Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Chapter 3

For the four days that followed, Ethan kept the jade slip wrapped in a strip of cloth at the bottom of his sleeping mat and left it alone.

This wasn't exactly a decision. It was more a recognition of limits. Opening a jade slip required pushing a thread of qi through its surface to unlock whatever was stored inside — that was the standard method, the one every disciple used, and Ethan had no qi to push. The slip had responded to something when Seth handed it to him, that deep quiet pulse travelling up through his hand, but nothing had come of it after that. Whatever it was waiting for, it didn't seem to be something he could force.

So he went about his work and let it sit. Water runs in the morning, maintenance through the day, deliveries in the afternoon. He passed Seth's door twice on errands along the second-tier path and saw it closed both times, lamplight showing faintly underneath. He didn't knock. The old man had given him what he'd intended to give, and whatever Seth was doing with his remaining time, Ethan didn't think it involved answering questions from someone who hadn't yet managed to do anything with the thing he'd been handed.

On the fourth morning, waiting alone in the supply alcove before Hobb arrived with the equipment log, he tried something different. He took the slip from his jacket pocket and held it flat on his palm without pressing or pushing — just held it quietly, keeping his mind as still as he could manage, the way he'd watched meditating disciples sit in the upper courtyard on clear mornings. He had no framework for what he was doing. But the slip had responded the first time to something that hadn't felt like force, so force seemed like the wrong direction.

For a while, nothing happened. Then the darker veins in the jade shifted — the way they sometimes did when the light caught them from a different angle — and a line of text surfaced slowly through the green, like ink rising through still water.

The Forgotten Sutra. First Principle: Before qi, there was silence. Before silence, there was void. You are not without. You are before.

He read it twice. Then Hobb's footsteps rounded the corner and Ethan folded his fingers over the slip and put it away, and the morning continued as mornings did.

 

The words stayed with him through the day in the way that certain things stay with you not because you are thinking about them constantly but because they are sitting just underneath everything else you do, and every now and then you become aware of them again. You are not without. You are before. He turned the phrase over during the drainage work, during the midday meal, during a long afternoon shift restacking the equipment stores on the first tier. He didn't understand it fully yet. But it didn't feel like nonsense, which was something.

By evening he had finished his tasks and was sitting on the low wall outside the servants' annex, watching the last light go out of the sky above the western ridge. The mountain was quiet at that hour, the kind of quiet that settles in after dinner when most people have gone indoors, and he had found over the years that it was one of the better times for thinking.

He was still sitting there when the alarm bells started.

They came from the northeast watchtower first — three short rings, then two long ones, the signal for a large beast incursion. Within half a minute every other bell on the mountain had picked it up, and the Academy shifted from quiet evening to organised noise in roughly the time it takes a lamp to tip over. Boots on stone from multiple directions, voices calling out formation positions, the sharp quality the air gets when cultivators are drawing qi quickly.

Ethan stood up from the wall and looked northeast. Above the tree line on the upper ridge, a cold blue-white light was pulsing in slow, steady intervals — too large and too regular to be fire, too high up to be any disciple's aura. Whatever was producing it was moving steadily downward through the trees, and it was not moving quickly, which was somehow more concerning than if it had been running.

The servant protocol in a beast incursion was to move to the inner hall on the western side of the grounds and wait for the all-clear. Ethan knew this. He had been walked through it during his first month at the Academy. The inner hall had thick stone walls, a warded entrance, and no windows facing the northeast ridge.

He went east along the perimeter path instead, keeping close to the wall and moving at a steady jog. He told himself he was checking on Mia — her herb storage sat on the eastern side of the grounds, closer to the ridge than the inner hall, and she might not have heard the bells clearly. That was a reasonable thing to want to confirm. He kept that reasoning in front of him until he came around the corner of the eastern terrace and stopped because the beast was already there, and it was considerably closer than he had expected.