Two pears, freshly squeezed; three clams boiled in-shell; a dollop of honey; a spoon of sugar to help it down; a bit of luck; and a whole lot of determination. -Qi Fever remedy from the recipe book of Shen Tuzi.

  The moment the veil dropped, I sprinted through the open gate with Lin hot on my heels. We tore through the well-kept palace, sprinting through the covered pathways until we reached the tower at the center of it all. Reili’s lab, the place where I’d given up my humanity, loomed in the darkness, but I spied several lights shining from the upper windows.

  After a half-hearted warning for Lin to be careful what he touched, I threw open the doors. At the top of the tower, I found Xinya sitting cross-legged in the center of the room. Qi flowed through her, and I recognized the motions immediately. She was advancing.

  Lin and I backed off, retreating a few steps down the stairs so as to not disturb her focus. Here, Reili’s storage room was still perfectly intact, not that I wanted to spend much time here. Long ago, she threatened to open a void tear and chuck me into it if I so much as looked crosswise at the treasures she kept in her tower. They were “for research purposes only,” and I had every faith that whatever qi array or mechanism she intended to use to deliver on her threats was both automatic and still functioning. Better to look from a distance.

  Soon, a ghostly figure surrounded by several undead wisps appeared next to us. Reili looked exactly the same as she had in life right down to the austere clothes and immaculate ponytail.

  “Yoru,” she greeted with a polite bow. I returned the gesture.

  “Reili. It’s good to see you, the real you, I mean.”

  My advisor cocked her head, her eyes asking a silent question. Before I could answer, though, her confusion melted into understanding, and she nodded.

  “Has the void been trying to whisper with my voice?” she asked, though it was less of a question than a request for confirmation.

  “You always were the smartest among us,” I answered.

  Her smile twitched slightly. “And what exactly was this false vision saying to you?”

  “It…well,” I looked away, shame filling my heart. “It encouraged my destructive tendencies.” It was a monumental understatement, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “I see.” Reili leaned back, resting her head on the wall behind her as she pensively considered the implications of my meaning. “I would encourage you to ignore those voices.”

  I bit back a sarcastic remark. This was the first time I’d seen my adopted sister since she died in my arms. This was hardly the time to taint the atmosphere with thirty thousand years of resentment, especially when much of it was undeserved.

  “They’re loud, but they don’t say much. I’m more interested in the quieter ones, these days,” I explained.

  She nodded. “Good, they’re better for everyone’s health.”

  A thud from the floor above distracted all of us from the current line of thought. Worried for Xinya, I raced back up the stairs, to find the little girl laying on the ground, having fallen over from where she’d been sitting.

  “Is she alright?” Lin asked, hovering just behind my shoulder. I knelt and took Xinya into my arms before setting her on the bed. It was the very same bed where I gave up my humanity to be twisted into a voidspawn, but that fact barely even registered. I was more focused by the blood staining her clothes.

  “She’s fine,” Shi Reili confirmed, joining us at a much more leisurely pace. “She is just tired from advancing.” Sure enough, a few minutes later, Xinya’s eyes flicked open, and she sat up.

  “Uncle Yoru? You made it in,” she said, stating the obvious.

  “You did the hard part by opening the way,” I answered, then I turned and pointed to Reili. “I take it this is the woman who’s been bothering you for months.”

  Reili rolled her eyes. “Bold words from the man we all agreed would never be allowed to have custody of a child.”

  “I am perfectly responsible and fit to care for my niece, thank you,” I quipped back, turning my chin up haughtily.

  “Responsible? Yoru, remind me what happened to Half-Moon Hearth during the single and only vacation I ever took?” she pointed a finger at my chest. “It took five weeks for you to put Lanyue in a state of emergency, and I had to come back and sort it out. Chouko had to finish that two-year vacation without me!”

  Lin bit back laughter but failed when I gave him the most betrayed look I could muster. “She and Lady Tsuyuki must have gotten along well. They both have the same technique in their verbal bladework.”

  “Everyone’s a critic,” I muttered. “Believe it or not, I had everything under control.”

  “Right, sure you did,” Reili finished dryly before taking a deep breath. “As much as I’d love to hash out old memories, I’m afraid my time is limited. It takes a great deal of qi to manifest such that you and your anchor can see me. Xinya’s core may not be able to handle the strain.” As if on cue, Xinya coughed violently, deep from her chest. When she regained her breath, she blinked several times, like she did when she had void fever.

  “I’m not dying, am I?” she asked softly.

  “Not yet,” answered the Void Herald. “And you won’t get to that state so long as I have a say in the matter.”

  “You know what’s happening to Xinya’s qi?” I asked.

  “What have you observed thus far?” Reili’s question was simple. Ever the scientist, she was keen to skip any irrelevant details, or those we already knew.

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  “Her qi changes color when tensions are high. Moonlight is replaced with void, it seems,” I reported dutifully.

  Reili took a deep breath. “Your deduction is correct. It’s the result of her bloodline trying to override her current path.”

  “You mean Shen Tori’s bloodline?” Xinya offered. I nodded.

  The bloodline techniques unique to the Shen Clan, passed to Xinya through her mother, Shen Reixin, were tricky. As far as I knew from fighting them, it allowed any void technique they used to plant a seed of the void within the victim, granting them a less potent channel to the whispers of the void. Anyone who was not used to them was quickly driven first to paranoia, then madness.

  “Correct,” confirmed the Void Herald. “If you had a less potent bloodline, then the path you chose would take precedence, but as it stands, your blood is fighting against you.”

  “I don’t understand. How do you know about this?” Reili hadn’t even been present in the Moon-Soaked Shore until my final fight with Shen Tori, where I thought I saw her phantom manifest.

  The look of disappointment Reili gave me was among the most scathing she’d ever given me. “Yoru. Remind me, you were supposed to be the most intelligent of your siblings, right?” I flinched. “I am a location-bound shade. I was subsisting on your qi along with the other Shades of the Shore until I began manifesting in the Black City to your niece and your niece alone. What does that tell you?”

  “You’re using Xinya to manifest. You use her qi to do so.” I scrutinized my adopted sister carefully. I trusted her, but I also was not keen on the idea that she was a parasite on my niece’s soul.

  “Do you remember what is required for a shade to haunt a specific person?”

  “Well, since you can’t have a strong emotional attachment to Xinya, given that you died millennia before she was born,” I reasoned, “then the only other way a shade could haunt a person is if they shared a bl-”

  I shut my mouth as soon as my brain caught up with the situation. Shades needed a strong attachment to remain. The dead may haunt a person if they had a strong emotion, such as love or hate, binding them to the living. But, since that wasn’t an option, the connection had to be familial. An ancestor haunting their descendant was quite common. But…

  “But…but…how did you…I don’t understand?”

  Reili pouted. “I’m hurt that you don’t think me capable of finding a cultivation partner. Between the two of us, which successfully established her own bloodline and which of us has gotten too caught up in pining for others that he has already failed to capture his interest once, but is well on his way to doing it twice?” I opened my mouth to protest, but she was already talking more. “If you must know, it was during the single vacation you so rudely cut short.”

  “But, you were on that trip with Chouko!”

  “And?”

  My blood went cold. I thought I might faint.

  “Uncle Yoru?”

  Which implications was Reili trying to make?! What was I supposed to draw from this?!

  “You…” The world was spinning. “You…deflowered…my sister?! Our sister?!”

  Reili waved a dismissive hand. “Yoru, please. Be reasonable. We were both over two hundred when we met. I was six hundred when you adopted me into the Tsuyuki Clan, something that was done at Chouko’s suggestion, I might add.”

  “But! But!”

  “It was for your benefit!” she protested. “Did you think I would have turned you into a creature like me and exposed you to the voices if I didn’t have a few contingencies in place? I needed a descendant with my bloodline so that someone could be around if the worst happened, since I was going to be made mortal the moment I gave you my core.

  “It’s just that,” she shuffled uncomfortably, suddenly looking nervous. “I just…failed to account for how quickly the drought would progress. I gambled that you wouldn’t need my contingencies…that I could be there to walk you through developing your connection to the void while we fixed things. I didn’t account for my own death…and you were left holding the consequences of my mistakes.” Reili took a deep breath, closing her eyes. “I can’t really say just how sor-”

  She was cut off as I leapt from my seat. I pulled her into my arms, letting qi flow through my body so that she could actually feel my touch.

  “Reili, don’t apologize,” I whispered. “There’s nothing to apologize for. If I’d just been stronger, this never would have happened. Don’t hold yourself responsible for my failure.”

  “Um, can I ask a question?” Xinya said softly. I released Reili, and the Void Herald nodded. “So, if you and Aunt Chouko are my ancestors, does that mean this pendent was yours?”

  Reili nodded and smiled softly. “I wore that to protect myself from Yoru’s natural aura after he took on my core. I was reduced to a mortal, and that amulet protected me from the sheer volume of qi coming off an Ascendent of his caliber. Your family passed it down to each wielder of my bloodline to this day.”

  “I knew there was something familiar about it,” I muttered. Yet, I couldn’t be too upset with myself. It was relatively common as a treasure, at least among those with an Ascendent’s resources.

  “Will it protect me from my bloodline, too?” Xinya looked down at the tiny pendent, and I could see the hope in her eyes. “I don’t want to be a void artist.”

  I shared a look with the other void artist in the room. From Reili’s sympathetic expression, she didn’t blame the little girl any more than I did.

  “No. It won’t,” she explained, crossing the room to sit next to her descendant. “But, I’ll do what I can to shield you from its influence. Still, you won’t be able to cure it until you cross to Salt and create your own blooded techniques. I will not lie to you, it will get worse the more power you have and the more time that passes. The void is persistent, and you are not the first I’ve seen try and take a different path from the one I set before my descendants.”

  That was troubling, to say the least. To minimize the effects, Xinya would need to advance relatively quickly, but getting the materials to do so would not be easy. Gold, in particular, required a treasure unique to one’s own path, and very few cultivators who attempted to bridge the gap between Gold and Salt survived the process.

  “Yoru, I can feel you thinking, and the danger is not immediate. You have limited time, but you know that cultivation is a path that takes years, not days or weeks,” Reili scolded.

  “Just trying to think ahead, Li-li.”

  The Void Herald crinkled her nose at the nickname. She never liked it, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

  “And here, I was going to offer you the last remnants of my research as your advancement treasure,” Reili sniffed. “But, maybe I won’t, since you insist on being ridiculous with that nickname.”

  I bowed deeply to her, a mocking smile on my lips. “Oh mighty Void Herald, Master from beyond our pitiful world, please forgive this unruly disciple and shower him with your favor.”

  She rolled her eyes. “In the box. Those vials are filled with blood from just after you took on my core. Should be good for your Gold requirements…if the qi doesn’t burn you to a crisp.”

  “Hopefully it’ll recognize its master.”

  “Right. Hopefully it’s stupid.”

  I shot her a withering look. I should have known she would know about that thing. That thing which I refused to even think about lest the-

  A splitting headache slammed into my mind, as the Labyrinth reared its ugly head. The spirit manifested briefly before my eyes, and for a moment, stone walls surrounded me.

  “Yoru? Yoru, breathe.” Lin was at my side, and I focused on his voice. The smoothness of it was pleasing to the ear and analyzing that made for a nice distraction as I shoved away that thing.

  “I’m fine,” I muttered as I blinked away the hallucination. I was in the Void Hearth. I never left. I was fine. “D-do you have room in the bag for the vials?”

  He nodded and retrieved them for me. “With this, we have everything we need to advance to Gold.”

  “I told you I had a treasure trove here in the Palace,” I answered before turning back to Reili. “How long can you remain?”

  “I think it’s time I went back to being Xinya’s personal guardian, but rest assured, I’ll be watching.”

  “‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ got it,” I translated.

  “I’d never say that, Yoru,” she said, her form beginning to shimmer and fade. “I know it would be asking the impossible.”