Kael tapped his knife against the metal a few times and listened to the ring.
"It's not the right one…"
He murmured to himself
Swordsmanship had become untraditional generations ago. Almost no pathway required it to reach its full potential. But that was precisely what made it valuable. Nobody had experience facing a sword user. Combined with the pathway he had created, it formed a hidden advantage that most opponents wouldn't know how to account for. The problem was one he had only recognised after Ina melted his blade.
He could infuse a new blade with the Stern mote or something similar, but the foundation the mote was placed on still mattered. And because swords were a dying tradition, finding quality steel was hard. Not to mention the blacksmiths too, had faded with the blades.
He had considered forging one himself, but smithing wasn't something a person picked up on a whim. It was knowledge passed down through generations of practice, refined over decades. He suspected it was one of the skills that would remain out of reach in his lifetime.
But to even start forging it, he'd need to find the right metal first.
Asterite, ideally. A black metal with twice the hardness of tungsten but the forgeability of ordinary iron. Rare by any measure. It only appeared when a parasitic fungus grew on gold and nested there for centuries, and the fungus itself had been a mystery since humanity first learned to write. Nobody had ever managed to replicate it.
'Seems like I'll have to ask him after all.'
He climbed onto Ina's head.
"Are you willing to change the deal?"
Jian looked at him with the same carelessness he always did.
"Oh? I'm listening."
"Asterite. Help me find Asterite and I'll allow you one question about my rank suppression."
Jian didn't jump at it. He turned his gaze forward instead.
'Of course.'
Kael followed his gaze.
It wasn't the answer that drew Jian. It was the question itself, and the particular pleasure of chasing something that kept refusing to resolve. Give him the answer and the game was over. Keep the mystery alive and he had a reason to stay curious. Kael had offered to shorten the journey when Jian had no interest in arriving.
'I should have considered that.'
He sighed inwardly.
It was easy to forget when talking with someone of this rank. Intelligence at that level created the illusion that logic was the primary driver, that decisions were made from a position of pure reason. But logic wasn't what moved people. Not really. History did. Ambition did. The particular shape of what someone had lost or wanted or feared. Every worldview, no matter how sophisticated, was built on a foundation of personal experience and feeling, assembled over a lifetime of specific moments that left specific marks.
People believed their decisions were dispassionate, and because of this, they were often the last to see that they weren't.
From Kael's position, stripped as far as he could manage from sentiment, those decisions looked different. Not wrong or inferior in any absolute sense. Just shaped by forces their owners couldn't fully see because they were standing inside them. A person couldn't read the room they lived in the way someone standing outside it could.
He would have to remember that.
After a while Jian looked over his shoulder and flashed a smile.
"I know where there's Asterite. I can show you, but you don't need to give up a hint. The extra time it takes to get there will be enough."
Kael gave a small nod.
"Then it's decided."
Ina dropped from a root and fell into Ocean Yunara. Their clothes were soaked instantly as a wall of water vapour rose from her skin.
"A small detour, but that's the deal."
Kael nodded again.
Asterite was available in Sole, but priced higher than diamond. Its qualities made it ideal for weapons, but its rarity had pushed it in a different direction. Noble families had claimed it for jewellery, and made it a sign of prestige.
Even accounting for every mindstone Kael had earned across his entire life, it wouldn't have been enough for a sword's worth.
—
Ina swam for almost two hours before slithering onto an island. The climate was a lot warmer than on main land, and the vegetation had changed to something more tropical.
'Volcanic origin?'
He picked up a black rock, answering his own question.
"This is where we'll find it?"
"Yes and no." Jian started. "Finding a natural vein of Asterite would be impossible down here, but there's an insect that enjoys collecting shiny things."
Kael glanced ahead.
Thick bushes and densely packed trees stood before them.
"An insect? Do you have a sensory mote to locate it?"
Jian looked at him with mild confusion.
"Oh." A small laugh. "We don't have to do anything. It's been a while since Ina has eaten, so we'll let her hunt while we rest."
Kael gave him a doubtful look.
He had no objection to the resting part. But an insect large enough to feed Ina required some mental convincing to picture.
"There's a natural hot spring near the centre. That's where I'm headed at least." Jian said, stretching. "I'd recommend the same. The beetle she's hunting is extremely sensitive to human scent."
Kael followed him toward the centre of the island.
"Why do you know so much about the Depths?"
He kept his voice casual.
Jian stepped onto some white rocks and began removing his hanfu. Light clinks echoed as the decorative stones struck each other.
"That would be information worth a reward. If I don't figure you out first."
He said it with a smile.
Kael removed his military cape. He had considered repairing it with the primordial eye's tendrils but decided against it, in case he encountered someone like Jian. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and stepped in.
The water was warm, on the verge of burning, but once he adjusted every muscle he had started to loosen.
He tilted his head back and worked the water through his hair, bringing the white back to something close to blinding.
Kael sighed.
"Jian. What is required to pass the burden of dreams?"
Jian had been dragging a leaf through the water. He stopped and looked up.
"You're a noble, aren't you? Do you really not know?"
"By blood, yes. By acknowledgement, no."
A faint smile played at Jian's lips.
"I see. Many nobles disagree with their own families. You're not so different from what you think."
Kael watched Jian lean his head back with a thoughtful expression.
"Burden of dreams."
Jian murmured it like he was tasting the words.
With that question came more questions. So, so many of them.
If he truly appeared rank one, then what people called Luminaire aura couldn't be based solely on Will current, soul brightness, or Thought capacity. It had to be something else he didn't have a name for yet.
That was the least of his concerns however.
Even comparing himself to a year ago, he was objectively a better and more knowledgeable refinement Luminaire than he had been when he first advanced to rank two, or rank three for that matter. So why hadn't he advanced again? If ranking up was built on deepening understanding, and his understanding had deepened considerably, he should have progressed by now.
But he hadn't.
Which meant something specific. Something that, as far as he could tell, no Luminaire in recorded history had ever needed to figure out.
The resurrection had reset his rank to one. But it hadn't reset his understanding. Which meant the understanding he now carried, the understanding of someone who had lived through rank two and rank three and studied beyond both, was compressed inside a rank one framework.
Kael's hand stilled in his hair.
And if that was true, what came next was worse.
Would his soul grow stronger when he advanced? Would his Will current deepen? Would his Thought reserves expand? And if the answer to those was yes, then advancing through the ranks again wasn't just difficult. The scale had tipped so steeply it bordered on insane.
To reach rank five he wouldn't need to advance five times. He would need to advance seven. And if each of those advancements required the understanding appropriate not to where he was but to where his soul already stood, then the enlightenment needed to climb from rank four to rank five might be comparable to what a normal Luminaire needed to reach rank seven.
He sat with that for a moment.
The burden of dreams indeed.
"The advancement from rank three to four." Jian lifted a hand toward the darkness above, absently. "I remember being stuck at that stage for almost a year."
Kael almost choked.
People died of old age before climbing past the burden of dreams and he had done it in a year?
"That's the tricky part about advancing. Reading won't help at this stage. Not really." Jian let his hand fall back into the water. "Think of it this way. From rank one to three, advancement is about acquiring. New knowledge, new understanding, new territory within your pathway. Each rank is a door you open by finding the key."
He paused.
"But rank three to four is different. The door doesn't have a new key. It has the same keys you've already collected, and it asks whether you truly know what they open."
Kael said nothing.
"Most people who reach that height get tunnel vision. They arrived there by constantly moving forward, by always reaching for something new, so they keep doing that. They go looking for more keys. But there are no more keys. The advancement isn't asking what else you know. It's asking whether you understand what you already know, completely, down to the bone."
He dragged the leaf through the water again slowly.
"It's like spending years walking through a forest gathering everything you find. Stones, leaves, roots, bones. Filling your arms until you can barely carry it all. And then someone stops you and says, before you take another step, tell me what each of those things actually is. Not what it's called. What it is, why it exists, and how it connects to everything else you're carrying."
Jian glanced at him.
"So that's what the burden of dreams is. Not a wall but a mirror. It shows you everything you collected and asks whether you were ever truly paying attention."
He settled back.
"When the knowledge stops feeling like knowledge and starts feeling like instinct, when you don't have to think to understand something within your pathway, and the answers arrives before the question finishes forming, that's when the door opens."
Kael sank deeper into the water.
"So I have to re-learn everything again?"
"Yeah. Something like that."