moth is from.""Yes," Kaelen said. "You've been putting things together since I arrived.""I have time to put things together," Iris said. "I run a tavern. It involves a lot of watching and listening."