Burning Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 4)

  Table of Contents

  Summary

  Shadow Alley Press Mailing List

  The Deeps

  The Undercity

  The Map

  The Bargain

  The Scepter

  The Sleepless

  The Lead

  The Museum

  The Spy

  The Sorcerer

  The Visitor

  The Discoveries

  The Cut

  The Talk

  The Mission

  The Burning

  The Heart

  The Wound

  The Visitor

  The Agreement

  The Farewell

  The Prestige

  The Tomb

  The Escape

  The Haul

  The Desert

  The Turn

  The Unexpected

  The Defender

  The Loss

  The Vision

  The Champion

  The Bond

  The Severing

  The Forge

  The Island

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  Need a Little More Adventure?

  Books by Shadow Alley Press

  Books by Black Forge

  LitRPG on Facebook

  GameLit and Cultivation on Facebook

  Even more Cultivation on Facebook

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Summary

  The quest for the Empyrean Flame has begun, and a deadly new threat has appeared from beyond the realms of mortals.

  AS THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR begins, Jace and his friends must puzzle out the meaning behind the map sent by a mysterious benefactor. But as Jace's daunting quest leads him to the most exotic destinations on Earth, he finds himself hunted by the last person he'd expected to oppose his mission: his own mother.

  With the heretics hot on his trail and a chaotic invasion looming, Jace and his friends must overcome challenges like none they've ever faced.

  Because the end of one myth is often the beginning of a new legend...

  Burning Core is book four in the bestselling School of Swords and Serpents series, a tale of wuxia adventure, cultivation mastery, and lurking threats.

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  The Deeps

  HAHEN JABBED ME IN the ribs with his index finger. “You must go deeper than ever before to find your way to the next level of advancement.”

  Hearing those words for the hundredth time that summer nearly pushed me over the edge. Three times a day, every day, the rat spirit and I had chased my advancement from a disciple’s core to the artist level. It was a difficult transition. Only one in three Empyreals ever made the leap. With each passing day it felt more likely I was in the unlucky two-thirds stuck at disciple. I gave Hahen an exasperated sigh and opened my eyes.

  “I don’t know how to go deeper,” I grumbled. “Give me something to work with here.”

  The rat spirit scratched the underside of his chin and tugged on his whiskers. He frowned at me, shook his head, then sat across from me and crossed his legs. He took a deep breath, let it out, and put his hand on his chest.

  “I am not a sacred artist, but when I cycle my breath, I feel it in my lungs.” He lowered his hand to his pudgy midsection. “And then in my core. Those are the first two levels of meditation. To reach the artist level, you must go deeper, to the third level. Only there can you find the insight to advance along your path.”

  This was nothing new. Hahen had explained it to me before, and I’d failed time and again. My patience had grown thin, and I almost snapped at my mentor. It took me a moment to gather myself and push my anger down.

  It wasn’t Hahen’s fault I hadn’t found the way after months of trying. With only a handful of days left before the new semester started, my failure to reach the next level had made me desperate and grumpy.

  That wasn’t the proper mindset to advance.

  After a long, deep breath, I considered the rat spirit’s words carefully. I picked them apart for new meaning that might light the path ahead of me. You feel it in your lungs, you feel it in your core—

  You feel it.

  Maybe that was the problem. I’d been thinking my way through meditation. I needed something more visceral to guide me. I jumped to my feet and stepped around Hahen to my desk. I pulled a case of jinsei vials out of its bottom drawer and popped the cap on two of the glass cylinders. Without hesitation, I guzzled them both down.

  My earlier cycling had filled me with jinsei. The new purified sacred energy I’d poured on top stretched my core an uncomfortable amount. An ache grew at the center of my being and pulsed in time with my breaths.

  Perfect.

  “What are you doing?” Hahen asked irritably.

  “Giving myself something to feel.” I dropped into a lotus position, facing the rat spirit.

  I closed my eyes and drifted into a meditative state. After two breaths, all sensations from the outside world faded away. The only sounds were the beating of my heart and the gentle rush of breath entering and leaving my body. I breathed deeper, slower. More jinsei flowed into my already overloaded core. The ache inside me was a spike of pain that sharpened with every inhalation. It was easy enough to ignore discomfort while meditating, but that wasn’t the point. I focused on the pain and followed the thread of hurt deeper into myself.

  A golden shell blossomed in my vision. It took up my entire mind’s eye and emanated warmth and power. There was no doubt in my mind that this was my core. The great sphere rebuffed my first attempt to enter, and my second. The gold wall was as impenetrable as a steel plate.

  Frustrated, I willed my mind’s eye to orbit clockwise around the shell. The glowing wall shone like a benevolent sun until I reached the halfway point. I was so surprised by what I saw there, my concentration nearly faltered and dropped me out of my meditation.

  My core was divided into two hemispheres by a gnarled scar the color of fresh ashes. On one side of that line, the shell was flawless as freshly smelted gold. The other half, though, was coarse and dark as wrought iron. Dents and pits marred its surface. Rough-hewn lines covered the blackened metal in a crude pattern. Cracks revealed the silver light of jinsei hidden beyond the darkness, like rays of winter moonlight through storm clouds.

  It nearly broke my heart to know this ugliness was inside me. The golden side was the real me, the hollow core, pure and natural. The rest was the Machina I’d used to save my life. That device had seemed elegant and brilliant to my eyes. Seen with my mind, it was malformed and misguided, a child’s attempt to recreate the work of a master artist.

  I had to find my mother. She’d built this thing. She’d made me a cripple. If anyone knew how to restore me, it was her.

  The despair and excitement that accompanied thoughts of my mother nearly drove me back to the waking world. I couldn’t allow that, not when I was so close to finding my way to the next advancement. I clamped down on my errant emotions and focused all my attention on the cracks in the dark side of the core. The largest of them held me mesmerized as it expanded and contracted with the rhythm of my breath. At its widest point, I willed myself forward.

  Nothing happened at first. My mind battered at the crack, but couldn’t force its way through the darkness to the light. Brushing my thoughts against the cold iron shell summoned the taste of old pennies.

  You’re thinking too much, I thought. The visions in my head had distracted me from my journey. I forc
ed myself to feel the pain that had led me this far. It was still there, sharp and clean as a scalpel’s edge. The ache guided me where thoughts couldn’t. A moment of pain obliterated my awareness.

  I clung to my meditation as I passed through it. Losing myself when I was so close to advancement would be the worst kind of defeat. The pain receded, bit by bit, and my attention pierced the shell. I’d broken through the resistance...

  And plunged into a rat’s nest of writhing black cords that immediately tried to strangle me. Loop after loop snared me, holding my thoughts motionless, paralyzing me with fear. The more I struggled against them, the tighter the bonds became. Darkness surrounded me in a crushing weight. My strength was nothing compared to the ebony coils, my powers were useless inside my shell.

  And that was the key. This was my core, my mind.

  “Enough,” I growled, and willed the cords to leave me be.

  The black lines unspooled from around my thoughts with reluctance and stuck to the walls of my core. When the last loop had wrapped itself around the bottom of the shell, I noticed the thread’s end pierced the core’s floor, exactly centered on the seam that stitched together the golden and iron halves.

  Hahen had told me to advance I had to go deeper. And what was deeper than what lay beneath my core?

  “Here goes nothing,” I said, excitement growing within me.

  Advancement was so close.

  I willed my mind to follow the cord. The grisly seam parted with the lightest of resistance. For the blink of an eye, sensations overwhelmed my consciousness. Amber light blinded me, the sweet smell of honeysuckle filled my nostrils, and a burst of cinnamon coated my taste buds. Childhood memories blossomed like fireworks in my thoughts. My mother sprinkling brown sugar over a bowl of algae meal to help me choke it down. Hiding under my neighbor Billy Chan’s bed to split a candy bar we’d stolen from a drugstore near the overcity lift. Mama Weaver’s crackling, grinding words as she cast me out of her domain. The reek of polluted jinsei forced down my throat by Hahen’s devilish contraption....

  I emerged from the stormy tides of my past to a tranquil sea of pure white embroidered with silver threads. Those thin lines formed a design so intricate it was impossible to take it all in. The sound of a million perfectly aligned gears humming with perfect synchronicity thrummed from beneath the great circular pattern, and tiny dots moved along those gleaming paths.

  The Grand Design, I thought, my mind reeling at its complexity and size.

  An imperfect copy of this had appeared to me during the Empyrean Gauntlet. In that vision, the Design had seemed impossibly huge and complex. Even scaled down so my mortal senses could envision it, the copy had been almost too much for me to bear.

  The real thing was impossible to grasp. The smallest section was still overwhelming, and I had to tear my thoughts off the pattern before its sheer magnitude flattened me like a bug on a windshield.

  I looked away from the center of the Grand Design to save my sanity. My vision sought refuge in dark patches on the pattern’s edges, and the blotches pulled me down with an irresistible gravity. As the totality of the Design narrowed, I understood the significance of the lines and the dots that moved along them.

  Each of those twisting silver lines stitched into the fabric of reality represented a single thread of destiny. And the black dot that moved along it was a person. The one nearest me was halfway along its length. Another had almost reached its end. Before I could discern any more details, my point of view zoomed closer to the darkness at the Design’s perimeter.

  What I’d thought were black blotches were collections of hundreds of smaller forms. Their amorphous bodies sloshed along the silver threads and left behind stains of shadow that sizzled like hot grease and reeked of ammonia. The creatures moaned a series of nonsense syllables as they devoured the lines of destiny. Oo-lorth-shog, oo-lorth-shog, oo-lorth-shog. The pattern repeated itself again and again, a chaotic maelstrom of slurred, sloppy not-quite words that grew louder and more insistent with each new cycle.

  The hypnotic chant pulled me down to the darkness before I could resist. I was near enough to a creature to make out every repulsive detail of its body. Most of it was undulating sacs filled with purple, gelatinous masses. Stick-like legs emerged from the top sac in a haphazard arrangement alongside flailing tentacles that slapped against the silver threads like greedy tongues. Its head reminded me of a flattened squid, and rasp-like teeth lined its writhing legs. Those teeth drooled a constant stream of black saliva that corroded the silver lines. I watched in horror as a creature shredded a thread and devoured the tattered remnants.

  “No,” I moaned. “This can’t be happening.”

  Every one of the tentacled monstrosities turned its head toward me. Eyes with hourglass pupils and rainbow irises locked on me. Their chant became faster and more urgent. “Oolorthshog, oolorthshog, oolorthshog!”

  Something answered their plaintive cries. It rose beyond the edge of the Grand Design, so massive it was impossible to see more than a fraction of its bulk at once. Its body shifted and twisted, a mass of undulating fibers that stretched and contracted as it pulled itself erect to look down on its children. The choking stink of ammonia flooded my senses as sticky fluids rained down from the thing’s drooling mouth.

  One mammoth eye opened and glared down at me. The weight of its attention smothered me and banished my thoughts. The pupil was the size of a star, all-encompassing, and it pulled me toward it as surely as a black hole’s gravity. There was nowhere for me to run, no escape. This thing, whatever it was, would devour everything in its path.

  “Jace!” Hahen shouted, shaking me. “Jace!”

  My mind reeled as it snapped back from the horrors I’d seen to my mundane dorm room. I was on the floor, on my back. Hahen was crouched beside me, his hands on my shoulders, and he shook me a second time. I was lying in something wet and foul-smelling.

  Ammonia.

  I bolted into a sitting position and scrambled to my feet. That odor clung to my nostrils and reminded me of the madness I’d seen just moments ago. One of those things had followed me back. It was here, somewhere in my room. My fusion blade appeared in my hands before I could stop it.

  “Stop,” Hahen said. “Whatever you saw, it cannot harm you here.”

  My instincts told me Hahen was wrong. The pressure of that titanic monster’s attention still weighed on my thoughts. Foul liquid that reeked of ammonia soaked my clothes, and a black stain marked the floor where I’d collapsed. It hadn’t been a vision. It had reached through the connection to my core and left its mark on this place.

  “There’s nowhere safe from that thing,” I said.

  Hahen stepped around the stain to reach me. He raised his hands and closed them around mine. His ancient eyes peered up at me with concern. “Banish your blade and tell me about it, my friend.”

  It was impossible for me to concentrate in those stinking clothes. I stripped out of my robes and dumped them into the wash container in my closet. What I wanted was an hour-long shower, but I settled for a clean pair of casual robes. Then I cycled my breathing to ease my panic and focus my thoughts. It took minutes before I could shake the terror enough to describe what I’d seen to Hahen.

  His expression went from concerned to skeptical when I described how I’d followed the pain into my core. Before he could interrupt me, though, I pushed on to explain how I’d found my way through the shell and down, down to the Grand Design. His eyes widened with surprise as my tale continued. When I’d finished, he covered his mouth for a moment and looked away from me.

  “I have never heard of such things.” He cleared his throat and looked at me from the corner of his eye. “You’re sure of what you saw?”

  I nodded. “That’s exactly what I experienced. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Hahen sighed and folded his hands in front of him. “What do you think it means?”

  The simple question floored me. I’d looked to Hahen for answers the whole time
I’d been in the School. There were things he didn’t know, of course, and he always told me when we’d reached the limits of his training and experience. To have him ask me something so serious, though, was new. It worried me.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  The rat spirit clambered up onto my bed to sit next to me. He looked down at the floor, lacing and unlacing his fingers as he thought. The silence between us stretched out for most of a minute, neither of us sure what to say. At last, he raised his head and met my eyes again.

  “You have seen something no one else has, Jace,” he said. “I fear you’re the only one who can divine its meaning.”

  His words reminded me I had seen more than just a copy of the Grand Design. During the Empyrean Gauntlet, I’d watched a dragon and human set fire to a much simpler version of the pattern. Another creature had been in that vision, too.

  That had to be the monstrosity outside the pattern. It was coming, eager to devour the Design and all it contained.

  “Yes,” I said, and told Hahen what I’d seen.

  He shuddered and closed his eyes when I’d finished. He became so still I worried he’d fallen unconscious. When he looked at me at last, his gaze was filled with sorrow.

  “I am very sorry this burden has been placed upon you, my young friend,” the rat spirit said. “I will search for answers with the other spirits. Perhaps someone can shed some light on what we must do in these dark times.”

  What I’d seen rattled me. But I wouldn’t let that fear destroy me or push me off the path before me. The Empyrean Flame had chosen me for a quest that would create a new Flame, a new Design. That destiny hadn’t landed in my lap by accident. I’d fought dragons and an army of locusts. I’d outflanked sages and survived assassins. The task before me was daunting.

  That didn’t change a thing.

  I had to save the world.

  Or die trying.

  The Undercity

  MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE bizarre monsters on the Grand Design left me strung out and worried. Every second they chewed on the silver threads of fate shortened lives. Even worse, the longer their fest went on, the sooner their dark master would arrive to wipe us all out. After we’d spent hours of discussing it, Hahen finally changed the subject.