Two hours later, his tinkering finished.

[Level-up!]

[Eyes of Almidas (modified) lv. 1]

Perfect. He teased out a thread of qi, which hung from his fingers like tendrils of liquid glass, turgid with energy. It was identical to the original sense-probe technique save for three key features. The first was its thinness and its muted, translucent characteristic; unlike the original Eyes of Almidas, this melted into its surroundings—the eye slid right over it. The second was its range. This extended his perception nearly double the length of the original Eye. The third was its sheer tractability. This thread responded to him like an extra limb; unlike the old thread, which was cast out like a fishing rod, this was easily maneuverable.

No doubt Pearl and his cohort had rustled up some defenses to the base form of technique. Whatever it was, Dorian was now confident he could skirt them. He breathed a slow, smooth breath, eyeing the string between his fingers. He pulled at it, felt its presence in his mind. Taut, flawless. It was time. Donning his matte-black leathers, he set off.

He stopped when he spotted the barest of flickering light from Pearl’s dreg tribe campgrounds and took in the scene. Like last time, a few would-be eavesdroppers lingered at the fringes of the camp, trying to worm in a spy-thread.

None found success. The reasons were the three serious-looking Origin realm drag-members who patrolled in a loop around the collection of patchy tents which made up Pearl’s headquarters. Clever, clever. They were using the eavesdroppers’ techniques against them. Qi-threads stretched across the length of the whole dreg tribe plot of land, crisscrossing in a mesh lattice. They were using spy-threads to detect spies; these threads would pick up on any rival, trespasser threads.

Faintly amused, Dorian picked out a nearby dune. It was close enough to the camp, a good vantage point, he figured; he’d start his work here.

There was a nearby figure cloaked in a brown which blended into the dunes—he’d seemed to have gotten here first. Another spy. No matter. They were far enough apart, and one dune was big enough to hide the two of them.

As he settled in against the dune’s slope, he caught a face-full of stinky side-eye from the other man.

“Psst!” The man half-whispered, half-growled. “This spot is taken.”

“Relax,” said Dorian with a whisper-laugh. “I’ll cause you no trouble. I’m here for the same reason as you.”

The man stared at him for a second. “Don’t you dare try anything funny. I’m a representative of the Yalta clan, you know.”

“Th-the Yalta clan?!” Cue fake wide-eyes. Cue gasp. “Of course, good sir! I wouldn’t dare. I’ll keep to myself—you won’t even know I’m here.”

With a humph of satisfaction, the man turned away to his spying efforts. With a roll of his eyes, Dorian started thinking about how he’d sneak a thread into this… admittedly fairly airtight-looking setup. The threads crisscrossed over each other every few feet; a bubble of sensory perception spread around each tendril. Sneaking one through from here, from this limited vantage and a far distance, would be a little like trying to sneak a blind man across a minefield. No wonder the poor schmuck here was so angry. He’d likely been stifled for hours.

Luckily, Dorian had made modifications to the technique for precisely this reason. He wasn’t a fisherman, throwing out his thread in wanton fashion. Rather he was a pilot, guiding his thread where he needed it to be. So he had an advantage the others didn’t.

Everyone else was a thief trying—and failing—to pry open the locks on the front door. But with his new, maneuverable threads, he had the option of circling to the back door. With any luck it’d be unguarded.

So he settled down, closed his eyes, and poured himself into a thread of qi. It took on his eyes and his ears and his sense of touch, a halo of perception which ran the length of the thread the way a magnetic field hovered around a very long, thin magnet. For a moment it disoriented him; it was an alien mode of perception, like his mind had been stuffed into some earthworm’s body. But soon he shook it off and started to guide the thread.

It dug into the sands, taking pains not to create any commotion, and burrowed deeper with each second. If there was no way through, Dorian would go under. Simple.

His mind was split between his body and the thread. He had a sense of direction, but that was all—all else was coarse sand and the constant drone of churning grits as his thread burrowed its way across. So far, no trouble. The only trick here was that he’d need to surface in the right spot. If he either overshot or undershot he’d be right in the midst of the tripwires.

Judging the timing was proving a mite harder than he’d expected. He could be anywhere from directly under the dreg tents to thirty feet away and it was near impossible to tell. He held out for a signal—a tell.

Soon he got it. A hum of qi emanated from above, cascading in tiny shocks across the breadth of the sands, like seismic waves in miniature. This was an unusual power indeed. Jackpot.

Slowly, surely, he crept the string upward.

His senses extended about ten feet in all directions; it meant that the string needed to be directly under the tent. It rose foot by foot until a vision, a soundscape, floated into Dorian’s mind from above.

A dimly lit tent. Nobody present, no lackeys. A room in disarray: great black chests stacked haphazardly atop one another, books flapping listlessly atop one another, elixir flasks discarded, half-filled with liquids. But it was the center of room which caught his attention.

Pearl sat naked in a lotus position, his eyes closed, and Dorian took in the damage wrought upon his body.

The man had more scar tissue than flesh. Disfigure was the wrong word; it was too light for what had become of his skin from the chest down. It was like he’d been cut open by a thousand blades, healed, then cut open all again—like some cruel artist had taken a carving knife and cross-hatched every inch of his trunk. Especially strange were the remnants of qi which coursed through each of the markings, a second circulation superimposed on his blood. They glowed a faint gold. Eerily familiar…

Then Dorian took in Pearl’s face. His senses flickered to the spot on Pearl’s forehead. A golden infinity. In his original body he frowned. It was a common enough symbol, but its purpose was unique: it served as a conduit between this realm and another. A Mark of a god. This man, it seemed, had mutilated his whole body to become a vessel which could support such power.

This development was a surprise, but told him nothing new. He’d hoped to see Pearl in heated discussion with his second-in-commands around a fire; he’d hoped to glean a sense of the man’s inner thoughts. But it seemed he was content on meditating here. His original body loosed an exasperated growl. Bad luck on Dorian’s part. Perhaps tonight would be fruitless after all.

His senses took in Pearl’s surroundings once more, then settled back on the half-finished elixir. A pause. Wait. Is that—? He froze. Hells. You’re kidding.

Was that what he thought it was? The tone of the elixir, its texture and its simmering of qi, touched upon a faint memory locked away in the back of Dorian’s mind. If he was right, this was a rare elixir indeed. Perhaps one Alchemist in all the Oases was qualified to brew them. The ingredients themselves were prohibitive, an eclectic mix of obscene obscurities; plants which grew under ten feet of ice in qi-dense environments, drake-horns, the bone marrow of a flood dragon. The Elixir of Devotion. Only consumed by the most pious adherents to a religion, the true believers or disciples of a god. It had the effect of, for a few minutes, bringing an avatar of a god down to this plane.

The elixir lay on its side, half-full. Which meant that a dose of it had already been drunk. He hadn’t even the time to consider his options before a great stillness took hold. An omnidirectional pressure descended which froze him in place; it felt like his mind and his body both had been encased in ice. The scene turned static, as though he looked out upon a painting.

Then the painting tore open. A gash formed in the fabric of reality, and for a second Dorian glimpsed space: the in-between nothingness which sat between all realms.

Fuck. Fuck. He battled the pressure like a man trapped in a glacier, trying to wriggle his way out. A full-force effort granted him a hint of space to move. Not enough for a retreat. Whatever it was on the other end was coming through. It was the source of the pressure: the natural aura which wreathed a god.

It looked like the world was leaking. A gaseous, wispy thing floated in, a dense, suffocating pressure radiating from it like heat. There was no physical form; to manifest materially would cost much more than a summoning. But even the extension of the soul of a god was enough to off-balance this realm, straining the fabric of the universe even as it stitched itself back together.

“Master,” said Pearl, collapsing to his knees. He touched his temple to the sands. “I have much to report!”

Speak. It was not a sound but a thought, and in it was a command: a sliver of will. It compelled his lips open.

“I’ve advanced past the second round, sire. I’ll soon qualify for the Tournament—it’s as good as done. Soon you’ll have access to the Oases’ inner sanctums.”

Good.

A sensation of satisfaction, overwhelming, stifling, like Dorian stood in the middle of a crowd all exulting in the same emotion.

Tell us of your investigation.

Here Pearl grimaced. “I’ve…not found anything definitive. All the other top contenders have strong alibis. Narong, Tianan, Yalta, they’re all clean—“

Now a hint of displeasure, just a hint, but it still nearly knocked Pearl over. It felt like the whole world was disappointed, a swamping of emotion.

“I have some leads,” he choked out. “Young Master Xiamen. He’s strange. His clan’s come out of nowhere in the past few months. He knows a lot. Almost too much.”

We know about Xiamen. It is not him.

Pearl cringed. “I see. Maybe—“

Hold.

Pearl’s words caught in his throat. His mouth refused his directions. His eyes fluttered in confusion.

Then it was like a divine searchlight bore down upon the world. Spiritual sense, the eye which sees all. Dorian’s heart dropped to his stomach. It swept the grounds around Pearl. Then farther out, taking in the crisscrossing tripwires and beyond.

A gagging sound. Pearl had managed to work his lips free. “I assure you,” he sputtered. “We’re secure. I’ve put my best men on it—they’ve set up airtight surveillance.”

Dorian kept as still as possible. He willed his heart to slow. He barely dared think. This should not have happened. The odds are astronomical. A part of him was still in disbelief.

The searchlight finished up its rounds, settling on the center of the tent.

“Sire,” gasped Pearl. “There’s no need—“

The searchlight dropped straight down. Dorian’s thread of perception entered its vision. It felt like he’d been put under a microscope whose scale he could scarcely fathom. He felt stripped bare, naked, seen at an atomic level. It was a gaze which seared like the harshest of sunlight.

Fuck.

Then a new emotion burst out from above. Rage. Total, swallowing Dorian up; he felt like a drowning man amid a vast and fathomless ocean.

Fool!

Pearl teetered, nearly blacking out from the force of the word. We are not alone.