Chang-li couldn't move his shield in time to stop the wave of shards from the exploding pillars but Min dropped her bow, letting it dissolve into lux, threw out her hands, and a red lux shield sprang up around them. It wasn’t as strong, and it lasted only a heartbeat, but that was all it took to knock the shards of dark jade away.

  The room fell to pieces.

  The ceiling cracked and shattered around them, great blue chunks falling, smashing through the floor. Where they hit, they left holes. Bright rainbow light gleamed through the holes overhead. The ceiling had been replaced with a shining field.

  The soldiers dissolved into lux where they stood, their streams of lux flowing around the room, circling like a vortex with its tip centered on the Emperor. The glowing green barrier still surrounded him.

  Now, Chang-li stood on a shattered floor. Chunks of jade tile were missing all across its surface. The walls and ceiling were simply gone. They stood on a broken tile platform with a dais and throne at one end, surrounded by a glowing rainbow-colored void.

  Chang-li reached out with his senses and recoiled. Beyond was nothingness, but nothingness with substance to it. It was like the space around the Morning Mist treasure room. This was a place between places in the void, and that substance all around him was, had to be, Lumos.

  Sun Wukong thrust his parasol through the chest of the majordomo. The man fell to his knees, his own lux unraveling.

  "Chang-li!" Sun Wukong bellowed. "Break the token, set me free!"

  The Emperor rose to his feet. lux streamed into him from all around. He was radiant with it. He stepped down, and the green field around him pushed forward, knocking Sun Wukong back to the shattered floor.

  "Fools," he said. "You cannot hope to match yourselves against me." His will pulsed. Chang-li lost his grip on the loose lux he was pulling in. Every bit of lux in the room rushed to the Emperor at once.

  Chang-li gasped for air. He forced himself to cycle what was in his core, keeping it inside his veins. Hiroko had collapsed to her feet. Min was looking grim. Joshi stood with head bowed.

  Chang-li reached into his pocket for the token. He found it there, cool under his fingers.

  The Emperor raised a hand.

  Chang-li snapped the token, and the red band around Sun Wukong's head vanished. "No!" the Emperor shrieked. "No! What have you done?"

  Wukong howled triumphantly, throwing his head back, his arms up. His copper-colored hair lengthened, growing past his shoulders, down his back until it reached nearly to his knees, tied so tight at the back of his head and down its length that when it swung around his legs it looked like a great tail. He glowed, and Chang-li saw how he reached out to touch the Lumos all around.

  The Emperor gestured. The great green barrier sprang outward, washing past the others until it surrounded all of them, a bubble against the Lumos beyond. As it passed him Chang-li felt it sweeping away lux. The area inside the shell of green was a void of no lux.

  "I can still do this much!" he shouted. "You will die with me."

  Sun's face was strained. He turned to Chang-li. "Help break the barrier."

  Chang-li felt his lux slipping away from him, trying to dissipate into the lux-void around them. He cycled it throughout his body, keeping a tight hold on it, strengthening himself, and pushed forward. He took a deep breath and summoned his sword. The act of cycling helped him grip it firmly.

  The effort to summon his blade left Chang-li trembling and clutching Liar’s Blade in his left hand. He didn't have the lux to spare for a copy or for any technique.

  Sun pointed both hands toward the Emperor and howled.

  A barrage of techniques rocketed out from him. Most faded before they reached the Emperor and the few remaining techniques had as much impact as a splash of water against a mountainside. The Emperor remained impassive.

  "Need you to pierce the barrier," Sun said through gritted teeth. "He can't touch the Lumos, but I can."

  Chang-li looked around. The Emperor stood on the steps of the dais, twenty feet away but the closest point fo the barrier was behind Chang-li. He turned and shuffled toward it. The air felt heavy and seemed to push against him.

  He stretched out his will, seeking, pushing. They could feel the barrier all around them, created of dense lux, under the command of a will many times stronger than his own.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The barrier was impossibly far away. But he tried anyway, picking up his foot, forcing it forward.

  The Emperor stood, unmoving.

  Chang-li focused. He could hear the many notes the Emperor was weaving into his own techniques, feel his Intent stretched, and he realized the Jade Emperor was at his limit. This shield took so much of his strength and power. He couldn't spare any more. He was putting all of himself into it, and trusting it to defend him from Sun’s attacks. He might look invulnerable. But he was not.

  "Joshi," Chang-li called, forcing the word through his lips, and in an instant, his friend was at his side, thanks to the treasure he wore on his feet.

  "What is it?"

  "Barrier."

  "You have an idea?"

  "I do," Chang-li said. "Need to reach it.”

  “Just this once,” Joshi agreed. He seized Chang-li's arms, lifting him from the ground, and with a rush of wind, they were suddenly twenty feet forward at the barrier.

  Chang-li forced the lux from his core, pouring as much he could into his sword. It shook and hummed with the effort.

  He was pushing much too much lux into the blade. This wasn’t a high enough-level weapon for what he was trying. He knew it was dangerous to put more into a blade than it could take, but he had to find a way.

  He stabbed hard into the barrier. The sword stuck, then stopped. He felt the lux he had poured into it bleeding away. He yanked the sword back as the last of the sword’s lux was consumed.

  Something caught Chang-li’s attention. The last scrap of lux still on the blade had been indigo, at the very tip of the sword. The tip that had poked into the barrier.

  Quickly, he filled the sword again with as much indigo lux as he had left. Then he leaned forward and shoved it against the green barrier.

  The sword sank in deep.

  The green barrier shattered, and the light beyond swirled in, rushing through them. Tendrils wound about Chang-li, his friends, the Emperor, and Sun Wukong. The damaged floor beneath them glowed, the holes filling in with rainbow light.

  The Emperor shouted, “No!” He stepped forward off of the dais and hung in mid-air over the shattered floor. Light suffused him. “You fool, you’ve trapped yourself here too!” he shouted at Sun Wukong. “The ones beyond, they won’t let you keep it!”

  Chang-li stretched out his perceptions, feeling. The space all around him hummed, full of power, Lumos. He couldn't touch it, but he could feel it, and feel the confines of their strange space that wasn't a space. Beyond, he could feel its edges, and pushing against them, two great powers, as though two different places in the surrounding space were being pushed in.

  The General and Prism Eri, he guessed, ready and waiting for someone to open this tower and let them in.

  Sun Wukong raised his eyes. His face was glowing. His eyes were balls of whirling light. He spoke, and his voice resounded. He lifted off the ground to face the Emperor, surrounded by a nimbus of power of his own. Lumos was responding to him, swirling around. Chang-li could see it, mostly by the way it affected the lux in the room.

  “You thought you could imprison me,” he said. “Now, taste your doom.”

  He thrust both hands forward. A beam of pure power rushed out of him, pure white light, too bright for Chang-li to look at. He turned his head away as the beam struck the Emperor.

  The Emperor screamed, an unnatural sound that went on and on. The beam died away.

  Chang-li looked back. Sun Wukong hovered in the air, panting, the nimbus around him noticeably diminishing.

  The Emperor lay on the ground. Chang-li assumed him dead, but even as he watched, the Jade Emperor pushed himself up to a kneeling position and began drawing in lux again.

  “Finish it,” Sun croaked to Chang-li, nodding at the blade in his hand. “Thrust your blade through his core.”

  Chang-li strode over, holding Liar’s Blade in his left hand. He looked down at the Jade Emperor. The man looked weary and tired.

  “You don't know what you're doing… doing,” he said softly. “You are not ready… for this.”

  “Do it,” Sun called.

  Chang-li hesitated. He knew Sun was hiding something from him, and while he expected the Jade Emperor might say anything to try to survive, what if Sun was setting him up?

  “Why don't you do it?” he called.

  “The Lens in your soul will protect you from the backlash,” Sun Wukong said. He descended to the floor and produced two items, which he held out to Min. “The Codex I promised you. Telling about conditions in the Heavens a few hundred years ago. And the seed of the weapon, just as I pledged. You'll have to learn to nurture that yourself.”

  He strode forward to stand beside Chang-li.

  “Do it,” he urged again, “and quickly. Your ally is looking for an entrance.”

  Chang-li turned to Sun. “What do you mean by backlash?”

  Sun Wukong snarled. Then, faster than Chang-li could react, he seized Chang-li's arm and thrust the sword forward, shoving the point of Liar's Blade into the Emperor's chest.

  Power flowed from the Emperor into Chang-li, denser lux than he had ever touched before. It raced up Liar's Blade and into his open lux channels, down into his core, where it burned and seared.

  His left-side channels, optimized for physical luxes, were overwhelmed with the sheer amount of spiritual lux he was sucking in. His core raced, the Lens humming a discordant note as his cycling went to pieces. It was a raging torrent, and if he tried to exert the Waterwheel, he knew it would merely rip him to shreds. He tried to divert the lux to his right channels. It was like one fish trying to redirect a river.

  His ears roared.

  There was pain, so much pain, like every inch of his skin was on fire. It moved in deeper, searing his bones, his channels, his body.

  Too much. Too much. This was worse than the moment he had first bonded the Lens.

  He could hear Joshi shouting angrily from far away, hear Min crying out. Then there was a blessed coolness washing over him. He felt the pain diminish. The torrent was there, but an outside will clamped down on him, urging the torrent to behave.

  He opened his eyes. Noren was standing there, face full of concern.

  “I wasn't expecting this,” Noren said. “Quick, where's the Temporal Crystal?”

  Chang-li could only gasp. His heart was racing and he struggled to control his cycling.

  Min stepped forward and snatched the crystal from around his neck, holding it out. “What do you need to do?” she asked Noren. “What happened to him?”

  “I should have foreseen this,” Noren said.

  And then the rushing torrent once more overwhelmed Chang-li, and he sank down into darkness.