Out of the twelve towers that guarded the Starwall, the northernmost and southernmost were by far the most isolated. They stood sentinel at the very boundary of the hidden land, with the curving mirror effect that framed the edge of the enclosed space visible from their bases. Land curved away from these outposts beyond the end of the wall, leaving no nearby communities that might offer a link to the rest of Mother's Gift. Surrounded only by wilderness and forestry plots, they stood isolated from all other human construction.

  Few ever came to such points. Cultivators on patrol marched past and turned about smartly, eager to have reached the conclusion of one leg of their duty. They walked by in confidence that demons would find their way towards points with greater concentrations of natural qi. Defense was largely left to the resident grand elders, a state that suited both of them just fine.

  The northernmost tower, number twelve in the counting, was a stark thing. It entirely lacked any form of accommodation or welcome. Structurally, it was wholly devoted to defensive operations. A most formidable assembly of fortification. High-step stairs, narrow corridors, shrunken apertures, and thick doors all made access by any attacker nearly impossible to sustain. Demons seeking to climb the exterior faces were met by a truly extraordinary barrage of deadly spikes. Row after row, they coated the masonry with a density that would impress most cacti.

  A single interior room within the tower was used for accommodation, and this too barely served to meet that need. It featured a small sleeping couch without blanket or covering, a lap desk for reading and composition, and nothing more. Books lined high shelves, storage chests were shoved against walls covered in tapestries. Thick carpets coated the stone floor to several layers deep.

  The extensive decorations presented a unified theme. All featured extended abstract, mathematical imagery utilizing the starfield as a backdrop. Stars and planets danced in stillness across those pictographs according to complex numeric relationships sighting without thread a sequence of orbits and intersections charted thousands of years forward. A cunning observer could deduce the distant future from those images, assuming they could see them at all. The room was dark as night, no lights utilized at any time.

  It was only occasionally occupied, the tower's mistress preferred to spend her time on the roof, where she kept her loom.

  Such was the domain of Itinay, twelfth of the Twelve Sisters, youngest of Orday's disciples. She lived alone in her stony fortress. Some of her sisters kept bright halls, numerous servants, and even allowed chosen students to lodge with them. They held banquets and offered food in company.

  Not her. It did not fit her dao. Why keep food about when you had not eaten in millennia? Or waste fuel on bright light when blessed with the capacity to see perfectly in total darkness? Such things were distractions, frivolity. The true face of the universe was dark and cold. She refused to flinch from it. Instead, she gathered it close around her, attached it to the very presentation of her being.

  On the rare occasions when she desired company, warmth, or the presence of beautiful things she would journey to the Textiles Pavilion. It had them in abundance. The Sword Hall, endlessly ready to work her blade, offered a different sort of interruption. At such speed as she could command, the journey was a matter of moments. Nor was it as if she faced any strain upon her time.

  Instead she waited on the rooftop, watching and weaving. In this way she kept the vigil that her duty demanded without compromising her work. Deep within her mind she advanced countless complex calculations, in depth study of patterns and light conducted upon the canvas of an advanced cultivator's mental projection. Contemplation of the long and narrow path toward ascension.

  Without the complete absence of distraction arranged through closed door cultivation she made minimal progress at best, but Itinay strove to assemble the endless fragments of the truth that skated across the night sky into coherent formulae that she might later seek to delve them for the enlightenment and realization they contained. An imperfect process, but at this stage no guides existed. Each path to the heavens was unique, and the skies treacherous.

  In such a state interruptions were unexpected, and usually unwelcome. Such messages as were necessary to allow her supervision of the pavilion and her sections of the sect could be sent on paper and answered the same. Few sought out a grand elder simply to bring them good news unanticipated.

  With the remarkable sensitivity of the second layer of the celestial ascendancy realm, and the absence of any other living forms nearby to offer any difficulty in differentiation, Itinay sensed the new arrival while she was still kilometers distant. Not that this provided much warning in terms of time. An elder on the edge of Soul Forging possessed immense command of the Stellar Flash Steps, and even simply walking along the wall unhurried could have outrun the best sprint of a mountain wolf. Early warning provided barely enough time to even begin speculating as to why Fu Jin might have come out to see Itinay in person.

  Private consultation, perhaps. The younger cultivator had long been a student subjected to more of Itinay's personal attention than most. She was talented, and her progress on the path had been swift and sure. She stood on the cusp of the second great tribulation, the moment when the fully tempered spirit was used in the ultimate exercise of will: grabbing hold of the soul itself and slamming it into place to begin forging it into perfect fusion with the mind and body and the immortal existence that waited upon completion.

  A very dangerous process. No heavenly tribulation was anything other than severe. Itinay could recall her own, nearly three thousand years in the past, with perfect clarity. Most cultivators did not survive the attempt.

  Plausible, but the grand elder did not think the careful woman, who stood second in the reckoning of the Textile Pavilion, not counting Itinay herself, would have appeared unannounced to conduct personal business. Nor was it likely to be a matter of the lineage of cats they both charted across the centuries. Both could have been handled during one of her regular visits to the pavilion.

  Intuition, a sense any cultivator who'd reached the heights where Itinay walked learned to trust, suggested something truly unexpected had occurred. An incident the spirit tempering realm elder determined required the personal attention of a Grand Elder. No one had sounded one of the Starwall's many alarms, so it was not an immediate crisis. Itinay trained her students too carefully for any of them to try and hide an emergency that imperiled the safety of the hidden land merely for the sake of pride.

  Unable to discern an obvious answer, she found herself genuinely curious; a very rare state indeed for one in her position. It would have been a welcome sensation, if not for the foreboding that walked in tandem alongside all such impulses. They did not live in a world of welcome surprises, not since the great betrayal. Otherwise, they would not be living behind a wall inside a mirror.

  Rather than force Fu Jin to navigate the maze that formed the tower's interior, Itinay stood up upon her junior's arrival. Moving to the edge of the roof, she leaned over and called out. “Come directly to the top.” She did not shout, or raise her voice at all. The other cultivator could hear the words quite easily without such augmentation.

  Fu Jin obeyed the invitation. Unleashing the least exertion of her qi, the slender cultivator bent her knees and vaulted upward, carried in an arc tens of meters through the air. She landed with perfect poise atop a pale blue ring painted around the edge of the tower's roof. The willowy cultivator's hair whipped about briefly, stirred by this motion, before her will stilled it. Fu Jin bowed low upon arrival, pressing her hands together and bending at the waist.

  Itinay ignored the formal gesture. They might serve a function in the halls of the sect, but she found such affectations pointless in the confines of her private space. “Welcome, come inside,” she opened the hatch door that offered access to her private room. There was no ladder, the five meter drop simply yawned in the darkness, but no one allowed to enter this place would have need of such aids. Fu Jin dropped down behind the grand elder without the least bit of difficulty.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  With a simple flick of her qi, Itinay projected a soft glowing light out from the tapestry attached to the ceiling. This bathed the room in soft orange light. The surrounding tapestries and carpets reflected back a thousand shades of blue. Taking up a seat on her couch, she offered a cushion to her guest. It was a simple thing, unadorned, but it had been made by the grand elder's own hand. The blue-dyed wool on the surface was impossibly fine and smooth. The down within arranged in a perfectly supporting pattern achieved through layering each feather within a lattice of self-reinforcing qi. Sitting atop it was akin to perching on a bed of clouds. Such an object would never find its way to mortal hands, not at any price, but to the grand elder it was a mere idle practice piece.

  “What brings you to see me?” she dispensed with all pleasantries the moment they both sat down.

  Fu Jin took a deep breath, her hesitation visible in both physical motion and the qi flowing through her nearly perfected spiritual presence. Such lack of confidence was rare. Though she appeared no more than thirty, the tall and slender woman was nearly four hundred years old. Despite this, Itinay recalled her as a fourteen-year-old girl, newly inducted into the Textiles Pavilion. Some barriers were only ever fully surpassed upon reaching even footing. Regrettably, for immortals that was terribly rare.

  Itinay did not especially enjoy the role of stern taskmaster, for all that in came easily to her, and waited for the younger woman to speak in her own time.

  “There has been a...” Fu Jin paused, visibly choosing her words with great care. “An anomalous development with regard to the newest member of our pavilion.”

  Itinay had been informed, of course, that a single member of the current crop of recruits had declared his intention to pursue the textile arts. She even recalled the youth, the trapper's son from the mountains she'd met on New Year's Day. The outcome had surprised her, a little. Most of those who entered into her oversight were young women from market towns or the sons of shepherds. She had briefly contemplated the possibilities attached to the acquisition of a dedicated leatherworker, something the pavilion had lacked for some time, but it would be decades at the earliest before his skills were able to stand on their own. “What is this anomalous development?” She did not enjoy unnecessary ambiguity. “Explain.”

  Recognizing her superior's displeasure, Fu Jin swallowed. “Something...strange happened during his demonic exposure.” She hurried ahead before any intermittent interval allowed speculation. “Normally, the demon detects the initiate's qi shortly after the elder departs and attacks at once. It always slams itself against the panels while they are still rising, clawing at everything. This time, that...did not occur. The demon completely ignored Qing Liao and continued facing towards the Ruined Wastes. It did not even move until he stepped forward and it heard him. Only then did it attack.”

  Itinay blinked. For a being of her extraordinary longevity, genuine surprises were rare indeed. Even battles and wars, notoriously chaotic, mostly unfolded as variations on well-established themes. This, by contrast, represented something genuinely unexpected.

  She did not, however, take this declaration on faith. “You confirmed this?” she questioned, perhaps a little too sharply.

  “Yes, elder,” Fu Jin, thankfully for her, had come prepared. “I repeated the test two additional times, and during the third event ordered Qing Liao to stand perfectly still and cultivate. The demon completely ignored him for almost an hour, until a drop of water fell and caused it to turn around. After that it attacked at once.” The tall woman raised her head and met Itinay's gaze, dark eyes like razors in the pale illumination. “Impossible as it seems, I believe the demon cannot detect his qi.”

  Before responding, Itinay rested in silence for a long moment, thinking carefully. Wheels spun at a furious pace in her mind, considering, planning, and plotting. Each thought unlocked new ones, triggered a cascade of anticipation, of excitement, greater than anything she'd felt in decades, maybe centuries. Adrenalin rushed through dark veins. “It is not impossible,” she replied quietly, contradicting her subordinate's doubts. “Highly unlikely, yes, but it has been two thousand five hundred years. The sect has raised almost forty thousand cultivators. Perhaps this was inevitable.”

  “I...I don't understand elder, apologies.” The request for an explanation was left unsaid, a binding of the strictures of rank and realm.

  Itinay found it irritating.

  “The demons are part of the plague,” she offered the answer without further preparation. “That is the best comparison, a disease that infiltrates mortal bodies and converts their qi to its consumptive horror.” This was a vastly simplified explanation, but she was a weaver, not an alchemist, ritualist, or formation master. It sufficed for her purposes. “And like any disease, there are always some who are immune.”

  This drew a sharp nod beneath eyes wide in shock. Outbreaks of plague within Mother's Gift were uncommon, and usually swiftly contained, but they did occur. They aggregated around years with poor harvests, when the people took to eating rats. Having lived for several centuries, Fu Jin had witnessed her fair share of containment measures.

  “Following the Great Betrayal, as the plague spread like wildfire and the Demon War began to take shape,” Itinay grimaced, her memories of those terrible days were among the least pleasant in a very long record. “Forces of the Orthodox Alliance, leading counterattacks, occasionally came across mortal survivors in provinces that had succumbed to mass conversion. Most of these were simply corpses, torn apart by demons unable to consume their qi.” Behind her eyes, she saw it all again, those terrible days. Endless villages, towns, and cities laid waste. Every man, woman, and child transformed into monsters, throwing their bodies at the homes of every cultivator they could find.

  “But,” she also recalled those rare deviations. “A lucky few were able to hide out, far beyond the reach of sight, and the demons did not know them.” She had observed a single case in person, a little boy, locked inside a cellar by his parents, unable to get out, pulled free on the very edge of starving to death. One of the rare few mortals to die of old age during the decades of warfare. “Perhaps one in ten thousand possess this immunity, demonic qi slides past them, never truly touching, pushed aside from contact by some inherent property of their own. It seems we've finally discovered a cultivator with this trait. That it is all.”

  “But, elder, would there not have been such cultivators during the Demon War?” Fu Jin's response resounded with confusion. No doubt she imagined such persons as invincible weapons against the plague.

  If only.

  “Yes,” Itinay had no evidence, but she spoke with clear authority. At the height of the old world, mere weeks before the Great Betrayal, a census of the sects counted one million cultivators. Statistically, some would surely have been immune. “But how to detect such a power? The demons cannot sense Qing Liao's qi, but they can still see and hear him. We fought against hordes tens of millions strong.” Those memories erupted without any need for summoning. She banished them furiously, rushing them from her sight with iron will. It was not time for such laments.

  “And tens of thousands of demonic cultivators.” Nearly one in ten of those able to channel qi had joined the traitors. Even though that reckoning counted none of her sisters, it still stung no matter how much time had passed. “The enemy discerned such things first, and by the time the alliance recognized the potential of such weapons, all were dead.” The war had been long, in mortal reckoning, but considering its scale, the immortals found it incredibly rapid.

  That limitation no longer applied. Itinay's mind whirled through whole constellations of concepts. The possibilities, now, were nearly endless. A true opportunity to alter the flow of events had arisen at last.

  Such things required acknowledgment. “You were right to bring this to my attention,” she told Fu Jin. “Have you told anyone else about this? What does Qing Liao know?”

  “I have told no one,” Confirmation came swiftly. “And though I am certain Qing Liao suspects something strange occurred, he does not seem to recognize why.” This caveat was swiftly applied, but was of little consequence. Anyone ordered to stand and meditate in front a a demon, even just one ghoul, would surely suspect some scheme. Had they not, it would have been deeply concerning on its own.

  Itinay did not consider a little suspicion from a newly minted initiate of any consequence. “How did he react to the demon?” She questioned instead, a far more pertinent inquiry. New cultivators were little more than children, taken from the confines of a peaceful world. They were neither inherently brave nor driven. This anomaly would offer little utility is he could not be shaped into a weapon.

  “With calm readiness to take up arms,” Fu Jin's answer cause a spontaneous smile, the first in decades, to break out across Itinay's pale blue face.

  “Excellent,” it seemed fate had deigned to move in accordance with her desires for once. “Treat the initiate no different from any other, for now. We will need to confirm the traits of his qi before proceeding. That requires a complete analysis. I will speak to Iay myself to arrange it.” Her eldest sister might well be the best ritualist in the world, and such a task as this required no less than absolute certainty.

  Fu Jin nodded, her task completed as the wheels of immortal schemes began to turn.