Jia felt like an idiot when she heard Sun Jaehwa’s voice through Eunae’s speaking stones. They had just assumed that she would stay behind the scenes, manipulating others in order to carve out a place for herself within the academy at their expense. What neither Eui nor Jia had considered was that for Sun, it wasn’t just about status or clout—it was personal.

Eunae lent Jia her speaking stone while she and Rika stayed behind to take care of the group of would-be arsonists, and as a result Jia had heard the entire conversation between Yue and Sun Jaehwa. Jia was flabbergasted by what she heard—apparently Sun still had feelings for Eui, and her entire vendetta was against Jia? She wished that Sun had answered Yue’s question—why had she been trying to flirt with Jia if she hated her so much?

She cast a nervous glance at Eui as they ran back to the house—what was she thinking? Eui noticed her looking and must have seen something in her expression, because she immediately laughed.

“Hah! If you’re worried I’m going to go jumping back into her arms, don’t bother. That bitch dropped me like a rock the second I was inconvenient to her, and I’d like to think I learned my lesson.”

That wasn’t really what Jia had been thinking, but it was still reassuring.

As they rounded a corner and came within sight of the house, Jia saw Yue standing tall, as if she was lording over the shorter girl before her, who was shouting angrily. She couldn't help but smile a bit—there was Yue, helpless and injured, stalling an opponent far beyond her ability just by being as annoying as possible. If only she had the ability to turn that particular talent of hers off.

Sun Jaehwa screeched in rage as they approached—Yue did have that effect on people—and the first thing she did was crouch down and power the unfinished formation. Jia tried to lunge forward to stop her, but they were still too far away.

“Wait, don’t—!”

Yue’s puzzled expression told Jia that she had no idea what was about to happen as the haphazard formation backfired without the proper engravings to direct the energy it was gathering. The resulting explosion—instead of being directed into the house, where it would no doubt cause a destructive conflagration—enveloped both girls in an uncontrolled ball of fire and destructive force.

The fireball was short-lived without a proper formation to sustain it, instead acting more like an oversized single-use spell talisman. As the flames settled, Jia saw that Yue had been sent sprawling by the blast, a few flames still clinging to her robe but dying fast—it figured that something produced by the Awakening Dragon sect would be fireproof. The house was superficially damaged, but the blast had been too brief to set it ablaze.

Sun Jaehwa was completely unharmed, a fire-element mana shield shimmering around her as its power was expended. She wasn’t wasting any time, and Jia could already see her quickly activating talismans that she had hidden on her person—not foolishly pulling them out to cast the spells by hand like the other girls had.

“You should have listened to me Lee Jia! I told you that An Eui is dangerous! Were you lying to me the entire time, or did you take her just to spite me?”

Eui crossed her arms and glared at Sun Jaehwa.

“Hey! I’m right here, and I’m perfectly capable of making my own fucking decisions, Jaehwa!”

Sun looked at Eui as if she’d only just noticed she was there, and scowled.

“You! How could you be so ungrateful after everything I did for you?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You are the entire reason I was exiled, in case you forgot!”

“I took you in and protected you from the other nobles. Without my intervention they would have chewed an upstart commoner like you up and spit the remains at the feet of your parents just to send a message to the ‘new money’. How did you repay my kindness? By ruining my life!”

Eui scoffed angrily.

“You’re one to talk about ruining people’s lives! You might have protected me when I was your good little pet, but the moment it would actually cost you something, you abandoned me!”

“I did what I could to protect you, but what was I supposed to do when you killed my fiance!? I never asked you to do that!”

“I thought he killed you! The least you could have done is just tell the truth!”

There was a pregnant pause as Sun Jaehwa tried to find a retort. Jia watched anxiously, but didn’t interject—this was Eui’s moment. Eui shook her head as the silence stretched on for a moment too long.

“Tch, that’s what I thought. You never really cared about me, Jaehwa. Even now, you don’t actually care about me. This is about you and your pride. You’re angry at Jia because you think she took me from you, but I was never yours, and I’m not Jia’s either. I don’t belong to anybody!”

Sun Jaehwa shook her head.

“That’s not true! I care enough to risk my reputation to save you from her! Look what she’s done to you, Eui! You’re trapped in some kind of strange dual cultivation with her, forced to become a demon—if Lee Jia abandoned you now, your life would be over!”

Eui sighed sadly.

“That goes both ways, Jaehwa. Are you even capable of comprehending the concept of an equal relationship, or is everything about power to you? I asked you to save me once, and you spat in my face—I neither want nor need your help now. If you actually care about me at all, you’ll forget about me and leave us alone.”

Sun Jaehwa took a step back as if she’d been struck, then clenched her fists and snarled at them.

“Fine! If you won’t listen to reason, then I’ll just have to use force. Don’t worry, I won’t kill either of you or destroy your cultivation—’undue suppression’ isn’t allowed, after all. I’ll just teach you a lesson, and then if you haven't learned by the time you recover, I’ll teach it again. And again. As many times as it takes.”

Jia clenched her fists and took up a fighting stance. She really wished that they hadn’t given Sun time to precast all those spells. Jia charged forward—most mages would start a fight by preparing their defenses, and she wanted to preempt—

Sun threw her hands forward and launched a barrage of sharp stone shards from within her sleeves. Jia cursed and covered her face as she threw herself to the ground to avoid most of the shards, quickly rolling back to her feet before Sun could take advantage of the opening.

Of course she didn’t need to set up defenses first—she’d already been casting them during the argument with Eui. Jia had sparred often enough with Dae, Eunae, and Kim Yongsun to know how mages fought, but she’d never been in a serious fight with a dedicated spellcaster like this.

Jia tried casting one of her own signature lightning bolts at Sun Jaehwa, but it was caught by a mana shield that flashed silver for a moment before the bolt was redirected harmlessly into the ground. Jia groaned in frustration—Dae used the same tactic whenever they practiced, and she hated it.

It was apparently common for advanced mages to learn to quickly change the element of their aura as needed, and a particularly devious version of the mana shield spell would link with their aura, changing element along with it. It was generally something that was learned in the second stage for mages and mastered by the third—Dae was an exception, having already mastered it in the second—but Jia had skipped that step when her mana sense was replaced by her domain, and had never gotten around to figuring it out. Evidently, Sun knew how to do it too, and she had deflected Jia’s bolts with a metal element shield.

A common phrase among the Goryeon colleges was that ‘a mage is as powerful as they are prepared’, and Sun Jaehwa was very prepared for them. If Jia attempted to close the distance, she’d be met with wide-area barrages of physical projectiles like stone, ice, or metal—things that her mana shield had a hard time dealing with. If she tried to counterattack from a distance, her spells were deflected effortlessly by that damned metal aura.

Eui wasn’t faring much better. While Sun Jaehwa was focusing most of her offensive efforts on Jia, she wasn’t ignoring Eui either. Eui was much weaker at range, and not as mobile as Jia—on top of that, without being able to use her Six Arms of Asura technique, her offensive power wasn’t as superlative as it had been in most of their fighting experience. Eui was kept at bay by earthen walls, sudden quagmires, and the occasional focused attack. Against Eui, Sun used elements that were harder to avoid physically, like fire, force, or even lightning.

Jia frowned angrily as Eui was forced to block a bolt of lightning with her ki—she knew that she wasn’t the only person who could use the element, but it still felt a bit like she was being copied. Frustrated, Jia tried to back off and regroup with Eui, but Sun Jaehwa pressed her advantage, throwing rapid fire spells at her until she was nearly forced into a full retreat.

“Eui, you never told me she was so good at magic!”

Eui swore furiously, trying to help cover Jia from the relentless assault.

“I didn’t fucking know! Last time I saw her she was barely a mage, and that was two years ago!”

Sun Jaehwa laughed, obviously not too busy casting spells to gloat.

“Did you forget who your invitation was originally meant for, Lee? Remember that everything you have, you stole from me! This is what real talent looks like!”

She punctuated her claim by producing a specially crafted talisman and channeling her mana into it. Jia was instantly on guard—while a mage could get by on quickly crafted and mass-produced paper talismans, their real weapons were the purpose-built specialty talismans like the ones she had used to defeat Yan Zhihao and Zheng Long.

Jia couldn’t tell at a glance which elements the talisman had been made to enhance, but she could feel a slight drop in the ambient temperature, and sensed the mana around her moving towards Sun as she activated the spell—water. The fur on her tail and ears stood on end at the realization.

In Qin, it was common knowledge that water was a soft, flexible element. Good for healing and defense, slow and inexorable, but weak in direct combat applications. Dae had completely disillusioned her of that notion once by demonstrating a focused beam of water cutting cleanly through a log of wood. Water was dangerous. Attacks using water would manifest physically, making them difficult to defend against with mana shields, and they were sustained, which made them nearly impossible to physically deflect.

Water-element attacks were the entire reason why most mages learned spells to create walls of ice or stone. Getting behind cover or avoiding them entirely was about the only way to defend against them, and Jia was really regretting neglecting to learn them herself. She searched frantically for cover, but they were too far away to get behind the house and there was nothing else nearby.

“Shit!”

Jia dove to the side just in time to avoid the focused blast of water that tore up the ground where she’d been standing. The thin beam of pressurized water followed her faster than she could move, and not even the erratic zig-zagging movements of the Lightning God Transformation were enough to dodge the spell.

Just when Jia thought she’d be bisected by the terrifying jet of water, she was tackled to the ground by Eui and the spell passed dangerously close above their heads. There was no time to consider how close to being beheaded she had just been—wasn’t Sun trying not to kill them?—as the spell’s power still hadn’t been expended and was already coming back around towards them. Without thinking, Jia pulled Eui into an embrace and prayed that they were both thinking the same thing.

The transition to Yoshika was completely seamless, and she wasted no time activating Absolute Awareness. She was stuck on the ground in an awkward position, without enough time to get out of the way of the approaching spell. Her only hope was to disrupt the spell somehow, but without her domain, there wasn’t much she could do.

The situation seemed hopeless, but Yoshika wasn’t willing to give up. She had less than a second before the water cut her apart, but at the speed she could think while focusing on Absolute Awareness, that was practically an eternity. She quickly reviewed her options for disrupting the spell.

Water spells were so dangerous specifically because of how hard they were to neutralize. Short of blocking it with a wall of some kind or overpowering it with another spell, it couldn’t be stopped directly. Another option would be to destroy the talisman entirely, or to break Jaehwa’s concentration on it, but at this distance neither option seemed plausible. Her metal aura would be effective at stopping lightning bolts, and a thrown knife would be too slow.

She remembered Jia’s duel against Yan Zhihao, and the way her shock spells had travelled through his fire whips. Jia had done a lot of research about her lightning element—it would pass through certain elements, and be dispersed by others. Metal was one of them—which Jaehwa had been using to deflect her attacks—and fire was another, but what about water?

She remembered discussing strategy with her team. Dae had warned her to be careful about using lightning near water because it would travel through it! Yoshika pointed one of Jia’s arms toward the beam and activated a lightning bolt talisman—if the lightning travelled through the water, it would bypass Jaehwa’s defenses entirely! The bolt arced out from the talisman in Jia’s sleeve, made contact with the water and—

Nothing. Yoshika cursed—she’d wasted precious moments on that! She realized her mistake too late—it didn’t work on magically created water. Dae had explained why to Jia once, but she hadn’t been paying attention. Something about purity. She wished she’d given that lesson the proper respect.

Now what!? The headache caused by Absolute Awareness was mounting, but Yoshika kept it up as she rolled away from the beam to buy herself precious fractions of a second. She was out of ideas! If only she could use her domain she might be able to do something, but that damned seal—

Yoshika stopped. She was thinking about this the wrong way. If she could break the seal, then there would be something she could do. If it was between breaking the seal or just dying here, then she would just have to do it. If she couldn’t break the seal, then she’d die trying.

The first thing she did was eliminate the idea of breaking it by force. She’d been trying that for weeks already, and hadn’t made any progress. Instead, she recalled Yue telling her that it probably wasn’t really a ‘seal’ at all, and focused on trying to understand what her domain was.

Her domain was her—Yoshika, the unity between Jia and Eui. That bond was the greatest thing that defined her, but it wasn’t the only thing. She was also shadow—a shelter to protect the weak and allow them to flee or even prey upon those stronger than them. She was hunger—an unending desire to grow and improve beyond her limits. Finally, she was shackled—tied down by her bonds, by the laws that restricted her, by the mandates of those powerful enough to enforce them on her—

Yoshika frowned, then winced as a sharp pain erupted in Jia’s side where the water had gotten uncomfortably close and begun to tear at her flesh in slow motion—she ignored it. That last part was not her. It was not part of who she was, but something that had been imposed on her. Yoshika began to understand what Qin Zhao had done to ‘seal’ her domain.

It was devious—insidious! She had no idea that domains could even work like that, and that was exactly why Elder Qin had done it. He had taken advantage of her poorly formed self-identity, and imposed a portion of his own domain upon hers. He’d suppressed her domain—sealed it away with nothing but the idea that he could. After that, she’d subconsciously internalized the ‘seal’ and made it part of herself.

Now, she rejected it—refused it with every fibre of her being. Bonds, friendships, close ties—those weren’t shackles that tied her down, they were her strength! She was unity—cooperation! The law? The powerful? She had killed those who threatened her loved ones, stolen what she needed to survive, and faced overwhelming odds with only her wits and the help of her allies. She wasn’t shackled. She was—

About to get torn in half!

The spell had cut deep into Jia’s flesh by now, and was mere inches from damaging vital organs. Yoshika didn’t have any more time to waste—she extended her domain as far as it would go, and to her relief, it responded. She could sense everything around her, but she didn’t have time to take it all in. She focused her domain on the one thing within it that mattered right now—Jaehwa.

Yoshika urgently drew every last drop of essence she could muster and poured it into the only technique she had that could take effect instantly through her domain. She only hoped that Corruption of the Fetid Bog would be enough to break Jaehwa’s concentration.

Everything happened at once as the world snapped into normal speed again—Yoshika was no longer able to maintain concentration on Absolute Awareness while putting everything she had into her aura. Jaehwa’s manic grin turned into a pained grimace, and the talisman dropped from her hand, ending the spell. Then she collapsed to the ground, clutching at her mouth and stomach.

Before Yoshika had a chance to breathe out a sigh of relief, Jaehwa lost the fight with her nausea and vomited profusely. Much to Yoshika’s chagrin, her domain’s focus on Jaehwa meant that she got a much more intimate perception of the expulsion than she ever would have wanted. Strangely, there was quite a bit of blood curdling within it. Yoshika was slightly concerned by that, then extremely concerned when Jaehwa vomited again—this time entirely blood—and collapsed to the ground.