Magic thrummed through my oath as I answered the call. Last time this had happened, my relocation had been sudden and completely unexpected, resulting from the collision of an enhanced mass of my magic with a bundle of the Clarsin primordial’s. That time, our meeting had been facilitated by Nishi’s manipulation of the primordial. More like a rope being tied around me and forcefully yanked.

This time, though, I could feel the rope being extended to me, offered rather than forced upon me, and I grasped it firmly.

The transition from my position in baseline reality to a place that was entirely other occurred in an instant once again. This time, though, I could almost track the process. Parts of it remained totally obscure to me, but I could feel the communication taking hold, Nishi’s spell enabling our access into this oath space.

Nishi was less blurry than he’d been last time. I could recognize his features, at least somewhat. A man from the east, it looked like. Potentially even one from a Yelian noble line, given his slightly darker skin tone and green eyes. I still couldn’t recognize crucial features, but it was a far cry from what little I’d seen of him last time.

The oathspace was still as paradoxical as ever, but I found myself able to process it more now. It was the difference between knowing how something worked in theory and having witnessed the truth of it in practice. I’d known technicalities of how these non-baseline oathspaces worked before, and I’d been able to figure out how to navigate in this space when Nishi had pulled me in here the first time, but now I took to it like a fish to water.

A moment passed, and I was facing Nishi.

“You called me here,” I said, folding my arms and giving him a mild glare. It was a rather meaningless gesture, given that—from what fragments of my oath, textbooks, and Nishi I’d understood—we weren’t entirely corporeal here in this liminal space, nor was time passing exactly the same way, but I did it anyway. If I was going to be communicated through a glorified meeting room, I would be just as petty as I liked. “Why? I was busy?”

“As pleasant as ever, Lily,” Nishi said, a shit-eating grin on his face. “Why, it was not I that called you here, but you that requested a meeting.”

“Did I really now,” I deadpanned, staring at him harder. It wasn’t really that big of a deal, but I was curious.

“You did,” he said, nodding. Being able to actually see his nod was a little disconcerting, I had to admit. That definitely hadn’t been the case last time. “After all, you sent a—“

[QUERY], he finished, and his message was all too familiar to me. It wasn’t quite a one to one replication of the first ever message I’d sent through the methods of divinity, but it was damn close.

“I don’t recall asking for you specifically,” I said. “Was this the only reason you called me here? To congratulate me or something?”

“Of course I would like to congratulate you,” Nishi said. “You learned a godly technique in time that rivalled my own.”

“And apparently, I’m much worse at using it,” I replied. “That got sent to way more people than I had hoped for.”

“It did not quite reach the murderer-god,” Nishi said. “Perhaps it is buried too far in the east, perhaps it was simply slumbering that day, but it did not request your presence in this reality.”

“It didn’t,” I confirmed. “Maybe I just wasn’t impressive enough.”

It was more than likely that Nishi was basing what my hypothetical interactions with Inome should’ve been like off of his own experiences. He had discovered the secret of communicating like the gods did long ago. If the god had realized that was unusually unique back then, it was unlikely that it would have believed it was unique again.

Then again, it had summoned me when I had killed a bunch of oathholders. Given Nishi’s apparent level of power, I found it incredibly hard to believe that he wouldn’t have done that in spades long before I had entered the scene. His physical appearance was young, sure, but that was easily achievable with a skilled enough Ditas or Nacea oath. The old could get old without aging a single day. As far as I knew, the only reason we had very few true ancients still hanging around was because they were almost killed to the last during the continental war. Nishi had referred to events “of his youth”, and his accent was a rather old-fashioned one.

Either he’d gained a lot of power in a short period of time, or he had used oaths to remain young over the years while slowly building that power. No matter what path he took, I highly doubted it was possible without a lot of murder.

In that case, I shouldn’t have been unique back then either, but our broken god had called me in anyway to express its [APPROVAL]. Why wouldn’t it do the same now for something that was arguably more impressive?

“I see you have understood the gravity of the situation,” Nishi said.

“I don’t understand shit,” I said frankly. “What are you talking about?”

“The murderer-god lies uncommunicative despite being irrefutably active,” Nishi said. “If it had gone dormant, laid down to die like so many of its ilk before it, I would have felt the pull of its oath fading. However, I did not.”

“Then maybe it just decided it’s congratulated you enough and didn’t feel the need to let me know,” I said.

“Perhaps,” Nishi said. There was deep thought behind those words, I could tell even through the haze, but he seemed willing to let the subject drop. “But that is an opportunity for another day and not, indeed, what I requested your presence for.”

“Do enlighten me,” I said.

“I call you not to warn but to inspect,” Nishi said. “You have progressed, I can see.”

“Thanks in part to you,” I admitted. “I doubt I would’ve gone anywhere if I hadn’t had the knowledge to communicate.”

I’d probably be dead, too, but I left that unsaid. As much as I had grown to trust Jasmine, I had grown to trust exactly her. Other people, even ones that had given me the tools to save my life with? Not yet.

“Yet you have far to grow,” the other oathholder assessed. Even in here, this odd world away from the world, I could sense the pulse of his oath—no, of his oaths—as magic pulsed over me.

I tensed up, but it didn’t seem to be anything harmful. An analytical spell?

“I do,” I said. “I am aware. Is that all you brought me here to say?”

“I summoned you so that you could learn, young one,” Nishi said.

I blinked, and suddenly we were standing atop a surface. Before now, we’d still been existing in that nebulous not-space, floating without floating and simply existing relative to each other. The mysterious oathholder had done something, manipulated the very fabric of the god’s domain, and now I could see an up and a down.

I looked at my feet, and I saw a flat expanse of stone. Kneeling down, I brushed my fingers against it. It felt as real as any floor in realspace would.

“You know how to orient yourself in here,” Nishi said, seeming vaguely bemused, “and yet you lack the knowledge to truly manipulate it.”

“I get it, I lack education and knowledge,” I said. “Are you going to provide any?”

“Patience, young one,” Nishi said. “Good prospects come to those with patience.”

“And they slip the contemptous lazy by,” I countered. “If you’re here to teach, I would appreciate if you actually did.”

“I do not claim to perfectly understand the whims of the gods,” Nishi said, utterly ignoring my statement and beginning to pace. The stone was about the same size across as one of our larger classrooms, so he had plenty of space to do so, beginning a circle around me. “However, I do understand oaths far better than any other mortal might.”

“A bold claim,” I said. Maybe a true one, given that he’d discovered how to communicate like a fucking god, which I was fairly sure no research had gone into before, but still. “There’s a lot of research out there. You claim to know more than all of the continent’s foremost scientists combined?”

“I do not claim,” Nishi said. “I state. When I perceived your message, it was from my current position. Hundreds of kilometers and several kingdoms away, and it had grown so faint that a lesser man wouldn’t have even noticed that it was passing him by.”

“But you did,” I said. “Okay. So what? You’re powerful, I know this already.”

“Your raw magic is strong, is it not?” Nishi asked, still pacing. I had to admit, it was getting the slightest bit irritating having to continually readjust the direction I was facing, but I wasn’t going to let that get to me.

“It is,” I said. “Benefits of having an Inome oath.”

“Ah, yes, your name for the murderer-god,” he mused. “A fitting one, if not entirely accurate. Its raw magic is rawer than most, and it provides a direct passageway to its godhead. A force to be reckoned with, for sure.”

“Your point?”

“To you, spells must seem unnecessary, and indeed they sometimes might. Your meditations have increased your perceptions of your own magic, and you can pull from your oath nigh-unrestricted. As a lower-class disciple, spells are naught but an unnecessary shortcut.”

That seemed pretty on point. I’d initially had the thought weeks ago, when I’d first observed Lasi perform his spell for the first time, but I’d hidden it away for a while. It hadn’t been necessary to mention before, since I was always the one determining whether I was using unstructured or structured magic and nobody ever asked for an explanation on adventuring jobs, but there was a reason I preferred the former.

What was the point of all the words and motions if silent magic was castable? Motions were supposed to create a frame, the words a spark, but then if people could ultimately just cast without actually invoking the spell… wasn’t that basically just unstructured magic? What was the point of learning more and more spells if the end result was just going to be the same fucking thing I could manage with my own oath? That combined with the general wrongness that I’d felt with spells had had me using unstructured magic far more in practice.

“I do think it’s somewhat unnecessary to cast spells,” I said carefully. “It feels like it’s more restricted than simply summoning magic is.”

Nishi sighed. “I feared you would believe so. You maintain a better mindset than those who believe that structuring spells is the sole solution to their limited power.”

I frowned. Not quite the entirely negative response I’d been expecting, and no revelation about unstructured magic being secretly the stronger choice or anything. “But my mindset has a problem?”

“It is true that truly bonding with your oath to the extent where you may maul it without harming your own power is important,” he began, finally stopping the damnable pacing. He sat down on thin air, and where he moved to sit the ground rose to meet him.

Of course. More bullshit magic that just worked here because it did. That was pretty par for the course, at this point. I was pretty sure I could still cast my own magic normally in here, but on the level of casual matter creation and manipulation? No chance.

“At your level, spells are limiting,” Nishi continued, gesturing for me to sit as well. “They offer little utility that you cannot achieve with the pure strength of your oath. From the snippets of your message that I was able to decipher, this much I gather you understand already.

I sat, not quite sure what was supposed to happen. Before I could unceremoniously fall to the ground, I found myself sitting quite comfortably. From its touch, it was still stone, but it had been molded into the shape of a chair somehow.

Wait, hold on, he’d decoded the message I’d sent? Given how he spoke about it, it sounded almost as if he’d managed to single out individual scenes and identify what I’d been thinking at various points. He was powerful, yes, but was he that powerful? Not even the nobles who’d seen the scenes play out in their minds had been able to fully process many of them, not even Jasmine. She’d been surprised by some parts of my past that I knew I’d included in that message, and she knew me better than most living people. And Nishi had just… processed it? From a distance thousands of times further away from me than the nobles had been?

Heedless of my churning thoughts, the ridiculously strong oathholder in front of me continued to speak.

“This,” he said, indicating the structure we sat on right now, “Is unstructured magic. Its potential is high, and its fine control is incredible. You have trained yourself to be utterly proficient in this, I believe.”

“I have,” I said. “I can hear a but coming, though.”

“You presume correctly,” Nishi nodded.

Still seated, he tilted his head, gesturing off to one side. I looked to where he was indicating, seeing nothing past the crystalline void that comprised the god’s body.

A moment later, I could feel the magic seep forth from him. It was no more powerful than his last effort, but it still filled the air differently. It was like the difference between the path of a falling stream of water being molded by guiding hands along the way and the same bunch of water being poured into a glass.

Even without witnessing him properly cast, I could feel the way that this was as much a spell as the last demonstration wasn’t.

In the matter of moments, a castle formed. I didn’t have anything except Nishi and myself for scale, but it utterly dwarfed us. One moment, there was nothing, and in the next there was a structure almost as large as the main royal castle. It was a style that I was unfamiliar with, all sharp spires and tapering points, but it was beautiful in its own right.

In the matter of moments, he’d expended the same energy that he’d used to painstakingly craft the stone floor and had built something orders of magnitude larger.

“Was that a spell?” I asked after a moment, dumbstruck. “All that matter from nowhere?”

“It came from somewhere,” he said, not even a little tired. “A different dimension. Not this one.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m familiar with how oaths work. But what the hell was that?”

“An advanced form of the classic spell Create Fortifications,” Nishi said. “Designed by myself and executed by myself. Notice how it is significantly larger than than the same amount of oath energy expended without structure.”

“Significantly larger is an understatement,” I muttered.

“Raw magic will benefit you,” Nishi said. “More than you even know. It is far too shunned by the narrow-minded practitioners of the present. However, it too is a trap that you will not escape from if you delve too deep into it. Without structure, your power will never truly reach the heights it can. Without powerful raw manipulation, you will never unlock those heights in the first place.”

“So what you’re saying is I need to go to school more,” I sighed. “Thanks.”

“Not quite,” Nishi said. “I am personally rather unaware of the education that occurs today, but when I was but a lowly student, they were just as narrow-minded as many of the ignorant soldiers of today.”

“How do you know the soldiers of today are ignorant?” I asked, injecting politeness into my voice. We were getting somewhere, but it was progressing much slower than I would’ve liked.

“I killed many,” he replied, just as polite. “And I examined their connections to their oaths as they died.”

“Sure,” I replied. I wasn’t quite disquieted, but I knew on some level that that was wrong. Still, I’d had plenty of experience dealing with murderers—particularly one whose ideas I’d had to deal with for the last twenty or so years—and this one, while extraordinarily powerful, wasn’t too different. “Thanks for confirming that. How do you suggest I discover spells, then?”

“Make your own,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “If you find yourself incapable of doing so, then steal those of others. I found the spellbooks of my own school to progress far too slowly, and so I took from the private collection of one of my professors.”

“Your wise, ancient advice,” I said slowly, stretching the words out deliberately, “…is to become a common thief.”

“Less a thief and more an opportunist,” he said. “The worthy take. The weak fall.”

And if that wasn’t uncomfortably close to a sentiment I’d heard before, nothing was.

Still, he seemed to be more reasonable than most nobles I’d met, apart from this particular little bit, so I’d let it slide.

Also, stealing books… it was actually pretty feasible. I was in Dakheng, after all, and there was a lot of chaos going on. Over the course of the last couple of days, the noble sector of this place had collapsed in on itself, and there was opportunity in that collapse. After all, who was going to notice House Tempet’s library being stolen away when the House itself was falling under the combined pressure of other Houses?

I could probably also request some spellbooks from House Rayes, now that I thought about it. The more I thought on the topic, the more I realized that I’d been placed in practically a perfect position to do exactly what he’d suggested.

I didn’t like perfect suggestions. That often had less to do with strokes of luck and more to do with pre-planned results.

Given the expectant look on Nishi’s face, I could believe that he knew what my answer was going to be.

“You knew this was going to happen,” I accused. “Somehow.”

“I did,” he replied.

“How?” I asked. “You didn’t even see me before. All you had was a brief meeting after the primordial. And you orchestrated for me to be in this position so you could, what, tell me to steal books?”

“Nothing so crude as that,” he dismissed, snapping his fingers. In an instant, a chunk of the castle he’d formed vanished into thin air, like it had been sliced off and simply shunted off into another world. “When I work towards a goal, I ensure that it is well and truly met.”

“And your goal here is…”

“To strengthen my only fellow disciple, of course.” For all that the words themselves sounded like they should’ve been delivered with a deeply sarcastic tone, Nishi seemed pretty damn earnest. “Your very existence is intriguing, and you may yet serve a greater purpose should we grow to work together. In the meantime, I seek for your power to grow as much as possible.”

“That doesn’t answer my first question,” I said. “I’m supposed to believe that you knew I would be here in Dakheng under the scenario that’s occurring right now? Based off a five minute conversation?”

“I would not have used the primordial if I believed it would not be able to continue tracking you,” Nishi said. “Its magic is still powerful even after death. Furthermore, I am capable of paying attention to a kingdom’s circumstances when need be.”

“So you just, what, figured out I was going to be here?”

“Have you heard, Lily,” Nishi said slowly, his voice suddenly grim, “of the rising god?”

“I have,” I said. “Have you information to share about it?”

That had been a massively abrupt change of topic, and one that sounded like it was going to precede a revelation.

“It is a force in the east,” Nishi said. “One whose power I have partially stolen. It has enabled me further powers, primarily through knowledge.”

That… didn’t quite sound like the truth, but he hadn’t directly lied to me either. Suspicion flooded into my mind, but I tamped down on it. He hadn’t done anything to warrant it yet.

“Knowledge.”

“Knowledge,” he repeated. “Knowledge that, when you are ready, will serve you well.”

“I’m not getting it now, then?” That was disappointing. I’d barely gotten anything from this conversation apart from the knowledge that Nishi was playing behind the scenes—which was more impactful than it sounded, I realized—and that I had to work on my spells more. Useful information, to be sure, but nothing worldshaking.

“Alas, the connection grows unstable,” Nishi said. “I cannot maintain our presence here for much longer with my level of magic.”

And that, I saw, was the first blatant lie he’d told me today. He absolutely could. He just had his reasons to end it.

“When you have expanded your repertoire, I will find you again,” he promised. “I will teach you how to make more oaths, and how to stay alive when you break them.

“Until then, I’ll be watching.”

And on that pleasant note, I was back in the carriage.