Radeon laid his palm on the small, dried tree behind his house. The bark was cold, though no snow had touched it.

He pressed in three spots that looked no different than any other flaw, and the wood answered with a soft give, like a door sighing open.

The world folded. He stepped through an array and into a narrow passage.

Smaller arrays lined the corridor, and Radeon used his Myridion Seersight to observe them.

The array was powered by ghosts and the faith he had been gathering.

Its task was simple. Counter scrying through heaven, earth, and even the stars.

In his vision, webs of different colors of divinizing arts descended, layered and probing.

Their intention was clear. They meant to find the men sent to test his gates, to gather scraps of information, to start violence, and to turn some small slight into an offense.

The spells scraped at the boundary, eager to find purchase, and each time they hit one of the smaller arrays they slid away and were swallowed, redirected into emptiness.

Radeon looked down on enemies like that. Not because they were weak. Because they were careless.

Who sent spies on the very first day while everyone else was still learning the prices of stalls and the taste of the city air.

It was clumsy. It was childish. It lacked tactics. Then the other side of the coin showed its shine.

Clumsy or not, they had bodies to waste. Men to spend as if lives were copper coins. That meant resources.

That meant an organization that could lose its tail and still keep its heads.

Radeon was here to test the wraiths. He went down. The passage widened, and the sound reached him before the sight did.

Wails. Howls. The thick, wet gasp of a man learning what his own nerves could endure. It filled the air and clung to the walls.

Even the dead did not speak loudly down here. They let the screaming do the work.

The first chamber belonged to Oisin. Premier blacksmith. Quiet. A wraith who watched more than he talked.

Radeon had read him early. Compulsive order, patient hands, and a mind that liked to catalogue.

Oisin only nodded when Radeon entered. No bow. No flourish. Just acknowledgement, like the work mattered more than the man who owned the mountain.

On the floor, strapped to a frame, lay the spy. He was conscious. That was the worst part.

Anyone who saw him would think death had already claimed him and forgotten to take the body.

The man had been deboned by an art that left the muscles, nerves, and meridians intact. Ribs detached. Spine loosened. Skull separated, yet still held in place by flesh.

There was no blood. No mess. The skin looked almost normal if you did not stare too hard and notice how wrong the shape was.

Oisin held a pointy candied-haw stick, plain wood with no ornament. He tapped a channel on the man's shoulder.

The spy screamed. His skin rippled as if a storm had struck a puddle.

His eyes rolled back, then snapped forward again as Oisin pressed at specific points, working the bare brain beneath the loosened eyes.

"I don't really know anything anymore, please." His voice broke into sobbing. "Let me go. I swear I will never return here."

Oisin did not answer. He tapped again. A bone slid back into place inside the flesh with a faint click. The spy's scream tore itself raw.

Pain without blood was its own kind of insult. It left nothing to clean up, nothing to bandage, nothing that looked like damage to an outsider. Only the memory.

Radeon crouched and put two fingers on the man's temple. He did not need to be gentle.

He only needed to be precise. He sank his qi in, tasting surface thoughts, skimming fear slicked memories, names repeated like prayers.

The man knew a supervisor's name. A handful of peers. A route. A meeting place. Enough to hang him. Not enough to impress Radeon.

Oisin's gaze flicked up. His eyes held no excitement, only a mild question, curious how another craftsman would grade his work.

Radeon gave the smallest nod. Oisin sent his findings, and a flicker crossed Radeon's sight.

[Target Forty Seven]

[Affiliation: Dark Emberhawk Syndicate]

[Supervisor: Kernel Tooth]

[Relationships: 287 People... (Click to expand)]

Radeon read through the list faster than any mortal tongue could name it. Names, aliases, cultivation grades, common haunts.

He verified Oisin's list against what his own arts had taken from the brain itself. It matched.

Wraiths extracted information much the same way he did, though their bias leaned heavier on the soul.

They broke a person until the spirit itself started answering out of reflex. Radeon's method was colder, more clinical.

He did not need to break a man to learn how he would break. He only needed to read the information held in each cell.

He checked the other three targets assigned to Oisin's wing. Each report landed the same. Clean. Consistent. No gaps that smelled like a lie.

He moved on. Elsin waited in the next chamber, another premier smith, and Oisin's brother.

Maeron and Ewan held the array chambers farther down. Premier array masters, old enough that their patience had calcified into cruelty.

Calyx was there too, working the task like a game he finally knew how to win.

He was careful to look dutiful when Radeon passed, yet his eyes kept sliding to the system prompts, waiting for the contribution points to register.

Radeon did not comment. He checked report after report. Target after target. Thirty nine in all by the time he stopped counting.

Each one matched. That alone was enough to satisfy him. Not because it meant there were no lies, but because it meant the lies, if any existed, were too complex even he could not decipher.

What more, these aged monsters did not coordinate that well by accident. If a target was too hard to crack, they would not pretend success for merits.

They would tag it as abnormal and call him down to see. That was the advantage of working with the old who still had passion. They did not pretend everything was fine just to save face.

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