Despite wearing one every moment of his incarceration, Rix had never really gotten a closer look at one of Spiritlock's tethers before. He couldn't physically examine his own, and it wasn't like he made a habit of getting that close to anyone else.

From the outside, it looked thoroughly unremarkable — a plain metal ring about half an inch wide. But the inside was where it housed its secrets.

"It's got array symbols on the inner face," he said, holding it up so Luna could see. Unlike the tattoo array that still marked his chest, these symbols didn't appear to use ink at all. Rather, they were carved directly into the metal itself. They glowed faintly and Rix could feel the vibration of the mana radiating from within those grooves.

Luna looked at him like he was an idiot. "Wow. Next you'll tell me you've discovered that swords are sharp on the pointy end."

"Hey, some of us have to work things out the old-fashioned way, not by having some wise old man explain them over tea and peaches."

A wistful look crossed her face. "I know you're making fun, but for the record, I would tolerate an awful lot of boring theory for that meal right now."

"So you had artefacts back at the sect?" Rix asked, trying to get the conversation back on track.

"Of course. I don't know much though. Just what they taught us as children." She took the tether from him and inspected it. "Also, the prison said this one is Nova-tier, which means it's above anything they could make back home."

"You didn't have any Novas in the Falling Leaf?"

She scoffed. "All the elders are at least Nova. Our Patriarch and his second are Omens. But it takes more than just raw power to make artefacts. When people say something is 'Nova-tier', they're talking about its effect. In this case, the tether could hold someone up to the tier Nova."

"Right," Rix said. "So what makes it capable of that if not for raw power?"

Luna's voice took on a monotone drone that he could only assume was an imitation of one of her teachers. "An artefact's strength has three contributing factors — the power used in its crafting, the skill of the craftsman, and the materials used to construct it."

She tapped the collar a few times with her fingernails. "I'm not sure what this is made of," she continued, dropping the lecturing tone. "Chronite maybe. Or sevenfold steel. We didn't have much access to profound metals in the valley. We had a great grove of deeproot elm though."

"So the materials dictate how much power an object can hold?" Rix asked.

Luna made a 'yes and no' gesture. "That's part of it. Try to channel too much mana into an inferior substance and the whole thing will just explode. But the material is useless if you also don't know how to inscribe it properly."

Rix nodded slowly. He'd heard some of those terms she'd used, but they were mostly still filed away in his head under 'Martial Soul stuff I don't need to understand.' In a way, she was right to mock him. His knowledge of the Martial Path was still very much that of a mortal, which was apparently below that of even a sect child.

"I don't see how this helps us," said Luna, handing the tether back to him.

"I don't know," he said. "Can't we, like, figure out how it works or something? Maybe find a way to remove our own tethers?"

Luna laughed. "First, they're on the inside for a reason." She reached up and tugged briefly on her own tether. "It's not like we can just flip them around. Second, even if you could somehow access the inside, what do you think you're going to do? Draw over the array symbols with ink and just turn it off like snuffing a candle?"

Rix glanced away, feeling his cheeks heat. If he was being honest, that thought had crossed his mind.

She shook her head in amusement. "Kids these days. You kill one big, terrifying, impossible opponent and suddenly you think you can just bend the heavens to your will. These things are made by people much stronger than us, and are specifically designed to not be removed. Even with all its inner workings exposed, you're not going to be able to just switch it off."

Rix exhaled sharply. He'd been excited about this, but she'd well and truly taken the wind from his sails. "Well, we're going to have to work out some way to remove them if we want to get out of here."

Despite the discussion, he slipped the dead man's collar into his robe pocket alongside the three treasures he'd scavenged. He still thought there was a chance it could be useful. At the very least it might teach him something about arrays and artefacts.

They made their way back to the prison without incident. He had a brief flash of panic when stepping through the security array, suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps it would be able to tell he had two tethers in close proximity, but it remained inert. For now, his secret was safe.

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But it would be challenging to have it remain so. Much like his previous cell in the Farm, his space here was bare, containing just a bed frame with a thin mattress and bed pan. That lack of furnishing, combined with the enchanted walls, meant there were no nooks or hidey-holes where one could easily stash something forbidden. Cell searches weren't common, in his experience, but they did happen. Getting caught with drugs was apparently a slap on the wrist, but he suspected that might not be true for something like a tether. He was not eager to repeat his time in solitary any time soon.

At dinner, he posed a question to Karn. "Is the library up here friendly territory like it is down in the Farm?"

The man's expression remained neutral. "Might be. Why? You in the market for a little pick-me-up? You haven't exactly earned any credit yet."

"Nothing like that. I just need something stored."

Karn chewed this over before nodding. "Bao can help you."

Having spent a few days now with the Cauldron Shadow Runners, Rix was quickly finding himself missing Wing and Huan. Karn wasn't inept or aggressive. He treated Rix and Luna much like everybody else, which was to say 'with weary tolerance'. Maybe it was simply a product of being locked up for too long, but Karn seemed like Spiritlock had well and truly broken him. He was a man just going through the motions.

After they ate, Rix found his way to the library. It was larger than the one in the Farm, but looked functionally identical. There were a few other inmates browsing the shelves, but nobody paid him any mind.

Behind the counter, stood a towering mass of a man. He had to be six and a half feet tall, with a shaved head and sharp eyes that felt like they didn't miss a thing. Rix approached him.

"Are you Bao?"

The man simply stared at him.

Rix glanced around, then cleared his throat. "I'm uh…here for some of Lai Shim's poetry."

He realized belatedly that he should have confirmed if the code word was the same up here. There was some chance he was just about to get some very esoteric bedtime reading.

The librarian continued to stare for what felt like an uncomfortable amount of time, but eventually he turned and opened a door behind him. Stepping through, he glanced briefly over his shoulder at Rix before disappearing inside. He still hadn't said a word.

Not knowing what else to do, Rix followed him.

The back room looked much as he expected, more shelves piled with all manner of tomes and scrolls. The man — who Rix assumed was in fact Bao — gazed at him expectantly.

He pulled the tether from his pocket. "I was hoping you could store this for me. I'll probably want to come in and experiment with it every so often too."

Bao cocked his head slightly, eyes darting to the artefact. If he was surprised, he showed no sign. After a beat, the man held out his hands.

It felt vaguely strange to hand over his prize to a man he literally hadn't exchanged words with, but Rix gave it to him and watched as he stashed it behind a large, dusty book on the bottom shelf.

"Thank you," he said.

Bao gave the tiniest incline of his head. It was the first thing vaguely resembling a response that Rix had received.

They left the room. Rix turned to head to his cell, but a thought occurred to him.

"Do you have any books on artefacts or arrays?" he asked.

Bao reached to the side and retrieved a slip of paper, on which he wrote the number '501'. Glancing around, Rix could see the shelves here were all numbered. Some sort of filing system. He nodded in thanks and went searching.

501 was up the back on the top shelf. It wasn't a large section, but several titles caught his eye.

Array Theory for Beginners

The Basics of Artefact Crafting

The Symbology of Arrays

They were hardly inspiring titles, but he'd expected nothing else. The knowledge required for true mastery would be fiercely guarded in the bowels of various corporate headquarters. This, at least, was a start.

He flicked through Array Theory for Beginners, trying to get a sense for its content. It was full of charts and diagrams and blocks of text detailing optimal materials for different outcomes. A specific section toward the start caught his eye.

To the layman, arrays may look like little more than scribbles in some foreign tongue. But appearances can be deceptive. Array runes are not simply letters arranged to give a command. Rather, they are reflections of the way mana flows at its basest level when representing universal truths. To master arraycrafting is to deeply understand the grammar of the universe itself. Each rune is a concept — 'containment,' 'inversion,' 'acceleration.' The lines connecting them are the syntax, dictating how these concepts interact.

It is in balancing these two elements that the true artistry lies. A novice connects 'acceleration' to 'force' with a straight-line thread and creates a simple push. A master understands that a spiraling thread, etched to a depth that harmonizes with the conduit material's resonant frequency, will not just push, but twist, turning a blunt force into a piercing drill. The array does not obey the craftsman's command; it obeys the craftsman's understanding. To etch a rune is to make a statement about reality. The universe, in turn, simply agrees.

He skipped ahead a few pages.

Many practitioners view arraycraft as a static art, best suited for the grand, stable constructs of civilization — the warding of walls, the powering of forges, the preservation of knowledge. They see arrays as tools of production and defense, ponderous and slow. This is a profound misunderstanding. While a lesser Martial Soul may fall to a stronger foe in a direct clash of power, the true array master does not engage in such crude contests. For them, the battlefield itself is the ultimate weapon. A true master can etch a rune of 'brittleness' into the very stone beneath their enemy's feet, turn the moisture in the air into a cage of ice, or bend light to create an army of phantoms. They do not need to overpower their foe; they simply command the world to conspire against them.

Rix's eyes were wide by the time he finished that section. There were a few array masters represented in the Chronicles, but they weren't a common archetype in those stories, probably because their capabilities were theoretically not flashy. Someone spending days meticulously etching shards of void granite was hardly heroic reading. As such, he'd never really aspired to that sort of power.

If the book had the right of it, perhaps he should have.

He'd mostly been investigating because it seemed like it might help their escape. Even if the tether itself was too strong to be tampered with, Spiritlock was a warren held together by arrays. Perhaps there was some weakness to be found. But it seemed like learning arraycraft might genuinely make him more dangerous in a holistic sense.

It was nearly time for lights out at that point, and he still had work to do on the Torrential Cycle, so he returned the book to the shelf. But he vowed to return soon. This warranted further study. When scaling impossible mountains, one needed every edge they could get.

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