Caen made his way across the roof to the sheltered terrace with wicker chairs and green walls. An oak door with no handles and a complex keyhole sat at the back of the terrace. He retrieved the bunch of keys Hshnol had given him and found one that fit. He took his shoes off before walking in.

  A short flight of stairs opened into a landing with a living room. There were three doors on the wall. The one in the middle was Vai’s room. Hshnol’s was on the right. Caen walked through the door on the left.

  It was a cozy meeting room that had been redecorated to serve as his bedroom. A well-made bed was at its center. A shelf of books entirely took up one wall. A large window took up another wall, and a prominent wooden desk had been pushed up against yet another to create more space in the room. A door beside it led to a bathroom.

  Caen put away his belongings and, after a quick shower, sank into the unbelievably comfortable mattress. He had some sleep debt to pay off.

  And sleep to store.

  ***

  Over the next two days, Caen paid off what he owed, sleeping as many as twenty hours at a time. During his moments of wakefulness, he introduced himself to the house staff, and he carefully went over the specifics of his aide work here on the island.

  With his debt paid off, he proceeded to store up enough sleep to last him days.

  Vai’s mansion here in Ser-gwu housed a private warp gate on the ground floor. A secured box in Hshnol’s room contained a few gate stones: precious gems that had been shaped into orbs and inscribed with runes. These were primed to several relevant warp gates on the island and allowed Caen to teleport to the first stratum, where most administrative buildings were located.

  The rest of the week was consumed with excessively complicated administrative procedures. Most of which involved him filling out and filing all sorts of forms.

  One evening, while waiting his turn to update some ledger details at the Records Office, he felt a presence above him that made him tilt his head upwards.

  There was a… transparent bird flitting high up by a chandelier. It resembled a sparrow, and its body seemed to consist of some sort of glass-like substance. With each quick flap of its wings, gold particles seemed to shed off the creature.

  Curious about what it was and how it had gotten in here, Caen gently connected to the glass bird. Its soul structure was not unusual; however, a faint secondary cord of connection linked the creature to a woman sitting across from him.

  A Contracted bond, then?

  The woman in question had multiple crystalline ornaments on her fingers, her hands, around her neck, and even in her red hair. This by itself wasn’t strange. But while he watched, several of the ornaments in her hair vanished. Then the next moment, they reformed.

  Her soul structure revealed a predominantly prominent Spirit-healing cluster, which immediately made Caen realize what he was looking at.

  She’s sustaining several mana crystals at once.

  Crystalized mana was unstable and could never hold form for longer than a few seconds without being actively maintained. Sustaining so many of these in various interesting shapes was not impossible, but it had to be abominably taxing on her will.

  A ring on her finger vanished, but it reappeared a few seconds later.

  An elderly, bespectacled man sitting nearby gawked openly at the woman. He seemed to catch himself and cleared his throat. “Er, excuse me,” he called to the woman. She turned to him. “Sorry to bother, but are those… artifacts?”

  “Mana crystals,” she said with a smile.

  Caen was even more impressed now that he’d gotten confirmation.

  The old man adjusted his glasses. “I’m not sure what you mean by—”

  An archivist opened their office door and said, “Ar’Caen Ereshta’al?” while panning the waiting area.

  “That’s me,” Caen said in a voice so hoarse one might think he'd caught a cold. He rose to his feet, a stack of documents under his arm, and shuffled awkwardly towards the archivist.

  ***

  The general library loomed before Caen, rising forty stories high. He walked into the high-ceilinged foyer, where an entryway to the left led into the public section. Caen walked past it and took the large spiral staircase to the restricted section.

  It was his first time coming here. Vai's ward key—an inscribed metal disk—was currently tucked in Caen's pocket and allowed him to bypass the ward schemes without issue.

  The ceiling was eight stories high with a false skylight, an illusion, no doubt. The restricted section was cylindrical, and the walls were covered with shelves. Stairs connected seven tiers of library balconies, each one with long tables and armchairs.

  The index display was a crystal ball on a platform at the center of the library. He channeled some mana into the construct, and it projected a light display of the library catalog.

  After a few minutes of searching the third tier of the library, he found the segment with dead languages and, very soon after, an ancient book titled, ‘Klakalk and the Simplicity of Mirrored Languages’.

  A lexicon was on the row beneath that, as well as an introductory material to Filiation Magic written in Klakalk. He also found a memory crystal that contained a collection of old stories told in the language.

  Caen felt someone approaching from behind him.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Are my eyes deceiving me?” asked a familiar voice as a spirit tendril grazed his spirit.

  Caen turned to see a woman in her late twenties wearing a thick grey tunic with the sleeves rolled up. Her brown hair was done up in a bun, and she had eye bags that would put Zeris's to shame.

  “Hello, Rithya,” Caen said with a smile that faltered a little. “Are you… okay?”

  She waved a hand. “I'm fine. I’ve been foregoing sleep to catch up with friends. You know how it is before the celebrations.”

  Caen didn't, but he nodded. “It's been ages.”

  “It has!” she replied with enthusiasm. “Four years. You’ve really filled out. And, Tahal, you're so much taller than me now.”

  When Caen was much younger, Rithya used to show him how to use all sorts of resources in the public section of the general library. She had developed a fondness for Caen because they each had a dud bloodline. In her case, though, she had three bloodlines. She'd been the one to point him to several of the materials he’d consulted about his abjection.

  Caen had a suspicion, but verifying it would be far too risky.

  “How did you get into the restricted section?” she asked, glancing at the books and memory crystal balanced on his left hand.

  “Uncle Vai. He appointed me as his primary aide.”

  “Oh? Good for you.” She craned her neck, squinting at one of the books in his hand. “The Intersection of Bloodlines and Affinities,” she read. A sympathetic crease marred her brows. “That's an interesting choice.”

  Caen looked down at the book. “You can read Klakalk?”

  “Barely,” she said. “I have a knack for languages. I developed an interest in that one some years ago. If you have any difficulties, just come find me. I'm usually up there anyway.” She gestured at the seventh tier.

  “Thank you, Rithya. I just might take you up on that.”

  ***

  Whenever he wasn't at the library learning Klakalk, Caen continued his preparations for the trials. This mostly involved training Mimicry and his affinities.

  Hshnol had made arrangements for a potency gauge to be placed in Caen's room, which helped track things neatly.

  Dream-guarding sat at a comfortable 2.0007, but it was the only one of his affinities that had risen so high. Everything else was still in abjection or stuck on 1.

  Body-enhancement, which he'd been trying so hard to raise in Drenlin, was at 1.9101. Kinesis was just on the cusp of abjection at 0.8347.

  Flora, regrettably, was at 1.5011, and he had little hope of raising it any higher quickly enough to help in the trials. So he prioritized Body-enhancement and Kinesis.

  ***

  With his hair temporarily dyed black and his entire head wrapped in bandages, Caen put on a cloak with a large, loose hood.

  He carefully moved his bed aside to reveal a trapdoor with steps that led down to the basement of Vai’s mansion. According to Hshnol, not even the house staff knew of its existence.

  There was yet another private warp gate here. Using a gatestone, he was teleported to another warp gate on the first stratum.

  It was nighttime, but there were so many lights and attractions in the central district, even as floating carriages sped by overhead.

  While the outer areas of the first stratum had passes for beasts of burden and bicycles, foot traffic reigned supreme. The biennial celebrations were about a week away, and already, the island was packed.

  The grand arena was positively huge. It housed the main grounds where the trials would take place, but it also included the accommodations for competitors, a great number of administrative departments, and, quite famously, the Hall of Choosing.

  People of all kinds stood in a depressingly long queue outside an office. Many of them were armored, and a significant number of them were masked as well. Those who lacked the backing of a faction or the endorsement of a family elder registered for the trials here.

  Caen walked around to the side where a nervous man with flitting eyes waited for him at a preplanned meet-up point.

  “Elder Lobos?” Caen inquired. A Vibration spell had rendered his voice deeper and unrecognizable.

  The man made a derisive sound. “And am I supposed to call you ‘Green Bandages’? Why is Vai making me do this? I promised him that I’d have his money by the end of the year.”

  Caen ignored all that and said his half of their agreed-upon phrase to identify himself.

  Lobos hesitated a moment but repeated his own half, grudgingly.

  He took Caen through a back entrance and down a few corridors before they reached an office where Lobos registered his endorsement of Caen.

  The registrar used Contract magic to determine under oath that Caen was, in fact, an Ereshta'al and was not being backed by a faction. Afterwards, Caen swore a few standard oaths relating to comportment concerning the trials. Hshnol had already run Caen through all these weeks ago.

  Caen was given a thin metal necklace whose pendant was a transparent bead, smaller even than the fingernail on his little finger. Channeling mana into the bead bound it to him and caused it to glow. It served as an identifier as well as an ‘escape hatch’ in the trials. It was the means by which injured participants were teleported out of an active trial.

  Caen was sternly warned not to misplace it under any circumstances, as he would be disqualified from the trials.

  “Go on to the Hall of Choosing. Remember that a mask has already been assigned to you.”

  The Hall of Choosing was, as the name implied, a vast hall from which competitors could select weapons and equipment to use in the trials. There were rows of weapons, equipment, and elemental materials on display; some were simply stacked or piled on the floor in heaps. Armor of scale, metal, and leather. Shields, capes, and masks of various designs and patterns. Crossbows, pistols, and rifles.

  Other competitors browsed the rows, quite a few of them in masks or cowls of their own.

  As long as a weapon didn't have any magical effect and it aligned with a competitor’s registered affinities, it would be allowed. There was a hard limit of two enchanted weapons, however.

  Caen selected a variety of vines from a patch of grass with various plant matter around it. These were of even better quality than the ones he'd treated and selected from the Mal-dawn Coppice Plane.

  Next, he picked a set of unenchanted but high-quality black armor. The helmet was sturdy and had a mask with relief engravings of tree roots, leaves, and flowers on it. There were no eye holes, but tiny perforations had been made all over the mask to allow for sight and breathing.

  Finally, he walked up to a row of weapon displays. Most of these were encased in glass and well-known for their legendary status. An axe off to the side had a blade that was the size of his entire body.

  But Caen's attention was ultimately drawn to the greatsword, which he'd come here for. It was half as wide as his shoulders and taller than he was. Its dark silver hilt bore engravings of pregnant clouds and forked glowing white lightning that snaked all the way down to its darkened scabbard.

  Within its glass containment, the sword hovered in the air.

  And Caen observed its soul structure with awe.

  A plaque heralded the weapon's name in neat Thermish script: Stormsong.