The man waited until Radeon changed into the spare uniform. With the helmet on, no one could tell anything was different at a glance.
"Stay here. I will be back quickly."
Once the guard vanished from sight, Radeon stepped away from the entrance and slipped inside the tent.
His hands moved fast. He lifted the lid of the stone chest and collected elemental stones one by one.
Fire. Wood. Water. Earth. Metal. The five elements.
"Must be a large-scale array," Radeon murmured.
He had no time to think and stuffed the stones into his cloak.
Radeon took a spare tent, folded it neatly, and put it inside the stone chest to act as a false bottom.
'A small trick to the eye. Better than nothing.'
He knew the seconds, maybe minutes, they spent poking at it would favor him.
When he finished, he stripped off the borrowed uniform.
He wiped it down, folded each piece with care, and left it exactly where it had been.
No dust. No sweat. No trace clung to him. It was as if he had never been there at all.
He dashed toward the captain's tent, his face had settled into the easy calm of the old first mate.
Radeon made sure his strides turned loose and unhurried whenever a crowd drifted close.
As he entered the tent, he tried to think of any reason Captain Todd would not be back soon. None.
Without delay, he shaped his qi into a thin blade and scraped away the lines he did not need.
His aim was clear. He would rewrite the array. The array shuddered and stopped drawing energy.
He took out the pouch of copper ink and dipped the brush into the intestine's opening.
Five empty points waited along the pentagon. A new iridescent glow flattened into a dull, hungry light that begged for elemental power.
He took out the elemental stones and set three on each side of the five-pointed array.
In his hand was the two-meter trunk. Radeon paused, and heard footsteps and men asking questions in the distance.
"Let us see your stuff right now for inspection. Please cooperate," said a guard with an awkward smile, clearly forced into the task.
"Why are you doing this?" a gilded core soldier snapped from the crowd.
No rush or panic stirred in Radeon's nerves. His hands quickened as he took out the spirit stones he had collected from passengers, crew, and even the cultists.
A rough glance told him there were over five thousand, and he even spotted a half-used middle-grade spirit stone.
'An investment. It better pay off later.' he thought.
Before turning on the array, he folded his cloak quickly and threw it outside the tent.
After he did, he channeled a bit of qi and the quiet array began to hum. His aim was to feed the wood all five elements to wake its lost potential.
The glow swallowed the power of the five elements instantly, and the residual energy burst like a breakthrough.
The other cultivators noticed at once and grew curious.
Breakthroughs came hard. Any sign of one promised enlightenment to trade.
"Someone's having a breakthrough over there!"
"Quickly now! Let's have a look."
Radeon had not expected such a strong reaction, every gaze drawn toward his tent.
With haste, he slit both palms with his knife and smeared blood over the wood like varnish, forcing it into each carved corner.
For a breath nothing happened. The wood shivered, then recognition.
The tree sank into him. Tree and man joined as one. A new identity Radeon could assume.
The other reason is that it could serve as a substitute for a companion artifact that grew with its owner. Other times, it could even be shared.
The issue now was the clamoring men outside the tent. He took the shape of the trunk at once, then shrank himself to a maple seed.
Radeon pressed himself near the linen flaps as his body dwindled, his importance gone from the world.
Curious onlookers probed the tent with spiritual sense, eager to pierce the man's privacy for any scrap of information that might lead to a breakthrough.
The guards, gilded core themselves, pulled the flap aside. Duty sat on their faces. Hunger for guidance burned in their eyes.
The moment the tent opened, they saw no one inside. For a breath the crowd just stared. Then cordiality broke.
Hands clawed at the linen walls, tearing through the tent's array.
"Move aside. I was here first!" a burly man yelled.
"Calm down. We wait. The masters will test this first," a formation master snapped.
"We're the guards. Order, all of you," one barked, even as his hands rummaged the tent harder than anyone.
In the riot of hands the little seedling was flung far from the trampled canvas.
He landed wedged between two distant tents, motionless and half buried in dust.
An alert cultivator still noticed the tiny plant. He prodded it with spiritual sense, pinched the seed hard, then snorted.
The man tossed Radeon aside and kept searching. A plant's shape should have felt nothing, yet he was no true seedling.
Pain screamed through his real body, as if his skull lay trapped in a blacksmith's vice.
Radeon forced the roots to creep toward his cloak, a dozen inches away.
Before he could reach it, an angry voice cut through the camp.
"Have you all gone insane? What does my tent have to do with any of you?" Captain Todd's voice yelled.
The captain stormed into view, face dark. He had wanted a short sleep.
Instead his tent lay flattened and filthy under a dozen boots.
The gilded core guards glanced at one another, ready to explain, then thought better of it.
No one who had lived past a century grew naive. Any words now would come out as mockery.
Radeon took their silence as his chance. He rolled the maple seed body with a flicker of qi, reached his cloak, and vanished beneath it.
In the shadow of another tent, where no eyes watched, he let the trunk swell back to flesh and bone.
He jogged back toward the commotion with shock painted across his borrowed face. Every line of his stance shouted innocent confusion.