Dao of the World Walker (Xianxia) Book 2

The letter arrived on a Tuesday. Yang recognized the seal before he picked it up. He had seen that pressed wax enough times over fifteen years to know it by weight and shape.

He broke it open and read.

Lord Ardeth's handwriting was as elegant as expected of a man of nobility.

Dear Lucien,

I write to you not as a patron addressing a valued partner, but as someone who has watched your development with genuine admiration over many years, and who finds himself troubled by where we have arrived.

I will not pretend I was without fault in how I handled our final commissions together. I pushed harder than was wise. I knew your reservations regarding vitality and soul inscription, and I continued to press those limits because I believed, as I still believe, that your talent warranted it. That does not make the pressure appropriate, and I acknowledge it freely.

However, I would be doing you a disservice if I kept my fuller concerns to myself in the spirit of politeness.

I fear, Lucien, that somewhere along the way you have allowed yourself to be too heavily shaped by the beliefs common to your origins. The reverence for spiritual matters, the weight placed on the soul as something untouchable and sacred, these are the concerns of people who have no other framework for understanding the world. They are understandable in the ignorant masses. They are not suitable for a Cardwright of your standing, who has dedicated his life to the rational mastery of inscription and energy. To let superstition constrain your craft is to let it constrain everything you have worked for.

I say this with care. I am also deeply concerned about the influence of the Cult of Hiraal on your thinking. I have watched for some time, and I am almost certain they have had some contact with you or with people close to you. Their adamant opposition to soul-based inscription is well known, and the arguments they make against it are precisely the arguments I hear reflected in your refusals. They dress their prohibition in the language of wisdom and caution, but their true purpose is to restrict the advancement of Cardwrights who might otherwise surpass what their doctrine permits.

Do not let them do that to you. Everything you have built, every year of work and experiment and hard-won understanding, would be wasted if you allow such thinking to become a ceiling above your potential.

I could not send you away into silence without saying this plainly, because I respect you too much for anything less.

And so I come to the reason I am writing at all, beyond what has already been said.

I am inviting you to visit the crystal mines.

Come in one month's time. The journey by rail takes a single day from Markech. I will arrange all accommodations. What I want to show you there is something I believe no explanation by letter could adequately convey, and something that I think may cause you to reconsider the conclusions you have reached about our alliance.

If you come and see what I have to show you and still wish to part ways, I will accept that without further argument. I give you my word.

But consider this, Lucien. You have spent fifteen years dedicated to the theory and practice of card creation. You have pushed further than almost anyone I have encountered in my long experience of this craft. And yet you have never seen the source. The blank cards, the inscription pens, the energy stones, they come from somewhere. What makes them different from ordinary crystal and ordinary stone is not an accident of nature. A Cardwright with your particular obsession with understanding how and why things work as they do, I cannot believe that does not call to you.

Come and see. That is all I ask.

With sincere regard,

Arthdal Ardeth

Yang set the letter down on his worktable.

He sat with it for a moment, reading it again more slowly the second time.

The first portion irritated him. The condescending tone was apparent despite being wrapped in expressed admiration and stated respect. Lord Ardeth genuinely believed what he had written, Yang was certain of that. The man was not pretending concern. He actually thought Yang's reluctance regarding soul inscription was a product of superstition picked up from common people who feared death and dressed that fear in religious language.

He frowned at the mention of the Cult of Hiraal.

He had no idea what the Cult of Hiraal was.

That was a strange thing to realize. He had lived in this city for fifteen years, had moved through its commercial and professional circles, had maintained a working relationship with one of its more prominent noble families, and he had apparently never encountered or heard of a religious group significant enough that Lord Ardeth considered their influence on him both obvious and concerning.

It said something about the narrowness of the life he had built here. Townhouse, meetings with Lord Ardeth's clients when required, and the Cardwright Association when certification demanded it. He had learned card making and the Ardeth family's professional world and very little else.

He thought about what Lord Ardeth had written. If his reluctance to use his soul as inscription medium could be mistaken for the influence of a cult, he found himself genuinely curious about what that cult actually believed. Either their doctrine was rooted in the same ignorance Lord Ardeth attributed to common religion, in which case the resemblance to Yang's position was coincidental, or they knew something about the soul that the average Grade Five Cardwright did not. One of those possibilities was considerably more interesting than the other.

Yang sighed and picked up his inscription pen, turning it in his fingers without purpose.

Lord Ardeth would push and push until he got a response. That had been true for fifteen years and there was no reason to believe it would change now. The man had the patience of someone who had never been refused anything he wanted, which meant he simply continued applying pressure in varying forms until the obstruction resolved itself. Saying no once had not ended it. Saying no twice had not ended it. The letter in his hand was proof of that.

Easier to go and see and then say no again from a position of having seen it than to spend the next several months exchanging letters that will no doubt keep arriving.

Also, and Yang was honest enough with himself to admit this fully, he did want to see the mines.

The crystal cards and inscription pens and energy stones had fascinated him since his first weeks in Lucien's flat, when he had turned a blank card over in his hands and felt the way it accepted energy differently from talisman paper, more smoothly and more completely. He had thought about it often in the years since. What made crystal cards different from ordinary crystal? Why energy stones held charge in the way they did? How were they made?

He had looked for answers in every library he visited and found almost nothing. The mine owners kept that knowledge locked away with a thoroughness that he had come to recognize as deliberate. Only the finished products emerged, the blank cards and the pens and the stones, ready for Cardwrights to buy and use and never fully understand. The Ardeth family controlled significant mining interests. Lord Ardeth had known for years that this particular piece of knowledge would tempt Yang in a way that money alone never had. He was using it now, and he was using it correctly.

Yang set down the pen and found paper.

He wrote a short reply accepting the invitation. He kept it brief and made no reference to the portions of Lord Ardeth's letter that implied him a superstitious peasant. There would be time enough for that conversation in person.

He sealed the letter and left it on the tray for the butler to send.

Then he sat back down at his worktable and pulled the latest issue of the Cardwright Collective toward him. He had been meaning to read about advances in energy regulation inscription theory. But his eyes drifted from the page and he found himself thinking about the Cult of Hiraal instead.

He would look into them. Not because Lord Ardeth had told him to avoid them and not because he expected to find anything that would change his position, but because fifteen years of deliberate isolation had left him ignorant of this world in ways he had not fully appreciated until just now. He had spent all of it looking inward, filling the status bar, creating cards, working toward the number in his Sea of Consciousness. He had not looked outside much.

He checked the bar briefly out of habit.

[89.3% Energy]

Still.

He let the thought go and turned back to the journal. There was still work to do before the month was out, and after that, there would be a train to catch.

The porter had taken his trunk ahead, and Yang settled into the first-class compartment as the station noise faded behind the closed door. The platform outside the window was busy with the ordinary chaos of departure, luggage being loaded, passengers embracing people who were staying behind.

The compartment was both beautiful and luxurious as expected from Lord Ardeth's arrangement.

Mahogany paneling along the walls, velvet seating in deep red, that could be unfolded into a sleeping berth for overnight journeys. A small table with a chair that locked into the floor for stability while moving. A discrete brass bell on a cord for summoning the compartment attendant from the dining car. A cabinet near the window concealing a washbasin fed by copper pipes, the water kept warm by cards embedded in the pipe walls. Everything luxurious and comfortable.

Yang had traveled in much worse conditions.

He set his bag on the seat beside him, took out a book, and began reading. Outside, a whistle sounded. The platform began to slide past the window, slowly at first, then faster as the locomotive found its pace.

The train was quicker than expected because of the cards making it possible.

The locomotive itself was a standard design but heavily modified, energy cards reducing air resistance around the carriage body, propulsion cards supplementing the engine's mechanical power, the whole system working together to compress what would otherwise be a week's journey into a single day.

He had read about the engineering and found it elegant, the same way he found any clever application of card theory elegant. The principle mattered more to him than the scale.

This world had aircraft as well, a fact he had absorbed with bemused interest he always felt when this world achieved something that echoed his first life. Single or double-manned crafts, still far from the passenger transports of his previous world, but airborne and controlled and moving through the sky using the same combination of engineering and card application. He had watched one pass over Markech from his workshop window some months ago.

The train picked up speed. Fields appeared outside the window, flat and winter-brown, stretching away toward hills that were still some way off.

Yang settled into the reading, letting the words on the page take up all the space in his mind

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