It wasn’t as if Old Taisei had simply cast him out into the wider world with no idea of where to go or what to do. The first leg of his long journey had been plotted out for him; or rather, flares had been set in the fog of the unknown. Whether he could reach them before they went out, that was up to him.

  He glanced toward that tree of flesh and bone, and began reciting the words that had, over the years, been carved into his skull in ten dozen variations.

  The Proper Invocation of the Sun.

  “Year four billion…”

  One version.

  “...Scutum-Centaurus…”

  Then a second, third, and fourth variation. All recounting the same tale, merely in a different manner, in different terms, refracted by culture and distorted by time.

  “...Sol Aeterna.”

  And the bone tree shuddered, and its trunk split open, creaking apart at a seam in the manner of a mouth.

  Within it waited an orb, one of dark, reflective stone. Reaching out a thread, he pulled it free as swiftly as he could, half-expecting the tree-maw to snap shut. It didn’t.

  The orb rested in his hand a moment, only to draw in a speck of his psionic aura, and it stirred to life. A projection emerged from inside, outlining the surrounding landscape. With a light shake, the projection collapsed into the sphere, and it rose from his hand, floating soundlessly next to his head, just within view.

  An Outrider Corps Mk.V Oculoid. Or, in more reasonable terms, an inside-out navigator, an automap so to speak, made by and for psions in ages past. It knew where it was, it knew its starting point, and, therefore, it could plot a path, compare it with whatever navigational data it had, and create new navigational data, allowing for accurate navigation with no need for constant signal to outside sources of navigational data. Such devices were strictly forbidden from Taisei’s island, or anywhere in its vicinity; there was no navigational data of the route or the island itself, and the old sage wanted to keep it that way. Hence the need for Zanma to pick it up from a dead-drop.

  He didn’t spend much longer atop that cliff. After all, he had a long journey ahead of him. At his will, the White Serpent stirred into motion, ambling back down the enormous shard of black stone that made up the cliff. Just this, just moving the white puppet, demanded eight threads of him; rousing it into combat would demand twelve, and bringing out the giant’s full power was completely beyond him, a full sixteen threads.

  Before him, to the west and north, sprawled out a land of mountains and rivers, but he would not delve into that realm of lost treasure and untold perils; let alone someone of his lackluster provenance, that realm was a halfway death sentence for adventurers by far his senior in experience and raw strength.

  These mountains were no piles of stone at all, they were the shattered remnants of antediluvian megabuildings. The savage scarlet that made up the Sea of Blood flowed from this place, branching out into hundreds of rivers and streams as it carved its path through the land. According to Old Taisei, somewhere, in the far, far north, a wound in the world, a burst artery, gushed forth a divine, royal-blue ichor, and the further it flowed from its source, the further it oxidized, the redder and more akin to the “water” composing the Sea of Blood it became. The sorry state of this region had resulted from tens of millennia of exploitation of that very resource, of endless search and conflicts for extraction points as far “upriver” as possible. The closer to the source, the bluer the liquid, the better its properties, apparently to the extent it was worth fighting wars over.

  In this place, countless evolver sects had risen, fallen, risen again, and fallen again, piling the mountains ever higher and carving out their entrails over the millennia. The Rivers of Blood had carved away at the land, halting only once they reached materials they could not corrode, naturally being less corrosive further upstream, thus causing the channels to grow deeper further down. And thus, estuaries such as this one had come to be, deep wounds in the land sectioned off by cliffs that the waters couldn’t eat away. Trees of bone and flesh grew in scattered groves along the shores.

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  Despite having no intention to venture into the Bleeding Mountains, there was still a reason he had disembarked the Etsutensoku here of all places. Had he merely wanted to be let ashore somewhere away from prying eyes, he could have chosen a landing point closer to his destination of Axis Fulcrum, the Hanging Citadel.

  Old Taisei had laid out two goals for him in this region, two treasures, and doubtlessly trials to go along with them. The first was a tool that could change into countless forms at his whim, and would be with him for the rest of his journey, hidden in an unknown ruin a few days’ travel into the Bleeding Mountains. The second was a lost blueprint, buried on an ancient battlefield far to the south, a battlefield of such scale that it was a region unto itself, the Puppet Graveyard. Such was its vastness, its peril and its bounty, that it had given rise to the second-greatest city of psions on the continent after Axis Fulcrum, and the greatest city of puppetmasters bar none, a churning maw of psychopaths and madmen known only as Puppet City. Zanma had been warned to stay away lest he be drawn into its clutches, and he intended to do so.

  Both were key to completing his inheritance and proving that he was truly worthy of having been chosen.

  As Zanma rode the Serpent down the cliff and made the first inroads west, the first few kilometers, he just took in the scenery at first, but the lengthy nature of the journey quickly sunk in. Not out of boredom, but the difficulty of it; he couldn’t zone out, even if he wanted to. Operating the White Serpent for days at a time and maneuvring it through challenging terrain was, in its own way, an extreme form of endurance training. It was something he had expected, certainly, but actually going through it was different. No wonder Taisei had sent him to the literal middle of nowhere, days of travel from the first nearest settlement; besides getting his hands on the Oculoid, it was also to give him the space to get accustomed to moving around like this. He slowly traced the outskirts of the Bleeding Mountains, descending further and further towards their base, their ominous, geometric silhouettes towering like the bones of dead gods in the all-pervading scarlet fog and clouds. The winds from the Bleeding Mountains rushed down and whipped up the white sand at the riverbanks, exposing tracts of fleshy mud that the bone trees dug into.

  Before long, he settled into a rhythm well enough to split some of his attention towards other pursuits, deciding to take it easy for now and just go over his manuals for the thirteenth or fourteenth time since he had left the island.

  Zanma had inherited two primary manuals: First, the Hadou Armature Method, a slip-scroll of off-white ceramic, with the “start” piece having a distinct shape, and each piece carved with a short description of its contents, able to project holograms of the writings within, controlled directly through psionic connection. Second, the Records of the Rupture King, a solid tablet of dark-grey, controlled in the same way, with the difference that its surface would physically shift to show the contents. Neither of them was a “real inheritance” in the strictest sense, as Old Taisei had put them together specifically for him, and their foundations were unassuming. A “real inheritance” in the minds of fools had to be something completely unlike any contemporary manual, thus someone without the eyes to see would easily mistake these for solid but otherwise normal manuals, so long as he didn’t make the mistake of reading the most pivotal sections in the open.

  The Records of the Rupture King were, according to Taisei, “just the basics and a bag of tricks.” They compiled a vast and wide swath of various psionic techniques and methods, framing them as a narrative to aid comprehension, but, thankfully, there was a more practical manual in the “back pages” for when he needed to brush up on something he had already comprehended.

  Record #1. Skeins of Blood. A refined push-forward thread formation method, as well as another method for solidifying the threads into physical form without needlessly wasting psionic energy doing it by brute force. Instead, this technique would render the threads as a “condensate,” something quasi-physical, but “real enough that the world can’t tell the difference.”

  Castigate, which he had used against Shellhead’s first-wave boarding party, was Record #24 in the Chapter of Yamaxanadu.

  A large section of the manual was dedicated to an extremely thorough exploration of “Territory Collapse Technique” and “Thread Rupture Technique,” both of which were entirely beyond his understanding at the moment.

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