Kael knocked on the door frame before stepping inside.
'Explorers before me, perhaps?'
It was easy to miss. Nothing more than a moss covered shack in its current state, but unequivocally of human craft.
It was a single room. Most of the furniture had been carved from dirty white limestone. Bare, as a whole, but the fact that someone had built here at all suggested it was safer than most of the surrounding space.
Water trickled from somewhere above, having carved a hole straight through the roof over what must have been decades, if not centuries.
He found a block of limestone, brushed away a clump of moss, and sat down.
A lingering question had been answered. Were others here? The answer was a confident yes. Or close to one.
The structure alone confirmed someone had been here before. But as far as he could tell the Depths were severely underexplored. He could think of a few reasons for that.
Rank five being the minimum requirement already excluded more than ninety-nine percent of the human population. Beyond that, knowledge of this place was almost nonexistent to begin with. The entrances to the Depths had to be extraordinarily scarce, otherwise people would be falling into them left and right. But the largest factor in keeping it wild was without doubt the Royal Noble families. The fact that they actively wanted it kept from the general public was already enough to deter most. Then how they used a Primordial mote to protect the entrance. That mote didn't just turn people away. It killed them. And if you somehow countered it, you were openly defying the Royal Noble families' will.
But what about those who had reached rank five? Luminaires who had somehow gained knowledge of the Depths and were demonic by nature? If you could defeat the colossal beasts down here, and the absence of human connection didn't trouble you, the Depths were the absolute pinnacle of solitude.
He tapped a finger on the stone, then stepped back out into the open.
The environment had shifted again.
A few steps ahead the ground levelled into a flat open space, and beyond it, gentle waves broke against a steep shore.
He stepped to the edge of the cliff. The water had eaten into the soft stone over time, creating a small drop. Even with the primordial eye Kael couldn't find the bottom, the water darkening into something impenetrable. Rocks jutting from the cliff face cut each wave as it came in, sending spray outward.
It was a little curious how wind managed to exist down here at all. His current working theory was that thousands of different entrances, mountain chimneys, fissures, gaps of various kinds, allowed air to travel down from the surface and circulate through the system. His other theory was that some massive heat source beneath the sea was warming it, creating temperature differences that moved the air the way they did above ground.
The sea radiated a kind of beauty but it troubled him. From here he had a choice. Cross directly over it and shorten his travel by weeks, or walk around. Arthur's estimate of a few weeks couldn't even be considered optimistic anymore. It was outright unrealistic. He must have assumed Kael could fly, or at minimum cross the water somehow. By the looks of it this journey was going to take months.
It didn't particularly bother him.
He had managed to deliver the next batch of Stone Coffins to Sielle before coming down here, so that front was in order. And the clinic was in good hands. Luke had taken the work far more seriously than Kael had expected, which meant he would do his best without needing to be told to. The only real concern was whether the mindstone reserves would run dry before Kael could get back and replenish them. But at that point he would have to trust Luke to take a holiday before the funds ran out entirely.
Kael gathered some sticks and placed them in a poorly made stove in the corner of the shack.
The beasts were wary of light down here, but did that mean they would attack it on sight? Unlikely. Fireflies glowed. Jellyfish glowed. They would all be dead if that were the case. He suspected the beast would have ignored the fireflies entirely if not for his presence. It was him that had startled it, not the light.
He placed his knife between the sticks and raised his blade high.
Something he had noticed recently was that the Stern mote didn't just grant the hardness of quartz. It also transferred the mineral's qualities themselves. Which made the blade perfect for producing sparks.
They danced outward when the blade came down on the knife, and the wood caught immediately. He blew on it a few times until he was certain it would hold.
Kael walked into the nearby woods and found a young ash tree. One swing and it fell into his hands. He grabbed some nearby nettles and snickered when he realised too late that they stung. Then he climbed a short cliff and sat down with his feet dangling over the edge.
He peeled the fibres from the nettles and wove them into a line, tying one end to the young ash. On the other end he tied a small rib bone from a rodent that had died in the shack long ago.
He had studied the Stern mote further and realised his understanding of it had been somewhat incomplete. It could indeed harden something up to roughly plate size, which was what he had been working with. But his testing had been half-hearted. It wasn't necessarily the surface area that determined the limit. It was volume. Which meant the nettle line, being roughly a third of a finger's thickness, fell well within what the mote could affect. It wouldn't catch anything large. But for now all he wanted was to test the water and get a small meal.
He baited the hook with an earthworm, tossed the line in, and leaned back against a tree, closing his eyes.
True to his own rule, today he was forced to rest.
He took a deep breath.
The air was earthy even with the sea so close. Not necessarily surprising, but he noted it.
The waves drowned out most of the sound, but occasionally something resembling a high pitched laugh pushed through.
He slumped a little deeper as his mind began to drift.
Refinement pathway, mind pathway, information pathway. He was starting to see the value of all three more clearly as time passed. Potential wise, refinement remained at the top. That wasn't even a question. But mind pathway was simply too useful to dismiss. Though his perception of it might be slightly skewed because of Syleena. If he had her soul-bound motes he could walk the Depths without much concern. Almost certainly none of the beasts down here would have the capability to detect him. And he could have pulled considerably more out of Arthur in their conversation.
'Information pathway.'
The thought arrived alongside Arthur's name.
With the right motes even someone at rank three could scout these grounds without dying. Even if that scouting was done from inside the Royal Noble family's Primordial mote's safety. The point still held.
And information pathway had its own perks beyond scouting. It held a particular interest for Kael, second only to refinement itself. Information wasn't just the key to winning fights. It operated in harmony with refinement at a fundamental level. Refinement, simplified, was the understanding of how to place laws. Laws were built from information. The two pathways weren't separate disciplines, but the same discipline approached from different directions.
He opened his eyes and watched the waves absently.
Refinement. He felt like he had stalled in that regard. Not in the sense that he had stopped gaining knowledge, but more like the ceiling of understanding refinement had suddenly revealed itself to be far higher than anyone reasonable would ever think. Everything had become harder to grasp, just like most things do the moment you move past the beginner stage. A pianist learns the notes, only to realise they can be arranged in so many different ways their hands can't begin to keep up.
He had also been hesitant to attempt higher ranked refinements lately.
Anyone with basic knowledge would understand why if they could see Kael's soul after his resurrection. It was purer and more solid than anything they would have encountered before. If a normal Luminaire's soul was iron, something that could be melted and shaped and forged into different forms, Kael's was closer to hardened steel.
This was why he kept to lower ranked refinements for now.
At first he had been excited about it. But problems began to surface the more thought he gave it.
He could fail a rank one refinement without any backlash at all. His soul was simply too hard for a failure at that level to leave a mark. Remarkable, in one way. In another, a problem waiting to reveal itself.
The Stone Coffin refinements could continue endlessly without risk of soul damage, which was what had made the deal with Sielle possible in the first place. Promising a monthly batch of rank one motes wasn't reckless if failure carried no cost.
But the problem appeared the moment he considered anything higher ranked. If he attempted a refinement that exceeded the hardness of his soul and failed, he suspected the damage wouldn't scale normally. Instead of a single crack, the failure would shatter through the hardness in a chain reaction, one crack pulling the next, until it shattered like glass.
Faint ripples appeared around the line.
Kael gave his rod a quick pull, and a black dotted silver fish soared into the air. He caught it, gave it a quick death, then headed inside again.