“Yeah,” said Leonis dryly. “Fair enough. But what about your friends?”
Which checked Scorio and stalled his flood of ready answers. “What?”
“Your friends. I know we’re not… never mind.” Leonis drew himself up. “We can’t let our desire to protect you and keep you around stop you from doing what you need to do. That’s not what true friends are for. So fine. I gave it my best attempt. If you’re determined to see this… absolutely insane and utterly ridiculous plan through, then I’ll help you in any way I can.”
For a long, drawn-out moment Scorio could only gaze up at his huge friend. Drink in the rough and raw emotion that blazed in Leonis’s dark brown eyes, and feel both proud and humbled to have such a companion by his side.
“Thank you,” he said at last, voice husky.
“Damn you,” said Leonis with a tired grin. “Damn you for wanting more from life than delicious drinks by our soaking pool.”
Scorio reached out and clasped Leonis’s broad forearm, and had his own clasped in turn. “Not saying I’m against that, either. I’ll be doing my fair share of soaking in between the crazy farming I’ve got lined up ahead of me.”
“Fair enough.” Leonis’s grin widened a fraction. “Then come on. Let’s go harvest those seeds already before it gets dark. Last thing I want is to die on my knees grubbing in the dirt in the dark as some heinous monstrosity drops on me from the ruins.”
Scorio laughed. “It’s a deal. Come on. Race you.”
And with a laugh, he took off, heart thudding with excitement and exhilaration, to race with his Heart burning black flames just a few yards ahead of his cursing companion.
Chapter 63
The next two weeks were an exercise in patience and cruel restraint. Scorio’s every waking thought revolved around two things: his growing Black Star farms, and his daily meditation and First Form practice. All other aspects of his life faded into the background; he performed everything asked of him with mechanical efficiency, but it was only when he was able to focus on his new obsessions that he really came alive.
Twice he ventured deep into the ruins and down into the caverns below. He didn’t tell his friends, sure that they would forbid him, but the wild thought that he might secure a sunphire with which to purchase healing medications obsessed him.
But both attempts ended in near-death experiences as he fled vicious monsters, retracing his steps in a panic through the caverns to the surface, and it was with reluctance that he accepted how rare sunphires were, and had to be, to command such exorbitant prices.
He had better luck with his farming. Of the hundred and six original Black Star plants that had survived, eighty-seven of them rendered seeds, which he was able to divide into three hundred and forty quarters with “eyes,” which left him in need of some fifteen plants. Unable to restrain himself, Scorio crept out of the Academy each night via the hidden passages, then loped across Bastion under the cover of darkness to scrounge amidst the ruins for elusive plants.
It was hard to remember just how rare they were; Scorio spent hours combing narrow alleyways, delving into half-collapsed basements, scrounging amidst the edges and upper parts of countless cracks and chasms. Twice he was nearly caught by floating filaments cast into the mana breezes by Coal spiders, each the size of a cart, the tip of each filament an impossibly sticky bulb. He was chased by a half-dozen kitursks that he accidentally disturbed at some ceremonial dance within a dark chamber, and another time discovered a completely new manner of barnacle that released exceedingly toxic Coal mana into the air when he wandered by.
But by the end of the first week, he’d collected sixteen plants, harvested thirteen seeds, which rendered another fifty-two quarters.
That night, weary, cut, and bruised, he’d lain in his bed with his sack of seed quarters resting heavily upon his chest. Three hundred and ninety-two quarters. It felt dangerous, to collect them all so tightly, as if their combined potential for future mana was explosive, could ignite like his own Heart and blast their entire suite apart.
A worthless fortune that any other Great Soul would sneer at. How it galled him to think of the top hundred students, all of them cruising through the Academy with their daily allotment of treasures, while he worked himself to the bone and trained so hard, he coughed up blood. How they’d laugh at his farm, sneer at his Black Star syrup as they swallowed their Fat Crickets and whatever else.
But it was the culmination of his journey so far, started so innocently back in the ruins when he’d decided to match the Academy’s resources with his own wits, and now resulting in such a perilous plan his own best friends had begun to mourn him as if he already had one foot in the grave.
That night he stayed up reminiscing, thinking on his first days with Naomi, his fierce determination to excel under her tutelage, his ill-fated adventure with Dola and the Basilisk crew, his first encounters with Helena and Feiyan.
Each of those moments felt like a miniature experience that was tightly circumscribed by the greater arcs of his soul; each fateful encounter played its own limited part in but one of his lives, his seventh so far, all of which could ultimately amount to nothing but his death, and in death, oblivion, for a time.
Would he come back sooner for having been so frustrated in this reincarnation? Would it take him another century to return? Why so long between each cycle of life? What kept him in the darkness, refusing rebirth, when his companions lapped him time and time again, so that they were born thirty times for every instance of his own return?
Scorio stared into the swarming darkness. He could have dispelled it in a moment by sharpening his vision but didn’t bother. Instead, he thought of Imogen the Woe and Sol, their words to him, their remembrances of him from lives past. What would it be like to have the doors to previous lives blown open upon reaching Imperator? The memories of hundreds of lives suddenly available and at your fingertips? Overwhelming? Mind shattering? Or perhaps by the time you made Imperator such stressors were commonplace?
He thought of Naomi with a guilty pang. Where was she, what was she doing with her time, and was she well? Thought on how he might approach her again, heal the rift between them, but came up blank. She’d retreated past a wall he knew not how to climb, and something told him that brute insistence would only backfire.
But he’d not forget her, nor cease to think of a way to connect. Perhaps Leonis was right, and the only way to bring her back to their side was to approach her in strength, girded with the powers of an Emberling.
Long into the night, he lay thinking, musing, the heavy sack on his chest, until at long last his eyelids drooped, and his feverish, fanciful thoughts gave way to deep and dreamless sleep.
The next morning was the ninth round of the tournament where the losers’ bracket would face off against the new influx of contestants who’d lost the round before. Leonis and Lianshi were eager to go watch, but Scorio excused himself, slipping away with his sack of seeds and making for the basement levels and their secret passages.
Who’d even notice if he was there to watch or not?
Sack slung over one shoulder, he jogged back across the now familiar avenues toward the ruins once more, but slowed and came to a stop at the sight of a procession working its way up one of the massive avenues.
A column, easily some ten people wide, snaked into view, drums banging a martial, challenging accompaniment as they walked under massive white banners. Scorio had never seen their like before, but each bore its own word, the character painted with fierce strokes: Independence. Freedom. Revolution.