Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Chapter 5

A day after the beast raid, the Academy could talk about nothing else. By breakfast, three different stories were already circulating about what had actually happened, each one slightly more impressive than the last, and by the afternoon the whole event had been folded into a broader conversation about the strength of the perimeter formation array and whether it needed reinforcement before the autumn season brought more activity from the upper ridges.

Ethan listened to all of it while he worked and said nothing. He had learned years ago that the best way to move through a place like Skyward Academy was to keep your opinions to yourself unless someone specifically asked for them, and in six years no one had ever specifically asked for his. He swept the outer courtyard, helped Hobb restock the first-tier supply rooms, and spent the afternoon re-hanging a set of training equipment that had been knocked loose during the commotion the night before. Ordinary work. He was good at ordinary work.

What he kept coming back to, between tasks, was Seth. Not the beast — he had filed the beast away to think about later, when he had more information to work with. But Seth had given him a jade slip and told him to trust no one, and since then Ethan had learned one line from the slip and had a large creature bow to him in the dark, and it seemed like the kind of situation where talking to the person who had started it all might be worth doing sooner rather than later.

He finished his last task just before the dinner bells and went to the second-tier path.

 

Seth's door was closed, but light showed underneath it, and when Ethan knocked the old man answered quickly enough that he hadn't been asleep. He opened the door and looked at Ethan for a moment, then stepped back and let him in.

The room felt the same as it had two nights before, except that Seth himself looked worse. Not dramatically so — he was still sitting upright, still composed, still entirely himself — but there was a tiredness around his eyes that hadn't been there before, and he moved back to his meditation mat.

Ethan sat down across from him. "A beast came last night."

"I know. I heard the bells." Seth settled himself and looked at Ethan with a directness that was becoming familiar. "And?"

"It walked straight past about a dozen disciples throwing everything they had at it and came to the eastern terrace. Where I was." He paused. "It bowed to me. Then it left."

Seth was quiet for a moment, and the look on his face was not surprise but something closer to relief, the same expression he'd had when he first opened the door two nights ago. "Good," he said. "That was a confirmation — old verification protocols, built into the world by the first cultivators. If the slip responded to you and the beast confirmed it, then there is no longer any doubt about what you are." He folded his hands in his lap. "Did anyone else see it?"

"No. I was alone on the terrace."

"Then keep it that way for now." He glanced toward the door, just briefly, in the way of someone who has gotten into the habit of checking. "Sit. There are things I should have told you two nights ago, and I didn't because I was still being careful. I'm going to be less careful tonight."

Ethan waited.

"Three thousand years ago," Seth began, "the five founding sects — Skyward Academy among them — built a formation array unlike anything attempted before or since. It runs through the spiritual bedrock of this entire world, woven into mountain ranges, river systems, fault lines. Most people alive today have felt its influence their entire lives and simply assumed that what they feel is the natural state of things." He spoke steadily, the way someone speaks when they have rehearsed something many times and are now finally saying it out loud. "It isn't natural. The array continuously suppresses the void frequency in every human being born within its reach. It severs their connection to the original cultivating source before they're old enough to know the connection existed, and replaces it with a weaker elemental imprint — one that can only be developed through sect-approved methods, at sect-approved speeds, using resources the sects control entirely."

Ethan worked through the logic of that. "So everyone walking around with a spiritual root —"

"Has a diminished version of what they were born with. Yes." Seth's voice was even. "The sects positioned themselves as the gateway to immortality and then made sure no one could reach it without going through them. They called the elemental roots a gift. They built the gate and then convinced the world that the gate was the destination."

"But the array didn't affect me."

"There is a section of degraded formation beneath the eastern servants' quarters — a crack caused by a battle long before you were born that the Academy has never repaired because that part of the grounds is too unimportant to bother with. You were born inside that crack. You grew up inside it. Your void connection was never touched." He looked at Ethan steadily. "When Crowe tested you, his instruments found no elemental frequency and he wrote null. But null and void are not the same reading. He simply didn't know the difference, because nobody has taught the difference for three thousand years."

The lamp on the desk made a small sound as the wick shifted, and for a moment the light in the room changed slightly and then settled again. Ethan sat with everything Seth had told him and let it arrange itself at its own pace. He had always known, in a vague, practical way, that powerful institutions protected their own interests. He had not expected the scale of it to be quite this large.

"Lord Kael," he said. "You told me to be careful of him specifically."

"Kael has been hunting fragments of the Forgotten Sutra for twenty years. He understands the theory — that void qi underlies all elemental energy, that someone cultivating the original source would eventually surpass anyone limited to a derivative. He wants that advantage for himself, and he has been removing anyone who knows enough to get there before him." Seth reached into his robe and took out a small iron key, old and heavy, with a character etched into the bow. He set it on the floor between them. "Foundation archive. Sub-level three, eastern stack, third cabinet from the left — there's a sealed compartment behind the false back. Inside it is the original documentation of the array's construction. The formation diagrams, the names, the dates. Everything needed to prove what was done and to locate the array's nodes." He met Ethan's eyes. "Don't go until you're strong enough to look after yourself down there. And don't let anyone know you've been."

Ethan picked up the key. It was heavier than it looked.

"You're telling me all of this now," he said, "because you think you're running out of time to tell me later."

Seth didn't deny it. "Come back tomorrow evening," he said. "There's more I want to tell you, and I'd rather do it properly than rush it tonight."

Ethan nodded, put the key in his pocket alongside the slip, and left. Walking back through the corridor, he didn't try to sort through everything he'd just heard. There was too much of it and he was too tired, and some information needs a night's sleep before it makes sense. He would come back tomorrow and hear the rest, and then he would start figuring out what to do with all of it.