Liu felt it the moment the formation expanded its reach, stretching its vast presence across the entire capital like an invisible net. Alongside it, he sensed the distinct aura of the one person he had hoped—prayed—not to cross paths with anytime soon. His stomach coiled. That presence meant only one thing.

  They were hunting him.

  A slow, resigned exhale escaped his lips as he sat atop the slanted roof of a tall building—less a proper establishment and more a glorified brothel nestled within the pleasure districts. From his vantage, he could see the glittering viewing constructs that floated in the air like oversized scrying mirrors, their luminous projections reflecting the brutal chaos of the second round within the Rift. Thousands had their eyes glued to them, cheering and placing bets, utterly oblivious to the silent war unfolding behind the curtain.

  Tunde had been performing better than expected. He was now stated to be among the top five contenders, with millions of lumens placed on his success. Liu smirked faintly—he himself had wagered on the boy in the first round and had made a rather handsome sum. A gamble, yes, but one guided by instinct, and Tunde hadn’t disappointed.

  He scratched absently at the edge of his blindfold, the scripted cloth always slightly irritating against his skin. It wasn’t just a tool for concealment, it was a necessity—for his safety, his seclusion, and for hiding the truth of what lay behind his eyes. Still, the cloth made him stand out more than he liked. And now, with the Arcanists already active within the capital, the walls were beginning to close in.

  He could feel it—he was slowly being caged.

  That meant someone was leading the hunt. Someone who knew him well. Someone dangerous.

  A frown creased his face as a familiar cold sensation settled into his bones: detachment. The kind he had honed after a year of being hunted, of ducking and weaving through the chaos of a world that no longer had a place for him.

  “No,” he whispered to himself, rising to his feet. He popped the last bite of a warm meat bun into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, then dusted the crumbs from his robe.

  “Not yet. Not now.”

  Liu had lived a life built on uncertainty. For a cultivator of his immense talent, walking the razor's edge of unpredictability had become a strength. If there was one thing Liu Han excelled at above all else, it was eluding expectation—becoming an anomaly in a world that demanded definition. A year on the run had only sharpened that instinct.

  Still, something about the timing of it all unsettled him.

  It was strange.

  The shift in his own fate had coincided with Tunde’s meteoric rise—almost too perfectly. As if some greater force, some ancient hand, had subtly aligned their trajectories without either of them knowing.

  Could it be?

  His mind reached back to the words of the Saint of the Luminous Path—words that had haunted him since his first days on the run.

  “We all dance on the palm of fate… and Bahataba itself.”

  Of course, it was a little ironic, seeing as the saint was Bahataba—at least by title. Liu had heard it was a name passed down across generations, given to the eldest brothers of a sacred sect. Still, the phrase carried weight. Meaning. Intention.

  It was during those early days, escaping the wrath of Arcanist sects and their relentless pursuers, that he’d begun to understand the deeper, crueler mechanisms of fate.

  His hands clenched tightly at the memory.

  His gaze wandered, eyes of the Celestial Scholar peering beyond the capital’s spires and haze. Ethra fluctuations shimmered faintly across the sky like mirages, barely visible to the untrained eye. He could see the web of fate itself straining, bending. Something immense was coalescing.

  Something monumental was about to take place.

  And that terrified him.

  It meant powerful forces were on the move, forces that should not—could not—be converging so soon.

  “But why now?” he murmured aloud, the wind catching his words.

  By all accounts, this was meant to be a simple banquet. A show of power by the Talahan clan, nothing more than a political performance to assure the world that the recent Revenant attacks on their borders were nothing but isolated anomalies. And yet…

  Why did it feel like reality itself was being twisted?

  Why did it feel like someone—or some thing—was tampering with the fabric of existence?

  The convergence was already an overwhelming prospect. Across Adamath, rifts were blooming at an unprecedented rate, affinity crystals, shards and resources appearing in terrifying abundance. It was too much. Too fast. An illusion of wealth hiding the inevitable scarcity that would follow.

  The cultivators were multiplying, the sects swelling with power. And when the resources could no longer sustain them, war would follow. Blood. Fire. Collapse.

  It always did.

  “So why now?” Liu asked again, louder this time.

  “Why hold a banquet, when your enemies are clawing at your gates? When your borders are bleeding?”

  It made no sense.

  The only consistent variable—the one anomaly his mind could trace amidst the chaos—was Tunde. That strange emptiness around him. That void-like presence that twisted the threads of fate until they tangled and frayed, until they meant nothing.

  That was where Liu would hide. Right in the eye of the storm.

  If the Arcanists relied on the probabilities of fate to track him, then there was no better place to vanish than beside the one person fate refused to touch.

  But then, the phantoms came.

  They moved like whispers, like shadows peeling away from the walls. The air around him shifted. He felt his formation array weakening—fraying at the edges. Her presence.

  He clicked his tongue, annoyed.

  Two short staves slid into his hands as he assumed his stance, Ethra subtly flickering around him.

  “If you want to know what I know about your precious heir,” he said aloud, voice calm but commanding, “now would be the time to step in.”

  A figure materialized atop the roof of the building across from him—silent, still, as though it had always been there.

  “Ah,” Liu said, eyes narrowing.

  “One of the Wraiths.”

  His Celestial Scholar's sight pierced the darkness, revealing the weight of shadow she carried. Her presence was like staring into an abyss that stared back. She unsheathed a blade so dark it seemed to devour the very light around it—absolute midnight.

  “I must admit,” he said lightly, twirling his staves, “I didn’t think I was important enough for the Shadow Saint to send her most treasured student.”

  More figures appeared, phantoms lurking just beyond the veil.

  “Are you Liu of the Han family?” the woman asked, her voice barely more than a breeze. Even the winds dared not disturb her words.

  “No,” Liu said with a grin, “I am but a humble cultivator of no particular importance.”

  He tilted his head, blindfold fluttering slightly.

  “Of course… I doubt you’ll believe that.”

  The phantoms shot toward him just as Liu smashed his twin staves together. A ripple of subtle yet potent aura radiated outward, disrupting the flow of their attacks. Their weapons missed him by a hair’s breadth, their calculated strikes thrown off by the reverberating energy of his technique. Liu danced between them, staves whirling like extensions of his limbs, crashing into the phantoms' forms with fluid precision. Their weapons gleamed faintly, hints of paralytic poisons woven into their cores—crafted not to kill, but to disable.

  Of course they didn’t want him dead. That would be too clean. Too easy. He was of no use to them if he died here, and they knew it. But he also couldn’t afford to be captured—not now, not here. Too much was at stake to fall back into her grasp. And quite frankly, Liu had much grander ambitions for himself than being reduced to a prized relic, paraded by a faction so old, so stale, that it baffled him how they hadn’t already crumbled into the forgotten annals of history.

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  The phantoms were good—damn good. If they had joined the banquet’s tournament, the Lords and Highlords hunting him now would be struggling to keep up. Liu snorted at the thought. No, they might have pushed the others to their limits—but not Tunde. Definitely not him.

  It was difficult to define Tunde’s fighting style. It wasn’t technique or brute strength alone. There was something else—something more refined, more elemental. A certain inevitability in the way he fought, like a river eroding mountains. Some called it instinct. Others, divine talent. Liu had a word for it, though he never dared say it in front of the boy: Seeker. A term from the old lores, long buried, forbidden knowledge that only a few in Adamath could even begin to understand. Most of the world had grown ignorant, illiterate to the deeper truths beneath the surface. But not Liu. Not him.

  Of course, the Arcanists—hoarders of secrets and remnants of ancient power—were among the few who had access to such lore. Lore that Liu had… liberated from their grasp.

  At first, it had stunned him to learn they still existed—boldly operating under the auspices of the Talahan Clan no less. But Liu knew better than to underestimate them. And he knew, more than most, that Tunde was no fool. The young man’s deadly, almost primal fighting style was not something to take lightly. Best not to make an enemy of someone like that.

  As two of the phantoms closed in, Liu moved swiftly, weaving runes in the air with his staff tips. In a blink, he trapped them in a formation array—one of his more vicious tools. The array resonated with suppressed emotion, dragging their buried regrets and fears to the surface, freezing their movements in a spiral of hesitation and pain.

  That left him face-to-face with her—the wraith. The wrath.

  The undercities whispered her name only in fear. The Blade of the Shadow Saint. Rumored to be the favored disciple of the Phantom Head himself. No one knew her true identity. No one dared speak it. Her origins were shrouded in mystery. But there was one tale—whispered so quietly it may as well have been a prayer—that claimed she too hailed from the borderlands… the same place Tunde had first appeared.

  That had caught Liu’s attention.

  She shared his dark skin, a rare sight in the inner provinces or this part of the world for that matter. And more intriguingly, her threads of fate had been entirely severed—obscured, hidden from all sight. Clearly the work of the Shadow Saint. And that alone was proof of her value. Liu had long suspected that she was connected to Tunde in ways the world hadn’t yet uncovered.

  But he had tarried here too long. More were coming. And she would come soon, too.

  “I wonder what Tunde would think of you right now,” he said, a soft smile tugging at his lips.

  That was when the shadows moved.

  And Liu knew, with a chill in his blood, that he had said something wrong.

  They came for him like a plague—silent, swift, unstoppable. The air thickened. Reality twisted. Despair wrapped around his senses like a blindfold soaked in mourning. It was the taint of death. Of the absence of probabilities. His Celestial Scholar sight—his most treasured gift—struggled to see, to comprehend. It was like trying to read a book that had never been written.

  This was the true strength of the Phantoms. The sect of hunters sworn to the Talahan Clan. The obscurers of fate. The devourers of hope. They were not just assassins—they were inevitability, given form. And he was their prey.

  But Liu hadn’t survived this long by being unprepared.

  He’d been expecting this.

  And he wasn’t alone.

  An explosion of wind and aura ripped through the rooftop, shredding tiles and sending bodies flying. Screams tore through the air as the entire pleasure district plunged into chaos. No doubt the Veilwardens would descend any moment now.

  Liu dropped down into the building’s interior, landing amidst plush furnishings and perfumed smoke. Talismans flared to life, burning into existence with a burst of gold light. A triple-layered grade 4 obscuring formation bloomed into reality. Every cultivator within Highlord rank and below collapsed into a dreamless sleep. In a moment, the entire building became a ghost’s shell.

  He was moving again in an instant, sprinting through the halls, robes fluttering like shadows in the wind. He had seconds. Maybe.

  Wraiths were relentless hunters, and he had poked one that was already close to snapping.

  Still, the building had once been a smuggler's haven. Beneath its foundations lay tunnels—an intricate web of escape routes snaking out to the district's edge. Of course, the phantoms knew this too. They’d be waiting at the exit.

  Which was why Liu wasn’t heading for the exit.

  He clapped his hands together, forcing his depleted core to give one last surge of power. Ethra flared from him like cracking lightning. The building trembled.

  A rift tore open before him, jagged and raw.

  Without hesitation, Liu dove in—twisting midair just in time to dodge a blade of absolute black that punctured through the rift’s edge, barely missing him. He poured everything into sealing it behind him, his will snapping shut the dimensional tear with a final burst of strength.

  He emerged somewhere else. Somewhere safe—relatively.

  The moment his feet hit solid ground, he tore the scripted cloth from his face, its woven runes unraveling as it attempted to reknit itself. Liu dropped to one knee, shuddering, breath heaving. His core was dangerously close to empty. His body trembled, the last of his Ethra and essence flame burnt out in the jump.

  A deep voice rumbled from the shadows.

  “You have one minute to explain why I shouldn’t cut you down.”

  Liu would have laughed—truly, in most situations like this, he had laughed. But not now. Not with the weight of exhaustion pressing down on him like a mountain.

  Instead, he forced himself upright. Slowly. Carefully.

  “I greet the venerable master,” he rasped, voice hoarse, almost cracking.

  “Still haven’t heard a reason, Arcanist,” the figure said, unmoving.

  Liu finally lifted his gaze.

  Cream robes. Ancient aura. Eyes like mirrors reflecting the past and future all at once. The man before him sat calmly in a wooden chair, yet his gaze pierced through Liu’s very being—into the spinning threads of fate that Liu himself could barely see anymore.

  “Because I bring dire news,” Liu said, his voice steadying. “News that concerns your student. Your heir.”

  The man leaned back in his chair, still as a statue carved by time.

  “Speak,” said Ifa.

  *************************

  Shen Zao stared at the sealed scroll in his palm, seated in the elevated chambers alongside the retinue from Clan Talahan. His fingers traced the intricate seal of the Zao clan, a mark older than many of the empires that now bowed to the Five Great Powers. The wax gave way with a sharp snap as he broke it, the scroll unfurling like a coiled memory, its delicate parchment whispering as it opened. His eyes skimmed the contents, expression unreadable, even as the words burned themselves into his thoughts.

  “Dire news, beloved?” came the soft, composed voice of his wife, Mei Talahan, cutting gently through his reverie.

  He didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he finished the message in silence, rolling the scroll back up with a practiced motion, sealing his thoughts away just as tightly.

  “Nothing urgent,” Shen said after a beat, though his tone was just a bit too neutral to be reassuring.

  Mei’s storm-gray eyes, always perceptive, flicked to him, narrowing slightly.

  “Yet,” he added, watching as she nodded, the unspoken tension lingering between them like static in the air.

  “I’m guessing the Zao clan elders already sense the build-up of the convergence?” Mei asked, folding her arms as she turned fully to face him.

  “Those old bags of bones worry about everything,” Shen said with a snort, though he was careful to keep his voice even.

  “Those ‘old bags of bones,’ as you so charmingly call them, are some of the oldest surviving masters on Adamath,” Mei replied, arching an eyebrow.

  “There’s a reason your clan has held that island city through every incursion, rebellion, and catastrophe thrown at it for the past few centuries.”

  Shen gave a half-smile, the corner of his mouth twitching.

  “Exactly why they’ve remained masters for so long,” he countered, his gaze drifting to the viewing construct hovering nearby.

  Mei’s attention followed his, her focus narrowing on the image of the seeker—Tunde. A storm was brewing in that one, a tempest of potential not yet realized. Shen knew it, and more importantly, Mei knew it. The way she studied him now, her fingers tapping against her elbow, meant she was already laying the groundwork for contingency plans. Shen could practically hear the gears turning in her mind.

  “Talk to me,” she said after a moment—not a command, not a plea. A quiet, deliberate invitation.

  She never ordered him. Not like she did others. He wasn’t some subordinate or a sycophant drawn by her power and beauty. He was Shen Zao—last master of the Zao Blade Style, the Saint of Forging, a power unto himself. And she was Mei Talahan—Stormblade of the Eastern Continent, inheritor of lightning’s wrath.

  “You feel it too, don’t you?” he asked.

  “The bottleneck we’ve been stuck at for so long—unraveling.”

  Mei’s eyes flickered with something he hadn’t seen in a while. Hope. Fear. Resolve. She stood and crossed the room, settling on his leg like she had so many times over the years. Intimate, familiar, grounding. Her body pressed into his, anchoring him even as the weight of fate loomed over them both.

  They had met on a battlefield. A wasteland of blood and ash, where the skies split with lightning and screams. Mei, newly ascended to the stage of master, had been tasked with eradicating a corrupted blood-poison sect—one that had lost its sanity to its own cultivation techniques. Entire heartland regions had been rendered uninhabitable by their madness. Schools had fallen. Clans erased. Whispers spoke of revenant interference, or envoys hiding behind mortal followers.

  Shen, back then, had been a wandering master—following wherever the Song of Blades called. And it had led him straight to that storm. He had watched from afar, fascinated, as Mei carved her name into legend with fire, fury & lightning. No mercy. No hesitation. A force of nature in the form of a woman.

  He’d fallen in love right then and there. Later, he learned that fate—or more accurately, his mother and Jaito—had orchestrated their meeting for political reasons. An alliance sealed in battle. But once he saw her, Shen had never looked back. He told her of his intentions immediately. Mei, true to her nature, leveled her blade at him and said the only way she’d consider it was if he bested her in combat.

  They fought for hours—blade and lightning, steel and storm. In their wake, nothing remained of the corrupted sect. The land itself seemed cleansed by their clash. Shen had achieved sainthood mid-duel, the Song of Blades crowning him as he delivered the final blow. That night, in the aftermath of destruction and rebirth, Rhaelar had been made in their wake. Their daughter, named after the land sanctified by love and war. A private joke between two warriors bound by fate.

  “Indeed,” Mei murmured now, her voice pulling him back.

  “Whatever the Regents are doing... It’s unraveling bottlenecks. The laws feel heavier, more... present. Like they’re inviting us to understand them. Even our affinities have become more responsive.”

  Shen nodded slowly.

  “And Jaito? Still no word?”

  Mei’s features hardened.

  “No. Whatever my father and brother are plotting, apparently I’m not worthy of knowing.” Her voice was flat, but the pain was there—buried beneath layers of control.

  Shen sighed, running a hand through her hair.

  “Kael Talahan has the empathy of a corpse and the warmth of a glacier. I’ve never once wished to meet the man.”

  “He rules half a continent like it’s a game,” Mei muttered.

  “We’re all pieces to him.”

  “Well,” Shen said, his tone sharpening slightly, “whatever he’s playing at, it has the Zao elders preparing for the worst. They’ve summoned me back. My presence has been formally... requested.”

  Mei looked into his eyes, her hand slipping into his. Her grip tightened.

  “Remember what we said?” she asked, voice suddenly firm with steel.

  Shen nodded.

  “Family over all.”

  “And that family includes me, you, and our utterly infuriating children,” Mei added, her lips curving into a smirk.

  “Careful, you’ll break Varis’ heart,” Shen chuckled.

  Words were left unspoken, hanging in the air between them like storm clouds. The drums of war were faint but unmistakable now, their rhythm pulsing through the very soul of the world. Two masters, side by side—knowing that change was coming.

  And they would face it, as they always had.

  Together.