Unsouled (Cradle Book 1) (34 page)

“Unsouled don’t win tournaments, not even among children.”

Without the Empty Palm, he never would have.

“Unsouled don’t beat Irons, with or without tricks.”

Whitehall had actually
seen
the hornet Remnants defeat Amon. All Lindon had needed was the strength to open a scripted jar, and the elder had to know that.

The Jade in the boy’s body toyed with the halfsilver dagger, studying him. “I believed you must have cheated to pass the Trial of Glorious Ascension, but now I understand. Anyone can put on a wooden badge. What are you really? Iron? You’re not Copper, a Copper body would have died by now. And a Jade wouldn’t throw away his pride.”

“Apologies, elder,” Lindon said respectfully. “This one is honored by the attention, but the elder surely has bigger problems than this humble disciple.”

Whitehall nodded slowly. “I will soon. Dropping seals on a Remnant in midair while calling a cloud? Those are not the reflexes of a Copper.”

This time, Lindon did allow himself a small smile. He was proud of that one.

“Whoever you are, you’re traveling a fool’s path.” Then Whitehall did something that Lindon hadn’t predicted: he flipped the halfsilver dagger around, offering Lindon the hilt. “Work with me.”

Chapter 20

“I have no grudge against you,” Whitehall said, the expression on his face far colder than anything a child should have produced. “I don’t even need the girl dead. I want the treasures of the Sword Sage, and nothing more. Here and now, with the heavens as my witness, I’ll swear an oath on my soul to leave you both alive. Furthermore, I will take you as my personal disciple. Whatever you are, you’re not a Jade yet, and in my care you will be.” He held the dagger out in a steady hand, waiting for Lindon to take the hilt.

To win, all Lindon had to do was delay while Yerin harvested her master’s Remnant. “Forgiveness, elder, but it seems as though…” He considered saying ‘this one,’ but it didn’t seem like time for humble speech. “…I have no reason to accept. If the Remnant is sealed, and I mean no disrespect, but Yerin will destroy you.”

“She’s more powerful than any Jade in Sacred Valley,” Whitehall said frankly. “But the battle has weakened her. I give myself even odds of defeating her, but whether I do or not, I hereby swear on my soul that I will first destroy your core. Unsouled or not, you will be truly crippled then.”

Lindon shivered, though he covered it by adjusting his robe against the cold. Unsouled were considered cripples, but they could still use basic madra. With his core destroyed, it would be as though he truly had no spirit—he couldn’t work with scripts or Remnants, and no elixir would save him. Some sacred artists spoke of losing their core as worse than death.

He still needed time.

“Yerin promised to take me beyond the valley,” he said slowly. “I’ve been weak for too long, and I won’t settle for the mediocre strength we have here.”

Whitehall’s eyes lit up, and his grip on the dagger tightened.
“Exactly right.
That is the heart a sacred artist should have.” He waved his hand around them. “Even this place is built on foundations deeper than we’ve ever explored. Our elders stay Jade because they’re too afraid to risk what they have and dig deeper. I am not.”

From outside, there came a crash, and the sound of metal bent past breaking. Whitehall’s expression hardened. “Choose now. Join me and rise, we’ll leave together, or else I’ll cripple you and take my chances against the Sword Disciple.”

Lindon prided himself on thinking through his options. He had sworn an oath to Yerin, but he wasn’t even Copper. Whatever oath the heavens extracted, it wouldn’t destroy his core.

But though he remained at the Foundation stage, there was some iron in him that would not bend.

He was not a coward. He would not abandon Yerin to captivity. And, more than anything…

“This is my second life,” Lindon said. He pushed off from the cloud, balancing on his own exhausted feet. Whitehall’s eyebrows drew in, but Lindon didn’t care to convince him. “It was a gift from the heavens, and I’d rather die than waste it.” He shrugged. “At least I’ll die trying.”

He stood proudly before Whitehall, tired and weak, his empty hand bared. He had no cards left, no tricks left to play. There was a certain peace to it.

Whitehall’s face twisted in disgust, and he tossed the stolen dagger to the floor. “Trash.” That was all he said. He covered the distance between them in a single step, his palm striking Lindon just below the navel.

And in the last instant, in that knife’s edge of time during the elder’s attack, Lindon remembered that he did have one more card after all.

The Heart of Twin Stars cycling technique had been preparing his core for months now, but he’d always stopped before that final step. Now, as Elder Whitehall injected his burning madra into Lindon’s core, Lindon activated the technique.

He tore his core in half.

The agony was unspeakable, beyond physical, and his scream shook every corner of the Ancestor’s Tomb. Whitehall’s energy flooded into his body. The Empty Palm was only remarkable as a technique because it allowed a sacred artist to affect an enemy on the same level. A Jade did not need a technique to destroy the spirit of an Unsouled; he would simply overwhelm the weaker core with power and let it burst under pressure.

But if Lindon’s core exploded, he didn’t feel it. The agony of tearing it in two blanked everything, washing his world in white. He collapsed to the stone floor, and he welcomed the pain in his body.

When he came to, Whitehall had only taken one step to the door. The skin of Lindon’s stomach was scorched where the palm had struck him, and his spirit cycled rapidly on its own, trying to rid itself of the foreign Heaven’s Glory madra. His veins felt like they were on fire, but even that was a relief next to tearing apart his core.

And when he thought of the core…

His spiritual sense dipped down to the center of his spirit, where two dim balls of light floated inside him like blue-white stars. Weak, but whole and unharmed.

After only a blink of thought, he understood why: when the cores split, they had
moved.
Where once he had one in the center of his body, now he had one a half-inch to the left and one a half-inch to the right. Whitehall had missed. Heaven’s Glory had entered his body, but it had only burned him. He wasn’t a cripple. At least, no more than before.

He wasn’t any stronger with two cores, of course, and in fact cycling would likely become twice as difficult in the future. But he had one crucial advantage: Whitehall wasn’t watching.

And no matter how strong his Jade spirit made him, he was still in the body of an eight-year-old boy.

Summoning strength from the depth of his spirit, scrounging for every scrap of madra, Lindon rose to his feet and lunged. Before Whitehall could react, Lindon had wrapped both hands around a small waist.

Then he lifted Elder Whitehall into the air.

The elder screamed incoherently as Lindon staggered over to the wall. A shoe caught him in the nose with a crunch, sending blood streaming into his mouth. Lances of Heaven’s Glory struck the painted ceiling, the pillars, the walls, but none reached Lindon. A flailing fist hit him in the side of the head, and the world around him spun. He limped forward, hoping he was going in the right direction.

When the floor fell out from under him, he knew that he’d chosen well.

They pitched out the hole in the side of the wall that Yerin had accidentally opened. Whitehall tumbled away from him, grasping at air with one hand as golden light shot from the other. His eyes met Lindon’s, and he looked pitifully like a confused, terrified boy.

While Lindon couldn’t deny some anxiety, he’d fallen too many times in the last few days. He’d learned to expect it. This time, he’d planned ahead.

He caught himself on the edge of a floating red cloud.

It had taken him the very last drop of strength to drag the Thousand-Mile Cloud along behind him, and when he hauled himself up to its surface, he collapsed in utter weakness. This time, finally, he had absolutely nothing left. No madra, no strength. Even his eyes were covered by tears, his nose and mouth filled with blood, his ears deafened by rushing wind. He drifted as if in a dream, feeling nothing but pain and gratitude for life.

Unguided by his spirit, the cloud drifted slowly toward the ground.

Hundreds of feet beneath him, Elder Whitehall’s body hit the rocks. He swiped tears from his eyes for a better look, horrified that the elder might survive, but then a golden Remnant wrenched itself free of the boy’s corpse. It was a twisted dwarf, a deformed imp drawn in shining yellow lines.

It would be poetic,
Lindon reflected,
if I killed a Jade just to die at the hands of his Remnant.

Not all Remnants were malicious, but Lindon had the suspicion that Whitehall’s likely would be. It didn’t drift away, but sat on its haunches like a frog, watching Lindon’s cloud descend.

Here he was, with no options left, waiting to slowly slide into inevitable death. It was not how he had imagined dying, but he hoped the story would make it back to his family. They would be shocked at how far he’d made it.

A weight slammed into the Thousand-Mile Cloud, bringing a veil of darkness over Lindon’s eyes, and then the same weight settled on him, pushing his pack into his bruised back. A choked gurgle escaped from his mouth as his breath was forced out under the pressure.

Yerin pulled her outer robe away from his eyes, leaning down to look at him upside-down. She looked…horrifying. He’d thought she looked halfway dead before, but with the fresh blood on her face, she looked as though she’d crawled out of her own grave.

“Don’t fall,” she said, and Lindon took her advice, hugging the cloud to his body.

Her madra filled the construct, and it lurched back into the air. It didn’t seem to want to rise, but she forced it up, jumping it back to the cliff in a series of awkward jerks. Finally, it slid through the gap in the Tomb wall and they both spilled out onto solid ground.

“Gratitude,” Lindon said between breaths.

She raised a hand in acknowledgement…and a steel limb lifted along with it. It looked exactly like one of the six blades on the back of the Sword Sage’s Remnant, and now it dangled from Yerin’s back like the single leg of a spider.

“Is that what Gold looks like?” he asked.

Yerin began to fumble around in her robes, searching pockets. “If my memory’s true, master left me…” An instant later, her hand emerged with a badge of solid gold. In the center, there was a simple picture of a sword. She slipped the ribbon over her neck and held the badge, examining it.

He collapsed onto his back, wallowing in pleasant relief. He hadn’t wasted his life yet. And now he had a Gold on his side.

“Do you trust me now?” he asked.

“More than none,” she responded. She heaved herself into a seated position, and the new limb on her back bobbed with her. “Real test hasn’t even arrived yet.”

Lindon craned his neck, looking out the door, and he almost cried. Three other rusty clouds had come to a stop, carrying men and women in white robes. “Oh look,” he said. “There it is now.”

Yerin didn’t seem to hear him. She was kneeling in the corner of the Tomb, next to something he hadn’t noticed before: the body of a man in black robes. The stone around him was charred in a long, black line, and a sword lay bare beside him. Its blade seemed unnaturally white.

She bowed so deep that her forehead touched the ground. Three times she bowed, as the first man from Heaven’s Glory ran through the door. His hands were glowing golden, and his Jade badge marked him as an Enforcer. Enraged eyes fell first on Lindon.

“Disciple, report!” he demanded.

Then Yerin rose from beside her master’s body. She had left her own sword with him, and was sliding the white-bladed one into a sheath at her side. The silver blade on her back rose like a scorpion’s tail, and she turned her scarred face toward the Heaven’s Glory elder. A gold badge dangled from her neck.

The Jade scrambled backward so fast that it looked like someone had kicked him. He screamed for the others to stop, to back up, to surround the tomb.

Lindon had discovered that he could only stay tense and afraid for so long before his body just grew numb. Yerin could frighten Heaven’s Glory away from the Tomb on her own, and if she couldn’t, it wasn’t as though he would be a great help.

So he was free to pursue an idle theory that had bothered him for some time.

From his pack, he withdrew the Starlotus bud. It was pale white with streaks of pink, the sort of pure color that he normally associated with Remnants, and its petals were curled into a half-bloom, as though it had frozen in the act of opening completely. It was a natural work of art.

He bit it in half.

It tasted like sweet grass with a slightly bitter undercurrent, but it dissolved like sugar on his tongue. He swallowed it in seconds, crossing his legs and straightening his back into a cycling position.

“They have to pull the tiger’s tail, don’t they?” Yerin said. “If they want their share sooner rather than later, I’ll…what are you doing?”

The energy of the spirit-fruit—was it still a spirit-fruit if it was an edible flower? He assumed so—showed in his mind’s eye as a bright pink-tinged white. It dispersed in his stomach, flowing around his spiritual veins in a river of lights that tickled as they traveled. When they had traveled around his body, they tried to enter his core.

Or rather, his cores.

When he had first read the Heart of Twin Stars, he’d theorized a few uses for the technique besides defense. He hadn’t been able to test them without ripping his core in half, but now he had his chance.

While keeping one core tightly closed, he directed the Starlotus madra into the other.

The right-hand core grew brighter, stronger, immediately nourished by the spirit-fruit. It had a small effect immediately, but many of the pale pink dots stayed in the core, tickling him from the inside out. They would be digested over the next days and weeks.

When he’d finished gathering the Starlotus energy into one core, he inspected the other. It was totally clear.