Blake didn’t want to spend any more time in his apartment. He’d already left that place behind. So instead, he tested the limits of his ability to stay awake. He filled his Brain Meridian with Honour, keeping it active while he wandered the town.

  Technically, he was still a thrall. In the past, he’d never really cared to learn what the layers of society afforded someone—what benefits, anything. For one thing, he was never going to ascend the ranks as a Blended. Or so he thought. So it was better to hyperfocus on what actually mattered.

  In the ages past, thralls had been slaves and indentured servants. They didn’t even have the rights of a freeman. Now, they were just workers to be bossed around by those more powerful than them.

  With his redcloak, everyone just assumed he was a regular freeman. He could walk anywhere, and no one even gave him a sideways glance. He passed restaurants and smiths, artisans and shopkeepers, and no one even cared.

  The lower city was divided into five districts. The Blended district and three others surrounding Centertown. He didn’t bother visiting Centertown, but he made a loop around the rest of the city, getting a lay of the land that he’d never been able to before. He spotted vendors selling beast cores, which was an income source he figured was worth taking a stab at some point in his life—obviously, beast cores were valuable. He could try selling them himself, if the Silk Fan Traders allowed it.

  But there was so much to do now. So many possibilities.

  As he wandered the town, he tried to make his best guesses at who were the freemen and who were the thralls. Apparently, freemen made up about eighty-seven percent of the Nord population (that was the statistic Mingel had given him before she’d left to go find a place to hide for the night), thralls ten percent, and Jarls the other three percent. Most mana-cultivators that made it to Nascent Soul were Jarls.

  Halfway through the night, he stopped outside a tavern and watched. It was located in a former business district, with buildings that had never been taller than five storeys and decorated in that bland, modern sheen. But the bottom floors had been repurposed into higher-end taverns.

  He sat outside, watching for nearly a half hour as cultivators tossed out people of a lower stage than them, even if they were all freemen. A Foundation stage three cultivator demanded a table from a bunch of Tempering cultivators, and they all willingly gave it up. They left the building like a bunch of whipped dogs, heads down, before making it out to the street.

  And then, as they held the door open, letting pounding music seep out from the building they’d just left, they spat curses at a vagabond wandering down the street in the other direction.

  Blake sighed and turned his gaze away. This was the world of cultivators.

  This was the world he had to build an alternative to.

  He watched for as long as he could, exploring the city until the first glimmers of sunrise lit the horizon. He headed to the ‘east gate,’ which had been built on an old freeway—the old 401 Express, according to the few street signs that survived. It wasn’t a true gate, but instead, an archway that the Fate Monks had built.

  They’d lifted logs into a frame over the highway, creating a trellis over it that marked the entrance to the five districts of the city. It was from there that a fence now stretched out in both directions, wrapping around the outer edge of the city. There were more Merge Mists on the eastern side of the city, but he’d never been in them, and they were far enough away that no monsters ever found their way through the gate.

  The dockyards were just outside. Blake crossed over onto a gravel patch covered in taxi longboats and smaller wooden skiffs that would take wealthy guests up to the manaship or ferry them around the city. Granted, of course, that you had permission to be on the manaship. Thralls couldn’t ascend to it without a guardian of some kind, and the average freeman still needed a permission slip and proper identification.

  The longboats were shaped like ships, like giant canoes, except they had steering vanes sticking out the stern from either side. There were no masts, and instead, mana-engines stuck out the stern from either side, beneath the steering vanes. They were gray cylinders marked with turquoise runes, and most of them glowed with the light of mana in their centers.

  Bricks of Shaped, aspectless mana powered it all. At first, they looked like bricks of turquoise glass, until the ships took off and the thrusters began consuming them. They slowly shrivelled, slowly eroding into nothingness.

  “How the hell do they float?” Blake breathed as he approached. That was the one thing he couldn’t figure out.

  And if he was going to steal the manaship, he was going to have to figure out how this sort of thing actually worked.

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  The boards have been infused with cloud-aspect mana, Ethbin explained. It was a similar process to Wind-Eyes’ staff, but the staff is far more receptive to new energies because of the sand. Imbuing his staff with an aspect is far faster of a process than the wood.

  “So cloud-aspect wood floats?” Blake replied.

  Watch them closely.

  As a longboat rose, its crew cast off a bunch of weights. The ship floated up, its mana-engines trailing bright blue jets of energy, and the wood naturally floating on the air with its cloudy nature.

  “I’d guess the wood itself doesn’t really float or sink,” Blake said. “It’s exactly as heavy as the air.”

  Good, Ethbin replied. You’re getting smarter.

  “Was I stupid?” He winced. “You know, when Mingel calls me an ‘idiot’ she doesn’t mean it. Gullible grandpa.”

  Focus on the task at hand.

  “How does the manaship float, then? It’s made of metal and stone.” The dockyards weren’t directly beneath the ship, but Blake still had to crane his neck up to see it high up in the sky.

  It holds vast wells of cloud-aspect mana in its cargo hold for atmospheric flight, keeping it level so it can float above a city without its thrusters constantly active. But you see those massive tubes sticking out the bottom?

  The manaship itself was shaped like a key, and it floated vertically, with its tip pointing down toward the crumbling skyscrapers of the old downtown. For its tail, two sheets of metal and etched stone sandwiched a row of massive mana-engines. They weren’t active, but they pointed down at the city, ready to lift the ship high up into space.

  “Yeah,” Blake said. “Massive thrusters. Where do they keep all the fuel?”

  Shaped aspectless mana, Ethbin said. If it’s anything like the ships I knew from my time, it’s a resource second only to hacksilver. Shaping mana into a brick requires it to be compressed nearly a hundred times, which makes it perfect for storing fuel. And extremely expensive.

  “So, I’m gonna get a Shaping technique at some point, right?”

  That is up to you, Ethbin said.

  “But Honour can be Shaped, right?”

  Correct.

  “And considering I have a nearly unlimited supply of it, the cost shouldn’t really be a factor for me.”

  Also correct. It means your Shaping will be an especially unexpected tool in battle. But for now, I believe you have some people waiting for you.

  Blake had barely been paying attention as he walked through the dockyards. There was a central aisle between two rows of parked longboats. Dogs fought over a plank of cloud-imbued wood, and a few braided coils of rope ran back and forth across the ground. Mooring lines lay discarded in the thin layer of snow on the ground.

  But at the far end of the dockyards, the Silk Fan Traders stood beside a longboat. Some of the servants they’d brought along had already boarded the fifty-foot long vessel and were preparing to set off.

  “Hey!” Blake called. “I’m here! I made it!”

  Stone Moon dipped his head as Blake approached. “Mr. Blake. We’re glad you could join us. Please find your way aboard.”

  Blake climbed a ramp and swung his legs over the longboat’s gunwale. A Nord cargo inspector paced up and down the ship with a clipboard, stroking his beard. His eyes landed on Blake, and he hesitated for a second, before saying, “That’s a new face. Who’s he? Does he have his paperwork?”

  Stone Moon climbed up behind Blake and said, “He’s a new employee of ours. I’ll get you his forms—he’ll just need to sign on the bottom line—and then he’ll be good to go.”

  Stone Moon disappeared into a tent at the stern of the longboat, which sheltered the fuel supply of Shaped mana bricks, then emerged with a stack of papers. He handed most of them to the cargo inspector, then passed a few sheets to Blake. Blake read them carefully, but it was simply to get himself aboard the manaship. He was only confirming that all the information provided was accurate—his species, the creature he was blended with, his age, the techniques he possessed, and more.

  What was more disturbing was how much the Silk Fans actually knew about him. They knew he possessed a Smite technique and an Augmentation technique, though they didn’t know it came from Honour. They claimed he had a ‘tainted lightning aspect.’

  Blake didn’t bother correcting any of that. He’d rather keep his Honour hidden, still. He handed the forms to the cargo inspector, who nodded then sent Blake and the Silk Fans on their way with a casual wave.

  “I was meaning to ask yesterday,” Blake said, turning to Stone Moon, “but do you guys use mana? I’ve heard that the Cohongs use qi.”

  “Most of our countrymen use qi, yes,” said Stone Moon. “But as Traders, we are expected to learn the ways of the Nords, and that means using mana. None in the Silk Fan Trading Guild use qi.”

  Blake nodded. He didn’t really know the difference, and he wasn’t interested in asking at the moment. He watched the ship’s captain—which was also called a steerman, but it was a lowercase s. These weren’t the Steerman, which was a far more official title given to the ruler of a manaship.

  The captain picked up a brick of Shaped mana and set it down on a stone circle at the ship’s stern. Runes flared, absorbing the mana and chewing away at the brick. It filled the channels with turquoise light and sent bolts of turquoise light running through chains of runes until they reached the thrusters.

  The longboat took off. They lifted up into the sky and raced toward the manaship.