“Love, wear this.”

The Patriarch handed him a full-face helmet made from metal, with a translucent screen for the face. The visor looked as if it was a strange kind of glass, but it was soft to the touch. A little confused, he put it on.

The Patriarch blasted the cave wall, and the door, made of tarnished gray metal, slid open to reveal a storm of wind and dust. Solera looked outside, but could only see a brown whirlwind. The tornado!

“Now that you’ve had your rest, it’s time for you to be taught more about our Home. But you must be very careful. The people you will be talking to today, they’re not us, and they don’t know about us. Don’t let them know who you are, or there will be big trouble.”

Solera nodded, still confused. If the teacher wasn’t Gray, then the teacher would be a normal human. But what normal human would choose this vortex to hold a tutoring session?

Almost as if in direct response to his question, a silhouette appeared in the cloud of dust. It took on depth, becoming a tall, frail man garbed in dirty gray robes which left no skin exposed to the dust. He wore a helmet much like Solera’s and his face could be seen through the visor behind. He had pale skin and a sickly demeanor, yet he looked very comfortable standing there in the storm.

“Professor Mohan.” The Patriarch had become a completely different person, his attitude instantly taking on an overbearing aura. “As I said last night, this is the boy I picked out from the slums. He has great potential, and it would be best if you treated him with care.” The veiled threat in the last sentence could easily be heard in his icy tone.

Mohan put on a strained smile, then beckoned. Solera glanced at the Patriarch, who smiled and gently pushed him out of the cave and onto the howling mountaintop. Mohan swiveled around, and led Solera into the dust storm.

The dust battered his helmet and his clothing, but the robes seemed to be resistant to wind, so he felt nothing. Up ahead, he saw Mohan tap the side of his helmet, and his voice suddenly spoke directly into Solera’s ears.

“Test test test. Okay, good.” Mohan nodded to himself and continued walking through the dust storm. “Solera, is it?”

“Yeah.” Solera said. Mohan seemed to have heard him as well, because he nodded again.

“The Patriarch is a strange man, really. Loves to pick favorites, and I can never know who he’ll chose. Today, it’s a boy from the slums. Consider yourself lucky, I guess.”

Solera’s eyes narrowed. He felt uncomfortable talking, but this man had knowledge he needed. “Favorites? Like who?”

“Not important, because we’re here.” Mohan swept his hands at the dust storm, then turned around. “Oh, take a few more steps forward.”

Solera did, and the dust storm disappeared. All the wind and dust was gone, and the area even fell into an eerie silence. He looked behind, and saw a silently swirling wall of dust.

“We’re inside the eye of the storm, Solera. This is the center of the Tornado Sect.” Mohan gestured at his surroundings, and Solera noticed the hundreds of gray robes scattered across the plateau. They were mostly adults, but Solera could also see teenagers and even children, all seated on the ground with their helmets by their side. Their eyes were closed, and their faces showed either relaxation or concentration.

But all these people were only at the periphery of his vision. His focus was on the gleaming blue tower at the center of the plateau, at least thirty meters high with a square base of around ten meter sides. It was made from a lustrous material, like hollow glass with a cloudy blue gas just beneath its surface. Siehnti! So much of it!

Solera couldn’t help but gawk at the tower. He had seen siehnti dust when the United Duchies had forced a surrender with immortals from the Halo cult and a siehnti golem they had obtained from the Blessing, but this was something else entirely. This siehnti was solid, a monolith of shining blue!

“Can you feel it?” Mohan smiled affably at Solera.

The question seemed strange, but Solera knew exactly what Mohan was talking about. A tingling feeling enveloping his entire body, and a presence surrounding him, touching his very consciousness!

Without hesitation, Solera opened his third eye to examine this strange feeling. He could see his Lake and the green roots that were his channels shivering in pleasure. Far, far above was a blue ocean so large it might as well have been the sky, emitting tendrils of colorless vapor. The vapor… it was everywhere! The moment it made contact with his Lake, it turned brown, and when it touched his soul, he felt a wave of ecstasy had passed through him. It felt as if his very self had been nourished.

“The Tornado Tower is mystical, without a doubt.” Mohan’s voice reverberated around him, bringing him back into the real world. “Just standing here improves your cultivation, your channels, and your Lake. This is, of course, a property of all siehnti landmarks. But what is special about this one is the pressure it applies on your soul. Walk with me another twenty meters or so.”

Solera stepped forward, and he could faintly feel the white mist thickening. From out of nowhere came a thin string of blue which pierced right into his Lake, sending a dizzy feeling shooting through his head as he saw the faint outline of a fuzzy image. And then it was gone.

He tried to focus on that faint image, to see what it was, but he could not. And yet, he could see something else. A third frame of vision popped up, along with the vision of him standing in the real world and the vision of him standing in his Lake. Now, he was a brown planet in a sea of white mist and clouds of blue strings which poured out from a faraway column of blue. The blue strings seemed to have a life of their own, darting out of their cloud and back as the entire cloud slipped in and out of the column. But not only that, he could see hundreds of other planets, one of them a pale green one not so far away from him. Mohan’s soul!

“Do you feel the pressure? If you take a step back behind this line, it will go away. Move forward, and it will intensify. More debilitating, but the benefits also multiply.” The gaseous green blob, much larger and brighter than Solera’s own, lit up as Mohan spoke.

Solera wrenched the two visions his third eye was feeding him to the back of his mind, and he was standing on the plateau again. Looking down, he could see that he had passed over a white line, which formed a circle ringing the entire plateau.

He shrugged. “I’ll stay here.” He wanted to examine this white mist and these blue strings in more detail.

Mohan shrugged and stepped over the line. “Take a seat, then. But don’t take off your helmet, we don’t want to disturb others with our talk.”

Solera concentrated on his third eye again as he saw a blue string shoot into Mohan’s planet, which vibrated slightly. It shot back out and rejoined the frenzy of strings whirling through the colorless mist.

“The inexperienced and weak will find it difficult to go much farther than here, because the mental pressure increases exponentially. You’d probably fall unconscious and then lose your mind if you’re out for too long.” Mohan pointed at some children who were seated well behind the white line. “Nonetheless, this is excellent. People enjoy meditating here, as you can see.”

Solera nodded. Though his third eye could only see his Lake and his channels, not his body, he could still feel the tingling of his body absorbing the colorless power and strengthening its cultivation.

“As I said, the Tornado Tower is the only siehnti landmark which exerts pressure on the soul. It is also the only landmark which creates a weather phenomenon, the tornado. So the question I will answer today is, what makes our Tornado Tower so different, and why?”

Normally, Solera would see this question as totally useless to him. Why should he be learning about some esoteric crap when he could be preparing his escape? But with the strange visions his third eye gave him, he felt he had to know. He opened his mouth to ask Mohan to continue and a blue string slammed into him again. This time, he could feel it leaking out colorless power into his Lake during the tiny instant it took to pass through him. Then it was gone.

Solera’s eyes went wide. The first time he had been struck, he had been too electrified to notice. But this time, he could feel that the the string had left behind an amount of power that was easily a thousand times more than the amount of power he absorbed every second!

And yet, as he looked at the string whirling back into its cloud, he couldn’t tell if it had shrunk at all! Just how pure was this blue power, to be able to release so much at every moment and still stay the same size?

Mohan began speaking again, taking Solera’s silence in stride.

“To answer that question, we must examine siehnti in general. Siehnti is an incredible substance. Every piece of siehnti is indestructible, a rift into Sky which never closes. It emits a power which can be absorbed by anyone to improve both their cultivation and power purity at the same time, something nearly impossible for any other kind of power to do efficiently.”

Solera broke away from his thoughts to look at Mohan. “I’ve seen siehnti break.”

Back at that fateful battle, the blue siehnti Vigor had shattered the Throne’s golden siehnti battleaxe into pieces. And from what he had seen, he was sure siehnti was just condensed power. Hell, he had siehnti claws buried beneath his Lake!

“Was that siehnti this shade of blue?” Mohan pointed at the tower.

Solera frowned. “No.” Though the Vigor had been.

“Common misconception. That was enti, not siehnti. Enti is the closest analog of siehnti, the stuff Sky artifacts are made from. But enti is different in three ways. One, enti artifacts may not have rifts inside them. Two, enti artifacts can be destroyed, though it is extremely difficult to do so. Three, enti artifacts can be any color, but all siehnti is a shade of sky blue. We suspect siehnti is only a variant of enti.”

Solera stared at the ground, trying to absorb the information.

“Strange, I know. Enti is not a word from the codex, but one we created to describe something that had never existed before. It’s why the Halo cult gathers all the siehnti and enti it can, actually. They believe that siehnti is the property of gods and not of men, while enti, which they call false siehnti, is blasphemous and a sign of the hubris that characterizes the demons who wish to become gods.”

Solera scratched his head. “So there are things that aren’t defined by the codices, and the Halo cult sees these things as… blasphemy?”

“Yes. What is outside the codex is outside the realm the Ancients established for man. Summoning, blood magic, demons… mostly summoning, nowadays. Every time the Halo cult has declared Holy War, it was to eradicate one of the three. The Prince, Emperor Wiki, the Gardener, Wildfire, all of them trespassed into the realm of the Ancients. But this is a tangent. I like tangents, but-”

At that moment, another blue string flew into Solera. This time, he contracted the water of his Lake into mud, and the mud of his Lake into rock in an effort to keep the string inside him. If he could trap it, then he could absorb the power the string gave off at an insane rate!

The string stayed inside him for an instant of an instant longer before penetrating past him, almost as if he didn’t even exist.

“-re short on time today, I’ve got some experiments to run. So back on topic. The Tornado Tower.” Mohan had continued talking, oblivious to Solera’s struggle, but it seemed Solera had only missed a fraction of a second.

“I do not believe I, or anyone else on Land, can tell you what exactly about this particular siehnti landmark makes it different from the ones in the Verdant Empire, in Opportunity Kingdom, and the ones the Halo cult seized from the Bloodsand Dominion or bought from the Pantheonic colonies. But I do know where the answer lies. It lies in the ancient history of mankind, all the way back seven and a half millennia ago, to the time of Heaven’s War.”

Solera had no idea where Mohan was going, so he nodded for him to continue.

“All siehnti landmarks were created by the Siehnti clan, one of the most powerful bloodlines to walk Land. Back then, the world was ruled by Veritas, the leader of the Truth clan and original holder of the Truth bloodline, because she knew everything, or so it was said. Four hundred years after the dawn of time, she had humanity set out from Heaven to colonize the western and eastern continents.”

Mohan paused, then jutted his head as he broke out into a wide smile. “Back then, by the way, Heaven was the center of the world, not the Pantheon, which is on the opposite end of the globe. Thus, our western continent is actually the ancient eastern continent, and the eastern continent was actually the west. So the Siehnti clan and a few others were tasked with colonizing the ancient east. They and everyone else was doing well, until Veritas visited the Siehnti clan capital, right here, and vanished.”

Another string had shot through Solera while he was listening to Mohan speak, but he ignored it. The fact that the Tornado Sect, a small country in the Warring States, was once one of the major capitals of the world was something entirely new to him.

“Of course, that led to a lot of finger-pointing, and it didn’t take long for world war to begin. I won’t get into the details, but it was basically Heaven and the ancient west against the ancient east. The Storm clan called down thunderstorms to raze this vast mountain range to the ground. You can still see the storms blowing in from the ocean if you go to the Thundercloud Sect, actually.”

Mohan coughed, then continued. “But anyway. As a countermeasure, the Siehnti clan modified this tower to become what it is now, a creator of this great storm. The tornado and the hurricane surrounding it keeps the other, more destructive storms at bay, and this clash between the Storm and Siehnti clans lives till this day. Sadly, we don’t know how either of them created these storms, because neither clan passed on their knowledge.”

“Long story short, Heaven suffered the First Cataclysm, still of unknown origins, and was completely cut off from the rest of the world by storms and sea monsters. The Siehnti clan thus seized the advantage and were destroying bloodlines left and right without mercy. Yet when they were on the precipice of victory, they were all recalled back here.”

“Why?!” Solera’s brows were knitted together as he struggled to justify such a stupid action.

Mohan’s smile could be seen from behind his visor. “Because the leader of one of their allied clans claimed to have gained enlightenment when he touched the Tornado Tower. He had received an insight which he and everyone else felt was more profound than the control of Land itself. And so all returned, and vanished, just like Veritas did. The war which had ruined an entire continent and annihilated every single bloodline ended, and the only marks the Siehnti clan left on this world are these landmarks.”

Mohan stood up, but motioned for Solera to keep his seated position. “So to sum up, the weather was created by the Siehnti clan’s modification to the tower, and the mental pressure an effect of the ‘enlightenment.’ I know this is all ancient history, irrelevant to almost everyone still alive today, but the Heaven’s War is still a major influence on our Tornado Sect. The reason we were founded, actually, was to rediscover this lost insight. Although that hasn’t happened in the seven thousand years this sect has existed, every genius and immortal who has been here has attributed a portion of their success to an insight reached on this plateau.”

“So stay awhile. Perhaps you might learn something in the next few hours.” Mohan left, disappearing into the brown vortex and leaving Solera there, amidst the sea of white mist and blue strings.