The new camp was harder to live in than the first one and considerably safer, which Ethan had decided was the correct trade-off even on the days when the correct trade-off was also the uncomfortable one.The section of the Wastes Vera had led him to was six kilometres deeper than his original position, in a shallow valley where the qi discharge activity ran at roughly twice the frequency of the outer perimeter. The discharges were not dangerous if you knew where to stand and when to move, and he had learned both of those things within the first week through the straightforward method of paying close attention and making a few mistakes that were instructive rather than serious. The ambient environment was noisier and more unpredictable than he was used to, but the void frequency at the valley's base was correspondingly clearer — the erratic elemental qi that surrounded it acted almost like contrast, making the deeper layer easier to locate and hold.Vera had been right that it would no

The new camp was six kilometres deeper into the Wastes than the first one, and the Ironpath contracts were twelve kilometres in the other direction from Redpost, which meant that on working days Ethan covered roughly eighteen kilometres before he started earning anything. He had decided this was manageable and had been proven correct, though manageable and comfortable were not the same thing and he was not confused about which one he had.He had waited two weeks before reaching out to Dana again. By that point the Academy patrol had been gone from the Redpost area for ten days according to Vera, who went into the settlement periodically to assess the environment in ways she did not fully explain and did not need to. When he did contact Dana, he said he had sorted out his personal business and was available again if the work was still there. Dana said it was. She did not ask where he had been or why, which he had come to understand as one of her more valuable qualities as an employer.

The northern region turned out to be exactly as difficult as Vera had described, and after five weeks of it Ethan had reached the point where difficult had simply become the baseline against which everything else was measured.The terrain was steep and broken in ways the southern Wastes had not been, with loose stone that shifted underfoot and stretches of ground where the qi disruption was strong enough to make the air itself feel slightly wrong, a pressure behind the eyes that took getting used to. The void frequency here was, as Vera had said, less clear but more consistent — it took him the better part of two weeks to recalibrate his practice to it, and once he had, the progress was steady rather than dramatic. No new sections of the Sutra had opened. The mirror property the slip had mentioned was still, as far as he could tell, dormant.What the five weeks had also done was run down their supplies faster than either of them had planned for. The northern region had less to forage t

He went back five days later.He had not planned to. He had left Ashford with a full pack and a clear intention to return to the northern camp and get back to the practice routine he had disrupted by making the supply run. He had taken the eastern route as Marcus suggested, found it exactly as described, and spent the two-day walk back thinking about the mirror property and the next sections of the Sutra and whether the northern region's void frequency would ever feel as natural to work with as the valley had.He had not been thinking about Ashford.Except that on the second full day back at camp, he was running through the expand-and-return practice when he found himself pausing on something Marcus had said at the table — not anything important, just an observation about road conditions in the area — and realising that the way Marcus had said it carried more precise knowledge of the landscape than a man who simply farmed a village plot would naturally have. The routes, the terrain, t

By the third week, the morning field sessions had stopped being instruction in any formal sense and become simply something that happened before breakfast, the way certain habits form when two people are in proximity long enough and find the arrangement useful.Marcus no longer corrected him very often. Occasionally he would stop and demonstrate something — a particular transition between positions, a way of redirecting momentum rather than absorbing it — but most of the time they just worked through the forms side by side in the early quiet, and Ethan paid attention to the quality Marcus brought to each motion and tried to match it, and the carved stone marker sat in his jacket pocket and he found himself touching it without thinking the same way he sometimes touched the jade slip.He was getting better. He knew it not because anyone said so but because the practice itself felt different — less like assembling something from parts and more like moving in a way that belonged to him, t