Kael stood with his arms crossed, looking at the tungsten pile beside Rosalie. It wasn't wide but it nearly reached her shoulders.
"That's enough, you think?"
Rosalie pouted thoughtfully. "Should be, yeah."
Yvette stood a little further back, picking up one tool after another and testing them with pretend swings.
She had decided to come along and meet Rosalie after Kael's first visit had gone without any real consequences.
"You use this on metal?" She held up a chisel.
Rosalie glanced past Kael at it. "Yup. For cutting heated metal." She looked back to Kael. "It's enough. I've barely slept, but I managed to finish the Royal's order, so I can start on your sword right away."
"Good." Kael nodded. "Yvette and I will find somewhere to sleep and come back in a few days."
"Right."
She would have offered them a place to stay, but the terms of her false exile had been clear enough. She wasn't to get too close to people, however loosely that had been enforced.
"White Lotus Spring isn't too far from here, you know. You could always try your luck while you're in the area."
'White Lotus Spring...'
The very reason the majority of Luminaires had boarded the ship in the first place. The spring believed to hold the secret to Serene Moon Demon Paragon's inheritance. Everyone wanted to take a dip in it.
Kael was considerably less enthusiastic.
It had always been a variable he'd accounted for. True to Rosalie's words it was only half a day's walk from here. He had known that, but he'd have preferred it to be even further away, to reduce the risk of running into people at an inconvenient moment. Which was why he had deliberately steered the ship so that anyone aboard would have been forced to walk in nearly the opposite direction to reach it, putting distance between himself and them while he handled his actual business here.
The attack had been an unexpected convenience in that regard. Far fewer people remained on the ship now. He wasn't even certain those who had survived still had the motivation to go to White Lotus Spring at all after everything. Then again, a brush with death had a way of making people either give up entirely or become considerably more determined. He genuinely wasn't sure which way that would go.
"It isn't?" Yvette asked, her interest immediately piqued.
"No, not far at all. I can even show you a shortcut to make it easier for you."
"Not a bad idea." Yvette said. "We've been separated for a while now. We should show our faces so they don't have to worry."
Kael tapped his arm.
His view on Serene Moon Demon Paragon had shifted somewhat since Yvette's words on the ship. He had known she had been right in a narrow sense. It really was a reach to think you could defy a Paragon, but the idea left a bad taste.
Whatever hidden intention a Paragon carried, whatever invisible arrangement their cultivation had put in motion, there was no force in the world capable of opposing it except another Paragon. That was simply true. These were not obstacles to be overcome through effort or intelligence or preparation. They were forces that operated at a level where the word defy stopped meaning anything.
And still.
The alternative felt hollow in a way Kael wouldn't entertain.
Was a person supposed to simply acknowledge their powerlessness and lie down? Faith and Paragons have a plan for you. It wasn't wrong exactly. But it wasn't right either. The moment you accepted that completely you had already stopped living your own life. You had handed the authorship of it to something else and called that peace.
The more he followed the logic the more paradoxical it became. If he moved it was planned. If he stood still it was planned. If he resisted the plan it was planned. If he accepted the plan it was planned. Every action and every inaction folded back into the same inevitable shape. What freedom remained in a world where everything was already arranged? What was the difference between a person making a choice and a stone rolling downhill if both outcomes were equally determined in advance?
The answer Kael kept arriving at was that the difference was everything. Not because free will was provably real. But because living as though it wasn't was indistinguishable from not living at all. A person who sat down and waited for Paragons to arrange things around them or accepted everything simply on that basis wasn't participating in their own existence. They were spectating it. And that struck him as the most fundamental possible betrayal of what it meant to be alive.
So he refused. Not under any illusion that the refusal itself was free from Serene Moon's influence. Maybe it was planned. Maybe this exact thought, this exact resistance, was part of whatever the Amber Dew was doing in his body right now. He couldn't know. He perhaps would never be able to know.
It didn't matter.
Whatever he did was his choice. If a Paragon had arranged the same outcome, that was the Paragon's business. The choice still originated with him. And that was the only part he had ever claimed ownership of.
"Fine. Let's go and take a look at this Paragon inheritance then."
The trail Rosalie had suggested cut the journey by close to two hours, leaving them with some daylight still remaining when they arrived.
"Oh, right… Serene Moon Demon Paragon was from the southern continent, wasn't he?" Yvette said, scratching her forehead as she looked at the bamboo bathhouse.
She had expected something typical of the west, pine or birch, and had completely forgotten about the Paragon's origin.
"Yes." Kael said. "One of the reasons people believe his inheritance is here is that in his later years he distanced himself from everyone and built this bathhouse by hand."
Folklore and stories tended to describe Serene Moon Demon Paragon as humble and secluded. Whether that was genuinely true or simply the result of people being too afraid to write anything unflattering about someone who could bend causality, nobody could say with certainty.
It had been said, after he achieved everything he had ever wanted except the one thing that remained permanently beyond every Paragon's reach. Eternal life. That's when he came here.
Kael and Yvette continued forward.
There were no familiar faces from the ship. But there were Luminaires everywhere, far more than the setting seemed to warrant. Each one wore a simple yellow robe and sandals despite the cold, hair tied neatly with a long white pin, moving through the area with slow and unhurried steps.
"These are...?"
"Serene Moon Demon Paragon devotees." Kael said flatly.
After centuries of no one claiming the inheritance, a small group had arrived at a different conclusion. Not that the inheritance was inaccessible, but that luck itself could be cultivated through devotion. If they stripped away every comfort, every competing belief, every personal ambition, and directed everything toward the Paragon, he would eventually respond through blessings. That he would choose them.
This belief had gathered enough followers to become a tradition, and the tradition had grown into a temple.
Kael's gaze moved from the hot spring to a bamboo structure that dwarfed the trees surrounding it. This was where most of their days were spent, praying and offering. The rejection of comfort had extended even to sleep. All of them rested around the hot spring in a seated position, with no beds or shelter beyond the robes on their backs.
That was the story they told outward.
What Kael saw was something else.
These were low ranked Luminaires who had stopped believing in their own ability to advance and had chosen devotion as a substitute. Not faith exactly. More like an abdication. They had handed the question of their future to a dead Paragon and called it hope. And where had it taken them? Most of them were reaching the end of their lives without having moved a single step from where they started.
It was, for lack of a better word, pathetic.
An old man approached them, bowed, and gestured toward a small bamboo building nearby.
"Please. Serene Moon has been expecting you. A towel rests within, one for each." He extended a hand.
"Mindstones?" Kael looked at him. "Money is the root of all evil, old man."
"Serene Moon always said, 'Wealth is no curse upon the righteous, but a blessing upon those deemed worthy to bear it.'"
Kael gave an unimpressed look and dropped a mindstone into the man's dry palm.
Yvette did the same and started toward the changing hut, then paused and looked back at Kael.
"You're not coming?"
Kael shook his head. "I'll look around while I wait."