“Do you know the origin of my name, Heilong?” said Tan, a glint in his eye.

“Tell me,” breathed Dorian.

Tan smirked. “Every year after the solstice, my father braves the dark corners of the Desert to hunt the Dusk Dragon—Heilong. The blood of the Dusk Dragon runs through each member of my family. It is said that these beasts are direct descendants of the Serpent.”

A suffocating aura pulsed out of the edges of the door like rays off a black sun. “What serpent?” snapped Dorian.

Tan shot him a quizzical look. “The Serpent!” he said. “You know. The One Above All. The Rain-Bringer. He Who Split The Sky.”

Evidently this thing was common knowledge here, but the boy forgot Dorian had hardly been here two days.

“Ah—that Serpent,” said Dorian, feigning wide-eyed acknowledgment. He still hadn’t the faintest clue what the hells they were talking about, of course, but he could hardly show it and still pretend to be some well-traveled fashionista. He nodded wisely. “I believe they call it the Ack-Thu in the forests of the Southern expanse. Say—to be certain we’re speaking of the same serpent—might you tell me a smidge more about this creature?”

“Of course! Its official name here is the Evernight Basilisk.” Tan grinned, and his white teeth were a silvery crescent in the dim light. Was it Dorian’s imagination, or did the torchlight flicker as Tan said the words? “Millennia ago, during the War of the Gods, it, battered and weakened, was slain by the Dweller in the Deep. Its fragments were scattered across the realm. Only a handful remain in the Azcan Oasis…”

Ah. Dorian thought back to the resonance he’d felt at the Sinkhole, and again at the Alchemist’s laboratory. This must be what he’s referring to. At last, some clues about my Bloodline! Evernight Basilisk, is it? The name meant nothing to him, but that was no surprise. There were more godly bloodlines than stars in the night sky.

“It seems we do speak of the same beast,” said Dorian, smiling through gritted teeth. The pressure was still immense; his veins stood out on his forearms like sickly roots. His whole body felt compressed, as though held deep underwater. “What of it?”

“As it happens,” continued Tan, doing a little twirl, “all of my family’s techniques, our manuals… they all come from this great Serpent!”

He giggled. “And you, my friend, will soon be among the few souls lucky enough to see a chunk of it. It just-so-happens… that my Heilong family has three of the Great Beast’s relics!”

Then he pressed his finger to the center of the door, and Dorian was nearly bowled over. He felt in that instant like a very small leaf in a hurricane whose breadth he could not fathom. There was a howling, a tearing, a pulling-yanking from all directions; then the moment passed and he was reduced to a small boat on high seas: rocking, nearly toppling, but above the waves. Just barely.

Goodness. He heaved in a shaky breath. If simply being in the presence of this thing was boiling him up like this—how damned powerful must it be?! A heady rush of anticipation was thrumming through him now. A wicked smile played at his lips. His fingers rattled against one another like strummed strings. He didn’t know his body could hold so much energy.

The door had opened a crack—through watery eyes Dorian saw Tan prance on through. How is this little worm so unaffected?! If his Bloodline did derive from this Basilisk, it must be so diluted the pressure was hardly noticeable. Dorian, meanwhile, felt like he’d been cast in iron.

Swallowing, Dorian forced his limbs to move. His leg was rooted to the ground. He glared at it. There, there. Move. Move, damn you!

And slowly, as his body grew acclimated to the weight, he did. Inch-by-inch, but it was still moving. Soon he was slogging his way along.

Tan poked his head back through, blinking. “Well?”

“Coming!” gritted Dorian.

At last he thrust his way through the doorway.

Green. Floor-to-ceiling, a splash of deep-ocean green, swirling through a circular foyer, up barefaced walls. In the walls, were inlaid a set of doors so huge they seemed made for giant-kin, each laced with intricate jade snaking up and down the surfaces, shimmering and flowing up like waterfalls in reverse. But the real prize lay in the center of the room, decked out behind a glass case on a massive dias.

A tooth the size of a man, polished to a shine which glowed crescent-white under a beam of glimmering pale light. It was hooked meanly, and there was a crevice where its

That whole tooth was one massive Prime Bone.

Ho—ly. Mother of gods.

Dorian was speechless. He could hardly believe his eyes. He almost leapt for it then and there. It was so big it probably contained the essence of six or seven Prime Bones—enough to last him until the Celestial Realm, even! If he got his hands on that massive thing and—somehow—managed to refine it, he wouldn’t need another drop of Bloodline essence until Demigod!

There was so much blood rushing to his head he had to gulp down big, deep breaths like a fish struggling out of water. He literally could not believe it. It was an impossibility, a mirage, a dream-of-the-flesh. The first time he snagged a Bloodline relic, he had to snatch out from under a beast two Realms above him, a half-dead Kaya in tow. He nearly died twice over in that little escapade.

Now one sat feet away from him! Defenseless!

Well—not quite. There was that thick layer of glass which he would bet could hold under anything he threw at it. And, now that he had a closer look at the thing, an obscene number of traps, arrays, and formations dedicated to protecting the thing. That was a lock far beyond his capabilities to pick.

The rush was starting to settle a bit now, enough for him to think straight, but he still couldn’t drag his eyes off the thing. Most of his brain was dominated by a squealing little internal goblin screeching MINE! GIVE IT TO ME! I WANT IT NOW! I MUST HAVE IT! He gulped back a bit of drool.

Then he noticed it wasn’t only a bone. The bone was only the blade. It was connected to a dark rope which seemed forged of the night-sky itself, speckled with swirling purples and teardrop-whites.

And at the end of that rope was a scale. It was nothing like the one Dorian swallowed; this one was too big for that. It must’ve been a neck-scale, or something closer to the tail—a scale big as Dorian’s chest, gleaming a wicked, green. The way the light played off it, it almost seemed to wink at Dorian. Beckoning to him. He took a step closer.

“My family’s legendary treasure,” sighed Tan fondly. “The Heilong Javelin. It is a triumph and a tragedy. It is an aesthetic masterpiece—but sadly, a decoration is all it shall remain! For only he who possesses the full-blooded Evernight Basilisk Bloodline can wield this weapon. And no faction would waste such a valuable treasure on one man…”

In that moment took every ounce of self-control Dorian had not to let that tiny screeching goblin take control. It was not so much a devil perched on his shoulder—he was the devil, after all. No; it was the purest, most distilled essence of him, his basest urges chomping at the bit which he had to wrangle. And it took a hells of an effort to bring himself to heel.

Patience. Patience!

Tan sighed so over-dramatically it could only be genuine.

“Any-how!” said Tan, twirling around with a smile. “That’s enough of that. Wanna go see my seashell collection?”

Plans were made and unravelled and made again in Dorian’s head a hundred times a second, smashing into each other in a blustering tornado of thought. He couldn’t contain himself. The scenario was simple; the solution to it was not. The situation: he was in the vaults of one of the most powerful families in the Oasis, feet away from one of their most powerful treasures, together with a dunderhead weakling. It was a galaxy-gallivanting thief’s wet dream. He could not ask for a more optimal stroke of dumb luck.

The problem: How the hells was he supposed to magick something that big, under that many protections, out of the Heilong family vaults?! And even if he got through all those layers of arrays, and locks, and who-knew-what-other alarms the family had installed, how was he supposed to even move the damned thing? Something of such ridiculous mana potency would collapse the fragile little interdimensional spaces in his Interspatial Rings in a second—they weren’t build to handle something with half that strong. What about absorbing it, straight-up? What was he supposed to do—eat that huge thing? With his mouth-hole? No; this thing would need to be prepared for months in a massive cauldron, drained of its essence, then absorbed elixir-by-elixir.

It would not be so simple as thwacking Tan Heilong over the head and zooming off with the thing. He rather suspected someone would notice him dragging a wyrm-sized super-treasure behind him as he made off. To say nothing its aura, which was a signal flare by its own to any hyper-powered Heilong family passersby—of which he was sure there were many crawling about in this place. He was essentially stealing from the police.

Long story short, he was a mouse strategizing on how best to swallow an elephant. He sighed and, with an insane effort of will, tore his gaze from the thing. Next time. Oh, make no mistake—the thing would be his. Just… not at this precise moment. Give him a few months, a little bit of prep. He’d heist the thing before Nijo and his army set so much as a spear within the Oasis.

For now—they were still in the Heilong family vaults, weren’t they? There had to be other goodies to snatch.

Then Dorian’s brain fizzled, and popped, and went stark-white.

“Hold on a second,” he snapped. “You said your family had three of the Great Beast’s relics?”

“Oh, yes,” said Tan, waiving an airy hand. “That one, father likes to use as a bargaining chip. We keep it in some storage room, collecting dust—not nearly as exciting. No glass cases and sky-lighting and pedestals and arrays and so-forth. Come! To more interesting topics. My seashell collection is the third-largest in all Azcan, you know—“

“Wait. Wait. Wait.” A vein in Dorian’s left eye bulged. “Say, why don’t you take me to this third relic?”