Chapter 33: Sect Trial – Part 1
She woke naked in the snow.
Not literally in the snow. The drift had come through her open cave entrance and piled against the far wall, but her bedding was dry and she'd been warm enough, beastkin blood doing what it did.
She rose anyway into the cold air, bare skin meeting the mountain chill the way it always did: sharp, immediate, and fine.
After washing, she brushed her hair until it shone, and combed her tail until it fluffed full and proud. Working through the base with Serenya's comb, the frost-scent so faint now she could only find it if she pressed the wood to her nose and stayed still.
She held it there for a moment, then she set it down and looked at the overlay.
The Roulette icon sat in the corner, smug as always.
'Trial today,' she told herself. 'Rankings on the line. This is not the morning.'
Her tail gave one sharp flick.
'Just one spin.'
She hit spin.
The interface whirred. Thumbnails flickered past.
Then, it stopped.
System:
[WARDROBE ROULETTE — RESULT]
Nothing.
Chaos Essence: 63 → 58.
Note: The Roulette has spoken.
And it said nothing.
[collapse]
Tharia stared at it.
“Eh—?!” She stared at the result. “I LOST FIVE ESSENCE FOR NOTHING?”
[Correct.]
“Fuk.”
Her tail lashed.
She hit spin again, because five essence already gone meant she was committed and her brain had stopped listening to the part that knew better.
The interface whirred.
Stopped.
System:
[WARDROBE ROULETTE — RESULT]
Nothing.
Chaos Essence: 58 → 53. Note:
Note: This is happening again.
Better luck next time.
[collapse]
“...Hah?” She read it again. “TWICE?!”
The empty ointment tin rattled on the shelf from the force of her tail. She picked it up — not empty anymore, she'd finally replaced it two days ago, generic stuff that smelled like nothing in particular — and set it back down with excessive care.
“I am now declaring WAR!”
Hit spin a third time with the energy of someone who had passed the point of good decisions.
The interface whirred longer.
Thumbnails flickered; something red, something white, something with what looked like fur trim at the hem.
… And it stopped.
System:
[WARDROBE ROULETTE — RESULT]
Illusory Raiment: "Winter Sprite" Edition
Item: Shoulderless micro dress — Crimson (Revealing. Is this legal even?)
Stability: Variable (Qi-Reactive)
Special Property: Becomes increasingly opaque under active qi pressure. Fully transparent during qi depletion or suppression.
Note: Festive. Daring. Structurally ambitious.
Secondary Note: Today is a trial day.
The System offers no further comment.
Chaos Essence: 53 → 48.
[collapse]
Tharia read the special property.
She read it again.
Transparent during qi depletion. Or suppression.
'The Transparent and the Shimmer techniques,' she thought, 'work by suppressing my qi signature.'
She looked at the dress. It was genuinely beautiful in the way that things were beautiful right before they became a problem.
She looked at it for a long time.
She had spent fifteen essence getting here.
'Fifteen essence… whatever. I am wearing this until I die,' she told herself, and willed it on.
The crimson fabric materialized across her body, shoulderless, cropped high above her breasts, the hem sitting right at buttocks level with white fur trim brushing the bottom curve of her ass.
Cool air touched the bare stretch of her legs and the considerable bare stretch of everything above the crop. She had nothing underneath. She never did.
She stepped out into the snow, heels clicking on the stone.
A passing disciple wrapped head-to-toe in padded robes looked at her bare legs, at the snow, at her legs again, and made a sound like a man having a small crisis.
"Beastkin blood," Tharia said pleasantly, and kept walking. She could already hear the whispers starting behind her.
Something about “modern nonsense” and “no sense of shame.”
She ignored them.
The world had opinions about outfits that didn’t involve twenty layers of fabric. And she had opinions about people who wanted to fight in tents.
System:
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Chaos Essence: +1 (Commitment to the Bit.)
Note: The System acknowledges the dedication.
Chaos Essence: 48 → 49
[collapse]
Maren shuffled forward on the terrace with his usual energy, which was to say none.
"Today begins the first half of your trial mission. This is not sparring. This is not lecture. This is the sect measuring whether you are worth feeding."
Around her, disciples stamped cold feet and adjusted padded robes. Tharia stood in her crimson dress and let the wind have opinions.
"Top three earn ranking points. Twenty for first. Fifteen for second. Ten for third. Fail, and you return to obscurity."
Twenty points. She'd slipped during the unstable training weeks. She needed to get back on the board. She needed top five by quarter's end for tournament selection.
She rolled her shoulders.
Joren, broad across the shoulders and already performing his confidence for an audience, rolled his neck. Renji shifted nervously two rows back, rubbing his palms together, ears slightly pink. The spear user from yesterday polished his spear tip. The dagger girl adjusted her grip.
"Begin," Maren said.
The formations flared. Snow crystals caught amber light. The course rose from the stone.
The first ridge was ice-slicked and her heel caught it immediately.
She caught herself with the fan. Snapped it open, planted the reinforced tip, pushed off. And kept moving.
"Damn you," she said, to the ice specifically.
The cold bit hard at every inch of skin the dress wasn’t covering.
The dress stayed opaque because she was moving hard and her qi was cycling like it had somewhere to be.
‘Good. Active qi means opaque. I'm fine. This is fine.’
She told herself this very firmly while her thighs froze.
The course was cruel. Ridges grinding apart with harsh cracks, phantom beasts coalescing from qi threads in the mist, the cold pressing in from every direction.
She moved fast, using the Shimmer to slide past the spear user while he hacked at a phantom. She flicked the fan open, sent a bobbing cluster of false light drifting toward the next beast, watched it lunge at the illusion.
"Cheap tricks," someone called through the mist.
"Working tricks," she called back.
The course tilted sharply. Her foot slipped on a frost-cracked stone and she scrambled, fan scraping for purchase, when a gust of wind came up from the drop below and tried to flip the hem.
She got her footing back before anything could be confirmed and kept moving.
‘Opaque. Please stay opaque.’
Joren was ahead, burning through the course. Five veins of qi and discipline forcing every surface to cooperate. She watched his line, picked a different one, longer but working with the formation cycles instead of against them, and gained ground without matching his expenditure.
The final phantom was large, built from the heaviest qi-weave in the course, and it fixed on her.
She let it fix. Waited for the committed lunge. Activated the Shimmer—
The dress went sheer.
Not the good kind of sheer. The bad kind. The completely transparent kind. The standing-at-the-finish-of-an-obstacle-course-in-front-of-witnesses kind.
She was through the phantom and at the top of the ridge before most of the watching disciples could fully process what they'd seen, and she willed the shimmer off immediately, qi circulation snapping the dress back to opaque in under two seconds.
From the watching area, a noise. Not quite words.
"Did she just—"
"The dress—"
"NAKED FOX."
“NO! That the Perverted Fox, remember?”
Someone else muttered, loud enough to carry, “That’s what happens when you wear that kind of thing instead of proper robes.”
Tharia stood at the top of the ridge breathing hard, dress fully opaque, expression serene, and said nothing.
Her tail was doing something behind her that she chose to ignore.
System:
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Note: The Special Property has activated.
Secondary Note: This was predictable.
The System predicted it.
[collapse]
'I know. I know. I know.'
Joren crested the ridge thirty seconds later. His eyes moved over her once, dress currently respectable, expression currently impeccable, and away.
Renji made it up after him, heaving, and his eyes went wide and then immediately somewhere else and his ears went the color of a medicinal berry.
‘He saw. Great.’
The duels came fast and she didn't have time to be embarrassed, which was the only mercy the day offered.
First opponent: the lean swordsman with controlled arc. She read his footwork, took the first exchange deliberately, and on his third committed lunge she made the call.
‘This is going to happen. I’m doing it anyway.’
She activated the shimmer—
The dress went transparent.
She moved through his strike anyway. The fan tip found his throat. He stood down. His face was the color of a man who had won and lost something simultaneously.
The crowd around the terrace had gone very loud.
"NAKED FOX—"
"Is that—every time she uses that technique—"
She reset her stance, dress snapping back to opaque the moment she stopped the Shimmer, and kept her face in the expression she used when she was pretending something hadn't happened.
Second opponent: the hand-to-hand fighter, knuckles wrapped, the kind who thought raw force solved illusions. He was not wrong. He was also staring at her with an expression that suggested he'd seen the first duel and had thoughts.
"Eyes up, big man," she said.
He went red and swung at her.
This one was harder. He adapted fast.
She threw false shimmers and he punched through them, adjusting his read faster than the swordsman had.
Her reserves were already thinner after the course. She was spending the shimmer carefully now, burning it only when the gain was worth the risk.
Which meant she was spending a lot of the duel just fighting. In a dress with a hem that barely covered her ass and nothing underneath. In winter.
He caught her shoulder with a qi-reinforced punch. Same shoulder. She was beginning to suspect it had a target painted on it.
She staggered.
Her qi spiked from the impact, dress going momentarily more opaque, which was cold comfort. She caught herself, reset, and dropped the shimmer entirely for the last exchange.
No technique. Just movement. She went the wrong direction twice until he mapped the pattern, then went the right direction, and the fan caught his ribs.
He sat down.
She was breathing very hard, steam rising off her in the cold. The hem was doing something concerning in the wind and the entire terrace had already seen through the dress twice.
‘Great. Perfect.’
Her tail curled so tight it might never uncurl.
She held the fan up anyway, snapped it closed with a crisp click, and smiled like she was fine.
System:
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Chaos Essence: +2 (Persistence Under Exposure. Again. Somehow.)
Note: Two duels. Two transparency incidents. One shoulder complaint.
Secondary Note: The shoulder complaint has been denied.
Achievement Unlocked: 'Fought in Public Naked and Won Anyway (Advanced): Illusion failed. Dignity failed. Victory did not. Again'
Chaos Essence: 49 → 51
[collapse]
Then Joren stepped forward and the crowd got very quiet.
He looked at her the way he always had, except there was something different underneath it now. He'd watched both her duels. He knew what the dress did. She could see him calculating.
"You won't hide behind tricks this time," he said.
Her qi reserves were at maybe forty percent and dropping fast. Her shoulder was screaming. The dress was opaque right now and she needed it to stay that way or she was going to flash the entire sect again.
‘No pressure.’
Her eyes moved to the spear. It wasn't the staff he'd been carrying since their first duel.
He caught her looking. Something shifted in his jaw, not quite acknowledgment, but close. "The staff was Kaela's recommendation. The spear is mine."
"Then don't trip over it," she said.
They took stances.
He came in controlled and methodical, spear cutting arcs that forced her back step by step. Patient. The approach of someone who understood the gap and wasn’t in any hurry.
She was sparing the Shimmer, using it only in short bursts, keeping her qi circulation high enough to hold the dress. But short bursts meant weaker phantoms, and Joren was already reading them faster than he should.
‘He’s waiting for me to run low’, she realized. He watched the duels. ‘What an ass.’
She was playing into his patience and she couldn't stop.
The Shimmer guttered. She pushed more qi in, and the phantom blurred convincingly for two seconds before Joren read the tell and thrust through it. The spear tip grazed her side, not deep.
She backed up, reset.
Twenty percent of qi reserves left. Maybe.
She threw everything at the shimmer for one last convincing feint. Full suppression. The real technique, the one she'd been saving. The dress went completely transparent.
Joren’s eyes tracked upward.
She was already moving. The qi that had been holding the dress redirected through her meridians into the fan, and the phantoms that erupted came out stronger than anything she’d managed all morning; not because she’d planned it, but because she’d just dumped everything into one moment, her body finally answering.
Crack.
Not pain. Not the clean patient opening of the first vein. This was a dam cracking open after two full duels, and one very long obstacle course in a transparent dress.
‘H-hah—?!’
Heat exploded through her. New channels, new qi paths. The Shimmer flared back to life without her asking and the dress snapped opaque so hard it felt personally offended.
‘That was cool.’
Joren's spear went through three phantoms and found nothing.
Her tail lashed once, sharp, involuntary, and she pressed forward before she understood what she was doing.
He retreated, which she was fairly certain had never happened before, and the crowd noise was something she couldn't untangle because she was running entirely on instinct, the new vein pulsing through channels she didn't know existed, the fan moving in patterns that felt like they'd been waiting for her to find them.
He rallied. Five veins, deeper reserves than her. The gap was real and she felt it clearly. He pressed back and she yielded ground and they pushed at each other across the dueling stone until both of them were burning everything they had.
They froze.
His spear at her chest. Her fan against his ribs.
She could feel his qi pressure from here. Five veins. She was two veins in, the second one so new it was still settling, qi running hot and undisciplined through channels that didn't know their own shape yet.
His eyes were doing something she'd never seen on his face.
Not contempt. Not the familiar resentment.
Just — calculation. Reassessment. Like a sum that hadn't landed where he expected.
"Draw?" she said.
A pause long enough to be meaningful.
"Draw," he said.
He lowered the spear and walked away without another word. But his eyes moved to her once before he turned — not to her dress, not to the crowd, not to the formation stone — just to her face, for exactly one second.
"Results. First place, Tharia. Second, Joren. Third, Yingying. Twenty, fifteen, ten."
Her tail gave one satisfied swish.
Twenty points. Back on the board. One step closer to tournament selection.
Maren's voice cut through the noise before she could enjoy it.
"The first half is complete. Tomorrow, the second half begins — low-tier spirit beasts. Endurance and dueling are nothing if you cannot face the wild."
Around her, the terrace shifted. Some disciples straightened. Others went slightly pale.
Tharia filed it under “tomorrow's problem” and turned around.
Renji appeared at her shoulder, ears still thoroughly red, eyes carefully at face level with the determination of a man who had made a decision and was sticking to it.
"The dress," he started.
"Yes," she said.
"Every time you used your technique—"
"Yes."
"And you wore it anyway."
"Hmph," she snorted. "I was not wasting it."
He laughed.
His hand found her bare shoulder, the good one, not the damaged one, which was either good luck or he'd been paying attention, and stayed there one beat longer than a congratulations required.
She let it.
The snow had started falling again, soft and steady, coming down across the terrace and the bridges and the lanterns of the sect.
She stood in her crimson dress with her tail swaying and her fan closed in her hand, steam rising off her shoulders, twenty points on the board, two veins open, the second one still buzzing through her meridians like it hadn't quite settled into being real yet.
The crowd was still talking. The nicknames were circulating. She caught "naked fox" and "perverted fox" and something new she couldn't fully make out but which seemed enthusiastic.
She didn't mind any of them.
System:
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Second Vein: Opened.
Stage: Foundation Veins — Two Veins.
Illusion Proficiency: 49% (+2%)
Quest Completed: Open Second Vein (Right Rib Node — Mirror Path).
Quest: Open the Third Vein.
Chaos Essence: +3
Note: First vein: nine days of meditation. Second vein: seven days of training, one trial under genuine threat.
The System notes a pattern without elaborating.
Chaos Essence: 51 → 54
[collapse]
"One thing at a time," she told it.
She looked down at the crimson dress, which had been through a great deal today and was currently holding at full opacity with the smugness of something that knew it had more to offer.
She had a feeling she'd be wearing it again. Her tail gave one slow, certain flick.
Twenty points. Second vein. One dress that was never going to be allowed to retire.
The day had been productive enough.
System Status:
Host: Tharia | Age: 18
Status: Healthy (Battered. Recurring).
[TECHNIQUE ANALYSIS]
Illusion Proficiency: 49%
Chaos Stability: Fragile (Holding).
Stage: Foundation Veins: Second Vein Opened.
Achievement: {Style Over Substance: Passed evaluation wearing absolutely nothing. Technically.} - {Fought in Public Naked and Won Anyway (Advanced): Illusion failed. Dignity failed. Victory did not. Again} - {Naked Field Researcher: Turned a failure into very thorough, extremely hands-on field research. Technically.}
Traits: 'The Reluctant Royal' (Passive). ‘Willing Exposure’ (Passive)
Passive Techniques: 'Shame-Guard' (Passive)
Module: 'Path of the Unseen'
Art: Transparent Illusion (Rank: F) | Hold: 14 breaths (record).
Active Techniques: Illusory Raiment (Rank: C), Shimmer (Rank: F).
Weapon Affinity: Illusory Fan.
Chaos Essence: 54.
Wardrobe: Lucky Charm Hakama (Shelf.) Winter Sprite Dress (Worn.) Mesh Set (Backup.)
Status: Duskwind Sect - Outer Disciple.
Active Quests: Open the Third Vein.
SHOP.
[collapse]
Please support the novel on patr3on or by like and rating/ reviewing the novel. To keep me going knowing many of my readers support me <3