The first thing Adam learned about the Golden Core was that it was loud.
He felt it as he climbed out of the cavern at dawn: a slow, heavy pulse in his dantian that sent a ripple through every broken iron sword on Ghost-Sword Peak. Hundreds of blades hummed in answer, their ancient sword intent leaning toward him like grass bending in the wind.
’A Golden Core can be sensed from three peaks away,’ Adam thought, pulling his hood forward. ’And I don’t yet know my own limits.’
Anyone who tested those limits before he did would be an enemy. He intended to meet them first.
He called the Void-Cleaving Sword out of his dantian. The jet-black blade slid into the air beside him, its starry runes pulsing in a lazy, curious rhythm. Adam stepped onto it, and the sword rose into the pale sky without a sound.
By midmorning, the iron chains of the sect had shrunk to a thread behind him. By noon, he was over the Desolate Ghost Valley.
The valley lived up to its name. Rusted halberds jutted from the red earth like grave markers. The bleached ribs of ancient war-beasts arched over dry riverbeds, and the torn banners of long-dead armies snapped in a wind that smelled of old blood. Nothing here belonged to any sect, and nobody would ask what happened to it.
Adam landed on a ridge of cracked black rock and let the sword settle back into his dantian.
"Let’s begin."
The first test was small. A pack of Iron-Fang wolves had been circling the ridge since he landed, a dozen low-tier beasts with coats like rusted wire. They came at him in a silent rush.
Adam didn’t move. His Sword Field unfolded around him, and it was no longer a three-foot circle. It was a thirty-foot sphere, and he felt every wolf inside it as clearly as his own fingers. The leader leaped. Adam turned one finger, and a thread of sword Qi slid through its throat. Eleven more fell in the space of a breath, and the survivors fled yelping over the ridge.
Easy, and that was the problem. Wolves would never show him where the Golden Core ended.
’I need something bigger.’
Something bigger found him. The ground shuddered, and from behind a hill of bones rolled a Bone-Plate Rhino, a mid-tier demon beast the size of a cart. Its hide was layered in fossilized armor that could turn aside Foundation Establishment blades. It lowered its horn and charged, each stride cracking the earth.
Adam smiled faintly. "You’ll do."
He lifted his right hand. "Ten-Thousand Blade Dominion."
The world turned silver. Ten thousand phantom swords rose out of the red earth in a hundred-foot circle, each a sliver of black-silver light with its point turned toward the rhino. The beast ran straight into them. Its fossil plates shrieked, cracked, and split. In three breaths it was a heap of ruined armor, and the blades kept cutting the ground beneath it into gravel.
The Dominion was magnificent.
On the seventh breath, Adam noticed that it was also eating him alive.
Every phantom blade was a thread of his Qi, and ten thousand threads were burning through his dantian like a lit fuse through a barrel of oil. On the tenth breath, the golden glow of his core dimmed to a flicker. He cut the Dominion off, and the silver blades shattered into light.
The backlash hit like a hammer. His knees buckled. Blood ran from his nose, and the bones of his body, tempered only to the First Turn, rang like cracked bells under a flood of Qi they weren’t yet built to carry.
[Status: Golden Core (1st Layer). Qi reserves: 11%.]
’Ten breaths,’ Adam thought, kneeling in the red dust with his chest heaving. ’A hundred feet costs me ten breaths, and then nothing. The core is a furnace, not a bottomless well.’
The smell of rhino blood rolled across the valley.
It reached the Grave-Hounds first. Gaunt, half-translucent shapes peeled off the dead battlefield, eight of them, low-tier ghost beasts that fed on wounded things. They circled him with their hollow eyes fixed on the blood at his lip.
Adam rose. He had perhaps a tenth of his Qi, and he wasn’t going to spend it on the Dominion.
He called the Void-Cleaving Sword to his hand and fought like a man again. The blade cut through the first hound in a single stroke. The second and third fell as he turned. The fourth slipped past his guard, and its claws raked down his left forearm.
Three thin red lines opened on his skin.
Adam stared at them for half a heartbeat. Nothing had drawn his blood since the First Turn.
Then he laughed, short and cold, and let a thread of black Chaos-Devouring Fire flicker from his fingertip. The flame touched the wounded hound and drank it. The Qi that poured back into his dantian was only a trickle, but it was enough. The remaining hounds stopped circling. One by one, they melted back into the dead ground.
Adam sat down on a rusted shield and let his breathing settle.
’Thirty feet, and I can hold it for a quarter of an hour,’ he calculated, watching the three red lines slowly close. ’A hundred feet, and I can’t last ten breaths. The Dominion is a finisher. It cannot be my opening move.’
It was a useful lesson. It was also one he would rather have learned from a rhino than from a person.
He stood and turned to leave, and his Eyes of Divine Insight caught something on the ridge above him.
A tattered banner pole stood against the sky. Pinned to it with a thin needle was a single black feather ringed in gold. A Gilded-Crow tracking mark. The soul-sense on it was still warm.
Someone had watched the entire fight.
Adam crushed the feather between two fingers and let the dust drift away on the wind.
"Ye’s grandfather hasn’t wasted a day," he murmured.