Sylver wasn’t sure what he had expected to see. He had thought the country would fall into utter chaos, once the barrier that protected them came down.

Instead, it was business as usual.

If you ignored the blood clogging up the streets that is.

A few houses had toppled over, due to the blood adding too much weight to the wood it had been absorbed into, but there were only a few, the vast majority were fine.

Not much of note happened for the next 4 hours or so.

By the time Sylver was done packing up, everyone was already halfway out the door. The cultivators Faust had trained didn’t own a whole lot; all of their possessions very comfortably fit in a small sack the elves helped make out of excess sleeping bags.

Speaking of elves, Tarragon and his lot had decided to leave, as soon as possible.

A terrorist organization called the Bucklers were using the chaos the blood rain had created to take over weakened sects and were currently in the process of working their way up to the emperor. The fact that most of the major sects’ heads were mysteriously missing made their revolution almost suspiciously easy.

The Red Ring might have been fine, but shit was going down in the Blue and Green Ring, which explained the giant pillars of smoke Sylver saw in the distance. Once he had reached the bottom of the mountain, he kept his head down and had somehow missed the active rebellion.

And he was more than happy to do as his sect did, and ignore it.

The people that weren’t cultivators, that Faust’s sect owned, or rented or something, had all been handled by Michael. From what Sylver understood, the vast majority had already left once they realized the cultivators were leaving, and the few that didn’t have anywhere to go were simply given enough green jade to go and live wherever they wished.

***

Sylver had been in the middle of looking through his status and his choice of perks, when Rosa quietly opened the door, walked inside, and closed it behind her.

“I need you to kidnap me,” Rosa said, as Sylver continued to quietly look at her.

“…”

“If the Council thinks I got kidnapped, they won’t do anything to my family,” Rosa explained, as Sylver gradually stood up from the floor.

He had been using Ed’s coffin as a seat. Since the moment he got his hands on the metal box, it hadn’t been further than a meter away from him, even when he needed both of his hands to do something, he simply had his robe hold it above his head.

As happy as he was, he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle it if the coffin was stolen from him.

“Let me think about it,” Sylver said as he closed his eyes for a few seconds, while Rosa ever so slightly loosened the top portion of her robe.

If Sylver had been looking at her, he would have noticed that he could see more of her shoulders and that she wasn’t wearing the tunic most mages tended to wear underneath their robes.

She didn’t walk towards Sylver, it was more of a sauntering movement, with a lot more hip swaying than necessary.

For starters, Rosa didn’t have the right body type for this sort of thing. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive, she had everything Sylver looked for in a woman, rock-hard abs, a predatory look in her eyes, a couple of battle scars littered on her neck and hands, and she was even wearing a proper mage’s robe.

Normally that wouldn’t matter, but Sylver had spent the last 2 months or so surrounded by people wearing clothes that looked like bathrobes to him, which meant that her loose mage robe got extra points due to Sylver’s homesickness.

“No. I’m worried kidnapping you would lead to the Council-controlled elves having a justified reason for starting a war with Arda. And the benefits of having you around aren’t worth the risk of making enemies of local nobles who have ties to the aforementioned elves,” Sylver calmly explained calmly, as he looked up and saw that Rosa’s robe was one good shrug away from completely falling off her.

“Are you sure you considered all the-”

She jumped as a shade materialized behind her, and pulled her robe closed.

“Is there anything else you wished to discuss?” Sylver asked without raising his voice or looking away from Rosa’s gradually reddening face.

He could see her struggle to not take the rejection personally.

But she would get over it.

Or she wouldn’t.

Either way, Sylver wasn’t going to sleep with her out of pity, and he most certainly wasn’t going to sleep with her in exchange for something. If she had been a bit vaguer with what she was offering and was about 3 heads taller, Sylver might have considered it.

Rosa stood there for a while, now uncomfortable in her almost nude state, and tried to find something Sylver would be interested in.

The two of them had a conversation with their eyes without saying anything, Rosa ended up offering to throw her two female companions into the mix, but Sylver respectfully declined.

“I’ll give you Tarragon,” Rosa said. She sounded so uncertain Sylver couldn’t decide if she was asking him or telling him.

Sylver made a show of considering her offer.

“I don’t need him. Look, Rosa… The Council is next on my list. I’ve only got 1 thing to do first, and then they will have my full, undivided, attention. And I’ll say this now, even though I’m certain it doesn’t need to be said, but if you try to run away from your group, and make it look like I kidnapped you… I don’t really want to finish this sentence, but it’s nothing good, I can promise you that,” Sylver explained, as he smoothed the front of his robe with his hands, while he lowered himself onto Ed’s coffin.

Rosa’s face was twisted in an almost grimace, and then without any warning, she started to smirk.

“Your full undivided attention you say,” Rosa said with a coy smile on her face.

She was clearly imagining something, but Sylver wasn’t a mind reader and didn’t get the feeling she was thinking about him in that particular way.

He guessed that she had an idea as to just how much Sylver had managed to achieve in the 2 short months he’d spent here. And if his undivided attention was enough to do this, then surely it was more than good enough to do the thing Rosa was imagining.

Assuming Lola hadn’t already defeated them, once Edmund was back, the Council would have 2 of the Ibis’ most experienced arch mages working against them.

***

He didn’t look that upset, which initially threw Sylver off.

Owl just handed him the vial full of scabs, and silently followed Sylver to what was left of his workshop.

He started to speak while Sylver was waiting for the tracker to solidify.

“First dark elves, and now cultivators. Arda isn’t that big of a city, what are you going to do with them?” Owl asked.

Sylver didn’t react to the blind man’s attempt at provocation. But he did feel like smacking himself for not just telling them all to fuck off. Celebration or not, it was a very stupid move on his part.

“World domination, what else?” Sylver answered with a casual voice.

“He tricked you, didn’t he?” Owl asked.

“You’ll have to be specific,” Sylver said.

“The man who warned the emperor. You recognized him. He fooled you, somehow, that’s where you know him from,” Owl guessed.

Sylver was immune to most forms of lie detection spells and techniques, but one of the drawbacks of not being fully undead was that your body sometimes reacted without your permission. He was fairly sure Owl did not manage to read Sylver, but he could not rule out the blind man was more perceptive than he appeared.

“Hard to say. All living people look the same to me. The only reason I can tell you apart from the others, is because of how fat you are,” Sylver said, but Owl barely registered the insult.

“You’re more than welcome to come with us,” Owl said, as Sylver finished the tracker, and just short of threw it at Owl.

The large man caught the thing in one giant hand and carefully put it away into his pocket.

“I would just get in the way. It’s best to leave these sorts of things to professionals,” Sylver said with mock humility.

Owl didn’t frown, but Sylver felt his soul stiffen up.

Apparently, the man was touchy about his [Hero] being a fraud.

Owl walked over to the door, and he turned around after he opened it.

“If you end up in Urth, look for a man named Grigori. Tell him I sent you,” Owl said, as he stepped through the door, and closed it behind him.

“This is exactly the kind of bullshit I’ve been talking about! Everyone knows everything, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know shit!” Sylver said to Ed’s coffin, while he gestured at the door Owl had left through.

***

Getting out of the Schlagen mountains, or what was left of them, wasn’t hard. Everyone following Sylver was capable of jumping to great heights, and the few that weren’t were light enough for one of the older cultivators to carry them.

For whatever reason Tarragon went through the “official” exit and was currently standing in an awfully long queue. The shade Sylver had left with the druid to make sure he got out safely found Sylver almost 2 hours later and confirmed that Tarragon was on his way home.

The road Sylver’s group was walking on was sprinkled with blood, but by the time someone requested to stop for a bathroom break, the surroundings were perfectly clean.

Mora was playing around with Dog off in the distance since Aleri was currently preoccupied with scouting the road ahead.

“What’s Arda like?” Xalibur asked.

Sylver scratched his chin, as he watched Dog do a backflip over Mora. The little creature was a lot livelier, and more friendly-looking, than the disheveled mut Sylver had initially met.

“Very loud. And the smell takes getting used to. And I know I’m one to talk, but everyone has a very odd accent,” Sylver answered.

It was only now that he realized he hadn’t talked to Xalibur in a while. He’d been busy, and if he didn’t know any better, he would have thought Xalibur had been purposely avoiding him.

“If memory serves me right, we’re going to have to cross the Sinis sea at some point,” Xalibur said.

“Don’t worry about that. The rain was interfering with Chrys’ magic. Once we’re far enough away Lola’s mage will open a portal for us, and we’ll cover thousands of kilometers in a single step,” Sylver said and was surprised to see that Xalibur didn’t look happy at the news.

“I read that the water there is so dense that you can almost walk on it,” Xalibur said.

Sylver nodded.

“I forgot the word for it in Eirish, but there are spots like that. Ships over a certain size have to avoid them, but the smaller ones can slide around as if they’re on ice,” Sylver said, as Michael started gathering everyone up again.

“Is Faust going to meet us in Arda?” Xalibur asked.

Something about his tone felt odd to Sylver, but he got distracted by Mora’s return before he could put the thought into action.

“That’s the plan, yes. I think we should be far enough away for Chrys to contact us in another hour or so,” Sylver said as he stood up, and helped Xalibur get up too.

As before, everyone formed into 4 neat lines, Michael did a headcount to make sure everyone was here, and with Sylver riding in the front on Mora’s back, the army of cultivators being led by a mage continued their march.

Sylver had Edmund’s coffin behind him, a wonderfully clear sky in front of him, and in a matter of hours, he would be home.

What could possibly go wrong?