Throughout the Bloodstone continent, I, Feng Sai, am the single most qualified person to state that all cultivators are utter fools.

  I should know; I was one. Feng Sai the cultivator died in a sand covered arena years ago, crushed by my father’s hands. The audience had roared at the spectacle.

  Let it be known that the Patriarch of the Iron Mountain has never been known to be kind.

  They say that when you walk the path of immortality, you shed your humanity, step by step. They’re right. But when I shed my path to immortality, I became something entirely new.

  I was young and stupid then; as all cultivators are. I believed myself to stand above the ranks of the myriad mortals whose backs upheld my family’s empire. As all cultivators do.

  Without cultivators, no mortal city can survive against the spirit-beasts that roam the Bloodstone continent. For every treasure buried here in a lost legacy and ancient ruin, there is a danger proportional. For every blood-red spirit-stone ripped from the earth there was a monster ready to rip apart a mortal for lunch. And for every field of tilled land, there was ten times as much untamed wilderness.

  But without mortals, there could be no cultivators.

  Mortals built the cities. They excavated the ruins. They mined the spiritstone. And they farmed the land.

  Cultivators needed to sleep; that meant houses, beds and walls. They needed the resources the mortals provided. And they needed the food they produced. All cultivators did was kill.

  The great sects on the mountains needed fuel; the mortals paid a tithe in children, fed them into a machine that crushed them down until their sons and daughters were dead and only cultivators remained.

  Do you know how many mortals die for every cultivator who reaches the Second Realm? Forced into the fields, tithed until their crops were gone. Forced into the mines until their hands bled, left to starve when they couldn’t meet their quotas. Pressed into service as fodder atop our walls only to be ripped limb from limb.

  I know the number now.

  These were lessons I learned myself. But the first lesson I learned was the one I had been taught by my defeat years ago.

  Our Feng Dynasty had build an empire atop the spirit stone mines that ran rich through our country. But we had never studied the geology that enables them. We knew that veins ran east to west, that they flowed like rivers, smaller tributaries feeding into gigantic veins that stabbed deep into the earth until they could no longer be followed.

  But no cultivator had ever seen fit to map them out. No governor had combined the information of multiple mining operations, painting a whole picture of the veins of stone that criss crossed our country.

  A few months ago, a mining foreman who had risen through the recently implemented exam system — my recent implemented exam system — pleaded for an audience.

  He offered incomplete maps of the spirit stone veins throughout our territory. And the maps displayed half of a pattern. The spirit stones all stretched from a single region in our territory.

  We agreed to his request, collecting data from the dozen territories to build a complete picture. Dead in the center of the land I controlled, and in the center of the spirit veins that ran through our entire country was a stretch of desert, lifeless land filled with ruins and abandoned. Or so I had thought.

  “The city of Sandgrave lies there, Young Master.” Feng Wen said with a grimace, pouring over the assembled maps in the center of a gigantic planning room. Scholars clamored around the table. A few looked up.

  “There is no city in the desert!” A scholar said.

  “Sandgrave?” I asked.

  “A rogue cultivator city.” Feng Wen replied, to the entire room. “It’s a den of crime and smuggling. Outlaws hide there within the desert, deep enough that mundane beasts of burden will often die on the way. They cross a span of oasis’s that form when the Stormwall breaks.”

  The room erupted into discussion.

  “Any serious effort at taking control of the city under the Feng banner will require more convenient access than waiting for the Stormwall to break.” I said. “What about a formation powered road to keep the deserts heat at bay? Like the Moonshadow’s safe path through their ever present blizzard.”

  “That would bankrupt us.” A scholar in my personal employ immediately replied.

  “We don’t have to build an entire road. Just enough formations to make the oasises and desert lakes permanent.” Another chimed in. Mortal formation experts were rare — they were unable to actually power and create the formations themselves, which left them with pages and pages of untested theories. But that same limitation caused them to have ideas no cultivator would think of.

  Under an ambitious plan proposed by a dozen mortal scholars, we tamed the desert. We carved obelisks from the mountain stone of the Stormwall that pulled down water element qi, condensing water into lakes, and brought the desert to heel.

  Then we tamed the city, executing its criminal lords, enforcing a tax code and importing food, all while launching a quarrying operation that ripped open the desert itself.

  The scholars assured me we would find what we sought at the bottom — a bleeding heart of spiritstone, a vein so massive the income from mining it would dwarf the sum of the Feng territories entirely. An open air quarry that would produce wealth hand over fist — enough to feed every mortal in my territory.

  We refined thousands of pounds of sand into thousands of pounds of spirit-glass, shipping it across my territory. We built mortal institutions — great colleges that pooled the sum of our knowledge into a city that rapidly grew.

  Only dozens of feet beneath the sand, we found something. We expected a heart of Spiritstone worth enough to found a nation. Instead, we found a ruin, uncovering rooftops buried beneath the sand. And we dug deeper still.

  Mortals moved by the hundreds to Sandgraves, scholars and laborers in search of a better life under our reforms, and the city grew. We built atop ancient stone ruins and even carved out houses inside of them, digging downward in the sand to reveal a labyrinthine city; a monolithic ruin, all carved from the earth, and all showed no sign of habitation.

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  We excavated sand from the ruin, unburying traps as we went deeper. A maze of tunnels criss crossed deep below. Sand seeped into previously uncovered passages. The simple excavation turned into the work of years.

  We found the heart of Spiritstone long before we reach the bottom of the labyrinth — and we didn’t tell anyone. No cultivator would even deign to visit Sandgrave — a city now known for being a city of mortals, where the qi was so thin spiritbeasts choked on it.

  So we mined it slowly, kept it secret, and kept digging downward.

  On the Bloodstone continent, almost every great and ancient cultivator left behind a legacy. They were typically dungeons full of challenges, testing the character of potential inheritors and rewarding them for every step along the path. None of them were as massive as the ruin we dug out of the heart of Sandgrave. None of them were as ancient.

  And none were as empty.

  But we preservered. Over years, our scholars compared the architecture to known ruins across the world. We found no matches for the style of building. And we found no treasure. But we kept digging. And we kept building.

  We built more roads that crossed the great desert expanse in the heart of the Feng. Traders no longer had to loop around the desert; by passing through Sandgrave, they could go directly through it. And our city became a hub of trade and center of power. Eventually, we no longer even needed the Spiritstone mines; just the taxes we took were enough to fund our city and schools.

  But I was raised as a cultivator. And cultivators were always greedy for more. So we expanded the schools further, build industry for trade, and with the help of mortal formation masters, built farms in the desert; they were nothing like I would have imagined, buried underground and vertical, but they produced grain as well as fields.

  The exploration of the labyrinth had become a distant concern to me, all but forgotten. Reports passed over my desk of new depths we found. Even weak treasures. But there were no manuscripts left from whoever had buried this legacy.

  So the day we found the artifact, it came as a surprise.

  “We greet the Young Master!” A dozen low ranking cultivator guards saluted with clasped fists as I descended toward the Labyrinthine maze leading deeper into the city.

  A downward ramp of packed sand led into the labyrinth, either side flanked by bowing guards. Above and around me, hundreds of lanterns fluttered in the desert night like blinking stars. The streets were filled with a hundred laborers shoveling away sand that accumulated during the windy day.

  My robes, loose fitting and cool for the desert wind, flowed around me. Feng Wen stood on my right. He wore an unusual grimace on his face, hand resting on his sword.

  Feng Fang stood on my left. He didn’t walk with the air of a born cultivator or noble; he was crude in a way that was immediately recognizable. But he had a pride of his own.

  “Feng Ruoying, reporting to the Young Master!” One of the youngest guards, a scarred women, pivoted and bowed as we approached the descent into the tunnels. Mortals looked down curiously from the city rising from the sand around us.

  “Rise.” I said. “Report.”

  I looked her up and down. Ruoying was one of the rogue cultivators reintegrated into Sandgrave after we took it over and decapitated most of the criminal organizations leeching off of it.

  But her foundation was still wild and unstable, her inherited attributes unusual and unsuitable for most cultivation paths. She would likely never reach the Second Realm due to her foundation.

  Most of these petty criminals had no skills other than fighting. And they weren’t good at that. In Sandgrave, we had no need for cultivators to defend the walls from spiritbeast hordes. The desert was empty.

  We carved out a life for people like her anyway.

  “We found an anomaly in the ruins. We believe… we believe we’ve reached the bottom.”

  I looked to Feng Wen. He still carried a serious look on his face.

  “What’s wrong, old man?” Feng Fang asked.

  Feng Wen’s expression didn’t change.

  “There’s something strange down there. I don’t know how we didn’t sense it before.”

  I focused on my qi sense. But I didn’t feel anything. My senses weren’t as strong ever since my core had been shattered, though.

  “Don’t feel it.” Feng Fang said. “This a second realm thing?”

  “Lead the way.” I turned and waved to the guard. With a nod, she turned and rushed down the corridor.

  The other cultivators flanked us, guarding us as we descended.

  It took us over an hour to descend over handmaid ramps of packed sand and sandstone brick. A series of buckets on rope carried sand away over our head, occasionally spilling out over us.

  Torches and lamps gave way to spiritstone lights deeper down where pockets of bad air rested.

  My mortal scholars said that air pumps were enough to prevent them, but I wouldn’t risk their lives on that.

  In the Feng territories outside of my control, it was well known that the lives of mortals were cheaper than spiritstone lamps.

  I sensed what Feng Wen had from outside the tunnels. The qi in the air shifted. Twisted. Bent. It was wrong intrinsically, like its very existence railed against our world and sought to tear away from it.

  Whatever it was, I knew one thing immediately.

  This is why there was no qi in the air across this desert.

  The cultivator guards led us to an ornate pillar rising from the center of a chamber bigger than any other I had seen in the labryinth. Sand still marred the floor, but it was clear that this building had never been filled with it. Rickety structures hung spiritstone lamps that dimly illuminated sections of a rich, painted ceiling.

  The ceiling depicted a war.

  At the edges, figures of purest black emerged from dark water, fighting with and being torn apart by men and women with glowing wings and halos of fire. Behind the army of winged men, a forest of trees spilled white light from the ceiling like spiritstone lamps. They emerged from a dark as black as night.

  At the center of it all was a figure of a man, swords crossed through his heart. Red veins stretched out from him. His expression was a horrifying, realistic rictus of death.

  I could hear Feng Wen’s knuckles tighten on his sword. My own heart was in my throat. There were no images or records of written words in the labyrinth until just now.

  At the center of it all was a smaller room, thrusting toward the ceiling like a pillar. Ornate doors of complex filligree surrounded each side.

  “When did you find this?” Feng Fang asked hurriedly. “You had time to unearth all of this?”

  “Reporting to the mayor of Sandgrave…” Ruoying started. “This room was empty of sand when we opened the doors. However, we have failed to open the inner doors.”

  I started walking toward the pillar. Something about the doors called to me. A step away, I hesitated.

  “You weren’t able to open the doors?” I asked. I needn’t have. I could see the marks where swords had failed to cut through the metal.

  There was no force calling me here, no magnetic attraction pulling me to the doors. I felt like I stood on the precipice of something. Years of work had accumulated to this moment.

  I placed my hand on the door and pushed.

  The qi in the air shifted. The slow ambient swirl turned into a raging storm as every ounce of power in the labyrinth was sucked downward in a single moment. I flinched, trying to pull backward. White hot pain and power lanced up my arm. I recognized it; a foreign qi forced itself into my meridians, backwards, rampaging inside of me. I grunted my teeth and tried to pull my arm back.

  “Step back Young Master.” Wen said.

  “I can’t!” My face was pale. I buckled as the power reached my dantian, piling in, pooling. Then, in an instant, it poured over my entire body.

  With a grimace, Wen raised his sword. And then he cut.

  An inch from my arm, the world froze.

  A blue box appeared in front of me.

  [Authority Recognized. New user detected: Feng Sai. Language integrated. Anti-Light Scepter integration initiated. Please complete first activation to finish integration.]

  [Damage to the user’s spirit has been detected. Damage will be repaired. Repair progress: 1%]

  [Time Dilation Active]

  [Teleport now? Refusing will end Time Dilation and begin recharge.]

  “Teleport where?” I didn’t say, because my mouth didn’t open. Nothing in the room moved. Feng Wen’s blade descended almost imperceptibly slowly.

  [Countdown: 10]

  More boxes were popping up without disappearing. I couldn’t move, couldn’t react; my body flooded with foreign power.

  The count down didn’t give me time to think. If I said no, I would lose my arm.

  The prompt said it would repair my core.

  [Count Down: 7]

  If I lost my arm, the path to cultivation would be broken for me. I would never be able to reach it again. I had cast aside that life, rejected the path to immortality, and lived among the mortals. The path was already broken.

  [Countdown: 5]

  Of course I wouldn’t choose to teleport. I had no idea the risks or challenges I would face. There was no way healing came for free — I knew that. I couldn’t be so greedy as to try anyway. I could get a prosthetic arm. I —

  [Countdown: 2]

  I was lying to myself.

  [Feng Sai has initiated teleportation]