The monk was still clearly out of it, his movements sluggish and uncoordinated.It couldn't be helped. He had only recently regained consciousness and was still fighting through the fog of exhaustion and pain. Grunting, he stretched his hand in front of him, reaching for something only he could see, his fingers grasping at empty air. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his eyes were suddenly wide with panic."Where is…. Where is Li Na!" he rasped out, his voice cracking. "My daughter.."He tried to rise from the bed, his body lurching forward, his legs tangling in the sheets. Monitors beeped in alarm, tracking his spiking heart rate, his elevated blood pressure. IV lines tugged at his arm, threatening to pull free.Zachary and Seraphina were on him in an instant."Easy, easy," Zachary said, his hands pressing against Yien's shoulders, guiding him back against the pillows. "She's right here, Master Yien. She's safe. Look."He pointed toward the bed beside Yien's, where Li Na lay sleepi

Seraphina's eye twitched and pinched the bridge of her nose, a gesture that had become habitual whenever Zachary decided to be insufferable.Yien, to his credit, did not laugh. But there was a softening in his expression, a gentleness that had been absent since the attack, a glimmer of the patient, fond teacher that Zachary and Seraphina had known on Sanctuary. His eyes crinkled at the corners, and for a moment, the weight of his confession seemed to lift, replaced by something lighter.He turned slowly on the bed and regarded Zachary with something that looked almost like pride. The bandages on his hand rustled softly as he shifted, and the monitors beeped their steady rhythm in the background."Young Lord," he said, and his voice was gentle now, carrying none of the weight that had burdened it moments before. "The purpose of a teacher is to rid his students of their own shortcomings. Their greatest achievement is to see the students surpass them."He paused, letting the words si

He paused, and a small smile played at the corners of his lips, not the smile of a teacher delivering a lesson, but the smile of a man remembering something precious.Zachary leaned back in his chair, his brow furrowing. He had heard of the White Rook title before.This tile had been mentioned in some of the more obscure scrolls he had read on Sanctuary, usually in passing, usually as a footnote to larger discussions about the monastery's role in the cultivation world. But he had never paid much attention to the details. His spiritual training had been focused on more practical matters: combat forms, energy manipulation, the application of dragon power in real-world situations. The philosophical nuances of monastic titles had seemed irrelevant at the time.Now, sitting in this hospital room with his teacher and his retainer, those details suddenly seemed important."Seraphina," Yien called out suddenly, turning his gaze toward her, "how does one attain such a title?"Seraphina's ex

His voice cracked on the words, grief prominent in his eyes."She had already killed him to get to the relic. He was... he was just lying there. There was…. blood everywhere. There was so much of it." He sucked in a sharp breath, face pale, “..And Morwen, she didn't even care! She was just standing over him, holding the bone fragment in her hand, staring at it like it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen."Zachary felt sick. Beside him, Seraphina had gone completely still, her face pale, her hands clenched in her lap."I was all that stood between her and her objective," Yien said. "I was all that stood between her and the relic, and the power it represented, and whatever dark purpose she had been pursuing for years. I didn't want to fight her. I loved her. Even then, standing over the body of our teacher, I loved her."He closed his eyes."But I had no choice."The room was silent. Even the monitors seemed to hold their breath."The fight lasted all night," Yien said. "A ba

And she had not just absorbed from them. She had turned her focus on Morwen, who also had monstrous levels of energy, and increased the input speed. She had drawn more energy, faster, harder, pushing herself past her limits.To use her absorbing ability, Seraphina had to convert her Obsidian energy into a domain. The domain was a space, a bubble, a pocket of reality that existed separate from the ordinary world. Inside that domain, energy was not bound by the same rules. It could be pulled, redirected, drained, funneled into an endless void that existed between dimensions.She was like a conduit. A pipe. A channel connecting the physical world to the astral plane. The astral plane was vast, infinite, capable of absorbing anything that was pushed into it. The conduit itself had no limit on how much energy it could pass through. The astral plane had no limit on how much energy it could hold.But the conduit itself was limited to how much strain it could handle while the energy passed th