Seth struggled to keep up with Elise's pace as she walked from site to site. It hadn't been a problem for the first couple of stops. Now, however, he was falling further and further behind. He tried to jog to catch up, but that just made breathing burn worse.

  "I thought you said you got stronger," Elise said without a trace of a smile.

  "I did. Just... traded a lung... among other things."

  "You should get that fixed as soon as possible."

  "Can't... already tried."

  She stared at him incredulously for a second before turning around and walking. It seemed like a bad time to explain that he had already tried to heal it. Who knows? Maybe the sect healer could come up with something. When I can afford the contribution cost. He was sure the dark circles under her eyes were not there the last time he saw her.

  The third stop for them was one of the laundry arrays. Before the trial, he had been too weak to work on these and knew too little. But now... his eyes focused as his qi sight took hold. It was big, but simple.

  One of his eyes started darting from place to place.

  [Food? Food?]

  "Not food."

  [Boring.] His stomach rolled when Mal pinched his optic nerve, but pulling on the ritual binding the tumor put a stop to that outburst. It sulked in a corner of his mind, so withdrawn that Seth couldn't feel Mal's presence unless he looked for it.

  Seth turned his attention to the formation. The disrepair was obvious, and he was about to start fixing when he realized that Elise had been speaking.

  "... and please be careful about this part right here. Letting too much qi through will turn the clothes to dust instead of... are you listening?"

  "Of course, elder sister."

  "Really? Then you should have no issues fixing the array."

  Seth felt his qi flow freely through his body as he traced and fixed the parts of the array that needed to be fixed. The difficult part of this task wasn't the complexity, but the size. When he left, he simply didn't have enough qi to make any major fixes to the arrays. He had left with a thimble of qi and returned with a lake.

  It took him two minutes to fix the array. Elise inspected his work and nodded in approval.

  "If I were to ask you to do your normal rotation and add the laundry arrays to it, would you be able to handle that?"

  Seth was about to agree, but realized he had a problem. He didn't know where all the laundry arrays were. And even if he did, his memory of his normal route was still foggy. It had been a couple of months, after all, and the details were fuzzy. No matter how hard he tried to recall, the details were foggy.

  "I would be able to take care of it if I had a map."

  "A map? You should know your route by heart."

  "That would be true if I only had to do the normal route, elder sister. Adding the laundry—"

  "But you're still slow, slowpoke." With a wink, she threw him a map. He caught it.

  "I'm surprised you didn't ask for one earlier," she said. "Make sure you don't lose that."

  "I won't, elder sister."

  "You'll have to tell me what happened to your face once things calm down."

  "Of course, elder sister," he said, and left after an exaggerated bow.

  Ten hours later, Seth, Elise, and Toman were sitting in elder Frerren's office. Elise sipped tea while Toman checked a book. Seth was trying to meditate. Not the cultivation kind, but the normal, calming kind. The elder would be back any moment, and fear gripped his chest at the thought.

  "Initiate Seth, please restrain your wandering eye."

  "I will see what I can do, but it does have a mind of its own."

  [Food?] Mal asked, its one eye fixed on Elise's teacup. Seth could only sigh at its antics.

  "For once, you're not wrong. That is food. More accurately, it's a drink."

  [Drink?]

  "It's... like food, but a liquid." Seth sent an image of liquid flowing down someone's throat.

  [Food without chewing? Easy food?]

  "Not quite—"

  [MINE! GIMME!]

  At that, Seth pulled a sliver of qi out of Mal using the ritual. It yelped in his mind, but stopped yelling. Does this hurt? Or is it just unhappy?

  "No! That's hers. We'll have some later."

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  [Mean.]

  Seth sighed out loud this time. He realized that Elise and Toman were staring at him. However, the eye had quit darting.

  "Better?" Seth asked.

  "Well, it is no longer wandering, but—" Toman was cut off by the door opening. Elder Frerren strode through the door, a scowl on his face. The qi radiating from him was oppressive, fixing them to their seats. Seth found it difficult to even breathe as the elder shuffled to his desk, then sighed before he finally sat down. The pressure only intensified as a deep frown settled on his features.

  [Scary. Make it stop.] Seth wished he could. He tried to take a breath in, only to realize he couldn't.

  "What a mess..." he muttered, almost too softly to hear. He looked up, and seemed as if he were about to scold them for their lack of decorum, before realizing his presence had frozen them. After a moment, the elder closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The pressure on them vanished.

  "Elder, why has the karmic seal been so unstable this cycle?" Toman was the first to break the uncomfortable silence.

  "I'm still investigating. If any of you learn anything, let me know immediately."

  The three sat in silence for a moment. Seth debated asking what exactly this karmic seal even did. His desire to be useful fought with his desire to stay alive. As if he could see Seth's struggle, he turned his eyes to Seth.

  "You have a question, initiate?"

  "Yes, elder. I apologize if this is ignorant, but my knowledge of the karmic seal is limited. I know it conceals the sect from enemies and requires fairness during the initiation. Other than that..."

  "I see." The elder stroked his chin as he spoke. "If you want the historic details, go look them up in the library. The important parts are that the magic was gifted to us by the light bridge immortal. The seal, in essence, smooths karma locally by blending good and bad karma until all entanglements are blurred to nothing. This renders almost all tracking magic unable to find us. However, the immortal put a number of restrictions on the magic to make us adhere to the agreement. I suspect one or more of these restrictions have been broken."

  "Elder, what are the restrictions?"

  "The major ones are that initiates must be accepted below a certain cultivation threshold, the sect must treat all initiates fairly, the sect may not take anything from the initiates by force, the initiates must all be willing participants, and there are some rules about relatives that don't apply here. There are other minor ones that..." Seth waited for the elder to continue, but his forehead just furrowed in thought.

  "Elder, I may have an idea," Seth said, drawing each word out to see if the elder would fly into a rage before speaking the next.

  "Go ahead, initiate."

  "If initiates must be willing participants, we may have a problem. I'm not sure what counts as willing, but I overheard a number of initiates being taken from their homes. Even if that doesn't count, I'm sure I can prove—" Seth's throat tightened as the familiar weight of Frerren's presence settled down on him, making it almost impossible to breathe, let alone speak.

  "Seth, be very careful with what you are about to say," the elder said, holding Seth's gaze with an icy stare. "If you're about to say that a participant is unwilling, you better be able to prove it. The sect mandates that all hall masters and grandmasters personally verify meeting this requirement. At best, you are accusing the grandmaster of incompetence, if not outright treachery. With that in mind, continue. If you can."

  "I can, elder. I myself was not a willing participant in this initiation."

  The tendrils that had probed his mind earlier stabbed into him once more. He thought the second time wouldn't be quite so bad. He was wrong. It was just as bad as the first.

  "Say that again, initiate."

  "I was not a willing participant in this initiation."

  "Then how are you here?"

  "I stumbled through a portal and was captured by a party including the elder's grandson, Bacchus, and Samuel."

  "And you said nothing before the initiation started?"

  "I was unaware that I needed to be willing. Besides, would anyone have believed me?"

  The elder asked him the same questions five more times. Each time, the tendrils prodded deeper into his soul, searching for any hint of duplicity. On the fourth pass, he could no longer withstand the nausea and threw up. After the fifth round, the elder set him down and removed the tendrils. Unable to find the energy to stay standing, Seth sank to the ground.

  "None of you breathe a word of this to anyone. Seth, are you the only unwilling participant?"

  The other two bobbed their heads up and down. Seth raised his head to answer, but a wave of dizziness assaulted him. It took him a moment to recover. Fortunately, the elder didn't seem to be in a rush for answers.

  "I can't prove it, elder, but I highly doubt it. I overheard other inductees talking about their caravans being captured."

  A gloomy silence fell over the room. It took a few minutes for Seth to find the strength to fight his way to his feet. Nobody had said a word in the meantime.

  Right after Seth got to his feet, an array encompassing the entire room flared to life. Elder Frerren's face went from anger to pure focus, and the magic flared to life. Before his eyes, a forest dwarfing the entire room appeared behind the elder, while somehow still being contained within the entire room. The scene made his brain pound. Elise and Toman didn't seem to fare much better.

  Within that illusory forest, multi-colored streams of qi flashed and twisted into a symbol. The elder nodded, then released another pulse of magic. Another symbol formed in response, but this time the leaves had changed from green to yellow. Another question, and the leaves withered to ash. The forest wavered, but the elder sent one more pulse of qi out. One more question. The forest disintegrated as it gave its answer before vanishing into dust.

  The elder turned around, blood streaming from his eyes and nose. He collapsed into his chair, as if the effort had wrung every drop of energy he had. For all Seth knew, it had.

  "Seth..."

  "Yes, elder?"

  Frerren took a deep breath and looked at him with an intensity that made Seth feel like he were being examined under a microscope.

  "Do you have multiple copies of the books you were talking about?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. I want to trade you the books for a cultivation technique that suits your... unique constitution."

  Seth swallowed. This benefits me too much. What's the catch? Still, he didn't dare to voice the challenge.

  "Understood."

  "You don't sound convinced, initiate. Speak your mind."

  "The deal benefits me too much, elder."

  His breath caught in his throat as he spat the last part out. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as he waited for a response. Of all the responses he had imagined, laughter hadn't been one of them.

  "That distrust will serve you well in the coming days. Normally, yes, it would benefit you too much. To the point where the karmic seal would need repair, but..."

  The elder just let the implication hang in the air. Seth mulled it over for a moment before bowing. Why can't he just say he's doing this to rebalance the seal?

  "In that case, elder, I believe we have a trade."

  "Excellent, initiate," Frerren said, pulling a slender violet tome out of a spatial storage he had... somewhere. Seth brought out the books he had brought back from the trial.

  As they completed the trade, Frerren's posture straightened, as if freed from hauling a crushing weight. Seth put the manual in his storage ring. He could look at it later.

  The rest of the meeting was standard reports on the state of the various formations and arrays. They left an hour later, the mood serious but calm. Seth went to get dinner before returning to his room. Unfortunately, he hadn't run into Therus.

  After he sat on the bed, he pulled the cultivation technique out of his spatial ring and frowned at the title.

  Ornate emerald lettering on the cover spelled "Decaying Spirit Furnace."