“Did you have to be that rude to her?” Ria asked.

“I wasn’t rude to her. Spring, was I rude to her?” Sylver tapped out the question, and the shade walking next to him nodded.

“You were. You’ve been in a bad mood since the moment you saw her,” Spring answered, as he took another bite out of his strawberry stuffed caramel wrap.

“Thank you for that Spring. If there was a man out there that could end my existence with a thought, I would personally always take his side, but that’s just me,” Sylver said, as Spring shrugged his shoulders.

“Last time a woman tried that, you explained in great detail how you would kill her in the worst way imaginable,” Spring countered, and even Sylver was caught off guard by Ria shaking slightly from suppressing her giggling.

“I wasn’t rude to her,” Sylver repeated, as he scratched his chin.

“You didn’t swear, but you were rude,” Spring clarified, as Ria nodded along.

“I wasn’t rude… I wasn’t polite, but I wasn’t rude. Why is everyone so on guard against me? I’ve been nothing but fair and reasonable, where do they get this-this reluctance to be upfront with me? It’s not like telling me would have changed anything,” Sylver wondered, as Spring provided an answer that almost physically hurt him.

“Because to her you’re not some personified force of nature, you’re just a necromancer. She knows you’re good at killing things, but she has healers with her and is protected by the guards, she thinks you won’t be able to get to her, so you’re irrelevant,” Spring explained, with an alarming insight into Sylver’s innermost thoughts.

“I’m tempted to go out of my way and attack her, just to prove a point,” Sylver said, but all three of them knew he didn’t mean it.

“You said you heard the name Gorynych from her,” Ria asked in an attempt to change the topic of conversation.

“He said he didn’t recognize the name, and Rosa said that it doesn’t matter since he didn’t want to get involved. So, this dragon is somehow involved with the elves, and their Eldar sapling? Or do you think she knows something about the dragon, and she thought you were somehow involved with it?” Spring asked, as Sylver ever so vaguely remembered what the shade was talking about.

“I’m old, the dragon’s old, maybe she thought us old people all know each other?” Sylver offered sarcastically.

“And the fact that she gave you one of the dark elves’ keys as proof of being owed a favor is just a coincidence?” Ria countered.

“Yes. Because the alternative pisses me off so much that it’s in everyone’s best interest for me not to think about it,” Sylver explained and hoped Ria would drop the subject.

“She was acting really weird though. From the way she thanked you the last time you saw each other, I would have thought she would be going out of her way to help you. Instead, she was guarded, reluctant to communicate, and above all else, afraid of you… The council started searching for you, right after you left that dungeon,” Spring offered.

Or rather, he vocalized the thoughts Sylver had thought he had done a good job of hiding away from himself.

“She was afraid, but I didn’t sense any hostility… You think she ended up joining the council and was afraid I know and would try to kill her?” Sylver offered, as Ria chimed in.

“That does fit with her reluctance to tell you why she’s here,” Ria offered.

Sylver physically shook his head and made a decision.

“Doesn’t matter. Council, dragon, elves, dark elves, Eldar saplings, I just need to find the girl and talk her into drinking a potion. Everything else is irrelevant,” Sylver said with finality, and all but shushed Ria as she tried to continue theorizing what Rosa was doing here, and why.

Sylver’s conversation with Tarragon was short and sweet.

He showed the man the card, the man tapped an identical card against it to confirm it was genuine, and then allowed Sylver to sit next to him at the front of the carriage.

Sylver refrained from asking for a loan right now, or an alliance, and was content with simply seeing what the new emperor looked like.

Under normal circumstances, someone from a sect that basically didn’t exist would never be allowed anywhere near the emperor. Unless that person was sitting next to the head of the group of magical healers that were called in to save everyone.

Tarragon was a surprisingly relaxed and polite young man, who happened to also be a level 417 [Ancient Druid]. He didn’t even ask any questions regarding who Sylver was, or where he had gotten that metallic card from, and seemed more interested in the fact that Sylver’s robe was connected directly to his nervous system.

He even offered to heal him, free of charge.

***

The closer they came to the center the fewer food stalls there were. They also started pricing things in green jade, and as much as Sylver enjoyed having Spring experience various foods, he wasn’t willing to spend a whole gram of green jade on what amounted to a tiny cube of meat soaked in some sort of fancy-sounding sauce.

Sylver toyed around with the idea of pickpocketing the required funds from the high-level cultivators walking around, but even if they were walking around with blue jade, it wouldn’t be worth the risk. Especially given Faust’s sect’s already tarnished reputation.

Tarragon offered to buy Sylver a small soup dish, that cost 3 grams of green jade, but Sylver refused using the excuse of being on a very strict diet. He also had a hole in his throat, and the soup would have likely leaked out of it if he tried to drink it.

Gradually Spring started sticking out like a sore thumb, there weren’t enough people for him to blend into the crowd, and now people went from staring at Sylver to staring at the skin-covered shade, who unmistakably looked foreign.

Although, if it weren’t for his height, Spring wouldn’t look too out of place here. If you removed the resemblance to Sylver, he’d fit right in.

Given that Sylver got him from Poppy, and he was a cultivator…

I wonder how many coincidences are necessary until you have to start calling it a pattern?

At some point, Spring found a good dark corner, slipped out of his skinsuit, wrapped it around his torso to make it a part of himself, and then returned to Sylver’s shadow.

Given the fact that the palaces were all at the top of the mountain peaks, Sylver had expected for there to be a ramp of some sort. Instead, he saw that the road led into the mountain.

Sylver hadn’t kept track of time too well, but the suns were setting when the carriage entered the mountain.

He was surprised by the fact that the guards standing outside the mountain didn’t search him or any of the elf carriages, and basically waved Tarragon through after asking him about his kids. Tarragon turned out to be the father of 4 small children. He even showed Sylver a small book that had drawings of them.

Sylver’s surprise was short-lived because he found that the inside of the mountain had hundreds, upon hundreds, of “statues.”

Every single one of which was occupied by a dormant soul, meaning that every single one of them was a golem. Going by the fact that Sylver could feel that the souls were very strong, he didn’t like his chances against one of these golems, let alone a literal army of them.

While this should have made Sylver afraid of going against a country that possessed such an army, it instead made him feel better about removing their barrier. That information alone vastly improved Ria’s mood, who had very likely been thinking about all the death Sylver’s actions were going to cause.

All the carriages fit onto a single circular stone platform, that was then lifted by 4 extremely large chains. Lifting such a large weight using magic would be ridiculously wasteful, and whoever built this seemed to share Sylver’s opinion. Instead of Ki, four men showed up and simply lifted the platform by turning a large metal crank mechanism.

Sylver remained seated next to Tarragon, as the carriages started to move again, and followed behind a small man whose bald head was covered in tattoos, from his scalp, down his face, all the way down to his neck. The pattern wasn’t symmetrical, and looked closer to writing, than random lines.

He and Tarragon spoke in the same language Rosa spoke in for a moment or two before the bald man nodded and started to lead the line of carriages.

“We’re actually staying at the Blue Rat sect, but it’s customary to first speak to the emperor. As the leader and their equivalent of royalty, I’ve been offered residence at one of the sects in the White Ring. I can bring you along as a guest if you’re interested. I prefer staying with my team, but if-”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you for the offer,” Sylver said quietly, as Tarragon nodded at him.

If he had needed to search the sects for traces of Edmund, this would have made it laughably easy. Thankfully, Sylver already knew where Edmund was, all that was left was actually getting him out of the dragon’s grasp.

Tarragon’s group didn’t see much of the royal palace, as they made their way towards it. Giant thick bushes walled them in from the left and the right, and the most Sylver got were a couple of glimpses at a pond, some kind of large sandbox, and what appeared to be a giant mirror on the ground.

Sending the shades out would be pointless, there was a barrier around them, so no exploring unless Sylver physically forced his way through the shrubs to see what was on the other side.

Sylver also noticed that the shrubs were moving and seemed to be used to box the group in, so they only had one path to follow. It was more intuition than anything [Swamp Lord] related, but Sylver got the feeling the man with the tattoos was responsible for the giant moving walls.

Tarragon had his signature warm smile on his face and was so relaxed that Sylver almost struggled to keep his guard up.

After a couple of minutes, they reached two enormous golden doors, embedded with so many gemstones that Sylver didn’t even attempt to count them. There were thousands of glowing diamonds at the top, thousands of glowing sapphires underneath them, then bright glowing emeralds, and finally a small knee-high strip of glowing red rubies.

As they began to open Tarragon whispered the history behind them, how gold and silver used to be used as a way of preserving Ki infused jade, and that Ki infused jade tended to appear naturally in places that had gold ore, and how the two were historically linked to one another.

Tarragon’s fascinating words were interrupted by an ever so faint cough from the man with the tattooed head, and Tarragon, and the elves inside the carriages, all appeared just outside of them, in a neat single-file line.

“You’ll need to bow when we enter, please make sure your head is lower than mine,” Tarragon whispered at Sylver, who just nodded at him.

The inside of the palace was nothing but gold. The floor, ceiling, walls, even the windows had specks of gold inside the glass.

The man with the tattoos on his head introduced the newly appointed emperor in a short speech, that Sylver didn’t hear a single word of, once the emperor’s name had been mentioned.

“Dobrynya Nikitich.”

And if that wasn’t utter motherfucking bullshit, Sylver also couldn’t shake the feeling of having met this man before. It was only when the young emperor brushed his hair out of his face that Sylver realized the emperor looked just like Nameless.

If his soul hadn’t been several times more powerful than Nameless’, Sylver would have thought he was looking at a slightly older Nameless.

Or “Aurick” as the book had told him. The boy for whom Sylver had summoned a demon to help him track down the owner of a drop of blood was called “Aurick.”

And if Sylver’s soul sense was to be believed, Aurick was a blood relative of the emperor Sylver was currently staring at.