We worked on the ritual until the sun began to drop low on the horizon, casting the desert in shades of orange and red, after which the eldest Shé began snapping orders at everyone once again, directing people to specific spots. Everyone within the dome – or rather, everyone visible within the dome – was put to work in a specific part of the ritual, including Salem, Jackson, and myself, which had definitely not been a part of their plan.

  “Two minutes until sundown,” Shé Ying, Yushin’s mother, called out. “Traitor Wyrm preserve us.”

  The matriarch of the clan strode forward, taking her spot near the center of the ritual, a scant few feet away from Yushin, who was kneeling in the center. The air seemed to grow still and quiet, even the humming of the killing field somehow less dramatic.

  “One minute.” Shé Ying called out. The seconds ticked by, both impossibly fast and impossibly slow, until she called out again. “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven…”

  At one, the matriarch raised her hand and released a pulse of chi so intense that I could feel it in my bones. The formation pillars all across the field blazed to life with an incredible glare of silver and brown. Shé Rui and Ying released their own chi an instant later, the Daos of Family and Space rushing into the ritual, blue and purple light sparking in the formations.

  The dualistic elders pressed their hands to the ground, and droplets of silver began to slide down their hands like beads of sweat. Their identical marks glowed brightly, the silver pulsing as they released all of their power into the ritual.

  Martha, Salem, Jackson, and I all began to channel ether into the ritual, and once again, I felt my power connecting to the ether dust and components, channeling it into something greater. Unlike before, however, this was barely even a trickle. It hurt like having a frozen iron pressed against my forehead, but that was only due to my wrecked and damaged spirit. The flames that spilled from my center felt normal, which really drove home the difference between being a supplemental caster and the primary one. I was certain to keep hold of some ether and flame, just in case.

  The artifacts of the Traitor Wyrm scattered across the field began to glow and hum with divinity, and the Shé matriarch began to chant a prayer. That was when the changes began. The first was expected: unlike when we had performed our miniature version for the curse, Yushin gave her chi one last little push.

  Thanks to the sheer amount of resources that the Shé clan had shoveled into her, Yushin had reached the absolute peak of the energy drawing stage weeks ago. All she needed to do in order to form a perpetual core was to condense the power in her dantien, transforming it from liquid to solid, and survive the tribulation that came with it. As if guided by my thoughts of tribulation, the environment began to blaze with light. I could only assume that chi of every type was being energized by the advancement, and converted.

  Lightning raced towards Yushin, and a part of me expected to watch as it wrecked her body or shattered her freshly made, pea-sized core. Instead, one of the formations flared, and the lightning bent, forking down into the earth and racing through the lines of power. I felt my breath catch at that. I was not an expert on cultivation, but even I realized that harnessing the power of a tribulation wasn’t supposed to happen. It was a violation of certain laws, and–

  An ear shattering boom filled the dome as a spear of lightning as thick as one of the towers of the Citadel crashed through the killing field. It broke into dozens of different forking branches, then raced through the ground, and I knew something was going wrong. The formations were being changed, altered by the powerful blasts of lightning chi.

  “Now!” the matriarch screamed, pointing at the dual cultivators. “Give it to him!”

  Both of them nodded in unison, then reached into themselves and detonated their cores. My eyes widened. There was a function of destiny marks that Charm had mentioned once. When one of sufficient power died of old age and natural causes, their spirit could release all of the pent up magic within their destiny mark, creating a new destiny pool that could awaken new destiny marks. I didn’t know the specifics, but it seemed like this sort of death was able to do it as well.

  Chi exploded through the formations as their detonating cores were swept into the power of the formation, glowing brighter and brighter, but that wasn’t all. The strange, metallic yet evershifting liquid that had been in the vial Shé Rui had given me poured out of them, forming massive pools on the ground. Within moments, the pools were large enough to fill a swimming pool, despite being only the size of one person, and my eyes began to hurt trying to look at them. Once they’d gotten larger still, the pools began to shrink, the power of destiny siphoning away into the ritual, and the dust took on a color similar to the strange pools.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  I tried to pull my spirit away from the ritual, to stop acting as a channel, but found myself unable to. It was like falling off a cliff. I’d jumped willingly, and changing my mind at the last moment didn’t stop gravity from working. It was all I could do to hold onto the parts of my magic that I’d disjointed from the rest, to prevent it from being drained.

  There was another tower-sized blast of powerful lightning chi that thundered down from the heavens, trying to reduce Yushin into nothing but ash, but once again, the formation took it and began to shift. The changes weren’t dramatic, the ritual wasn’t re-writing itself. They were small things, things that could almost be ignored if not for the fact that I’d spent months studying it intimately.

  “What are you doing?” Shé Rui roared, and at his words, a massive wind began to blow, rising and sweeping through the wasteland. It was far more power than I’d ever seen him demonstrate, and I wasn’t sure if it was him not holding back, the fact that there was so much chi leftover from the lightning, or if someone or something else was taking control.

  “Ying!” the matriarch shouted, and her voice was barely audible over the gale. Yushin’s mother stepped forward and raised her hands, and I saw tears swept off her face by the wind, carried upward into the sky. She mouthed something, and Yushin’s eyes snapped open.

  Far overhead, a crack in the fabric of the world formed. Shadows that somehow glowed with divinity pushed against the world, and for a moment, I thought that despite everything, the Traitor Wyrm really hadn’t betrayed his own people, that he was sending an avatar down. The cracks expanded, then snapped into a portal. A tentacle of shadow flowed down from the sky, and the lightning overhead began to dissipate, no longer intent on killing Yushin for attempting to cheat her advancement. I just wish I understood what that meant. The tendril of magic reached down, then touched Yushin, right where her dantien was supposedly spiritually located. It plunged into her body and her spirit, and divine power exploded down the tendril, racing into Yushin.

  My curse blazed to life.

  It wasn’t perfect. The Traitor Wyrm had changed the ritual, meaning that we’d failed to take the end formation into account with the magic. We had, however, still gotten a match for the start of the ritual, had channeled more power a fifth circle mage could have produced in ten years, and had the rules of Magyk herself on our side. Bright blue light flared around the spot where the tentacle was, and then raced upwards. Light and a hundred thousand runes exploded against the sky, where the crack in reality was. Glowing purple shadows slammed into it, but my curse spell held. Magyk’s rules meant that the Traitor Wyrm couldn’t enter the world without obeying the ritual’s magic, and I had held back the ritual.

  But the ritual’s purpose had been for him to take her magic in order to open a gate and send an avatar through. A tendril rushed down from the sky, ignoring my runes as if they didn’t even exist. Yushin screamed. A spike of purple shadows tore itself out of her body, melding with the tendrils overhead. My eyes flashed over to Yushin, and I wished I had the spiritual sense of cultivators. I didn’t know if she’d just depleted her chi, and would recover, if her cultivation had been destroyed, or if the divinity had allowed him to rip out her cultivation and bloodline alike, similar to what the Dreki Matriarch had done.

  “No!” Shé Ying shouted. “Yushin, what did you do?”

  Tears were streaming down from Yushin’s face as she slowly rose to her feet, and just like Ying’s, they were carried up into the sky.

  “Trusted you,” she said, and though her voice was low, barely a whisper, the howling winds seemed to serve to amplify it. Once again, I tried to tear myself away from the ritual, but it hadn't been completed. If what I suspected about the Traitor Wyrm was true, it couldn’t be completed. He didn’t have the power to make an avatar and send it through. The ties that bound me to it were weaker, and weakening by the moment, but for now, I was bound to complete it. The Shé matriarch tilted her head, as if listening to something, then her eyes snapped to Ying.

  “How long can you keep the portal open?”

  “Another minute or two, no longer,” Shé Ying panted. “Why? How long will this seal last?”

  “One day,” I said, my voice rolling out. I held my staff in my hand, and though my spirit was still bound, I found I could step forward. I did so and ground my staff into the ground to stabilize myself against the wind. I felt a pair of hands on my shoulder, and I recognized them by feel. One of them was the warm, steady, large hand of Jackson, while the other was the small, cool, but firm hand of Salem. We stood in a unified front, and I reached into the disjointed power that I’d held onto for so long, shaping a spell that was rapidly becoming my new favorite.

  The cultivators still alive all turned to us. Shé Rui had a look of grief and thankfulness warring on his face, and to my surprise, Shé Ying’s own look wasn’t too dissimilar. I was no expert on reading people, but she wore her emotions so clearly on her face that even I could tell that she was terrified at the circumstances, relieved that her daughter was alive, and furious at me for defying her god. The face of the Shé clan leader, however, was filled with only one emotion: rage.

  “You’ll pay in blood for this,” the eldest Shé declared, and a dark light of the Traitor Wyrm’s divinity began to glow around her. “We will kill you and destroy that hells-born seal!”

  Papers flew out from my locker, all of the spellglyphs that I’d specifically prepared to fight Yushin’s family, and the few dozen summoning spells I had left. Around me, angelus began to appear. Gadhar hounds filled the air, joined by wadjetktt, as well as lytemoths. Jackson’s body shimmered as his golden armor began to form around him, and strings of light began to spill from Salem’s hands.

  Patreon Here!

  Discord Here!