Rather than actually beeline straight to Yao’s paper-walled fortress, Krahe bumbled around the city for a short time and eventually made her way to Gashward Road. There, she found nothing. No deliveries waiting for her at the nearby shrine, and no signs of break-in. Everything was exactly as she had left it, if dusty.

  And so, she waited, passing the time in any way she could, making for Yao’s only when the time felt right. The talisman mistress, unlike Garvesh, expressed not an iota of worry for Krahe’s life.

  “Two months or two years, I don’t care,” the old monster shrugged. “I saw that you yet lived, and that you would return in time. That was enough. The changes you have undergone, on the other hand, I cannot ignore. You seem to have failed to mention anything regarding your cultivation.”

  Krahe genuinely wasn’t sure what she meant by that.

  “What cultivation? Remember, I am not familiar with your terminology.”

  “Your soul furnace. It has been altered. Multiple times. You have clearly undergone a forced advancement, but the path… Have you omitted your possession of a cultivation manual tied to the Hexkey? But it does not seem to be anything of Shang’s design, how strange.”

  “It was part of the Atomica’s impntation-quenching. You didn’t expect this?”

  “Why would I? The odds were miniscule, and, I admit, I foolishly expected you to know what to expect from a voidkey of this level — and thus, to know what was abnormal. Come. Tell me precisely what took pce, for all I know you run the risk of bursting your soul furnace each time you cast thaumaturgy, if not exploding altogether. It is not my pce to stop a stranger from committing suicide, but I will not have my escape route colpse itself.”

  Krahe half-wanted to simply mention that there had been issues and that they had been resolved, but she managed to convince herself to show a greater degree of trust than that by eborating to greater detail on the Atomica, the Fourfold Astral Implosion Furnace, and the issues that resulted from her foolhardy decision during the raid.

  “Well, your decision was not as foolish as you might think, at least. I have seen far uglier examples of forced advancement in my time. Without your friends in the church, assuming you came to me, I could have had you using the Atomica with minimal side effects within a year at most. I suspect you will say that you do not have such time.”

  “I wanted to say that about the two months the church asked of me, but I had no choice in the matter, and would not have a choice were your theoretical course of events to take pce either.”

  “You mentioned four of these… Control rods, was it? Was that the limit of your method?”

  “Six. The number isn’t fixed, as far as I know.”

  “A unique thauma-burning method that evolves the user’s thaumaturgy, improves efficiency, and allows for gradual advancement, at this early a stage. The world truly is vast beyond reckoning,” the talisman mistress remarked, chuckling to herself with clear disbelief in her voice. “Perhaps, without a curse to fuel, the remnant will Shang left within the Hexkey helped condense some profound knowledge of yours into that thauma-burning method. Does it seem to have any retion to the words you uttered during the transmutation ritual?”

  Krahe looked at Yao for a few seconds, considering what to say, whether to even bother trying to expin or to just say yes and move on. She considered expining the Solomon atomic transmutation reactor, the mysticism and ritualism involved its design, and how it was an early example of psychokinetics being applied on a rge scale. In the end, she decided to simplify things.

  “Yes. My Astral Implosion Furnace mimics the operation of a great machine that transmuted pure materials into other materials through physical phenomena and harnessed a subtle kind of magic that allowed pure force of will to manifest as physical force. I don’t yet understand the transmutation machine or this world’s magic well enough to transte it in a way you would understand.”

  “That which can be conveyed through words alone is not truly profound. What you’ve said has already answered the question I had, that being the reason you decided on that particur incantation. The fact it so directly paralelled the ritual expins why it worked so well. Now, I believe you had a reason to come to me, yes? I didn’t take you for one to commit an unannounced visit for company’s sake.”

  “Where to start, where to start…” Krahe hemmed and hawed, summoning a cigarette. She lit it, took a drag, and let out a smoky sigh, looking around the room, sweeping her eyes over the many talismans pstered inconspicuously over the walls. While many were camoufged into the stone, just as many were pinly visible, if one had the eye to look at them. And yet, they refused to be noticed. Krahe had to fight to keep her eyes from slipping off them, and even then, they bled together. Finally, she looked at Yao.

  “Some of those,” she nodded in the general direction she had just been looking. “I mean to open up a detective agency with a public-facing office. I’ll need proper security. If I am to open myself up for attack like that, I’ll need to turn the pce into a paper fortress of my own.”

  “Alright, I can help you set up security — only the basics,” Yao said. With a gesture, a scroll flew off of a shelf and onto the coffee table. “The rest, you’ll have to do yourself. I’m not a charity, and I don’t expect that my preferred security measures would suit you. You can cook up your own traps. Come back to me when you have the location. What else?”

  She sounded impatient, almost disinterested, clearly expecting something more interesting. Krahe figured she shouldn’t be surprised — securing a location must come as second nature to this old monster.

  Akaso