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263 - Prodigal Politics [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-07-07 20:00:53 +0000 UTCA/N: Made an edit to the final 1/3 of this chapter for better pacing.
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As the woman sat across from Gideon, one of her braids shifted into motion, and from an ought-of-sight storage tablet it lifted a sizable growler bottle onto the table. It was a pale blue colour, constantly gave off an ice-like chill, and blood-red liquid sloshed about inside. Faintly-glowing Borean runes were carved on its surface, and the stopper was the fang of a beast carved with subtly-twisting fins that locked into the bottleneck.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A gift. Borean blood-mead in a glacierglass bottle. A drink fit for a sect elder, or any cultivator who has surpassed the effects of even alchemical alcohol. I’ve heard that a shot of it can force a First Circle cultivator to come to terms with whatever is preventing him from dissolving his Azoth Stone… Though for most cultivators at that level it’s also terribly poisonous. For us, it’s just a very stiff drink.”
She said all this as she casually opened the bottle and filled her own and Gideon’s cups with the bloody substance. It was only one-fifth of the cup, two shots, but just the smell of it made Gideon’s eyes water. The liquid was also ice cold.
Another braid rose up, with another glacierglass bottle, this one opaque like glacier ice and densely covered in runes. Its stopper was also much simpler. She poured what looked like water into her cup, and then into Gideon’s, thinning the blood-mead 1:3.
“This one is water from Tertiary Springs of the Boiling Lake. Roughly three hundred liters of it, as I recall.”
Somehow, even after being thinned out that much, the liquid still seemed wholly opaque like blood. Gideon waited until Newman took a swig, though he knew it to be a pointless measure, as he was well aware that she could’ve just used a poison she herself was immune to. Nonetheless, he also had no good reason to suspect her of having ill will towards him; it was just his cautious nature speaking up.
Gideon woke up the next morning with a head-splitting headache and a copy of a strange manuscript on his table. It looked new, but also handmade.
When he opened it, a note fell out.
Contact me again if you still think your proposition to be a good idea when you’re sober.
Zelsys Newman
With the flaring of his headache, he remembered what that note pertained to. He had, in his intoxication, convinced Zelsys to accept the Arkaley Sect as a branch of the Newman Sect. It was true that he had wanted to split off from the Black Horses for some time, since the Arkaley Sect had been functionally independent for as long as it had existed, but… What he remembered himself saying was significantly more straightforward and hostile than he had intended.
Fortunately, the Newman Elder had taken it well.
He looked over and saw that both the glacierglass bottles were still there on the table and no more than perhaps half a liter of the blood mead had been drunk, out of a total of around two liters.
Then, once more turning his bloodshot gaze to the manuscript, he started reading. It took him nearly five attempts at the first page before he realized what it was, and he nearly dropped it.
It was a fragment of the Severing Scripture, a lost great work, on whose fragments both the Sanger Family Arts and Black Horse Family Arts were based. More than that, it was a fragment specifically pertaining to swordlight, albeit in opaque and metaphysical terms.
Gideon sat there in a daze as he weighed how many years it would take to pay off this debt, how much strife and trouble it would bring to snub the Black Horses and start practicing something the Southern Tarpans’ previous elder had hidden from the main branch in his personal library.
In the end, he decided it was worth it.
How could he decide on anything else?
As for Zelsys, she hadn’t given the scripture fragment much thought beyond whether it was suitable to the Arkaley Branch and its hyperfocus on swordlight. She had found the original inside an unlabeled, seemingly random tome in her library, and though it read like pretentious horseshit at first glance, she could tell it had real substance and that it would be good for a sword cultivator.
Of course, she made copies of it available to the more trusted among the Newman Sect’s members. However, the Arkaley Sect would doubtlessly be the ones to benefit the most. Makhus was the only inner-circle Newman Sect disciple to harness swordlight, and his use of it was basic due to how spread out his focus was. Out of the entire Newman Sect, the number of dedicated sword cultivators could be counted on one hand. Certainly, this particular Severing Scripture fragment could benefit others who harnessed armament aura, but that benefit would be far lesser for someone like Jorfr or Vaceran… If Vaceran’s ghostly arms even were auratic in nature. Zelsys didn’t know and Vaceran wouldn’t tell.
As for the blood mead and Tertiary Spring water, she knew well they were valuable, but she had a secondary storage tablet full of them and she knew the Arkaley Sect would benefit much from just such a gift, given how badly starved for resources they were. To this day, Zelsys had no clue where Makhus had gotten his Rubedo storage artifact bottle, and neither had she managed to learn whether they were common or rare. Every source on the matter that she found contradicted the last, and it didn’t help that such sources were all at best decades and countries apart.
There was no doubt in her mind that, compared to any one craftsman in Ikesia, it was far easier for Oasis City to produce glacierglass storage artifact bottles in numbers. The abundant glacierglass, the environment, the people’s natural affinity, the Crescent Jungle’s resources; it was no wonder they gave over several dozen artifact bottles full of various basic liquids as part of her departing gifts. They had warned her, of course; that placing so-called Cavernous Bottles in Fog Storage was one among a handful of edge cases that worked like this, that such edge cases only went down one layer, and that she would be suicidal to attempt any matryoshka dolling of storage artifacts.
