It had been seven years since the leaders of the most powerful sects on Nia had been forced to place their youngest children in the care of the most dangerous cultivator in the world, seven years since nearly a century of ceaseless warfare had been snuffed out by the actions of a single elderly man. The Overseer of the Winterlands had left his territory for the first time in eighty years in order to kidnap these youths under the guise of putting an end to the Hegemon Wars once and for all, but Jason had always suspected that there were other elements to the situation aside from what everyone had been made to believe. There were other heirs among the sects, other youths with better aptitudes for cultivation than he and his sibling disciples.

His suspicions were confirmed when his master nonchalantly admitted to the five of them that the true reason he had forcefully taken them in was because they had been the most compatible candidates to learn his techniques.

He went on to describe that originally he had only planned on taking in Dalian, a boy born to a barbarous tribe somewhere in the unexplored islands of Nia’s southern hemisphere. As fate would have it, however, the old man had decided to take a detour on his way back to the Winterlands after having safely secured his new disciple. He decided to peep in on the United Sect Assembly on a whim, and it was there that he was met with the most pleasant of surprises. He happened to notice four tiny children with outstanding potential to inherit his teachings, though these were the offspring of the most influential people in the world. In actuality, he only ended the Hegemon wars because it had been the quickest and easiest way to obtain the children without bringing about any unwanted headaches.

“What made us so qualified to be your disciples?” he had asked his master as the sun had set upon his twelfth birthday.

“It was your character,” replied Halvin. They stood beneath the shade of an overhanging eave as they watched the other children playing in the water of the lake that surrounded the tiered tower that they lived in. “You five have one thing in common, and that is your auras. I have lived for hundreds of years, and yet you lot form a five-way tie for the most pleasant shades that I have ever sensed.”

“Shades? How do you mean?”

Halvin shook his head, his short white hair devolving into a steely grey in light of the imminent gloaming. “One day you shall understand, Actius, once you’ve cultivated the Ancestral Body Technique to its three hundredth stance.”

“There are three hundred stances?” Jason’s mouth fell open and his eyebrows shot to the sky. That was far more than his master had previously revealed. Coincidently his twelfth birthday coincided with his mastery of the technique’s ninety-ninth stance. He was a full dozen steps ahead of Dana, the next most adept pupil after him, though all of them were used to their master’s constant praise and admiration, for they all excelled in different areas. Andrus had his brute strength, Dalian his speed, Dana and Trina their healing attributes, and he his adeptness at conceiving and conjuring spiritual arrayments as if it were second nature.

“There are many more than that, though none from this world have managed to progress further than the three hundredth stance.”

“This world?” Did he expect him to believe that there were others?

“You lot are aware that my master wasn’t originally from Nia.”

Jason nodded. He was the only one of Halvin’s disciples to entertain the notion that his words had been true, for even though the others trusted their teacher as if he were family they lacked the imagination to explore such a concept as the existence of other realms aside from the one that they knew. If this world existed, then why not another? At the very least he couldn’t disprove it.

“Where was he from then, your master?”

“I often wonder.” The old man’s strong-lined face arranged itself in nostalgic order. “Enough talk for today. Why don’t you go and join the others?”

The last thing that Jason wanted to do was to go and play pointless games with what little leisure time his training schedule allotted him. Fun wasn’t playing catch-the-mouse with the others or racing at sprints or swims, it was compounding a new spiritual arrayment that even common elders of his family’s sect would have a difficult time conceiving, let alone creating. It was unravelling yet another piece of the puzzle in regards to the natural mechanics behind these arrayments, the greater mystery of how and why spiritual energy was able to affect the world around it in so many ways.

Admittedly, aside from his master the only person he knew that had a knack for working with spiritual arrayments in a naturally coherent way was Dana. He felt that she didn’t take her talent as seriously as she ought to, though he still held her in high esteem. He would never tell her this, of course, even if there were some sort of profit to be gained in doing so.

He donned a mask of eagerness and nodded at Halvin. “Master is always so considerate.” He dashed forth and called out to his friends so as to interrupt their game and proclaim himself as the mouse. Andrus and Dalian doubled their efforts and the game suddenly lost its leisurely air. He spent the next hour having fun with the others, fully aware of his master’s approving gaze all the while.

“Is everything okay, Dana?”

Jason had subconsciously sensed her as she slipped out of one of her room’s many windows from up on the third floor of the tower, which resided at the top of a mountain within the heart of the Winterlands. He’d been the only one roused from slumber, his aura completely concealed as he quietly left the tower.

“There’s no need to concern yourself with me,” she said quietly, unmoving where she sat along the shore of the crystalline lake that surrounded their home. She kicked off her sandals and dipped her pale feet into the water, which sparkled like a sea of diamonds under the strong supply of soft light from the night sky above.

Her eyelids were lined with moisture, her angled cheeks flushed and warm. She had recently styled her luscious brown hair in a curly, shoulder-length fashion, which he secretly preferred over the long and straight strands that used to dangle down to her waist up until only recently.

“Do you regret cutting your hair for the first time since Master took us in?”

“Go away, Actius!”

He frowned as he noticed fresh tears threatening to fall from her eyes. What was he doing, intruding upon a private moment so casually? Why had he followed her outside?

Looking up at the cloudless sky and the full moon that filled nearly a tenth of it, he considered the light distillation arrayments that he had recently been experimenting with. By creating special panes of glass with a self-invented spiritual arrayment, he was able to isolate the various colours that he had discovered ordinary light to contain. As he recalled the aftermath of the spring storm that had instigated his initial enlightenment, a clever idea suddenly possessed him. He conjured dozens of plate-sized discs composed of iridescent energy and then scattered them in the air around him and his sibling disciple, each disc angled with the utmost precision.

“What are you doing?” Dana grumbled. Her frustration appeared to have increased. “Just leave me alone, Actius.”

He ignored her and plotted out a compound arrayment by combining several arrayments that he had long since learned to the greatest level of aptitude. Once the diagram had been formed, he sent it out over the calm surface of the beautiful lake to hover at the centre of the diagrams that he had scattered moments before.

A bright flash of golden light accompanied the arrayment’s activation, and within moments a giant pillar of water shot out of the lake and began to gather into a large ball about fifty paces above them. The sphere of liquid stopped siphoning from the lake just a few moments after its appearance, and almost immeidately after the gathered water exploded into a mass of drifting mist.

With a slight bit of effort he sent a small torrent of energy into the entry points of each of the remaining arrayments, which quickly transformed the floating diagrams into thick panes of distorted glass. Finally, he directed a particular pane of glass to hover directly above the entire scene that he had created, which shone brilliantly as it absorbed the moonlight and redirected it toward one of the panes of glass below. It only took a split second for the light to connect each pane, which instantly birthed a wonderland of wandering rainbows born from carefully refracted rays of light. He activated the last function of the arrayment, which caused the entire scene to rotate in a soothing circular motion.

Dana didn’t say anything, simply sat there and watched the lightshow with an astounded expression.

Spectacular as the arrayment was, it only had a lifespan of twelve minutes. It wasn’t long before the mist disbursed and the panes of glass disintegrated, and soon the lake had settled back into its previous state of tranquility.

“I see now why you dismissed that rainbow as ‘nothing special.’”

He recalled the relatively small rainbow that the five of them had seen while hunting beasts throughout the mountain range a few weeks back. That had been around the time that he had succeeded in isolating individual colours through specific adjustments to the arrayment that conjured his specialized panes of glass.

“You’ve seemed a bit distant lately. How can I enjoy outdoing you in our lessons when you’re wearing such an empty face?”

Her auburn eyes took on a glint that he hadn’t seen before, though it quickly disappeared as she averted her gaze with a considerate sigh. “You haven’t visited your family since we were ten. Don’t you ever miss them?”

He crossed his arms and regarded the sea of stars that surrounded the ancient moon, which melded with its mirror image on the surface of the still lake. The reflection was so flawlessly in manner that for a moment it seemed as if he had soared past the heavens to exist among the countless celestial bodies that dazzled his vision from the great Infinity that loomed beyond.

“It’s not that I don’t miss them,” he said after a while. “I do, and I love them deeply.” His face took on a strange weight as he struggled to find the right words to express his thoughts. “Honestly, I didn’t enjoy my last visit.”

The strange silence that followed reminded him of the fact that, while he and Dana had become friends of sorts over the years, the enmity between their clans had always acted as a barrier that assured they would never truly get along despite how friendly they behaved out of circumstance. He knew that Andrus had never forgiven her people for killing most of his immediate family on the day that they had first become Halvin’s disciples, and honestly, neither had he. Still, that incident was hardly her fault, so only harm could come from treating her as if she were directly involved in the schemes of her sect. Due to the delicate history that existed between their dominant bloodlines, he had never opened up to her in the slightest.

“Did something happen?” she asked uncertainly.

“No, nothing in particular. The reason that I couldn’t enjoy everyone’s company was simply that I was too restless to sit still.”

“Restless? What could agitate you enough to overlook your family?”

“Since the day that he’s taken us in, Master has always maintained the habit of staring off into space at least once a day. I’m sure you’ve noticed this.”

“So? He’s an old man, Actius. Old men space out at times.”

He shook his head and then folded his hands behind his back, his limbs antsy as he considered his words with care. “Yes, they do. But over the years I’ve noticed that Master has the habit of literally staring off into space, his attention always centred on the same section of the distant skies.”

“And you’re saying this means something?”

He projected words into her mind. “Remember when Master told us of his teacher?”

Her brow furrowed in concentration “I can’t spea…speak like thi…this well. I only just reached Genesis.”

“Just listen. Master’s teacher has been dead for centuries, despite having achieved a true ancestral body. That would make him a god, Dana. Why would an existence like that come to this world and found the Blackstar Sect?”

“What are you going off about?” Dana said aloud. “Gods only exist in myth.”

“Then what are we doing here? We learned long ago that the peak of our core cultivation method will result in us forming an ancestral body, the body of a god.”

“That’s just something that Master told a bunch of children to encourage them to cultivate. If you actually believe that then you’re delusional, Actius.”

“Just say for a minute that it’s true. If we’re to believe Master’s words, then how exactly did someone several stages above the current strongest person in all of Nia manage to lose his life after coming here?”

Dana shook her head and shot him her usual smirk. “How can I be weighed down by my nostalgia when I’ve got such a fool at my side to keep me distracted?” She stepped back from the quiet shoreline and turned to go. “Thank you for the lightshow, and for the talk. You’re not as insufferable as I thought, for someone from the Kabern clan.”

“He was injured.”

“What?” She glanced over her shoulder.

“That’s the only way that such a powerful person could have lost his life in a world where everyone else was so much weaker than them. He was injured, which would mean that there’s a chance that he fled here.”

“First you say that he is a god and then you say that he was killed?” She let out a half-hearted laugh, the mirth in her voice hallow. “And you expect me to believe that you started to pick up on all this when you were still a runt?”

He shrugged, a bit disappointed that someone as intelligent as Dana had showed such a narrow-minded response to his mounting suspicions. “Don’t tell the others about what I’ve said. I hope you enjoyed the lightshow.”

“As if I would give more time to the topic.”

He leapt to the top of the tower and stared off into the vast expanse of starry sky, his eyes on the same spot that usually stole his master’s attention for short spans of several moments. Halvin should have overheard all of the words that he and Dana had physically spoken, which was a natural way for his master to learn of his suspicions.

How long? Jason wondered as he stood there atop their tiered home, a warm summerly breeze washing over the snow-capped mountains that made up a majority of the backdrop. How long before he learned the reason why his master was always so stricken with silent worry?

True to her word, Dana didn’t mention their conversation to the others. Andrus and Dalian would have jumped at any opportunity to make him seem a fool, so their silence on the matter served as proof of her honesty. Though she refused to touch upon the topic once again, he saw that these days she was astutely aware of the habitual stares that their master frequently directed at the distant skies. Every time he caught her stealing glances at their distracted mentor, he noted the growing unease of her expression.