Chapter 807 — Departure
Blade of Dawn Page 1 of 2
At last, the onlookers who had gathered as though for a viewing of the deceased dispersed.
Gao Yang breathed a quiet sigh of relief. He glanced at Amber, eyes closed in rest on the armchair nearby, then at Tyr, coiled in the corner of the room awaiting his "spiritual sustenance," and steadied himself once more. Gathering his focus and letting his thoughts settle, he entered the mind network of the Eternal Dreamers.
……
In Grantland, at Splinterstone Keep, inside Patty's bedroom.
The last of the giant sun's radiance had sunk beyond the far side of the mountains, and faint starlight now glimmered at the opposite horizon. Bright mana-crystal lamps flickered to life within the room, joining the courtyard lamps and streetlights inside and outside the castle in driving back the thickening dusk. In that clear light, Patty sat at the desk that belonged to her alone, earnestly reading a textbook of fine printing and plain binding.
The contents were hardly abstruse—by the standards of the Empire's general academies, it was elementary material—but Patty had missed so much schooling that only now was she beginning to read these foundational texts.
Yet she was happy all the same, for to sit steadily in a chair and read, free of the ceaseless pain and convulsions, was a stroke of fortune she could not have imagined in all the years past.
A wisp of air drifted in from the vent in the corner, stirring the hair beside Patty's cheek. The girl lifted her head, sensing something, but found no one beside her.
Patty lowered her eyes and pressed her lips together in faint disappointment.
She had not had that wondrous dream for a long time now—had not seen kind "Sister Selina," nor the hot-tempered red-haired uncle, nor the big tall uncle who called himself "Uncle Selsey."
Everything in that dream seemed to have shattered into scattered fragments along with the muddled years behind her, growing blurred in the girl's mind as she slowly recovered. Her mother told her those were hallucinations brought on by the painkilling salves, and that as her body healed, that strange, endless dream would fade at last—drifting away like the wild fancies of any child's early years, because Patty had… finally grown up.
Yet Patty still thought now and then of the things in that dream—of those lovely streets and gardens, and the gentle people there… She had never dared tell her mother that she truly wished to return to that world in the dream, to see those uncles and aunts once more.
Because the last time she dreamed, she had forgotten to say goodbye.
But her mother would surely worry, so Patty kept it all hidden in her heart.
Another breeze came, this one from the direction opposite the vent. Patty turned quickly, but still saw no one.
Only from the corner of her eye, catching the glass of the window opposite, did she seem dimly to see a warm, familiar lantern floating in the reflection—but when she rubbed her eyes and looked again, there was nothing to be seen.
……
Pale golden runes flowed like water across the surface of the great round table. Under that purely decorative glow, figure after figure emerged around the table.
Compared with the last council of the Xuanji Sect, several seats now stood conspicuously empty around the table, and the ordinary Mingzhu cultivators in attendance had plainly noticed—yet they merely let their eyes pass over the vacant chairs, and not one of them spoke a question.
Soon, almost every gaze had come to rest on the place beside Selina Gerfen.
A peculiar "attendee" sat there in plain sight, smiling as he met the eyes of the Yaoji cultivators.
"Everyone's quite punctual," Gao Rong remarked, looking in turn at the few familiar faces in the hall—You Yaoheng's seat was several places away from his this time, and the color had clearly returned to that Yaoxu cultivator's face; Ma Ge Mingheng sat across the table, lips pressed tight, seemingly with no intention of unleashing a mind storm, which drew a satisfied nod from Gao Yang.
That was more like it. Not everything needed to be carved into the subconscious—was a mind storm something to be kept on hand for self-defense?
The mood in the hall was somewhat strange. Plainly, even though this was the second appearance of the Outlander Wanderer, the Yaoji cultivators had not quite adjusted to the situation of "a great neutral wild monster suddenly becoming a senior figure of the organization." The attendees exchanged glances, and only after a thorough round of eye contact did a few of them greet Gao Yang with some awkwardness, while the greater number could only force a smile, at a loss as to how to respond to the "Outlander Wanderer" in a way that would make them look unflustered in the face of danger.
Gao Yang paid it little mind; he had expected as much. After a few brief greetings he surveyed the hall, and, as expected, found several people missing.
"It seems a few are absent?" Unhurried, he looked toward Meigao'er III floating in midair. "Shall we wait?"
"They have unfortunately suffered contamination by Upper Narrators," came the placid voice from the slowly writhing constellation of starlight that was Meigao'er III. "They are no longer fit to appear here."
Gao Yan nodded and remarked offhandedly, "…Ah. That is unfortunate indeed."
Even among the Xuanji Sect's Mingzhu cultivators, some had been placed on the purge list… It seemed Meigao'er III's internal cleansing of the sect was truly thorough. Was this preparation for the coming reorganization of the sect and the transfer of its core?
To accomplish so much in two or three days—this Dream Pope's abilities were indeed extraordinary…
With a touch of emotion stirring in his heart, Gao Yang shook his head and steered the conversation to the matter of Upper Narrator contamination. "Speaking of contamination by Upper Narrators—Selina, have those runes I gave you last time produced any effect?"
"They have had an astonishing effect," Selina answered at once, undisguised delight in her eyes. "The brethren contaminated during the earlier exploration of Sandbox One quieted down very quickly once they saw those runes. Now they receive a 'rune calming' every six hours, and even the most severely contaminated have ceased their prayers to the Upper Narrators. The quarantine will continue for some time yet; once the incident is over, if they show no relapse, they can be declared recovered."
"Good," Gao Yang said, in fine spirits. "You see? The Upper Narrators can be dealt with after all, can't they?"
The "runes" he spoke of were the siren runes he had given Selina during their last conversation through the mind-illusion projection—patterns traced from Tyr's sea-demon form.
Though many mysteries still surrounded those runes born of the sirens, and Cecil's runesmiths had yet to fully unravel their secrets, Jenny's research team had already sorted out several effective rune combinations and put some of them to use. They had been employed to heal Daniel's mental affliction, fashioned into the "Mental Protection System," and proven effective in the fight against the body of the false god—and now those runes from the deep sea had been shown to counter the mental contamination of the Upper Narrators as well!
Of course, those who recovered might fall into a brief bout of squid fervor, or grow overexcited, overoptimistic, and unnaturally cheerful for a time. These were aftereffects—but compared with being thoroughly contaminated into a worshipper of the Indescribable, or losing one's mind entirely and becoming a sacrifice for the Descent, such minor "aftereffects" were plainly acceptable, even negligible.