“Sure!” beamed Tan. “This way…” and they were off.

They passed the first great door in the chamber, which was emblazoned with a hulking anvil symbol. “The forges,” said Tan airily. It made sense for a military family. There were always swords to be repaired, speartips to be honed by firelight. Dorian narrowed his eyes. Interesting. A heist plan was already fizzling in his mind—and a forge could play an important role indeed. Forge and forgery were but a slip of the tongue apart, after all.

They went past another giant door, this one with a fireball-wisp emblem. “Our cultivation rooms, of all elements!” intoned Tan. “This is what I shall lend you, hmm?”

“If it still pleases you,” said Dorian, shrugging. “I won’t be longer than a half-day in them.”

“Bah, take however long you like!” Tan snorted. He stretched like a big cat. “Time is a commodity of which I have, it must be said, all too much.” Dorian blinked. And I have all too little.

They came to a third door inlaid with thick swathes of shimmering gold, as though a solid-golden block had melted over a jade door, and frozen there.

“Here we are!” Tan strolled up to an indent in the door and pressed his thumb in. There was a click, a harsh pulse of qi which rattled down Dorian’s bones, sent his teeth chattering. Then the door groaned open with a clattering of gears and pulleys.

A stray thought struck Dorian like a thunderbolt. “Say,” he said absently. “What triggers the door’s opening?”

“My Bloodline, of course!” laughed Tan, winking. He wagged a finger at Dorian. “I know you won’t try anything naughty, of course, but you couldn’t if you tried! Only those descended from the Great Serpent can open these doors. Hehe.”

Dorian fought to keep his eye from twitching. He grinned, even as his heart did a little flip in his chest. Interesting. Very interesting. Who else do we know has this oh-so-rare Bloodline? So, in theory—this means I can open… every door in this chamber?

It was almost too easy.

Outwardly he only said, “Naughty? Me? I wouldn’t dream of it!”

The vault was an concrete hall, wide and long as a thoroughfare, lined on either side with shelves upon shelves of mechanized metal. On each shelf, lined up down the hall, were an uncountable number of crates. Their edges were framed with coal-black steel studded with black nails and inscribed with a maze of gnarled emblems. But the crates’ sides were see-through: they seemed made of the same stuff as the case surrounding the Spirit Weapon—that is to say, nigh-invisible, nigh-impregnable.

Which was a terrible pity, since a mere cursory glance down the hall had Dorian salivating. One box held a cluster of putrid-green elixirs which pulsed with enough qi to skyrocket him to mid-Profound. Another was a diamond-studded crown with such a strong air-aspect that, Dorian guessed, wearing it would let him dash around mid-air like a baby KunPeng. Other crates held stranger trinkets: a once-pristine greatsword cleaved in half, dented chainmail, the ruins of a stone visage—they must be spoils of war.

But Tan was still humming and strolling ahead. Dorian forced himself to follow, swallowing. Next time, he repeated to himself. Next time. There was a grander prize waiting for him still.

And there it was, nestled on a podium at the end of the hall, a wink of mossy light in the near distance. They were coming up on it now, and with each footstep that familiar weight settled in on him. The air seemed to thin. He smiled. There you are.

On the pedestal, hidden behind glass, was a silver ring. And on the ring was a pearl which seemed to hold within it a universe of swirling, glowing gaseous-green. It seemed not of this world.

“This is my favorite of the three,” said Tan, sighing fondly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Dorian sucked in a breath. “It surely is.” His eyes glittered.

Now all I need to figure out is how to steal it! Preferably without having the most powerful family in the Oasis hunting me down instantly after.

A hairy conundrum indeed.

***

“Well, then!” sighed Tan with a wan smile. “It’s been fun. I’ll check up on you in five hours, eh, pal?”

If I’m still alive, that is! Those protective arrays look quite gnarly. “Five hours. Certainly. Well met, and well left!” grinned Dorian, waving.

The chamber door clicked shut behind him, and Dorian was alone.

Tan had left only one of the doors open—the one leading to the cultivation rooms. Tufts of smoke drifted out from the doorway like teasing fingers, and through them qi-lights pulsed soft pastel purples and petal pinks and lazy orange. There were rooms there, past that doorway, decked out in arrays powered by a king’s ransom worth of Spirit Stones. Arrays which would focus the powers of Heaven and Earth upon him, and him alone. A paradise of cultivation.

Dorian could simply walk through that doorway, ascend to Profound, nab himself a high-grade Spirit Sea, and waltz out. Indeed, that’d been his plan when he came in.

Well, things have changed. Dorian’s eyes glittered as he strolled over to that vault room, nestled his gaze on the keyhole indent in that thick gold door, and licked his lips. Can I really just… stick my finger in, and the door’ll open? Bloodlines were fickle things. In as sensitive a place as this, supplying a wrong Bloodline meant he’d be identified as an intruder.

If he did that, if he had to guess, he’d be incinerated on the spot. Or perhaps the floor will open up and I’ll fall into a pit of acid. After all, he doubted the door would detect a foreign Bloodline in the highly confidential Heilong family chambers and simply say, “Sorry, trespasser. Wrong Bloodline! Try again?”

The trouble was—what if his Bloodline, the distant ancestor Bloodline to the Heilong’s, was too far removed to be a valid key? He hummed, strolling up to the door to the furnaces, scratching at his chin and squinting down the inscriptions on the door.

Then he noticed them, but only because he was looking for them. Lines of qi, thin and gold like strands of blonde hair, snaking through the air in long, bowed-out arcs. They attached at the other end to that hulking, gorgeous machinery of violence: the rope-javelin, fitted nicely with those two huge Bloodline relics. His eyes flashed.

So they are keyed to the Serpent’s Bloodline. Dorian strode up to the indent, squinted at it again, shrugged, and jerked his thumb in.

For one heart-stopping second, nothing happened. And in that second he fully expected some comically large anvil to drop out of the sky and squash him flat.

But then the door clank-clanked open, slow as all huge things do, and he was in.

The Heilong vaults, all to himself? Sometimes things really are this easy. He rubbed his hands, licked his lips, and strode on in.

***

Ten minutes later, he came to the realization that things were not, in fact, that easy.

He growled at the prizes in those steel-wrought cases—so pretty, so mighty, so untouchable. As it turned out, these cases weren’t to be opened via a Bloodline. No. Each needed an artifact with a very specific and very untraceable key signature.

Which meant they may as well have been buried a thousand li underground, for all he cared. There would be no nabbing happening here. He groaned. And all of the things had alarm arrays wrapped around them too, so they’d know the instant an object was missing. Even if he got into a case—which, given the time frame and the resources at his disposal, was a fever dream—he still had to contend with six other lines of defense.

He swore under his breath as he strolled. Forget everything else. What about that ring? That oh-so-delectable relic?

Now this, thank Fortune, was in no locked-up case. The Heilongs, in all their hubris, had it smack-dab at the end of the hall, fully, proudly displayed on the pedestal, with only a partition of glass to guard it.

But even as Dorian strolled up to it, he knew it wouldn’t be so simple. That pedestal was crawling with qi-lines winding in a thousand directions, and they converged at its center—right where the ring lay.

Dorian peered over the marble top at it, squinting.

A pressure plate which did who-knew-what if the ring was removed. And the ring itself was tied up in so many qi-lines that to move it was to trigger undoubtedly a half-dozen alarms. If Dorian were designing the vault, he’d also have it spontaneously lockdown, trapping the thief within.

A slow, devious grin was sliding onto Dorian’s face. Now this was a much more tractable challenge indeed. These defenses he could deal with. There were ways of disentangling qi-threads. There were ways of tricking pressure plates. The tricky thing, though, would be sneaking the damned thing out of here. And wouldn’t the Heilongs notice its absence?

They would—unless it was replaced by a very, very convincing fake.

A plan sprung to mind. A shaky plan that might require more than a smidge of luck, perhaps, but a plan.

He could not let a chance at a Prime Bone slide. With another Prime Bone, he could forge himself a Spirit Weapon. But even more crucially, he now had a chance to bond with a Spirit Weapon during his ascension to Profound!

Just thinking about it made his inner goblin cackle with joy.

Dorian took in the ring, letting its grooves, its curves, its etchings, the slope of its girdle and shank all seep into his mind until it was solid, a fully-fleshed vision, a blueprint of cognition. Then he squinted at the pearl, that droplet of swampy essence, and did the same. Within a minute he’d memorized its shape.

He tapped his chin. Five hours before Tan returns. Then his mind turned to the forges.

It was time to put his artificing skills to good use!