He left on the forty-third day of the Autumn Harvest month, which was a fortuitous choice not because he was superstitious but because it was the day the Ironveil Sect held its biannual assessment banquet for inner disciples, which meant that every elder, inner disciple, and senior servant was either in the main hall or occupied with banquet preparations.
Wei Liang walked out through the northern maintenance gate at midmorning, carrying a pack with three days of rations, his work tools folded into a laborer's oilskin roll, and the Primer bone wrapped in cloth against his chest.
The gate guard saw him. Gate guards always saw him. But a hollow lodestone boy with his work tools, setting off toward the outer market in the foothills — this was a thing that happened weekly, when laborers were sent on supply runs. Wei Liang had made supply runs seven times in the past year, always returning, always with exactly the requested goods and no more.
The guard waved him through.
Wei Liang walked. He did not look back.
The foothills below Ironveil's mountain were cultivated territory — farms, villages, minor formation stations that maintained the sect's border markers. He moved through these quickly, traveling as a laborer going to market, which meant staying on the public road, nodding to other travelers, keeping his eyes down. He bought nothing. He spoke to no one. He reached the foothills' northern edge by nightfall.
Past the foothills, the terrain changed. The road became a path, then a suggestion, then nothing. The forest here was old and strange: the trees leaned in directions that had nothing to do with sunlight, and the undergrowth grew in spirals that made Wei Liang's eyes water when he looked at them directly. This was the boundary region, the bleeding edge of the Shattered Wastes' influence. Corrupted qi seeped from the northwest and touched everything within fifty li.
A standard cultivator would need to begin running cleansing circulation techniques to prevent the corruption from taking hold in their spiritual roots. Wei Liang had no spiritual roots. He had a hollow. As the first tendrils of corrupted qi brushed against his skin, he felt the hollow reach out and, automatically, consume them.
The corrupted qi tasted like iron and old smoke and something his mind categorized as grief, which was absurd, and possibly accurate. He noted the sensation and continued walking.
He camped at the forest's edge and spent the night reviewing everything he knew about the old sect — the Verdant Mirror Sect, destroyed three hundred and twelve years ago in the War of Shattered Peaks — and cross-referencing it against the fragments of conversation he'd overheard in the library.
The Verdant Mirror Sect had been a water-element sect, strong in divination and reflective arts. Their signature technique had been something called the All-Remembering Mirror, which supposedly allowed the cultivator to see the true nature of anything reflected in it — including other cultivators' techniques, cultivation bases, and spiritual root types. The war that destroyed them had been started, by most accounts, because several major sects decided that a sect capable of seeing everyone else's secrets was a liability no one could afford.
The discovery in the Wastes was almost certainly something related to that technique. A relic, perhaps, or a fragment of the foundational cultivation art. Something that would let a sect see what other sects were hiding.
Something that, in the wrong hands, could be catastrophically useful.
Wei Liang considered his hands and decided they were probably the wrong ones.
He entered the Wastes proper on the second morning.
The transition was abrupt. One step the forest was strange-but-livable, and the next step the air had a particular quality of wrongness, thick with qi corruption so dense it was almost visible — a shimmer in the light, like heat waves but cold. The trees here were dead, their bark bleached white, their branches twisted into shapes that looked intentional. Formation arrays, Wei Liang realized. The corrupted qi had settled into the old array-lines of the Verdant Mirror Sect's defensive formation and was cycling through them endlessly, without purpose, like a mechanism still running after everyone who built it was gone.
His hollow consumed the ambient corruption steadily as he walked. This was, he noted with something close to academic satisfaction, exactly the scenario the Inverse Sutra's partially-legible third layer had seemed to describe: a practitioner of the void entering a region of spiritual damage and becoming, effectively, a walking purification array. He was cleaning the Wastes simply by being in them.
He tried not to find this poetic. He was not in a position to be sentimental about his own abilities.
The ruins of the Verdant Mirror Sect's outer complex appeared by midday. Buildings remained, which surprised him — he had expected rubble — but they had a quality of wrongness that made the forest outside seem normal. They had not decayed. They had simply stopped. Walls that should have crumbled stood intact. Doors that should have rotted were merely open. As if the destruction of the sect had stopped time inside the complex while time continued outside it.
Divination sect, he reminded himself. They would have built with temporal arrays as a matter of course. Preservation of the past was probably architectural habit.
He moved carefully, watching the formation lines in the ground. The corrupted arrays activated sporadically — he saw evidence of this in the scorch marks on walls and the fused patches of ground that indicated an energy discharge — but they seemed to respond to spiritual energy rather than to physical presence. His hollow nature, again, was an advantage. He walked through the ruins reading the scorch patterns, predicting activation zones, and avoiding them with the patience of someone who had spent five years making himself invisible.
The inner sanctum of the Verdant Mirror Sect was marked by a gate whose doors had been sealed with a formation so powerful that even three hundred years of corruption hadn't broken it. It had been forced, though — recently. Someone had been here within the past month. The lock formation bore the marks of a high-level array-breaking technique, and there were bootprints in the pale dust of the threshold.
Ironveil Sect had scouts. Of course they had scouts.
Wei Liang stepped over the threshold and followed the bootprints into the sanctum.
The inner hall was large, its ceiling lost in shadow, its walls lined with the remnants of thousands of bronze mirrors — all of them shattered, which Wei Liang suspected was not a coincidence. Shattered mirrors in a mirror sect's inner sanctum suggested that someone, in the final moments of the sect's fall, had chosen to destroy the most valuable thing rather than let it be taken.
Most of the mirrors. In the center of the room, on a stone altar, one mirror remained intact.
It was small — hand-sized, bronze-framed, the kind of thing a cultivator might use for a personal divination technique rather than sect-wide scrying. The scout had found it and, apparently, had not been sure what to do with it. There were more footprints around the altar, circling, then retreating. The scout had left it and returned to report to the sect.
Wei Liang picked up the mirror and looked at his reflection.
What looked back at him was not his face.
It was — him, recognizably him, the same gaunt features and careful posture and work-rough hands. But superimposed over his reflection, in lines of pale light that he could see only because the room was dark enough, was an image of his hollow dantian. Not as the absence it appeared to standard examinations. As what it actually was: a wound-shaped thing, deep and dark and eating itself at the edges, with something at its center that was either very small or very far away, and that looked, inexplicably, like a door.
The mirror showed true natures. His true nature was a door to something none of the cultivation manuals had ever described.
Wei Liang wrapped the mirror in his oilskin, tucked it into his pack next to the Primer bone, and began the process of understanding what a door meant and where it opened to.
He had three days before the Ironveil expedition arrived. He intended to use all of them.