Radiant blue and white whorls in an ice blue face granted Liao a single glance before he plunged to the floor in front of Grand Elder Itinay. Surrounded by the grand opulence of the Hall of Elder's, he saw nothing but the tiles in front of his nose.

  The grand elder, looking down at him, offered a single pronouncement. “You are terrified.”

  Liao gave no reaction to these words. There was nothing to say. It was the absolute truth. The Grand Elder was an immortal, a being one step below the heavens themselves. She had the power to destroy him with no more than a gesture, perhaps a mere thought. Awakening his qi sense only made the overwhelming disparity in power truly clear, measurable beyond what the eyes could see. The pale blue form she possessed was revealed as not something cosmetic, but an expression of her dao unleashed through the full forging of her soul by will alone.

  “You should be terrified,” Itinay's strange, oddly echoing voice, suggested a form of amusement that sourced to some place beyond his limited understanding. “But your reasoning is faulty. You are not being disciplined, Qing Liao of the Textiles Pavilion.”

  Carefully, she moved to sit on a low couch, tucked away in a corner of the hall, behind a towering pillar. This motion obligated Liao to shuffle about on his knees in order to face her as respect demanded. Throughout this relocation he kept his gaze firmly to the floor. The polished tiles were perfectly smooth. They did not hurt his flesh. His knees would have complained mightily at his posture, were he not a cultivator. Even new as he was the use of qi reinforcement, acting to strengthen his bones and defray that pain was already instinctive.

  Upon hearing he was not to be punished his composure stabilized, somewhat. Despite his recent arrival within the sect, he knew he had no business meeting with a grand elder under any circumstances. Certainly not in private. Without any means to understand why he had been summoned, for if not to be punished he could not imagine any business Itinay might have that concerned a newly minted initiate, he remained imprisoned by trepidation.

  “Do you recall your demon test?” Itinay asked without preamble. Her ferocious eyes hunted down his own with formidable skill, clamped his attention on those blue-white-blue-white whorls.

  Liao swallow. Of course he did. The image of the ghoulish red-skinned monster remained seared into his brain. Such wrongness, a violation of everything he'd learned of the world growing up, he would never forget it. A single nod indicated his acknowledgment.

  “Fu Jin put you through the test three times,” Itinay continued. She did not sound as if this interested her. “That never happens. She told you there was a problem with the restraint formation; that you were used to calibrate it.” The elder's tongue clicked, very fast. It sounded as bone cracking against ice. “That was a lie, a deception presented to silence speculation while we, your elders, debated.”

  Liao blanched, and returned his gaze to the floor. The idea of the elders lying to him, it was horrifying. Not as a matter of deception, of course they had countless secrets, but because it implied that there was some truth he could have grasped that might have harmed them, harmed the whole sect. He did not want to know such things.

  He did not ask what they had debated. It was not his place to speak. That chance, if it came at all, would be made abundantly clear. Drawn in inviolable layers of qi, the hierarchy of the sect possessed a clarity beyond that of any other human organization. Regardless, it took all his will to clamp down in fear in the face of the revelations passing across the dark blue lips.

  “We debated what to do with you, Qing Liao,” Itinay smiled slightly. Her indigo lips bent in a just barely visible rise. A terrifying expression, as if an avalanche were amused by that which it was about to bury. “Because you, it so happens, are just a little bit special.”

  Hearing those words, Liao never wanted anything more than he, in that moment, wished to be perfectly ordinary. The warning given to him by Su Yi, that cultivation was the not glorious gift so many children thought it was, were now revealed as cruelly accurate prophecy. The sect already demanded much, he'd never been busier in all the days of his short life than he was now. He was absolutely certain that, whatever followed, it was going to require a great deal more. Refusal was not to be attempted.

  He could only pray that Orday gave him the strength to meet such expectations.

  “During the test,” Itinay laid the circumstances bare. “The demon did not sense you. It reacted only when its eyes and ears informed it. Afterwards, my sister Iay measured the resonance of you qi, extracted from a drop of blood.”

  Liao recalled the pinprick, one Fu Jin said was used to check for disease.

  “She confirmed the truth,” blue lips hardened to stone. “You, your qi, Qing Liao, cannot be detected by demon qi. Across the expanse of the primordial, you are invisible to our enemies.”

  It was a simple statement, but one filled with profound power. Taught to hunt in the mountains, Liao knew the essential use of tricks to obscure the senses of prey. Camouflage, false scents, blinds, mimicked calls, all of these necessary to fool the sharp eyes of hawks, the cunning noses of wolves, the brilliant hearing of deer. Qi was, ultimately, no different, it was simply an additional sense, one his burgeoning awareness suggested loomed as potent as all the other five combined.

  Unable to detect his presence, demons were no longer enemies to be fought. They were prey to be hunted.

  The elimination of demons from the world was a cause with absolute moral clarity. He knew this; it had been drilled into him every week during temple services. He'd seen it, in the monstrous wrongness of the imprisoned ghoul. He'd felt it when he'd stood on the and glimpsed the barriers that sealed off the rest of the world. When Fu Jin told him defense was the first duty, he'd simply nodded. It was obvious.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Now, the grand elder was calling upon him to take up the fight in a new way. That much he discerned with absolute clarity, even as everything else became obscured. All thoughts, plans, of the future vanished. Blue-white shrouds buried them all.

  “The grand elders have met, and decided to make use of your talents,” the litany of revelations continued. “A plan exists, suited to develop your abilities in line with efficacy and need, but,” Itinay hesitated for the very first time. A noticeable pause interrupted her normal blizzard of intonation. “It departs from the sect's traditional methods. There is uncertainty and risk attached. It was decided that you are to make the choice whether or not to pursue this course yourself.”

  Young though he was, Liao could sense that this was not the whole truth. Beyond that, however, he did not have any idea what might be happening. He might have formed doubts, finding gaps in those declarations, but they remained amorphous, impossible to articulate. “What am I to choose?” He asked helplessly, recognizing that the ensuing gap was one he was meant to fill.

  Itinay reached back and pulled out a small object from beneath a silk towel.

  It was a headband. The base layer was stout horse leather, but the outer surface was covered in finely layered silver and gold brocade and dotted with star-shaped beads of perfectly clear quartz crystal. In the front, perfectly oriented in the center, was a wide disk, a silver plate setting that held a single piece of turquoise. A complex interplay of blue and green shades, this gem was wide enough to fill a circle made between Liao's thumb and forefinger and thicker than the red belt he tied about his waist. Exquisitely polished, it was laced with streaks of black, silver, and gold struck through the gemstone matrix.

  He'd never seen such an impressive gem in his life, not even among the jewelry the elders habitually wore. This piece could match any portion of Itinay's private panoply with ease.

  “Reaching the celestial ascendancy realm requires fully forging the soul, a process that transcends the boundaries of mortality.” Itinay unleashed this incomprehensible statement regarding elite cultivation as if it was nothing but a breakfast recipe. “The previously joined body and mind are made as one with the soul, forming not only an immortal body, but a core that cannot easily be dissipated. Simply striking down the immortal body does not suffice to truly slay an immortal. Should the soul find its way to a suitable receptacle, it may persist indefinitely.”

  Liao stared at the circlet with eyes wide and mouth open.

  “This is rare,” the grand elder continued. “If able to slay an immortal in battle, the victor usually swiftly crushes the soul with the next strike, but it can happen. The result,” she lifted up the headband and pushed it towards the youth's face. “Is known as a remnant soul. This artifact houses one such, Sayaana, last survivor of the Infinite Spines Sect. She fell in battle against the Scourging Wheel mere moments before Akiray and Artemay arrived and struck down that particular pestilence. Three hundred and thirty-two years have passed since that day. Now, the time has come to make use of that legacy.”

  Though he was unable to grasp the specifics of this scheme, the outline of the request was comparatively simple for Liao to understand. There was a mighty cultivator, an immortal, trapped inside the circlet. She had been chosen to teach him, to properly utilize this strange qi he'd been granted by Orday's blessing. From there, he could project what followed, the path that emerged from within Itinay's terrible frozen star eyes.

  Demon hunter.

  It took no additional reasoning to recognize the cost. He would share more than just lessons with the soul trapped in that brilliant turquoise. She would become an inextricable part of his life, joined closer than anyone else.

  That would set him apart, isolate him from the sect. He would have to walk this road with only the remnant, a woman he'd never met. He would be dedicated to the war against demons, forever, whether or not he wanted it.

  Whether or not that dao could carry him to immortality and ascension.

  Qing Liao was fourteen. He had been a cultivator for less than one hundred days. Such distant goals, things millennia in the future, where simply impossible to properly consider. His mind could not extend far enough to grapple with them. In their absence, he turned to the only source of authority available. “Why do you think I should do this, elder?” he dared to ask Itinay.

  This time, the smile that bent the indigo lips was deep and genuine, reaching all the way up the icy face. “Opportunity.” When this single word simply washed across Liao's head without penetrating, she elaborated. “It has been two-thousand, five hundred, and twenty-two years since the Demon War ended. We have lived in Mother's Gift that whole time, unable to send anyone into the Ruined Wastes for more than a few hours at a time, and that tentatively. Twenty-five centuries in hiding. In that entire time, we have had one strategy, one alone. To outlast the demonic cultivators. We can grow our numbers. They cannot. We reproduce. They do not.” The multi-layered eyes flashed hard with reflected light as she bent closer. “It is a sound strategy, but a weak one.”

  Her smile transformed into a sour, blue-tinted frown. “But there were no others. Until now. You are an opportunity. You can move through the wastes unseen. You represent the first step in finally taking the fight to the enemy rather than hiding behind mirrors and walls.”

  It took a moment, but Liao soon realized that she was offering him the world. The entirety of the Ruined Wastes, a vastness hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times the size of Mother's Gift, his to roam. For a boy from the mountains used to long journeys, still only fourteen years old, that boundless freedom held extraordinary allure. He would be able to go where no one else could.

  “What do I do then?” He asked, agreement granted.

  A pale hand, almost translucent and softly glowing with inner light, passed the gem-bearing headband in Liao's grasp. “When you place this on your brow, you will be able to see and speak to the remnant soul of Sayaana. This requires qi. I have placed enough in the gem to allow a conversation, but to walk this path you must forge an agreement. That will bind the remnant to you, allow her to draw on your qi. That carries serious risks. The bond flows both ways. She might use it to try and seize your body for herself. You will need to decide whether or not to trust her. Such a move is unlikely, it would violate her dao in the extreme, ruin any chance of future advancement, but it has happened in the past. Demonic cultivators certainly never hesitate.” The grand elder's conclusion struck a distinctly sour note.

  “Is there no hope of restoration, for her?” Liao knew it was the question of an ignorant child, but he asked anyway. He did not want to carry around doom forever.

  “A slim hope,” the pale blue face offered truth, however merciless. “Should you rise to complete the tribulation of celestial ascendancy, then forming two immortal bodies instead of one is trivial, but few reach that far, or succeed in the attempt. Eldest sister Iay scoured the records from before the war, but found only two cases of success.”

  Rare was not hopeless, not to a fourteen-year-old. In that moment, Liao was unwilling to bow to the cruel burden of numeracy. Not with an elder transformed beyond mortality seated before him, speaking to him as, not an equal, but someone worthy of making his own choices. To refuse, in the face of that, had never been possible. “I will do it,” Liao said firmly, though the words contained far more bravado than he'd ever admit aloud.

  He grasped the circlet tightly, feeling its varied composition, metal, leather, and gems. It was cool to the touch, and somehow strangely supple. Qi pulsed through it, a mirror to grand elder's icy presentation.

  He placed it on his head.