Redfall sat at the base of the last major Step descent, in the first true lowland valley they had encountered since Karveth's Post — a town rather than a settlement, by the distinction that mattered, which was whether the people living there had built institutions beyond the ones required for basic commerce. Redfall had institutions. It had a proper Artifact Guild office with two permanently stationed sub-agents. It had a Martial Clan registration hall, which indicated enough Martial practitioners in the region to make their formal organization worthwhile. It had a public cultivation ground — an open-air space designated for safe, monitored Adaptive Battle practice, with chalked circles and a small seating structure for observers. And it had, most relevantly to three travelers who had spent the last week in the foothills and forests of the Step Lands, a bathhouse that operated through the afternoon and evening hours.

  Sven discovered the bathhouse within twenty minutes of their arrival, through the direct method of asking the first person who looked like they had recent experience of being clean. He announced its existence to the group with the satisfaction of someone delivering welcome information.

  "I need two hours," he said.

  "You need thirty minutes," Luc said.

  "I need two hours to do it properly."

  "We have a timeline," Vayne said, though with less conviction than she might have had before four days of walking through forest, clay-road dust, and the general ambient material of lowland travel.

  "The bathhouse," Sven told her, "is non-negotiable. I will be faster on the road tomorrow for the rest."

  This was, Luc had to acknowledge, not actually wrong. The cost of genuine rest was not nothing, and two hours in a bathhouse was not equivalent to two hours of travel time in terms of what it produced — a person who had been properly cleaned and relaxed in warm water for a reasonable period was, measurably, a more effective traveler than one who had not been. He said this to Vayne, framed as the logistics analysis it was, and she looked at him for a moment and then looked at herself and said, "Fine. Two hours." And they went to the bathhouse and two hours turned into three, because Vayne had found the bathhouse's reading room, which had current issues of the three major Arcane research periodicals, and had become comprehensively unavailable.

  Luc used the time to run a full world audit, sitting in the warm room with the meditative access open, moving through the Eternal Hive with the systematic attention of someone who has been traveling for two weeks and has not had enough uninterrupted time for the detailed internal work the world required. The tunnel network had expanded since the night before the Walk ceremony — the ants built continuously regardless of his attention, guided by the colony's collective intelligence, but the Law of Structure's refinement of new construction was significantly better when he directed his attention to specific sections, and there were three areas in the mid-level infrastructure that he had identified as candidates for optimization two months ago and had not yet had the focused session to address.

  He addressed them now, and found in the process something he had been searching for since the advancement to Realm 2 — not the full answer to the ??? advancement method, but the next piece of it. The library chamber in the world's deepest section had added a new cluster of architectural notation since they had entered the Step Lands, and the pattern of the new notation was legible to him now in a way it hadn't been a week ago, which meant that some threshold of external engagement had already produced a change in the world's internal understanding of what it needed.

  The notation said, in the spatial language that the ants used for all communication: *The world grows when it is tested. The method is not crystals. The method is contact with genuine resistance — challenges that require the Law to respond fully, not partially.*

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  He sat with this for a while, integrating it. The forest section had required the Law of Structure — the Chitin Armor's distribution, the Load Amplification's targeted application, the Structural Awareness that had read the ambushers' positions. The world had responded to that engagement by clarifying the advancement path. Which meant the road ahead was not just cultivation opportunity but was, in a fundamental sense, the curriculum.

  He wrote this in his own journal, in the northern notation system Maren had taught him, and then he went to find Sven and Vayne.

  ?

  Redfall's public cultivation ground was occupied when they walked past it that evening, and the occupant stopped Luc in his tracks with the same quality of attention that the geological strata had — something unexpected in a familiar category, something that required looking at more carefully.

  The man practicing in the largest circle was old, which was the first thing, and then immediately not the most interesting thing, because old people who used cultivation grounds usually moved with the specific quality of people who are maintaining rather than developing — working established patterns at established depths. This man was doing neither. He moved through a form that Luc had no specific reference for, a flowing sequence that combined what looked like Martial Path body mechanics with something else, something with a different origin, and the cultivation energy that moved through him as he performed it was neither the purely physical kind of a Martial practitioner nor the internally-sourced kind of a Worldbearer but something that incorporated both and was doing something with the combination that Luc could not immediately classify.

  He was perhaps sixty-five, with the loose-limbed spare quality of someone who has shed everything that wasn't useful over a long period of time, skin the weathered brown of decades of outdoor activity, hair the iron-grey of someone who used to be some other color and has finished transitioning. His cultivation belt was old enough to have been replaced several times, the leather worn to a specific suppleness that took years to achieve. He had not yet looked at the three people standing at the cultivation ground's edge watching him, but the particular quality of his not-looking had the character of someone who is fully aware of being watched and has decided to finish what he is doing before acknowledging it.

  He completed the form and turned to them with the unhurried quality of someone who has been unhurried about most things for a long time.

  "The tall one is Martial Path," he said, looking at Sven. "Second realm, pushing into the threshold." He looked at Vayne. "Arcane. Second form notation specialist — the copper residue on your left wrist says you've been using binding notation recently, and the depth of the residue says you're good at it." He looked at Luc last, and was quiet for a moment. "Inner World, non-elemental, non-combat Core Species. Second realm. Law active." He tilted his head slightly. "I can't classify the Core Species from the energy signature alone. It's not one of the standard combat variants."

  "Builder Ants," Luc said.

  The man looked at him for a long moment. Then, in a way that was absolutely different from every other response Luc had encountered to that specific information, he smiled — not politely, not with the condescension of someone managing their reaction to something they found disappointing, but with the genuine warmth of recognition, the expression of someone who has just encountered something they were not expecting and finds it precisely interesting.

  "Builder Ants," the man said. "I haven't seen that Core Species since — " he paused briefly " — twenty years? The last one I knew was a woman in the eastern coast cities who ran the most sophisticated World Clash defensive strategy I've ever encountered. Everyone was so busy not being impressed by her Core Species that they never noticed what she was actually building." He looked at Luc with the specific interest of someone who has been given a subject they are genuinely curious about. "Where are you headed?"

  "South," Luc said.

  "Of course you are." The man sat down on the cultivation ground's seating structure with the ease of someone who has decided the conversation is worth having and is making himself comfortable for it. "I'm Orren. I was a traveling examiner for the Artifact Guild for thirty years and I am now thoroughly retired and a source of considerable frustration to the Guild because I refuse to take my accumulated knowledge back to their archive offices." He looked at them with the frank curiosity of someone who has been alone long enough that the company of interesting people feels like a specific pleasure. "What's south?"

  "Research materials," Vayne said. "For me."

  "The road," Sven said, which was both true and sufficient.

  Orren looked at Luc.

  "Something I need to find," Luc said. "And something that may be trying to find me."

  "Those are usually the same thing," Orren said, "and the trick is to understand which one you're actually encountering before you decide how to respond to it." He appeared to reach a decision. "There's a reasonable inn on the east side of the market, which has the secondary quality of backing onto the cultivation ground, so the noise is cultivation noise rather than drinking noise. I'll tell you what I know about the road south of here over dinner, and you can decide whether it's worth the dinner."

  "What do you want from it?" Vayne asked, which was, Luc thought, the most useful question she had asked yet.

  Orren smiled again, the genuine kind. "The company of people who are going somewhere," he said. "I've been retired for two years and it's been seventeen months longer than I expected it to be interesting."