All Chapters of Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel: Chapter 11
- Chapter 20
22 chapters
Chapter 11
For the five days after the assessment, nothing happened, which was itself a kind of answer.Ethan had expected either nothing at all — meaning Kael had looked at him, decided he had imagined it, and moved on — or something fast and decisive, the way problems got dealt with at Skyward Academy when the person doing the dealing had enough authority to act without much process. What he had not expected was the feeling of being quietly watched without anything being done about it, which was different from both and considerably more uncomfortable than either.It was hard to point to specific evidence. The inner hall administrator who handled the groundskeeping schedules had restructured Ethan's work assignments so that he was spending more time on the upper tiers near the elder residences and less time on the outer grounds where he usually had the most independence. An inner disciple he had never spoken to had stopped him on the second-tier path one afternoon to ask, with no obvious purpos
Chapter 12
Ethan was directed to the single chair facing the table. He sat down.Fell opened the proceedings with the efficiency of a man who had run enough hearings that the language had become automatic. The charge was theft from a senior elder's private quarters — specifically, the removal of personal cultivation materials and one iron key from Elder Seth's rooms in the period preceding the elder's death. There was testimony from a witness, whose name was not disclosed, who had observed Ethan entering the elder's quarters on multiple evenings. There was also a record from the inner hall's qi monitoring logs showing an unclassified energy signature originating from the outer grounds' eastern section on several recent evenings, which the proceedings officer noted as a secondary matter of concern.Fell asked whether Ethan wished to respond to the charge.Ethan thought through his options in the space of about ten seconds and found them limited. He could deny it, which would hold only until they
Chapter 13
The first town at the base of Skyward Mountain was called Crestfall, and it had the specific atmosphere of a place that existed primarily because a large institution nearby needed somewhere to buy things. There were supply merchants, a few inns, a handful of service trades catering to Academy staff and the occasional visiting cultivator. It was not an unfriendly town, but it was not a place that had much use for a seventeen-year-old with no cultivation, no references, and a theft annotation on his Academy record that any employer connected to the sect network would be able to pull up with a single inquiry.Ethan spent two nights in the cheapest room at the cheapest inn, eating modestly and thinking through his options with the focused practicality of someone who understands that sentiment is not going to solve the immediate problem.The immediate problem was straightforward. He needed somewhere to continue his practice without being found, without being observed, and without the kind
Chapter 14
The slip had more to give him now that he was here.He had noticed in the waste pit that the slip responded more readily in environments with high ambient void content — the degraded, stripped-down energy that accumulated wherever elemental qi had been spent and discarded. The Broken Wastes had that in abundance, not from waste disposal like the pit but from centuries of disrupted qi currents gradually losing their elemental coherence. The land was full of energy that had started as fire or wind or water and had been broken down by the disruption until it no longer had a clear elemental signature. It wasn't void, exactly. But it was closer to void than anything in normal terrain, and the slip seemed to respond to the proximity the way a lamp brightens when you bring it near a reflective surface.By the second evening he had read three new sections of the Sutra, more than he had managed in all his weeks in the waste pit combined.The second section elaborated on the first principle. Vo
Chapter 15
He thought about Mia, and whether she had received the short letter he had sent from Crestfall before leaving. He had kept it brief and told her almost nothing — only that he was going somewhere he couldn't be easily found for a while and that he was not in any immediate danger, both of which were true. He had not told her about the Broken Wastes because she would have worried about that specifically, and there was nothing she could do about it from inside the Academy anyway.He thought about Hobb, probably updating inventory records in that supply room with the same steady, unremarkable efficiency he had brought to it for forty years.He thought, briefly, about Kael — about the look across the assessment courtyard and the questions in the office and the four-day interval between the meeting and the hearing. He thought about what kind of man plans that carefully and moves that cleanly, and what that man was likely doing now that the immediate problem had been resolved to his apparent
Chapter 16
A suppression array worked by projecting a sustained qi pattern calibrated to the energy signature of whatever it was containing. The pattern essentially created a ceiling — anything inside that tried to expand its own energy beyond a certain threshold hit the array's projection and was pushed back. The array didn't need to be stronger than its target in absolute terms. It just needed to be precisely tuned, and precision, in formation work, was worth more than raw power.The problem with trying to break one from the outside using conventional cultivation was that elemental qi interacted directly with the array's projection — fire qi hit the fire-frequency components of the array, wind qi hit the wind-frequency components, and so on — which meant the array could distribute the incoming force across its whole structure rather than being overwhelmed at a single point. It was the same principle that made a net stronger than a wall of the same material weight. The force had somewhere to go
Chapter 17
When Ethan woke the next morning, Vera was sitting outside the rock hollow on a flat stone he had been using as a cutting surface, watching the direction the wind was coming from with the focused, professional attention of someone assessing whether a location met their standards.He built the fire and put water on without saying anything. She did not acknowledge him until the water was ready, at which point she turned and looked at the camp with the same evaluating quality she had applied to the wind."Your sight lines to the southwest are blocked by that formation of rocks," she said. "Anyone approaching from that direction would be within fifteen metres before you saw them.""I know," Ethan said. "It's the trade-off for the shelter the formation gives on the other three sides. I decided the southwest was the less likely approach direction."Vera considered this. "That's a reasonable assessment given the terrain. I would still clear the lower rocks if you intend to stay here another
Chapter 18
Vera declared him ready on a Tuesday, eight days after he had freed her from the ruin, in the same matter-of-fact tone she used for most things.She had spent those eight days following their first conversation with the occasional observation but mostly with watchful silence, monitoring his practice sessions from a distance that felt respectful rather than disengaged. She corrected him twice: once when he was allowing his awareness to drift slightly during the return motion, which she identified from watching the pattern of the ambient void frequency rather than anything externally visible, and once when he started developing a compensatory habit in his breathing that would have eventually undermined the whole practice if it had been allowed to continue. Both corrections were brief and specific, and both times she returned to her position and let him work without further comment.He had come to understand that this was her teaching method. She did not explain things before he needed t
Chapter 19
The spirit stone Mia had given him was down to about a third of its original value. Ethan had stretched it carefully — one meal per day from the town market at the Wastes border, the rest supplemented by what he could find in the terrain — but careful only delays the problem, it does not solve it. He needed income, and income, in a region with no sect presence and no institutional employment, meant working for the people who had money to spend on capable hands.The mercenary group had a semi-permanent base at the northern edge of Callow Town, the closest settlement to the Wastes' eastern perimeter. Ethan had heard about them from a supply trader who came through the area once a fortnight, a practical man named Gordon who traded in materials salvaged from the Wastes' outer zones and who had, over three brief transactions, become the nearest thing Ethan had to a local contact. Gordon had described the group as reliable, modestly sized, and run by a woman who did not put up with unnecess
Chapter 20
There were four of them, moving along the perimeter road from the north in a loose formation that was relaxed enough to suggest they were not expecting trouble but organised enough to suggest they had been trained to move that way regardless of expectation.Skyward Academy outer hall colours — grey robes with silver piping at the collar. Ethan recognised the colours from fifty metres away and stepped off the track into the scrubland without thinking about it, moving low and smooth between the sparse bushes until he had the bulk of a large rock formation between himself and the road. He settled in behind it and stayed still and watched them pass through a gap in the rock.He recognised two of the four. The taller one at the front was a third-year outer disciple named Wei who had been a year ahead of Cole and had always treated the servant staff with the particular absence of acknowledgment that was the outer hall's default. The one walking second was someone whose name Ethan had never