Taryn didn’t go home that night; he couldn’t bear facing his grandmother without that journal, so he wandered the streets of Haven City until well after Dawen had risen.

Looking to the stars, Taryn saw that Dawen had been in the sky for nearly seven hours, which meant most of the city had been asleep for hours.

It wasn’t uncommon for Taryn to do this—to go one or two days without returning home.

His grandmother believed that he was staying over at Xian Hui’s house. He’d met the boy during the New Year’s Festival last year, only… No such person existed. Oh, Taryn had certainly made a friend during the festival, just not the one he’d said he had.

At first, Taryn had made Xian Hui up to hide the fact that he’d secretly been sneaking into the second residential district to meet up with a girl… But after that was no longer the case, it became a convenient excuse to sneak into the clan district and observe the way they trained their children.

Taryn had observed different families training at different times of day—it usually just depended on what kind of Eco they were training with.

For instance, Taryn knew that he could usually find the Gu family heiress training in their courtyard from midnight to dawn. Taryn had a few guesses on why this was, and his running theory was that it was easier to train Ice Eco at night, something the Gu family was famous for.

Of course, he had no evidence that his theory was true, and even if he did, no one would tell him if he was correct. He had to resort to other means of gathering information.

Teng De called it spying, but Taryn preferred to call it “observing without permission.”

Even though Taryn’s grandmother was a former cultivator, and thus could most likely answer any question he could think of and more, she couldn’t help him; she’d once told him that the condition for allowing her to proceed with his adoption was that she take a vow on the day she took him in. She could not assist him in any way, and she’d been forced to stick to that vow whether she wanted to or not. How was he to learn about Eco if no one would tell him anything? How was he supposed to study it without someone to guide him?

The short answer was, he wasn’t.

But Taryn couldn’t let it go—wouldn’t let it go. Becoming a cultivator was his dream; he’d longed to become a true member of the Ukata clan and train alongside them for as long as he could remember.

It was something he wanted more than anything else in the world. Because at the end of the day, cultivators were respected. Their words meant something… They were important...

They weren’t Clanless.

That’s why Taryn couldn’t give up on his dream, even if it meant he was exiled from the city. If they exiled him, maybe he could find someone outside the city to awaken his core.

Maybe he could find a master willing to teach him.

Sure, he’d miss his grandmother, but she knew he couldn’t stay with her forever. A day would come when he’d have to be on his own, so why should he do what Teng De said if they were just going to kick him out anyway?

Steeling himself for what he was about to do, Taryn made his decision and turned towards the gate separating the market district from the clan district.

If viewed from the sky, Haven City would have an oval shape. The farming district took up much of the lower half, and the market district was northwest of it, positioned between the first residential district to the south, the industrial district to the east, and the clan district—or if Taryn was being generous, the “noble” district—to the north.

To the east of the noble district was Haven City’s second residential district, and further north were the barracks and training fields used by the clans.

Taryn’s destination was the Ukata clan training field, located in the most northeastern block of the city.

He wished it would be as simple as going to the second residential district and entering that way, but he wasn’t lucky enough for it to be that simple.

There was only one entrance to the training fields, and that was going through the noble district.

By the time Taryn arrived at the wall separating the market district from the noble district, it was already well past midnight and Dawen was high in the night sky.

At this hour, the city was as quiet as it ever was. Most people went to sleep shortly after dusk so they could return to work the following morning. Usually, the only people who were out and about this late were the city guard and those they hunted.

Taryn didn’t see himself as a criminal, but he accepted that the nobles wouldn’t agree with him. Taryn shook his head, quelled his unsteady mind, and focused on the task at hand.

The wall itself wasn’t that large, only about ten feet high, but at the top were stone spires that added an additional two feet to its total height. And they were positioned so close together that Taryn could barely slide his fingers through the gap between them.

The best location to sneak into the noble district was in a small alleyway positioned between a produce stand and old lady Fen’s bakery.

Both were pressed up against the dividing wall; but there was enough space between them for Taryn to squeeze through and use them to assist with his attempt to scale the wall.

It was rather convenient that the produce stand had a display table that wrapped around the front and extended to the dividing wall on both sides.

It took some doing, but by bracing one foot on the produce stand’s display table, Taryn was able to jump just high enough to grab hold of the top of the wall. He then shimmied to the left a few feet, enough to stand on the produce stand’s tin roof.

Now came the tricky part, getting over the spires.

Good thing this wasn’t Taryn’s first time doing this.

Taryn reached into his bag and pulled out an ordinary black linen blanket that was as long as he was tall.

One end of the blanket had been tied into a knot, creating a rather large loop. Taryn tossed the loop at one of the spires, then gently pulled it back to him.

The blanket slid between the gaps in the spires for ways before eventually getting stuck as the gap narrowed too much for the blanket to continue moving.

Taryn gave the blanket a few cautious tugs, then placed his left foot on the wall and began to walk up the wall.

Upon reaching the top, Taryn placed his left foot at the base of the spires. He had to be extremely careful, as the only ledge was the width of two of his fingers placed together.

Taryn had fallen off the wall numerous times in his attempts at breaking into the noble district, and most of those falls were due in no small part to this ledge.

However, after more than three hundred attempts, Taryn had gotten rather good at it.

After bracing his left foot on the ledge, he swung his right leg over the spires and braced it against a second ledge on the opposite side.

Then it was just the process of swinging his left leg over, removing the blanket, then dropping the ten feet to the ground below.

Taryn wasn’t concerned about anyone seeing him at this time of night, so he took a moment to partake in something that had become a tradition: he gazed out over the city.

Taryn was always fascinated by the sight of Haven City under Dawen’s light.

The silver light garnished the black roof tiles of the surrounding buildings, making them sparkle against the darkness. Off in the distance, Taryn could see the tops of the noble district mansions, whose tiles had been dyed the colors of the various clans: red for the Cai’s, blue for the Ukata’s, and green for the Qiao’s.

Taryn always thought color coding the roof tiles was one of the stupidest decisions the clans ever made, and that was saying something.

With his viewing complete, Taryn stepped off the ledge and dropped to the ground.

He ended up behind a small stone house. No one had lived there in several years, not since the previous owner died when Taryn was ten.

That’s not to say the house was completely abandoned.

The owner’s children still came by once every ten days or so to take care of it, but they weren’t due for a visit for another four days… At least, Taryn hoped they weren’t.

For sixty days he’d kept count on the inside cover of his journal, marking each day they showed up and each day they didn’t, in order to establish a pattern.

But Taryn didn’t have his journal and therefore could not ensure that he was correct. He could only trust in the truth of his memory.

Taryn crept to the back right corner of the house, staying low to the ground. He made sure to always keep both his eyes and ears open for any signs of people.

He peeked around the wall, then slid back as quietly as he could. He’d seen an orange light flickering in front of the house, which could only mean one of two things: the house was currently occupied, or there was a patrolman standing in front of the house.

Patrolmen liked to use a special kind of oil to make their torches burn brighter than a normal lantern.

Since patrolmen were always chosen from the few thousand cultivators who managed to leave the channel building stage and enter the body refinement stage, the torches were meant to act as a deterrent for criminals rather than a vision aid. Being a full stage higher than nearly everyone, save for the “nobles” and the occasional prodigy, most guards were understandably unconcerned with the average citizen causing trouble.

The logic was that if a criminal saw one of their torches, they’d be less likely to commit a crime in that area.

Taryn thought the whole idea was stupid.

It told him exactly where the patrolmen were at any given time, and he could just go around them. He was rather proud of the fact that he hadn’t been caught yet.

Taryn circled around the back and walked to the front left corner of the house. In order to remain as quiet as possible, he got on his hands and knees and crawled until he could peek around the corner.

As he’d expected, a lone patrolman was leaning against the front of the house, his torch planted butt first into the ground next to him.

Taryn crawled backwards a bit, ensuring that he could stand up without being seen.

Getting caught sneaking into the noble district was punished by lashes to the back; Taryn couldn’t remember the exact number, but one lash was too many as far as he was concerned.

He looked around for anything he might be able to use, but even with Dawen’s light it was nearly impossible to see anything on the ground.

“I know you’re out there.” Taryn’s eyes widened at the voice. “I can sense you skulking around in the dark. Did you really think we wouldn’t hunt you down after what you did?” The voice was getting closer, Taryn realized.

He could hear the patrolman’s boots scraping across the pavement as he walked, and the darkness retreated as the torch was moved closer to Taryn’s hiding spot.

“Got you!” the patrolman yelled.

The guard’s hand grabbed the corner of the building and he stepped into Taryn’s view, his spear held in a throwing position. The man was a shifter, some kind of bovine if Taryn had to guess. Atop his head was a pair of short ivory horns, and black fur had sprouted on his face.

Taryn sucked in a lungful of air and a chill raced down his spine seconds before a spear flew past his hiding spot. An instant later, Taryn heard a shrill squawk from only a few feet away. The spear had pinned a creature to the wall separating this yard from the neighbor’s: its chest was misshapen from the spear piercing through it, though it was obvious that it was a lizard of some kind. It had a red fringe around its neck and dark gray scales that seemed to shimmer beneath Dawen’s light. Its body was about three feet long, five if you counted the two-foot-long eyestalks that now hung limply by its sides.

Taryn couldn’t stop the involuntary gasp that escaped his mouth. It was an Eco Beast, a real live Eco Beast. This was the first Eco Beast he’d ever seen, as the domesticated ones were kept inside the agricultural district, a place Taryn had never been allowed to go. The rest were killed before they could get this far into the city.

The patrolman advanced, each stride bringing him closer and closer… But he passed by Taryn as if he hadn’t noticed him. In fact, he seemed far more interested in the Eco Beast. Taryn stupidly stared at the patrolman as he approached the Eco Beast and took hold of his spear. He pulled it out of the creature’s chest in one smooth motion, causing it to collapse to the ground in a heap.

The sound of it hitting the ground snapped Taryn out of whatever spell he’d been under. While the patrolman was distracted by the Eco Beast, Taryn slipped around the corner of the building and quickly crossed the street. He hopped a wooden fence, then crouched down to catch his breath. His chest was hurting; he wasn’t sure if it was from how hard his heart was pounding or how long he’d been holding his breath. Regardless, all Taryn wanted to do was get out of there before the patrolman came after him.

Taryn ran across the small property as quickly and quietly as he could. He would stick to the back alleys for as long as he could. Hopefully, that would be enough to get him to the training field without running into any more patrolmen.

Taryn arrived at the training fields without another incident. The place looked deserted, which wasn’t unusual. The training fields were usually abandoned at night; however, it wasn’t uncommon for people to start arriving around dawn.

Feeling fairly confident no one would find him, Taryn rifled through his bag until he found his lantern; he’d taken to wrapping a white cloth around it to make situations like this easier on himself. He found it a moment later and carefully extricated it from his bag, along with a small pack of matches he’d “borrowed” from his grandmother twenty days ago.

She wouldn’t miss it.

He struck the match on his pants leg, igniting the match head almost instantly. The lantern came to life with a bright orange flame, which Taryn quickly hid behind the dark glass. The light now was little more than an orange glow. It illuminated an area of six feet around him but seemed to make the shadows beyond even darker, if that was possible.

Taryn searched the small forest bordering the Ukata training field for his journal’s cover, but even after Dawen began to sink below the horizon, he still hadn’t found it.

Both the Cai and the Qiao had forests like this in their training fields. It was these small patches of forest that helped conceal what the clans were doing. Taryn believed there were sound suppression scripts carved into the trunks of select trees inside the forest, as it was remarkably difficult to eavesdrop on conversations from within the forest. Hence the reason Taryn carried around a spyglass. It may have been difficult to hear what they were saying, but it was relatively easy to watch what they were doing.

Taryn wasn’t sure why the training fields weren’t better protected, but his running theory was that the clans just didn’t care if they were spied on. The Ukata clan techniques were infamously dangerous to practice if you weren’t a member of the clan—something about the Ukata having more durable bodies than the other clans. Taryn’s grandmother had once even claimed that should another clan attempt to replicate the Ukata techniques, their bodies would burst like an overfilled waterskin.

Several hours had come and gone with nothing to show for it. No matter where Taryn looked, he just couldn’t find the cover. And he’d looked everywhere: in the trees, beneath the bushes, buried under fallen leaves.

The only thing left to do was widen his search radius, but he was beginning to run out of time. Taryn could see Rala’s light appearing over the horizon, turning the sky from a dark bluish black to a mixture of reds, greens, and purples.

However, with Rala’s light came an entirely new perspective—literally.

As Taryn rounded a large tree trunk and began walking deeper into the forest to widen his search radius, the forest around him rapidly rushed upwards as the ground beneath his feet caved in, causing him to fall into a large pit.

Taryn screamed as he reached for anything to help stop his fall and found only open air. Luckily, he didn’t fall for very long.

The air was knocked from Taryn’s lungs the moment he reached the bottom of the pit, landing back first on the harsh stone floor. The fall had only lasted a second or two, yet Taryn had fallen more than a dozen feet.

Taryn fought to regain his breath; it took almost a full minute of painful gasping to do so. Almost as soon as he’d recovered his breath, Taryn noticed a throbbing pain at the back of his skull.

Touching it with his fingers, Taryn hissed in pain. He spotted blood on his fingertips and realized he must’ve struck his head on the floor when he fell. It was bad enough that his hood had become damp and heavy with his blood.

Even as he tried to make sense of where he was, Taryn’s vision swam from the pain and blood loss. However, something on the far side of the crater caught his eye: a leather-bound journal lay there.

Taryn couldn’t believe his eyes. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear them so he could see if it was real or not.

It didn’t work. The pain and blood loss were making it difficult to concentrate, but he was sure that was his journal. He’d seen it enough to recognize it anywhere. The only question he had was how it had ended up at the bottom of this pit.

The pit wasn’t massive by any means, probably twenty or thirty feet across. If anything, it looked more like someone had set up a pitfall and forgot to finish it. There was also the issue of the hole being covered up. Taryn hadn’t noticed the danger until he was already falling.

But his head was hurting too much to properly consider any of this.

Taryn removed his bloodstained vest and robe, leaving him in only his pants and mask. Thankfully, the mask was tied tightly behind his head, so a little blood wouldn’t do much… Though, depending on how horribly it was stained, he might need to make another one after returning home.

He knew that he would be scolded ruthlessly by his grandmother the instant he walked through the door with a ruined robe.

Taryn wasn’t sure why that information made him smile, but it did.

He struggled to his feet and used the wall of the pit as support while he walked towards the journal.

Though he felt like he would pass out at any moment, he reached the journal without issue. He dropped to his right knee in lieu of bending over to retrieve it.

The instant his fingers took hold of the journal, everything changed.

Suddenly, Taryn was not in a dark pit in the Ukata clan training field. He was standing on a massive wall overlooking a destroyed city. Thousands of people fought in the streets, each of them wading through an ocean of blood to get to their next victim.

A gargantuan shadow passed over Taryn’s head. Looking up, Taryn felt his jaw drop at the sight of something his mind couldn’t fathom.

A massive creature hovered above the city. Its teeth reflected light like the sharpest steel, its scales were whiter than freshly fallen snow, its wings were as dark as night, and its eyes... Its hate-filled crimson eyes stared at him, meeting his eyes and staring right through him.

The creature Taryn believed only existed in myths and legends opened its mouth, and he could see fire building within. The Dragon threw its terrible head forward, sending an ocean of flame to wash over Taryn’s body. Taryn closed his eyes in anticipation of the pain that would come… Only, the flames weren’t hot.

Taryn opened his eyes. To his surprise, a shimmering transparent shield surrounded him, protecting him from the flames.

“We need to talk.” The voice that reached Taryn’s ears sounded ancient—and tired. “Do not turn around,” the voice continued. Taryn realized then that he couldn’t turn around even if he wanted to. “What you are seeing is nothing more than a memory, my memory. In finding my journal, you have unwittingly become my successor.” Taryn heard a truly exhausted sigh escape the man’s lips, not of relief, but of sadness. “I am sorry, truly. But I knew of no other way. I did not want to burden another; you must believe that.”

“What are you talking about?” Taryn asked, surprising himself with his ability to speak. He didn’t know he was able to until he tried.

“You are my successor, and as such, you must carry on my memory to the best of your ability. Or your world will become what you see before you.” Around Taryn, the ocean of flame still passed by harmlessly, preventing him from seeing anything else. “Now, brace yourself—”

“W-Wait! Please!”

“You may ask one question.”

Taryn racked his brain for anything to ask, anything that would prevent or at least slow down whatever this… thing... this person was going to do to him. But now that his life was on the line, he couldn’t think of anything. “Who are you?” Taryn asked, hoping to stall him for even a moment.

“I...” The voice trailed off. “I do not remember my name, only my memory of my failures remains. I am the one who devoted his entire life to gaining power in order to take revenge on someone who died long before I ever reached them. The one who ignored my family in my pursuit of power, and the one who was not there to save them when they needed me most.”

“I… am the Mourner. And my only wish is to prevent you from becoming me.”