We got in! I know it might seem silly, but I’d been a bit nervous there. Even if our friends had tacitly made it seem like this whole thing was a done deal, I’d been a bit worried. Rejection was never fun, and there was a non-zero chance of us getting turned down. That was the part of the equation that my mind insisted on focusing on. So, I’m quite relieved to be able to say that all went as we hoped and we were successfully able to join not only the Tree of Passionate Verdance, but the Forest of Life and Death behind them.

As to how “that” happened, I've already said that attaining a high status in the junior-sect would create opportunities to join the senior-sect. I just hadn’t expected that to happen so quickly. Maybe our friends did though. In which case, it means that I didn’t give them enough credit in regards to their promise.

Anyway, we were accepted into the TPV(Tree of Passionate Verdance) as Junior-Elders. That was a surprise. I had kind of thought we’d enter as disciples but nope...Apparently, it’d be inappropriate for individuals of our strength to be anything less than elders when even the Sect-Master was still just a Beginner-Stage Primordial. Then the FLD(The Forest of Life and Death) took us in as core-disciples, which left that Elder Pradhan fellow looking oddly salty for some reason.

Now Jack and I were preparing for another move. We weren’t leaving the 14th Pearl, but the TPV’s main headquarters, Birch Grove, lay some distance away from Five-Fire City and the Spice Empire in which the city resided. We didn’t have much to do by way of packing. Everything that mattered to us, was easily put back into our shared inventory. So, now what we were doing was going around town and buying up things we thought we’d need or want over in Birch Grove. Most of what we bought were books and media. I’d already given the city’s libraries a visit, and now I was making the rounds at all the bookstores, curio shops for the high-class, and a few other shops.

If it seems we were only buying and packing trivial stuff. Again, congrats on being observant. We ‘were’ only packing trivial stuff. Thanks to my [Tale of the Craftsman], all our years of living in the wilderness, and the near-infinite confines of my inventory, there was nothing substantive that we needed that we didn’t already have in hundreds of colors, sizes, and excessive numbers. We were like the decadent descendants of a doomsday prepper, and a certain ultra-wealthy, nocturnal-mammal-themed, superhero. The only things we’d lacked during all that time that we’d spent in the wilderness, was information, entertainment, and people.

By that same measure, the one important thing we’d set up for ourselves before making our next big move, was a private communication network. My stories had provided me enough knowledge and experience to allow me to create a communication network that made most of the networks in use today look like hollering and string cans. In fact, I would even hazard to say that I knew enough to make the networks of the ancients look parochial.

The [Tale of the Arcanist] and the [Tale of the Craftsman] had taught me how to marry magical-attunement with quantum-entanglement in order to create a near-perfect, high-fidelity, wireless pipeline. That was then paired with some exotic, spirit-crystal-based particles, that I created and disbursed using insights [Tale of the Alchemist] to serve as anchoring points, and molecule-sized servers, for the network. Add in a little programming and data-manipulation, aided by [Tale of the Fool], and the [Tale of the Empty Archivist’s Heir] and we got a user-friendly, nigh-uninvadable, nigh-disruptible, potentially universe-spanning, communication network.

I called this network, the Empty-Network, because it was built in such a way that it hypothetically could never be full, possessing a potentially infinite capacity. It was a self-evolving, self-maintaining, self-expanding, construct. The first of many, that I could see myself creating in the future. The best part was that this network had no need for specialized hardware. So long as a device could make contact with the network’s technological or magical interfaces, and one had user-access rights. Then one would be able to access the network using even the simplest of communication jades.

Which was why, when Jack and I were saying our goodbyes to our friends in the city. We gave them all user-access codes. We didn’t just stop at giving “them” access rights, we gave extra codes so that they could give others access-rights. A thank you gift for hooking us up with the Tree of Passionate Verdance, and the Forest of Life and Death.

The going-away party itself wasn’t that big an affair. We just went to a restaurant we'd taken a liking to, with our friends, plus that girl Alisha, who was apparently Alina's protege, or whatever. First off, we didn’t have that many friends. Second, we weren’t really “going away”, or at least we weren’t going that far away. We were leaving Five-Fire City behind, but Birch Grove wasn’t that far away, and it was likely we’d still be able to meet our friends again soon enough. The Spice Empire and the 14th Pearl were both vast, but not so vast that enemies and friends were unlikely to run into one another.

Finally, the day came for us to set off. We took a spirit-crystal-powered locomotive to Birch Grove instead of flying there. Birch Grove wasn’t that far away, relatively speaking, but it was still, very firmly, outside the borders of the expansive Spice Republic. We saw no reason to rush and tire ourselves out, and ultimately, we figured travelling by train would be a new experience for us.