Dao of the World Walker (Xianxia) Book 2

The train came to a smooth halt at the final station.

Most passengers had disembarked at earlier stops along the line, filtering off at the larger towns and commercial centres that dotted the route. By the time the last station arrived, only Yang and a handful of others remained in the carriages, mostly people who had business at the mines or with the settlements that existed because of them. Nobody came this far without a reason.

Yang rose from his seat, straightened his coat, and pressed his right palm briefly against his abdomen and looked out through the carriage door at the platform beyond.

The air was different here. He could see it in the quality of the light, sharper and cleaner than anything Markech produced. The station itself was small, a single platform and a low building that served as both waiting room and administrative office. Beyond it, mountains rose in the middle distance, their lower slopes dark with pine and their upper reaches bare stone against a pale winter sky.

He disembarked. The porter assigned by his compartment’s butler followed behind with his trunk, navigating the narrow steps with practiced ease.

Yang stood on the platform and breathed.

Fifteen years in Markech had acclimatised him to the particular texture of city air, the faint persistent underlayer of coal smoke and factory exhaust that the air purifying cards in his workshop could clean but could not entirely make him forget. This air had none of that.

He walked through the sparsely populated station, the porter a few paces behind, and emerged near the exit to find a coach waiting with the Ardeth family emblem pressed into the lacquered door panel. Beside it stood Arnold, one of Lord Ardeth's household attendants, a man Yang recognized from the various estate visits over the years.

Arnold came toward him with a bow. "Welcome, Mr. Valemore. I hope your journey was pleasant."

"It was fine, Arnold."

Arnold led him to the carriage and opened the door. Yang got in and settled against the seat while Arnold directed the porter to the luggage area at the rear. Once the trunk was secured, Yang drew a silver coin from his pocket and passed it through the window to the porter. The man's face lit up with genuine pleasure as he thanked him. Arnold took his place beside the driver at the front and the carriage drove off.

The roads out here were old, generations of use had worn into the landscape but the carriage moved smoothly regardless, the cards embedded in its undercarriage doing what cards embedded in undercarriages were meant to do, absorbing the irregularities of the road surface. Yang watched the countryside pass through the window and let his mind rest.

The journey from the station took a few hours. The terrain shifted gradually as they moved toward the mountains, the flat agricultural land giving way to rougher country, loose stone and the occasional dry stream bed cutting through the landscape. The pine forests thickened on the slopes above.

Then he began to see the perimeter.

The first indication was the fence line. Tall metal posts connected by multiple runs of heavy wire, the top strands barbed and angled outward. Then a secondary fence behind the first, with a cleared corridor between them. Guard towers at intervals, stone-built and solid, with figures visible at the top. The road passed through a series of checkpoints, each one staffed by armed men who examined the carriage carefully before waving it through.

Yang observed all of this with the same detached attention he gave most things. The conventional rifles he understood. The men without rifles he found considerably more interesting, because the absence of a visible weapon in a security context of this kind did not mean unarmed. It meant something else. A person carrying a card in a prepared hand could activate it faster than a rifleman could raise and aim, and a card user operating from concealment had every advantage over someone expecting a conventional attack. The ones without rifles were the dangerous ones.

He had not built a shield card across fifteen years of iterations for nothing.

But underneath the cool observation, something else was happening that Yang had not anticipated.

The closer the carriage moved to the mountain, the more he felt it.

It was subtle at first. A low thrum at the edge of perception, the way you might feel the vibration of something through the floor rather than hearing it through the air. He had felt something like it before, in the rare moments when he used the highest grade energy stones Lord Ardeth sourced for him. But those had been drops. Concentrated, yes, powerful relative to the common energy stones, but still bounded and finite.

This was an ocean.

The energy that permeated the air here was the same kind that lived in energy stones, the same native charge that blank crystal cards were made to accept and hold. But here it was not contained in any vessel. It simply existed in the air and the rock and the ground beneath the carriage wheels, diffused but pressing gently against his awareness.

Yang pressed his palm flat against his knee and breathed slowly.

He had spent fifteen years learning to inscribe using energy stones as the power source, feeding energy through the crystal pen into the blank card in a controlled and deliberate flow. The technique required precision because the stone's energy was finite and the inscription had to be completed and locked in before it ran out.

Later, with vitality inscription, he had learned to push his own life force through the pen instead, which was a different and more demanding process, the body fighting the unnatural expenditure of something it recognised as essential, requiring the Cardwright's full concentration to override that resistance and maintain the flow.

Here, surrounded by this much ambient energy, he thought he could probably inscribe without either. The air itself would provide. It would take more control than drawing from a stone, more attention to manage the diffuse input rather than a concentrated source, but it was theoretically possible. He had not known before today that such a place could exist.

He filed this away and said nothing about it as the carriage completed its final approach to the main entrance.

Lord Ardeth came through from the inner corridor to meet him as Yang was being led deeper into the mountain complex. The man looked genuinely pleased, which Yang had learned over fifteen years to read as a distinct thing from his social pleasantness. This was real.

"Lucien. I am glad to see you here. I trust your journey went well."

"Very well, Lord Ardeth." Yang returned the smile with one of his own, and watched Lord Ardeth's expression shift with almost imperceptible surprise, the slight recalibration of a man who had prepared for reluctance and encountered something else entirely.

Yang had not tried to conceal how he felt. He was interested. He was genuinely glad to be here. That was simply true and there was no particular reason to pretend otherwise.

Lord Ardeth led him to a well-appointed room where Arnold deposited his trunk. "Lucien, it has been a long journey. You must be in need of rest. Take your time and when you are refreshed we can talk, and I will give you a tour of the mines."

"Lord Ardeth," Yang said, "you booked me a very comfortable compartment. I had an extremely relaxing journey. I would love to have the tour now. I can rest tonight."

Lord Ardeth looked surprised and hid it quickly. "Then come along," he said, the smile returning with something warmer underneath it. "Let me show you the base of the Ardeth family's power."

The living quarters and administrative offices were well maintained in the manner of a permanent installation rather than a temporary work camp. Lord Ardeth led him through them.

Then they passed through a final corridor and the character of everything changed.

The room they entered was a large cavern, its original stone walls and ceiling preserved but fitted with rows of bright lights that eliminated shadow entirely. The space was occupied by long workbenches arranged in parallel lines, each one occupied by a man working with the focused quiet of skilled labour. The benches themselves reminded Yang of what he imagined a jeweller's workspace would look like, small tools arranged with precision, magnifying lenses on adjustable arms, soft cloths and brushes and polishing compounds. Order and cleanliness and the specific concentration of people doing delicate work.

Yang moved closer to one of the benches to look.

The worker had a bundle of thin rough sheets on his table, their colour an uneven blue-grey, the surface texture somewhere between clouded glass and compressed mineral. Nothing that would be recognisable as a blank card yet. The man lifted one sheet up against the overhead light, holding it the way a doctor might hold an x-ray, examining it through and through. He set it aside with a small movement of dismissal. Lifted the next. Examined it. Kept it. The sorting continued with the rhythm of long practice.

The kept sheets went into a machine at the end of the bench that Yang studied with interest. It cut them, a precise mechanical process with what appeared to be without any card assisted guidance, trimming each piece to the exact dimensions of a standard blank crystal card. Then the cut pieces passed to a second stage where mechanical polishing was combined with careful work by hand, bringing the surfaces to the smooth finished clarity that Yang recognised from every blank card he had ever purchased.

Lord Ardeth came to stand beside him. "The cards are made from the same material as the energy stones and the crystal pens," he said. "Think of them as the lowest grade of energy stone. They carry barely a residual charge and are found furthest from the source, where the concentration has diffused to its thinnest. We mine them and process them by hand rather than using cards to cut or shape them because they would absorb the energy from any activated card nearby."

Lord Ardeth continued, "They are hungry for it. Place an activated card against unprocessed crystal material and it will draw the energy out of the card continuously until the card is rendered useless." Lord Ardeth paused. "Although it is worth being precise about that. The absorption only occurs when a card is activated. An inactive inscription placed alongside the raw crystal does nothing. The sealed inscription holds its energy in a stable state that the unprocessed crystal cannot access. It is only the active flow of energy that triggers the draw."

Yang processed this. He had known from his first weeks with blank cards that they accepted energy differently from talisman paper, more eagerly and more completely. He had attributed this to their crystalline structure, some property of the material that made it a better medium for inscription. He had not known until this moment that the eagerness was something more fundamental than a passive material property. The crystal was not simply receptive to energy.

"Then why don't inscribed cards run out of energy over time?" Yang asked. "If the crystal is drawing energy in, and the inscription is using it, the system should eventually exhaust itself."

Lord Ardeth looked at him with the expression of a teacher who has been waiting for precisely this question. "Because the crystal does not merely receive energy. It produces it. At a very low level, continuously, as a function of its own nature. Once you have inscribed a functional inscription in a card, what you have created is a closed cycle. The inscription draws on the card's energy to function. The crystal regenerates that energy slowly and constantly from its own internal natural process. For simple inscriptions, the regeneration rate exceeds the consumption rate when the card is not actively doing work, which is most of the time. The card sits in your pocket between uses and quietly refills itself."

Yang stood very still.

"The grade difference between blank cards is a difference in how much energy the card generates per unit of time," Lord Ardeth continued. "A low-grade blank card produces very little. Sufficient for simple inscriptions with low energy demands. A high-grade card produces substantially more, which is why complex high-grade inscriptions require high-grade cards. The inscription's energy demand during active use must not exceed what the crystal can regenerate between activations, or the card will weaken and eventually fail. What you are matching when you select the appropriate card grade for an inscription is the inscription's appetite to the crystal's productive capacity."

Yang thought about every card he had ever made. Every choice of blank card grade. Every calculation about how much energy an inscription would draw during use. He had been making those choices correctly by intuition and experience for years without understanding the mechanism underneath them.

"The books don't say any of this," Yang said.

Lord Ardeth made a short sound that was not quite a laugh. "Of course they don't. Every mining family keeps it close. The Cardwright Association publishes what is necessary for a Cardwright to practice the craft competently. They publish nothing that would allow someone to understand what the craft is actually built on." He glanced at Yang sideways. "The only reason I am showing this to you is because of what exists between us. Partnership and something I would call friendship, if you will permit the word. Even most of my own family members are not allowed this far into the mine's workings."

Yang said nothing for a moment, still turning what he had learned over in his mind.

The crystal card generated energy. Continuously. From its own nature.

In the cultivation world, there were things that behaved similarly. Certain spirit treasures that recharged themselves slowly under the right conditions. Certain formations that drew ambient qi and converted it. He had never expected to find an analogue here, in this world without qi and without cultivation. But the principle was not so different. Energy existing in matter, circulating in ways that most people who used it never thought to examine.

He looked back at the row of workers sorting their rough crystal sheets against the light, discarding the pieces that would not serve and keeping the ones that would, doing by long practice what he was only now beginning to understand.

"What determines whether a piece of crystal is suitable?" he asked.

Lord Ardeth smiled and gestured toward the far end of the room, where another corridor led deeper into the mountain. "That," he said, "is what I want to show you next."

They moved on.