The Aegis Knight and Rive Knight bore Galyn’s Shield and Tolyn’s Blade respectively. Twin Archmages Galyn and Tolyn created the items. Galyn elected to craft a shield with his soul stone to make full use of his affinity for the Font of Barriers. His brother’s affinity for the Font of Severing made for a great blade. These two artifacts would only ever Bond siblings, and those knights were always kept as a pair. The Rive Knights magic could create a field of destructive severing on a microscopic level that even the blade’s wielder ws not safe from, but the Aegis Knight’s Barrier magic could protect them both. These items are not picky in Bonding their wielders, so long as they are siblings. If one of the pair dies, the Bond with the survivor fails—unless they have another sibling ready to take up the Bond.
-Bladed Knights by Kysin, the 195th High Librarian
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It was the eleventh week of the semester when the rift finally closed. Life in Edgewater had persisted as it normally did while it was open, but everyone existed in a much more furtive state. Visible from all over the city, extending hundreds of feet up into the sky like a jagged scar in reality, people’s eyes tracked towards it throughout the day, reminding them of the interdimensional war being waged all through Basin.
Knowledge of the suspected remnant of the Midian empire had been made public after the rift. The various governments on the continent releasing what they knew of the threat, while also sharing some of what they’d been working on to combat it.
There had been some initial panic, but life did eventually return to normal as the feared threat never manifested. Everyone knew they were preparing an invasion, but no one knew when or where it would occur.
Contact with Amara had grown scarce in the two months following their return from that other realm. They’d seen her in their home and on Saturdays briefly, but she spent every spare moment working with her mentor and idol on a solution to the rift—both trying to close it and prevent new ones from opening.
They knew it would be impossible to stop them from opening rifts in the Material Realm entirely, but they figured so long as they could ensure rifts didn’t open within the defended cities of Basin, that every city could weather this threat as they had countless other—invasion from monsters from in and beyond the realm was a fact of life after all, one every city dedicated vast quantities of their resourced combating.
Kole had been walking to class when the rift began to flicker in the sky before rapidly shrinking away to nothing. It happened so quickly and left not a trace that it was easy to imagine that it hadn’t ever been there.
He stopped on campus, marveling at the sky along with everyone else until his gawking was about to make him late for class.
He made it to class to find Professor Tailor present once more. The Spatial primal had been sporadically absent the past few weeks, consulting regularly with those at work on the problem of the rift while also serving as a liaison with the think tank of ‘eggheads’ back in the Hollow Peak who were studying the rift’s Spatial properties for a clue as to the nature of this newly discovered realm.
Their results had been inconclusive.
In his absence, other professors and some teaching assistants had filled in, making the classes less visually stunning, but slightly less monotonous.
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Tailor greeted the class with no indication that anything special had occurred outside and began his lecture. It was only after a student asked him to comment on the rift that he even acknowledged it had been sealed.
“Ah, yes,” he said, as if he’d been reminded he’d left a door open. “My colleague Professor Donglefore devised a series of runes to break the congruency between here and this other realm.”
“Why did it take so long?” another student asked.
“Well, you see, breaking Spatial congruencies is normally a simple process, but the normal means of doing so all failed. They found that a series of interdiction runes around the rift served sufficient to cancel out its effect. They are now in the process of copying those runes around the city itself. You will find—should you have the requisite skills—that in the coming days it will be impossible to teleport into or out of Edgewater, or send message spells out. The Fonts of the Mind and Space will be blocked from passing through, though they will not be cut off, so magics of those types within the city should operate as usual—so long as you keep the destination within the city.”
“Any further questions?” he asked, but his overly detailed answer had lost the interest of the crowd.
The rift closing was the sole topic of conversation all over campus, and despite the task’s completion, Amara was still absent from the group's nightly dinner.
“Can we talk about something other than the rift tonight?” Zale asked the group over dinner.
Kole was at a dining hall table with Zale, Rakin, Doug, and Mouse—who had begun to join them in an attempt to get to know his friends better.
Kole found Mouse’s presence to be fine, if subtle and forgettable. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say she was using his Fade ability, as it was entirely too easy to forget she was there during a conversation.
“Are you guys going to the dance?” Doug asked, complying with Zale’s request.
“No,” Rakin said.
“I want to,” Zale said, giving Rakin her ‘we’ll see about that’ look. “But I’ve no one to go with.”
Zale looked around the table as she spoke, speaking to everyone, but Kole thought that just maybe her eyes lingered on him as she spoke.
Or is that wishful thinking? he thought.
“Harold would probably take you if you wanted,” Mouse said. “Or Gray. They are just going alone.”
“Esme’s not going with either of them?” Kole asked, surprised. He’d always expected her to start dating Harold. Even he could tell she was interested in him, but Harold didn’t seem to reciprocate.
“No, she prefers to go to those things alone and just find a date there,” Mouse said.
After dinner, Rakin waited for Doug and Mouse to head out before stopping Zale.
“Kole has something he wanted ta ask ye,” he said.
“I do?” Kole asked, receiving an under the table kick from Rakin and a look.
“I do!” Kole said again, getting the hint.
“You do, do you?” Zale asked in a repeated fashion to tease his own repetition.
“Yeah, about the dance,” he said, mustering the courage.
Rakin had been telling him all week that this would be the best opportunity for him to ask Zale out on a ‘safe’ date.’ To ‘test the rock' as Rakin put it. If she wasn’t interested in him, then she’d just interpret it as a friendly date, and if she was, then she’d interpret it however she wanted.
This hadn’t been the first of Rakin’s nudges, but he hoped it would be the last.
“I was wondering if you’d like to go with me.” He got the words out, but then his mouth betrayed him. “With us I mean.”
What are you doing? he asked internally in horror as his mouth kept running.
“We could all go as a group. You, me, Rakin, Amara.”
Stop talking, stop talking. He tried to command himself.
Zale’s face was scrunched with a mix of emotions. She bit her lip her brow furrowed slightly, but the corner of her mouth was turned up in a slight smile.
“Sure,” she said eventually. “It’s not like anyone else is going to ask me. But I have one condition.”
Kole didn’t particularly like how she’d worded her acceptance, but neither did he like the question he’d ended up asking, so he couldn’t blame her.
“What's that?” Kole asked.
“I get to pick what you wear,” she said, happy once more with the conflicted emotions gone from her face.
“I was actually kind of counting on that,” Kole said, smiling back.
One moment he’s dying in a warzone — next, he’s naked on a moon full of real cultivators.
Jake Sullivan just woke up in the wrong body, on a moon called Verdis, inside a cultivation academy where failure means getting culled back to Earth to live as a powerless mortal—and probably die uselessly in the upcoming alien invasion.
His memories are mostly gone, but his spirit’s intact. His classmates? Rich kids with qi crystals and family techniques. The school? Doesn’t give a damn. Let the strong survive. With enemy agents already on campus, Jake will need to out-cultivate, outfight, and outsmart everyone around him. He has only one year to become a real cultivator.
No dying this time!
Dark humor. Sharp dialogue. Flower picking, teeth flying. A fresh blend of sci-fi, xianxia, and LitRPG.
