Grig was left behind. The last memory they had of him was his determined face. Han looked over his shoulder twice.
They left Vraalk behind. They walked into the frozen jaw of the mountains; the wind felt like a blade. Mo Fei stumbled as they walked, Jian Yue supporting him.
Jian Yue led them with an unerring sense of direction, occasionally looking at the page floating beside him, perhaps a map. The air grew colder, almost choking. Mo Fei’s wounds went numb from cold.
The sun began to bleed behind the peaks of the mountains. The hue shifted to orange fading.
Ahead of them, a vast mountain was rooted on the earth like a primordial tree.
"Here," Jian Yue said as he placed his palm against the ice. Symbols floated around him, the sigils of chants. The snow surface brightened.
"This is Still Point, a temporary hideout," Jian Yue explained. "This is made by one of us, the Ascended of the Keybearer."
With a sound of a crystal sighing, a vertical slit appeared in the ice, widening into a doorway. A warm, dry smell of stone, herbs, and hot water wafted out, hitting their senses.
Inside was a small house with five rooms. One garden filled with soft soil, and a bittersweet scent of the roots. There were planted some unusual shaped herbs. The light green veins grew around a pillar. A faint yellow-colored herb grew beside it, its flowers leaking that bittersweet scent.
A lady sat there. She had dark hair, streaked with silver strands. The woman wore a flower-shaped hairpin and a flowing Hanfu. She looked young, maybe around twenty years old.
She glanced at them with her light green eyes.
On the other side a young boy, barely more than fourteen or fifteen. He hunched over a slate covered in frantic chalk diagrams and flinched at their sudden entrance. He wore modern clothes and baggy pants, a belt wrapped around his waist with a sheath, with dark hair and middle curtain haircut.
"Jian Yue," the lady said in an exhausted tone and put aside her work. The woman’s gaze lingered on them, then landed on Mo Fei’s bloody form. "You brought strays again. We don’t have much space."
Jian Yue nodded to the woman. "Only one of them is an ascended, Lin. This bloodsoaked boy is Mo Fei, a Lightless."
The name ’Lin’ cut through Mo Fei’s haze. He had heard it in world three.
Mo Fei suddenly remembered something as his eyes held a small irritation.
"So you are Lin, your clue was clueless. That almost killed me there."
Lin snapped back coldly. "Be quiet, I don’t even know you! If you needed a complete guide then how are you gonna survive things."
"Find out the next step yourself?"
"You are still alive."
"I almost wasn’t."
"You are." Lin smacked her hand on the ground.
Mo Fei went quiet then said quietly, "Next time, try giving a way the doesn’t lead to grave."
"You are half dead already; mind me to silence that half."
Mo Fei didn’t say anything.
Lin stood and approached them. She examined Mo Fei’s side, his ear, and the ribbon on his wrist. "The wounds are deep... They are touched by an Authority. Did you perhaps fight an entity?"
"Kholkis and Suture Worm,"
"Kholkis and Suture Worm..." She stared at Mo Fei, a flicker of surprise in her eyes. "And you survived it..."
Lin looked at Jian Yue. "The wounds are deep; ascension could cleanse them."
"He will stay," Jian Yue dropped the words. "He has chosen to learn."
Lin grumbled and muttered. "Always find a stubborn one," she turned to the young boy. "Zhuo, get the red moss paste and the silverleaf bandages." The young boy named Zhuo scurried away to a room filled with the scent of herbs.
Zhuo returned with supplies, and Lin set to work. Her hands were swift. The red moss paste burned like fire when applied. Mo Fei whimpered slightly from the burn. .
"Tch, are you supposedly taking revenge?"
Mo Fei’s voice cut off when she pressed the silverleaf bandage on his palm. It seemed to shimmer as they bound his wounds, holding a faint, soothing light against his skin.
Her eyes lay on Mo Fei’s ear and his sides again, "How did you not die yet?"
Then, for his ear, she gave him bitter-tasting tea. "It won’t fix the damage," "But it will keep your pain in check."
The group settled down on the ground. Zhuo gave Han and Elara blankets and bowls of a thin, hearty stew. They ate in exhausted silence, absorbing the reality of this strange heaven. It was far better than the cold scraps thrown by guards for breakfast and better than meals measured in lashes.
At the doorway, a luna moth was resting their quietly. No one noticed it, but it was too beautiful to get unnoticed.
Mo Fei sat near the bonfire. His pain began to recede, his expression slightly relieved now. He looked around at the faces of the Epilogue. Zhuo was a teenager, but he had survived longer than Mo Fei, he couldn’t underestimate Zhuo.
"How many?" Mo Fei asked, his voice curious.
"Of us? Here, now. Well, six, with you three," Jian Yue pointed. "If you mean total across the worlds? Perhaps hundreds, but they are scattered. Some create their own cults. Some become Royals. Like Xue Lan."
"Xue Lan was one of you?" Han asked.
"No, but he is truly not one of them either." Jian Yue swept his gaze over them and continued. "I can’t call Epilogue a cult, they have twenty-two members." He explained.
Mo Fei thought about this as he finally spoke. "So it’s just a group of some random powerful ascenders."
"Call it what you want," Lin snorted at his words.
"More like survival," Jian Yue followed.
So, it wasn’t a simple survival. It was a desperate war of Godhood against each other. These worlds have different politics, and betrayals as worse and lethal as any monster.
Mo Fei heaved a sigh and stretched his arms with a yawn.
Han spoke once again: "Is Xue Lan a void spawn too?"
"Yes, most likely." Jian Yue pushed, "But he might not be?"
Lin joined; her voice was more serious.
"Xue Lan plays his own game. The ’Honorable Court’ grants him royalty. His curiosity is his one redeeming trait. He can trade information for novelty if he feels like."
Jian Yue’s hand gestured at Lin: "She was alone for only two weeks before we found her. That was two weeks of sleeping with one eye open, never staying in one world for more than three days. That’s the alternative... She Ascended of the same time as me, Zhuo ascended later."
Three days passed.
Mo Fei rested. His body was still bruised, but it began the slow process of healing. In these three days, he didn’t just lay down. He tried to understand the ’Apprentice’s Eyes’ in the safe, controlled environment.
Jian Yue helped him in how to fight. Lin taught him about how the patterns of the world work and the known cost of triggers and told about the recorded entities they had faced, their weakness, and their power.
Zhuo, the young boy, showed him mad, beautiful maps of the inter-world spaces, the ’static’ between layers. He was a young warrior, a prodigy. Although every so often Zhuo’s childish traits come across as his naïve self, as questions to Mo Fei about the Suture Worm, and Kholkis.
He was Mo Fei who had a different ideal but the same survival instincts. Mo Fei was comfortable around them; it had been a while since he was not running from terror or fighting madness.
During his spare time, Mo Fei utilized his ’Apprentice’s Eyes’.
"Hmm, so that’s how it works," he remarked. He closed his eyes and experienced a mild, tolerable headache. "I can use it for 16 minutes." Mo Fei held his head and estimated, "I can likely use it for approximately 19 to 20 minutes with headache."
Han helped Lin with catalog supplies, his practical mind finding purpose. Elara tended the small fungal garden they cultivated in a warm crevice, her touch gentle and eyes slowly losing their perpetual fear. Her face was calm with a joyful twinkle, a hint of happiness.
She was tending the garden when Mo Fei found her. She didn’t look up but spoke in a murmur. "I always wanted a garden. Back home, before..." She trailed off. That was the first time that she voluntarily mentioned her past and herself. It was not a speech, but rather a moment of vulnerability. Mo Fei acknowledged it. He did not need to speak; simply being present with her sufficed. The silence conveyed enough meaning.
On the fourth evening, as they sat around the bonfire, Jian Yue took out a brittle, jagged-looking old page. There was a diagram of the Box. Mo Fei instantly realized it was the same shape as the one from the antique shop.
"The key isn’t just surviving eleven worlds," Jian Yue said, his finger tracing the twelve holes and eleven spots. "But it is reaching the center of An Jie, World Twelve."
Mo Fei’s eyes widened. There weren’t only eleven worlds. "Twelve..."
"Yes, the world above the cosmos, but when we reach world eleven..."
Mo Fei’s ears perked up at the mention of reaching world eleven; he was anticipating the answer. He had been questioning that to himself. "Then what?"
Jian Yue sighs, his face faltering into resignation as he answered it. "We..."
"Reach back to world 1."