Radha Suresh, Sect Head of Harta’s branch of the Radiant Orrichalcum Gardens sat with his head in his hands. His thin gray fingers rubbing his temples. His essence scrawled glasses lay on the table. Leaving the eyeless old man blind.

Radha Suresh was a half-breed, a not uncommon trait in Embla. He was half jotun, half-monstrum. Gray skinned, goat horned, with a little fur on his ears and a long scaly, ox's tail poking out from behind his robes.

It had been somewhat of a hard week for the Sect Head. Good news and bad news had abounded. Piling up on his desks till the legs began to creak.

On the part of the good news, he’d just gotten a report that one of his sect’s members had discovered a breed of glass-petalled flower that was as potent in purifying and amplifying essence as certain ultra-rare, top class, medicinal herbs were, and yet was as prolific as certain common medicinal grasses.

An amazing find, that if properly capitalized upon could easily alter the field of alchemy and cultivator medicines in Embla forever and push the Radiant Orrichalcum Gardens to the top as a resource acquisition and trade sect.

Sect Head Suresh would have been over the moon and doing backflips in joy, were it not for his aged, his dignity as a sect head, and the ill news that had come overshadowing this discovery.

The first of the bad news arrived, carried by the Sect’s informants and agents beyond the continent. One of the great sects from overseas was thinking of moving in and staking claims over Hartan territory.

When it came to power and politics having an outside element come in to try and take a piece of the pie, was never a good thing. There was only so much “pie” to go around, having someone else take a slice meant that others who’d already been there would have some of their own claims and stakes infringed on. Which meant there’d be a lot of jostling about, and figurative elbowing, as the various factions and powers fought to keep what was theirs….theirs.

A period of strife that others who were savvier and more cutthroat would no doubt use to try and snatch bigger slices, of territory and influence, than they’d originally had.

In other words, there was a very real chance that sometime in the near future the sects and powers of Harta would be at each other's throats. At the very worst a cultivator-war would take place, one that would include every man and woman on the continent. Likely becoming accompanied by a war amongst the mortal nations.

Suresh was already seeing signs of it in the missives and communiques he’d gotten from the sects within the South-Harta Alliance. The Sect Heads of Iron-Blood Kings and the Courts of Steel and Amber had agreed that no matter what happened their faction would stay united, as was often the case, it was less what they said, and more how they said it that had Sect Head Suresh concerned.

The way he saw it, he could probably trust the Iron-Blood Kings to honor their bond if only because their warrior mentality would never allow them to give ground as others tried to encroach on their claims.

The Courts of Steel and Amber would be the biggest concern as they were really more a group of sects than a single unified sect, and therefor more fractious as a consequence. Helena Windking, their Sect Head, had more or less stated it as such. Stating that so long as she still had a say in the decision, the sect would stay the course. Which was as much blackmail, as it was a promise.

Not that Suresh could judge her for it, they all had to watch out themselves, the first recourse an invasive power always took when stepping into new territory was to cause division and strife within the resident powers.

In real life, unlike in chess, the best way to capture an enemy king was to have his own court do the capturing.

From now on Suresh would have to keep a closer eye on the elders and senior disciples of his sect to make certain that any interactions, that they may or may not have with the newcomers were innocent in nature. Lest he look away one day and he wake up the following morning to find himself surrounded by enemies, with a knife sinking into his back.

Speaking of which, the Sect Head had another headache on his hands to deal with. Several of the elders had come to him, speaking of nominating one of the Sect’s senior-most disciples for Eldership.

Which on paper seemed perfectly natural, until his personal aides looked into things and discovered the aforementioned disciple, was still only just now, entering his twenties and had been in the outer-sect little more than a year ago.

It was one thing to accept the strange but promising youth’s, many, many oddities, when there wasn’t a plot to undermine the sects underfoot but now things were a little more serious.

If the youth hadn’t had a backer so profoundly dangerous that even Sect Head Suresh was cautious of him, perhaps he would have simply gotten rid of the young jotun and quelled the possible threat that way. As it was, now Suresh had been forced to send people to take a second look into the youth’s background to make sure he wasn’t the first ground troop for whatever the foreign sect was planning.

The Results of the investigation proved to be almost troublingly bland, the youth was a farm boy from the middle of nowhere. His family was mostly made up of military folk, farmers, and traders.

There was something in the report that the sect’s people wrote up, about a fallen Oedheim clan that was wiped out by the joint scheming of the Palmas Kingdom and the Helios Empire that ruled the mortals in the northern part of the continent.

However, all that was mortal history, and old history at that, nothing that drew the Sect Head’s eye. The report as a whole was clean, too clean, a simple background that was thoroughly incongruous with the performance of the youth in mention.

The same youth who was responsible for the discovery the groundbreaking breed of glass-pettalled flower.

Searching for dirt and finding freshly fallen snow instead, was a discomfiting thing. The boy’s successes couldn’t all be explained by the intervention and tutorship of his master. As a teacher of several famous students himself, Radha Suresh refused to believe that such a thing was possible, because if it were so it would mean the youth was some manner of monster, something that went beyond the realm of genius and into the realm of the abominable.

Yet, it seemed that this was exactly the case. They had testimony of people finding the boy odd, but mundane, up till the moment of his debut in the tournament in Vignale. So if he was a plant, he was a deep plant, one that had been kept under wraps for quite some time.

The only thing that eased the Sect Head’s suspicions was the boy’s master, who’d exhibited a level of power that made such circuitous scheming seem unlikely, making Suresh feel that it was possible that if the boy was at the center of a plot, it probably wasn’t a plot against the sect. They were possibly being used for something, or made into a cover or smokescreen for the boy’s later actions, but they weren’t the target of whatever his aims were.

Or so...the Sect Head hoped.

Now, recently, while he was doing all this thinking, yet another report came in, explaining the sudden rush of support from the Sect Elders. Where it was revealed that their reasons for nominating the youth into the position of Elder, was for the sake of saving their faces.

According to the report, the youth had been tutoring the Elder’s personal disciples in profound arts, both magical and martial. Profound enough that even the Elders were finding themselves drawn to the tutorship sessions. Watching from a distance and taking discrete notes.

A youth barely two decades in age was teaching century old masters, and it seemed they wanted him promoted so they could, ask him questions about some of the things he’d been expounded upon in person, rather than sending their disciples to do it.

After hearing this the old Sect Head nearly flipped over a table. While he was still unsure of the youth’s origins or intentions, he knew that regardless of who he was and where he came, he was far too young to be placed in the position of Sect Elder. Especially not as an Elder of the Core Sect, since he’d already become a disciple of the Core Sect and had already climbed to the middle-ranks of the sect’s core-circle.

Yet the other elders kept asking, their persistence making the old Sect Head feeling like splitting someone’s head open, even if it was his own.

“You old foxes and weasels. Face? You’re actually worried about face? What do you call this then? You’re willing to let someone several decades your junior stand as an equal so that it’s less shameful to go to him for guidance...tch.” he grumbled to himself, still nursing his terrible headache. Concentrating on using essence to calm the turbulence within his circulation.