[Can’t Opt Out]

It didn’t take long to track down Jin’kori and discover what the problem was.

Yujao couldn’t decide if discovering Jin’kori’s corpse, slowing rotting away, in one of the hallways that led to the room they were using to reassemble the xphern message repeater would have been better or worse.

In the long run… worse. Rumai’se weren’t common, and Yujao had only managed to earn the loyalty of a handful. Of those, only two had his trust in return. Jin’kori might be a squishy little thing, too soft for her own good, but the woman was entirely loyal to their faction, and losing her would have been inconvenient—and yes, Yujao realized his heart was something cold. The problem with having both grown up on the streets and having lived in this festering place of never-ending plots: Yujao knew perfectly well the reality that the lives of himself and his friends could be snuffed out at any moment.

All it took was a misplaced word for the mountain of lies and deceptions that surrounded him and those who held his loyalty to come tumbling down. In the end, it was easier to keep the heart cold.

Love only those that you cannot live without; cast everyone else to the harsh tides of the Inner Court and know you may need to leave them to drown during the smallest of tidal changes.

A change was coming—the death of the ryohua’taiyung had guaranteed that. There was no escape, and according to a short message from Emilia the evening before, that change may be mere days away. Still, Yujao found himself somewhat surprised to come across not Jin’kori’s corpse, but her kidnapped conversation.

A ryohua—one of those rare ryohua who had so clearly been on the outs with their recently deceased leader that he couldn’t even pretend to be loyal to his late leader—had cornered the poor thing. What were they even talking about? Also, how incapable was this ryohua, to have not even noticed him appearing at the end of the hall?

It was a long hall, and Yujao slowed his pace, his steps remaining the silent things they always were. No matter how he shifted through the halls, whether on business or pleasure, whether being easy in his confidence that no one would see him unless he allowed them leave to, or leaking flighty, inept chaos into the world, Yujao was always silent.

People only heard him coming if he wanted them to.

Within their faction, there lay a nest of secrets. The one they were most proud of was the reality that, unless they were told outright, no one knew that Emilia and Hurinren loved each other unendingly. To the Inner Court, and even many of those who would never set foot within their conniving halls and courtyards but had ears within its walls, the Jiaonai Lo Shintai’s top students hated one another—or, at least Hurinren hated Emilia. It was difficult to tell what people thought of Emilia, her own reputation of ripple of mystery—of whispers of silverstrains and sex and power and smiles so bright they could melt the heart of anyone caught within their shine.

It was a good secret; Yujao was also quite proud of his own ability to stuff his competence beneath the surface—and the reality that no one outside of his closest friends and allies had ever learned he was a low-dev? Definitely up there in the rankings of best-kept secrets.

To be viewed as flighty and empty-headed was one thing, for no one to suspect he even had the capability of sneaking abilities into the world with his impressive core control? No ability to pluck words from the air? Nor even the heart and strength to kill people from afar?

Yujao didn’t kill often, but he did. Some people were simply too evil and problematic to be allowed to continue drawing breath. The eavesdropping, however? Now that Yujao lived for, and as he swept down the hall with delicate steps, he let his abilities ripple out of him.

Hurinren had been taught by the Jiaonai Lo Shintai—Emilia, too, her own education in Dion mixing together with all the bits of information she learned from the clones and her studies of everything under the sun. Yujao had learned from the gorankai and their heir. Together, the three of them were a masterpiece of competence. They were the students of war heroes and assassins and criminals.

They were monsters, their ethics pulled taut around them until they did not hesitate, they did not regret, they simply did.

Facts catalogued themselves into Yujao’s head as he moved, and really, he would quite like a Censor, if only so it could help him out a bit! All this organizing! All this thinking! According to Emilia, many Baalphorians relied too much on their Censors to think for them, and while there were safety features that were supposed to trigger to stop such overuse, their triggers were questionable at best.

Yujao thought that living so much of his life without a Censor was good—it had taught him to use his brain through its own power alone. The reality remained, however, that when he was with Emilia, she was so flawless in her own plucking of facts from everything she and her Censor knew. Part of it was likely the non-dev thing; Yujao thought her Censor a significant part of it as well.

Regardless, he was but a poor Dionese boy without a Censor!

Thus, putting the pieces together with his own brain power!

The main thing he knew? It was weird for this ryohua to be here. While this place was in no way part of their faction’s territory, it was also a relatively unused area. On their way there, they had seen the occasional wannabe scholar or researcher—people who were unable to find themselves a patron and had therefore taken over a room in this rongdo.

So, was the ryohua meeting someone here? Doing his own thing in a room he had claimed as his own? Alternatively, had he followed Jin’kori here, and if so, did anyone know?

Too many variables to simply risk killing the man—and really, Yujao wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t forgotten other options. Regardless, all things to keep in mind—to look into. Arms crossed, hands tucked into the long, falling sleeves of his clothes, Yujao plucked his xphern from his inner sleeve pocket and sent a message off to one of the ryohua entirely loyal to them. I’orin would take care of looking into this ryohua and his reasons for being there and whether they should be concerned.

What Yujao did know for certain? Even if their meeting had been nothing but happenstance, the ryohua was purposefully keeping Jin’kori with him. They weren’t even talking about anything interesting! Really, it would have been quite easy to drag the rumai’se into a conversation about their abilities—the girl really was quite passionate about her profession and could talk about it for hours. Instead, the ryohua was talking about some sort of pastry they had been obsessed with recently, asking if Jin’kori had tried it and similar items over and over again, all while ignoring the reality that the rumai’se was allergic to the things?

“No?” the girl said for not the first time as Yujao entered the range where he could reasonably claim to overhear the pair’s conversation without the use of some ability to enhance his hearing. “Why would I have tried a different sort of pastry when I am allergic to them all?”

“But they’re so good,” the ryohua continued, and what was his name again? There were so many of them, and while Yujao was generally quite good at keeping names and faces straight, this man’s name was slippery as a water buru, sliding through his fingers as he grasped, grasped, grasped—

Biori Hondao! That was it: the risen child of the Hondao, the Hondao family name itself literally meaning cold bread rolls. Terrible name—the sort of over-the-top name families who were too new to the Inner Court gave their first child. The cold bread roll is rising—with some liberal understanding, the ryohua’s name could be taken to mean something along those lines. Really, the dude had never had a choice but to be forced into the outs of Inner Court life—because that was the cold reality of this place: even a silly name, indicating a lack of understanding of the Inner Court’s culture by the person’s family, could doom the person unless they were exceptionally competent or had connections, as was the case for Yujao.

In a world where entire families fell from favour for the smallest of slightest, the biggest of incidents and ineptitudes reaching out to everyone they knew? Perhaps even to everyone they called friend and ally?

Yes, within the culture of the Inner Court, such a small thing as a terrible name could ostracize a person, yet, to discard the name gifted to one by their parents was considered something even more difficult. It could be done—obviously, Yujao’s own name something entirely his own. Most recently, there had been a small incident in the Jiorao family, which had led to the majority of the family being cast out of the Inner Court. It had all been rather boring—a standard attempt by the matriarch of the family to gain a higher position within her workplace by ruining her boss’s reputation. She had failed, been caught, been punished with exile for not just herself but her entire family, save one of her children.

Turned out the woman’s plan had been to claim her boss had inappropriately touched her teenage daughter. Obviously, this would have been required the teenager in question to agree to the plan—while such situations weren’t the business of the ryohua and their truth-seeking eyes, there were other officials within the Inner Court who would have investigated the claims in a more standard way—but the girl was in love with another Inner Court member and had known that, were this love interest’s parents to find out about the teenager’s defilement by an older man, their relationship would have been forbidden. So, the girl confessed the plot to the ryohua—regardless of their how they generally couldn’t be bothered with the internal drama of random workplaces within the Inner Court unless someone involved was influential, the girl confessing to them had forced them to intervene.

In compensation for her truths, the teenager was allowed to remain within the Inner Court while her family was exiled. This had required the girl to take on a new name as a result—something akin to a permanent severing of her ties to her birth family.

It was something rare. Chances were it wouldn’t work out well for her, as she now had virtually no support behind her, but she was a teenager in love. While Yujao hadn’t been keeping up on the drama much beyond that, the last he had heard, the girl was being allowed to officially court her love, but the boy’s parents had made no promises about allowing their relationship to extend into an engagement or marriage. It didn’t matter that Yujao wasn’t actively keeping an eye on things—it really had nothing to do with him, but chittering birds who whispered in his ear knew he liked to be kept abreast of the various goings-on of the Inner Court, even when it didn’t affect him—he still knew how things would end: in heartbreak.

Currently, the girl had a little favour within the Inner Court, as she had saved a more powerful person from being accused of something heinous. The favour would fade with each holiday that passed, so many Dionese celebrations wrapped up in family and obligation. The girl had no longer had a family, and without them, with every holiday that passed, people would be reminded that the girl put herself and someone separate from her ahead of her family.

Who would ever want such a girl in their own family? How were they ever to trust her when, heinous accusations or not, virtually everyone within these rotting halls wanted to rise higher and higher? Were she to rise up and do something impressive, the girl might be able to make a name for herself that would allow such whispers to be cast aside; more likely, the family of the boy she loved would eventually push for their son to court someone else, and like the good little boy most children of the court were, he would do so.

Then, the girl would have nothing, only rumours and whispers of the past that she could not escape.

Some people, like Yujao himself, had managed to push whispers about him into territory he deemed acceptable: people whispered of Hurinren’s love for him, rather than of the rumours of his birth. Still, every member of his immediate family was dead, and when he told people who dared question the use of a different family name this, there was little they could do but give their condolences and scurry off. They could ask about more distant family members; no one ever did because everyone within the Inner Court understood that family was both a blessing and a burden. To ask about what family of his might still be living was to imply he should be burdening himself with them in a world where, more often than not, the dream was to be free of familial obligations; from there, Yujao would know their intentions were nothing good.

No one wanted Hurinren to believe they had bad intentions towards his beloved partner.

This ryohua, from what Yujao could remember of him, was mediocre—most certainly not the sort of person who could get away with changing his name and hoping to obscure that reality with deeds worth of awe and terror. Considering the fact that the man didn’t seem to understand that Jin’kori would quite literally be risking death were she to eat any of the pastries he was insisting she had to try?

Yujao, by the time he arrived behind the ryohua, vaguely wondering how long he could stand there before the man noticed him, wasn’t entirely convinced Biori Hondao wasn’t a complete idiot.

There was trying to keep someone distracted so they couldn’t get where they were going, then there was whatever this was. Maybe the ryohua really had just happened to run into Jin’kori and decided to… was this flirting? Yujao wasn’t sure; if it was, it was bad flirting.

Regardless, he definitely needed I’orin to look into the guy—figure out if he was a threat either in terms of trying to disrupt their faction and whatever they were doing at random times, or if he was a threat because he was an absolute idiot.