My time in the library made me comfortable with handling old tomes, so I headed straight for the bookcase and went to work. Most of the volumes I found were even older than the ones I’d catalogued over the summer. They were bound between heavy metal or bone covers, laced together with thick bands of leather or copper wire. Languages I’d never seen before ran down their spines. That would make things a lot more difficult. With a frustrated sigh, I plucked the first volume from the shelf at random, carefully opened its cover, and scanned the contents.
There was little writing on the thick vellum pages. Arcane drawings littered with runic symbols covered most of them. I carefully combed through three more books and found nothing more intelligible than I’d seen in the first.
That trend continued for the next two hours as I pored over one book after another. While the books didn’t do me any good, I made a careful stack of those that looked most promising based on the snatches I could decipher. One phrase, the winds of jinsei, jumped out at me from one of the more modern volumes, and I placed the book on the shelf right in front of me. In the worst-case scenario, I could bring some of these back to Librarian Tanoki for his input. Maybe he could find something between their covers that I couldn’t.
It was nearly midnight when I decided to call the search for the day. No one had stumbled into a trap, thankfully, but working ourselves past exhaustion would only hurt us in the long run. We’d end up breaking something or tearing a vital page, and then we’d have nothing to show for our efforts. In the instant before I could call out to my friends, though, Clem half-shouted my name and urged me to come join her.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” She held a strange booklet out to me, and I gingerly lifted it for a better look.
The thin volume’s pages weren’t paper, vellum, or even cloth. They were crystalline plates, their surfaces covered with intricate scrivenings that contained the telltale markings of a circuit just waiting for jinsei to trigger it. I studied the inscribed arcs and whorls on the first page but couldn’t decipher their purpose. It could’ve been a translation script.
Or a trap more devious than the one at the door.
“This is incredible,” I said. “What do you think it is?”
“Well,” she said, “that’s some advanced scrivening work, so it’s hard for me to say for certain. But look here...”
Clem was far more adept with scrivenings than I was, and I hoped she could figure this out. She tilted the book so we could both examine it at the same time.
Clem traced a design with the tip of one finger held just above the crystal page. She started, frowned, stopped, then started again. After a minute, she blew her hair out of her eyes and shook her head.
“There’s something there about memory and dreams. But there’s so much more that I can’t understand.” She frowned and turned the book back to me. “I don’t think it’s dangerous, but I also don’t know what it does. It’s like... Not a different language, exactly, but a different conceptual framework. It’s much older than anything I’ve ever seen.”
Frustrated, I peered at the page, willing it to reveal its secrets to me. It remained silent, though, and I knew the only way to get more answers, good or bad, was to feed jinsei into the contact points on its front cover.
Something about the book called to me. There was a strange sense of familiarity, not just in the scrivenings that filled its pages in a continuous circuit, but in the feel of the thing in my hands. It was as if I’d held the tome every day of my life.
My pulse quickened, and the hairs across the back of my neck and down both forearms rose. I had to know the secrets held on those crystal pages.
“Keep an eye on me, please,” I said to Clem. “I’ll trigger it and see what happens.”
“It’s your funeral,” Clem said. “Just kidding. This won’t kill you. Probably. I think.”
That wasn’t exactly comforting, but putting my life at risk was nothing new. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d been seriously wounded or threatened with death. It was another day in the life of an Eclipse Warrior. Or, now, the chaos core.
A thread of jinsei uncoiled from within my core and wormed its way through the air to touch the connection point. The circuit completed with a sharp snap, and more of my jinsei oozed into the scrivening pattern. The sound of distant voices tickled my ears, and the scent of woodsmoke teased my nose. My eyes closed, just for a moment, and I glimpsed a cave, dancing flames illuminating the strange drawings that covered its limestone walls. Voices grew louder, then faded when my eyes opened again. The silver light of jinsei filled the scrivening from end to end.
The world around me vanished.
I found myself crouched in front of an old woman. The weight of years had etched wrinkles into her face and leeched the color from her long, braided hair. But she held her spine stiff and straight, her shoulders square. The light of life still danced within her eyes, though aspects of disease and decay clung to her aura like bloated ticks. She’d lived a long life and reached levels of power none of us living could even dream of. But, master cultivator or not, she had failed to achieve immortality. The time would come, and soon, when her core would fail, and death would claim her.
We were not alone gathered within her small home. Others were crowded around the fire with us, their shadow forms indistinct, eyes sharp as scalpels. The
