Chapter 120: ABRUPT HALT

CHAPTER

120

ABRUPT HALT

JIEYUAN

—∞—

They spent only as much time inside the cave as it took to collect everything. And not a second more. Jieyuan quickly collected all the scale blades he’d thrown, and then helped Daojue put away the artifacts into the glyph-stretch pouches—their own, and when those were filled, some of the ones lying around in the cave.

In the process he learned that these glyph-stretch pouches weren’t empty, but he held off from taking a proper look inside until they were out.

Jieyuan also put away the jackal’s corpse, which went into a pouch all of its own. Though they had plenty of Orangesoul weapons now, that didn’t mean he was about to pass up on the beast’s claws and fangs.

Waste not, want not, and all that. You could never have enough Orangesoul things to throw. Even though Jieyuan always did his best to retrieve the scale blades he threw, sometimes that just wasn’t possible—like, say, when you were being chased from pocket to pocket by an irate house-sized Orangesoul bear after you killed a normal-sized bear that turned out to be its wee little cub—and he was already down to two-thirds of his original stock.

As soon as they were out, they made for the next pocket.

There was no guarantee the jackal hadn’t had friends—or worse, a pack. Meiyao might’ve been able to tell, but she wasn’t around. So, like always, Jieyuan thought it best to plan for the worst—and hope the Heavens didn’t find your imagination lacking and decide to show you just how bad things could really get.

Thankfully, the Heavens seemed to have already sated their sadistic streak for today with the one Orangesoul beast, so what followed was just more of the same old song and dance.

They moved from pocket to pocket, mowing through whatever Redsoul beasts the Dome sent their way—the ones that didn’t end up backing down after the customary stare-down, at any rate—until they came across a clearing Huaxin deemed safe enough for them to set up camp.

Or, at least, the cultivator version of setting up camp, which boiled down to just sitting down and calling it a day. Usually, that was. This time around, things promised to be a fair bit more interesting.

“All right,” Jieyuan said, standing in the middle of the clearing. Both Huaxin and Maeva were on the lookout, and they’d gotten good enough, Huaxin in particular, that they could detect the approach of anything under Orangesoul ten times out ten. “Let’s have a look.”

Trees—or at least the parts of trees peeking out from the thicker boundary mist—circled the edges of this particular pocket, but the center of it was mostly bare.

Jieyuan first cleared away some of the undergrowth from the center with Daojue’s silent help until they had a nice, neat, tidy patch of grass and dirt and not an inches-thick jumble of wild plant stuff. Then they went about emptying the glyph-stretch pouches in front of them, taking out all the new artifacts they’d picked up earlier.

When they moved on to the ones they’d put away in the new glyph-stretch pouches, Jieyuan found himself taking out more artifacts than he’d put inside. They hadn’t even started yet, and already things looked promising.

They’d only had to fill up some of the Redsoul bags, but he emptied all of the Redsoul ones, getting it all out on the forest floor. Soon, they found themselves staring not just at weapons, armor, and accessories, but also jade books and red prisms. Lots and lots of prisms, for that matter.

Jieyuan didn’t start inspecting the artifacts immediately, but instead looked over to the Orangesoul bags, which he hadn’t looked inside yet. He considered it for a moment, but then decided to leave them alone for now. Saving the best for last, and all that.

Jieyuan and Daojue crouched in front of the artifacts on the ground and got to work. Deciding to start with the weapons first, Jieyuan picked up one of the swords—a standard, utilitarian steel blade—trained his soulsense on it and searched its spiritsong.

He didn’t need to have the weapon in his hands—he could’ve done it from a distance—but physical contact helped with concentration. And though just holding a sword still made Jieyuan’s skin crawl—for reasons he was no closer to figuring out—he had no intention of actually wielding it, so it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.

“Hmmm.” It took Jieyuan only a few moments to get the measure of the weapon. Which was because there wasn’t much to measure. It practically didn’t have a spiritsong—it was as plain as it looked, without a gear-skill. The only thing it had going for it was its soulsign, tenth-sign Redsoul.

In other words, it’s useless. Jieyuan shrugged before setting the sword aside. It was a pity, but he’d doubted he’d be finding anything on the level of the Shifting Feathers, anyway. And they still had plenty more opportunities to strike gold.

As soon as he let go of the weapon, the discomfort vanished. But then it came back with a vengeance as he picked up a second sword that could’ve been the previous one’s twin. He ignored the odd, inexplicable revulsion, and gave its spirit-song a quick inspection.

Plain again. He set it down next to the first one and glanced over at Daojue, who was in front of him. Daojue was holding a sword himself, Gleaming End lying on the ground just beside him. And on the other side of him, another sword as well as a saber that Daojue had probably already checked.

Daojue only held the sword for a moment before also setting it aside.

“Plain?” Jieyuan guessed.

Daojue didn’t answer.

Jieyuan hummed, nodding to himself, as he picked up another weapon, a saber this time. A brief inspection later, and he set it down with the two swords he’d already checked, a frown on his face.

He was starting to notice a pattern here. Three more artifacts later, he was all but sure of it.

“They’re all plain gears,” he said, tossing yet another gearskill-less sword into a quickly growing pile to his side. It was at tenth-sign, sure, but that didn’t matter much when it was just a plain, old, boring sword.

Granted, it was a sword, so it wasn’t like he’d had any intention of using it, anyway, given his irrational aversion toward them.

The pile by Daojue’s side was much bigger than his—Daojue barely had to glance at an artifact to tell what it could do—but as far as Jieyuan could tell, Daojue hadn’t found anything interesting yet either.

The gold, as it turned out, remained unstruck by the time they’d finished going through all the Redsoul weapons. All but one of them were plain artifacts, and the single weapon with a gear-skill—a sleek, fancy-looking saber—was nothing to write home about.

Jieyuan’s leading theory was that the scouting parties sent into the Dome had mostly only had plain artifacts with them because they weren’t expected to return and their sects didn’t want to risk losing anything precious.

As Jieyuan turned his eyes to the remaining artifacts, though, he hoped he was wrong. Because that meant that those wouldn’t be much better.

The weapons done with, they moved on to the armor pieces, though Jieyuan hadn’t expected much from those to begin with. As far as he knew, cultivator’s greaves and gauntlets couldn’t have gear-skills at Redsoul, as their basic functions were already plenty complex.

He was proven correct, and the Redsoul armor made itself at home beside the weapons. Next came the turn of the accessories.

“Cleansing ring, cleansing bracelet, cleansing ring,” Jieyuan murmured, putting them away one after another. And after that, a series of glyph-stretch pouches, bags, and purses, and then mind-link artifacts in all shapes and forms. Nothing particularly useful.

And with that, all that was left of their Redsoul haul were the red prisms and the jade books, neither of which he bothered with for now. The prisms were straightforward enough and definitely welcome, while the jade books he set aside to look through later.

“Well, that’s that,” Jieyuan said, frowning at the dozens of mostly useless Redsoul artifacts. “Plain artifacts, jade books, and prisms.”

There wasn’t even a single field-focus to spice things up a little.

Granted, the artifacts weren’t exactly worthless. They could be sold. But for that they’d need to leave the Dome first, and that didn’t look like it was happening any time soon.

Putting them out of his mind for now, Jieyuan turned his attention to the artifacts he couldn’t sense. The higher-realm artifacts. Those, at least, promised to be more interesting, even if by virtue of their realm alone.

He couldn’t inspect them, though, what with them being invisible to his soulsense. But he was pretty sure that Daojue had a way around that, considering the whole deal with Gleaming End.

And so he turned over to Daojue. “Can you look through them?”

Daojue didn’t reply, but he picked up one of the higher-realm artifacts—a sword—and stared at it intently for a few moments. It didn’t look any different from the Redsoul ones, following the same basic, unadorned design.

“Ninth-sign Orangesoul,” Daojue said, simply, as he set down the sword. “Plain.”

And there you have it.

Jieyuan nodded, and then asked, “I take it that’s another bloodskill of yours at work?”

“Sovereign Gear Affinity,” Daojue replied, picking up another sword. This one looked a little fancier, with cupped, disc-shaped guard in the shape of an open lotus.

Sovereign again, Jieyuan noted. Daojue’s other bloodskill had been sovereign too. While all of Meiyao’s had been divine. But what exactly did that mean? It could be just some fanciful naming at work—cultivators were hardly a humble bunch—but if it weren’t… Bloodrights might be even more special than he’d first assumed.

To begin with, there was still the question of how they came about. Of how exactly the one who originated a bloodright—the blood progenitor, as Meiyao had called it—got their bloodright. Meiyao hadn’t known much, and Daojue had ignored him the times he’d asked.

Jieyuan wanted a bloodright to call his own. He wanted one really badly. It was already high up in his list of priorities, right beside figuring out a way to make it all the way to Violetsoul.

The Liangshibai Bloodright hadn’t seemed like much—in fact, Jieyuan reckoned that one might be more trouble than it was worth, what with the whole obsession with gleamstone—but Meiyao’s and Daojue’s gave them an absurd advantage over everyone else. And that was considering he didn’t know everything they could do yet.

Jieyuan only knew of two of Daojue’s bloodskills, and though Meiyao had shared with him everything she knew about hers, her bloodright still apparently had plenty of bloodskills just waiting to be rediscovered.

“Tenth-sign Orangesoul,”                      Daojue said after a little while, putting the Orangesoul sword beside the first one. “Plain.”

And on and on it went, one Orangesoul weapon after another. Over a dozen swords, and one saber. And not a single gear-skill to be found among them.

Jieyuan wasn’t too disappointed, though. All of the Orangesoul weapons were at either ninth-sign or tenth-sign. Gleaming End had been immensely useful so far because of its realm, not because of its gear-skills—which Daojue had only managed to use that one time, during their escape from Viridian Death City. And it was only at first-sign Orangesoul.

There was one issue, though. The reason why Gleaming End worked so well was because Daojue had bonded with it, letting him use its chromal weight offensively. Otherwise, just like with his scale blades and daggers, besides being indestructible it wouldn’t have been any better than a Redsoul sword against Redsoul beasts. Only against Orangesoul beasts would they offer any advantage over Redsoul weapons.

But Jieyuan already had a way around it in mind. Before Daojue could move on to the other Orangesoul artifacts, he asked, “Would you mind bonding the saber for me to use?”

Sabers also felt wrong to him, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as with swords, and needs must. He could live with some discomfort.

“I cannot,” Daojue said.

Jieyuan’s thoughts came to an abrupt halt.

His dreams, to an abrupt end.