Chapter 80: The Last Commission

Yang set down the latest version of the shield card and looked at it.

It sat on his worktable among the scattered tools of his trade, the inscription pens, energy stones, and blank crystal cards. An unremarkable rectangle of crystal to anyone who didn't know what they were looking at. To Yang, it represented fifteen years of returning to the same problem again and again, each time convinced he had finally solved it, and each time finding a new issue to resolve.

He had improved it more times than he could count.

The earliest versions had been simple. A barrier against solid objects. Thrown stones, blade strikes, and blunt force. That version had worked well enough, and he had been proud of it at the time. The existing defensive cards were all specialised. A fire shield. A water shield. A shield against solid projectiles. One card for each specific threat. What Yang had made was special, a card that worked against any physical force regardless of what form it took.

He had celebrated quietly in his cramped flat, then immediately started wondering how to make it better.

The next version incorporated a wider definition of what constituted an attack, trying to account for energetic forces as well as physical ones. That had introduced new problems. He had discovered through careful testing that the inscription's logic could not easily distinguish between a directed force meant to harm and an undirected force simply present in the environment. The barrier either blocked too much or too little, depending on how he configured the threshold.

He had spent the better part of two years on that problem alone.

Then had come what he thought was his greatest achievement at the time. A version that blocked everything. Every particle of every kind. Solids, liquids, gases, and energies all stopped at the barrier's edge. Nothing could get through. He had activated it inside his workshop, stood within the protected space, and felt a deep satisfaction at having finally created something truly complete.

The lightheadedness had set in gradually.

It had taken him an embarrassingly long time to understand what was happening. His brain, deprived of fresh air, had not been thinking clearly enough to identify the problem quickly. He had deactivated the card while spots moved across his vision and sat on the floor of his workshop, breathing hard, feeling both the relief of oxygen returning and the humiliation of being a man who had almost suffocated himself with his own invention.

Back to the drawing board.

The solution had been staring at him from the corner of his workshop the entire time. He kept two air purifying cards running constantly in this room, a habit he had developed in his first weeks in Markech when the factory smoke had been bothering him. The air purifying cards had become so familiar that he barely noticed them anymore, but looking at one after his near-suffocation, he had finally understood.

The problem was not what to block. The problem was what to let through.

He had spent the next two years rebuilding the shield inscription from a different starting point, this time beginning with the air purifying card's principles and working outward from there. The purifying card was his oldest and most used card.

Due to his habit of devouring knowledge, he understood it the way a craftsman understands a tool he has used for decades. He knew every part of its inscription logic, how it distinguished between clean air and contaminants, and knew the design philosophy behind its filtering mechanism.

He had adapted that philosophy into the shield card's barrier.

The result was a card that blocked any directed mass or energy above a certain threshold while permitting passive atmospheric exchange. A thrown stone would stop. A fired bolt would stop. The pressure wave from an explosion would stop. The heat blast from a fire card would stop. But air drifting at the slow ambient pace of undirected atmosphere would pass freely through, and the person inside could breathe.

He had tested it thoroughly. Poison gases released inside a modified barrier card's contained radius, a shielded rat sitting calmly in the middle breathing clean air while the poison clouded the space around it. Test after test until he was satisfied.

Then he had spent another six months trying to adapt the same principle for underwater breathing, imagining a version of the inscription that could filter water the way it filtered air, allowing oxygen through while blocking everything else. That version had defeated him completely. He had tried approach after approach, rebuilt the inscription from scratch four separate times, and never managed to make it work. The card simply could not be made to function in that way with the techniques available to him.

He had accepted the failure. Not every problem had a solution he could reach.

Yang looked at the completed card on the table and felt satisfaction. It was as completed as he could make it.

He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes move around the workshop.

Fifteen years of work occupied the storage racks along the walls. Hundreds of cards in labeled cases, organized by function and grade. His first cards refined far beyond his early versions. Motion detection cards, environmental monitoring cards. The barrier card he had developed years ago and improved steadily since. Duplicates and early versions of custom commission cards made for various Ardeth family clients, each one tailored to a specific need and each one representing work he had executed with care even when the commission itself held no personal interest.

He had made a great deal of money. More than Lucien could have imagined, more than Yang himself had ever expected to accumulate. The townhouse in the affluent district of Markech. He had converted the upper floor entirely into this workshop. The lower floors held a sitting room, a dining room, a master bedroom, and rooms for the small household staff. A cook and two cleaning servants handled the domestic work. A butler managed the house, correspondence, and appointments, and a driver for the carriage and horses for whenever Yang needed to travel beyond walking distance.

He barely used the carriage. He barely left the workshop.

He was genuinely glad of it all after those first years in Lucien's cramped and smoky flat. But none of it felt like his life in the way White Cloud Sect had begun to feel like his life in those early months.

This was a life he had assembled from available materials. It functioned but it was not what he would have chosen.

Yang closed his eyes and checked the status bar.

His Sea of Consciousness opened easily at the inward attention, the vast internal space spreading behind his eyes with the familiar luminescence of his own soul drifting in slow patterns. He navigated the web of light threads until he found the bar.

[89.3% Energy]

Almost eleven percent remaining.

He had stopped calculating obsessively several years ago because the calculations always produced numbers he did not want to see.

Progress at this level had becomextremely slow. Each new card he created, each innovation he pushed into a design, fed the bar an increment that was getting harder and harder to perceive. The easy gains were long behind him. He was deep into the difficult territory now, where meaningful progress required genuine creative breakthroughs and those could not be forced or scheduled.

At the current pace, accounting for the increasing resistance of each fraction of a percent, the remaining eleven would take a decade. Possibly twice as long.

Yang was thirty-five years old in this body. Lucien had been eighteen when he died.

He opened his eyes.

Lord Ardeth had kept his word throughout. That was worth acknowledging. The man had provided access to card inscriptions Yang could not have obtained on his own, had sourced the highest grade crystal cards and energy stones once Yang's work began requiring them, and had made introductions that opened doors for him.

Once Yang had achieved fourth grade certification and his cards began commanding serious prices in the market, Lord Ardeth had asked him to take on commissions for the family's clients. Yang had done so. The arrangement had been as described, fair in practice if not entirely free in spirit.

The progression through the grades had been the work of those years. Third grade. Then fourth. The access to higher grade materials that fourth grade required had come through Lord Ardeth, which was part of why the arrangement had continued as long as it had. Fifth-grade certification, achieved a few months ago, had been the culmination of everything he had built here.

His cards now commanded prices that he would not have believed possible when he was scrabbling in Lucien's flat trying to create his first functional light card.

Vadal had grown distant well before that. They had been friendly in the early years, linked by the shared circumstance of being young men learning the ways of card creation. But Yang had reached third grade well before Vadal, and Vadal had never forgiven him for it.

He had grown colder as the gap between their grades widened, the friendship curdling into something that looked like respect from a distance but was resentment up close. Yang did not blame him for it, but he had felt the loss of what had briefly seemed like friendship.

He had not replaced it with anything.

The knowledge of vitality inscription had come through Lord Ardeth after fourth grade certification, as promised at that dinner years ago. Yang had received it with genuine interest and then immediately begun the process of understanding exactly what it meant and exactly why he needed to be careful with it.

Vitality was the body's fundamental life force. Not qi and not magical energy, but the essential physical substance of existence itself, the strength in muscles and clarity in thought and resilience against injury and illness. Unlike qi, which a cultivator could replenish through meditation and spiritual absorption, vitality recovered slowly. Rest. Good food. Time. Those were the only reliable remedies for its depletion. Using it to power inscriptions meant spending something that Lucien's mortal body could not quickly replace, and overuse meant weakness, sluggishness, vulnerability, and eventually, if pushed far enough, death.

Yang was a cultivator, or had been in a body that benefited from years of beast core transformation. But he was not in that body anymore. He was in Lucien's body, which was a complete mortal's body, and it had none of the resilience he had built in his own flesh. The beast cores and the years in the forest and the cultivation training at White Cloud Sect, none of that had transferred. He had the knowledge, and he had the Heaven-Refining Soul Sutra's early progress in his Sea of Consciousness, but the physical vessel was ordinary.

He had accepted vitality commissions carefully and slowly, never pushing beyond what he calculated Lucien's body could recover from within a month at most. It made the work tedious and limited how much he could take on. He and Lord Ardeth had reached an arrangement about volume and pacing that left both parties somewhat unsatisfied but functional.

Then, a few months ago, after the fifth-grade certification, Lord Ardeth had raised the other matter.

Soul inscription.

Yang had sat very still in Lord Ardeth's study and listened to the explanation and felt himself getting cold and absolutely unsettled.

Soul inscription meant using the soul's own energy as the inscribing medium rather than an energy stone or vitality. The effects achievable through soul inscription exceeded anything possible by other means. Cards of a grade and complexity that simply could not be created any other way. The top Cardwrights of this world, those operating at the highest levels, used soul inscription regularly. Lord Ardeth had spoken about it the way a master craftsman speaks about the finest tools of his trade, with informed appreciation and the assumption that anyone serious about the craft would naturally want to use them.

A client wanted illusion cards. Only soul inscription could produce them at the required grade. The offered price had a number of zeros that Yang had found himself reading twice just to confirm what he was seeing.

He had refused. Absolutely. Without negotiation and the careful diplomatic softening he usually applied to disagreements with Lord Ardeth.

Lord Ardeth had been genuinely shocked. In all their years of working together, Yang had always found some middle ground, some compromise position that acknowledged Lord Ardeth's interests while protecting his own. This time, Yang had simply said no.

The soul was not a resource to spend. That was the complete entirety of his position. He may have been interested in learning newer ways to inscribe inscriptions as a young cardwright, but what Lord Ardeth was describing was akin to carving out your soul piece by piece to feed the cards. He was still interested in the knowledge, but the knowledge had no application for him as long as he didn’t advance the Heaven Refining Sutra enough.

The people of this world had no framework for understanding what the soul actually was. They experienced it as a source of power, the way someone might experience a deep well and think of it only in terms of how much water it could provide. They had never sat inside their own Sea of Consciousness and watched their thoughts form as luminescent bubbles rising through the void. They had never seen the light of their own identity moving in slow patterns through absolute darkness and understood from direct perception that what they were looking at was the irreplaceable foundation of everything they were and everything they could become.

Damage to the soul did not heal. Not the way a broken bone healed or a depleted energy stone could be replaced. Soul damage scattered the essential self, left the victim alive but fundamentally changed, will broken, identity worn away like stone under water. Complete destruction of the soul was true death, the kind that made even the possibility of reincarnation impossible. It was the thing that cultivators who sought longevity feared most, the one loss that could not be recovered from.

Yang had opened his Inner Eye. He knew exactly what was being asked when someone said use your soul as ink.

He would not do it. Not in this body, and certainly not with his soul’s current cultivation, he had hardly cultivated his soul, only managing to open his inner eye, the very first step of soul cultivation, before he was dumped here, not for any amount of money, and definitely not to please Lord Ardeth.

Lord Ardeth had eventually let the matter rest. But Yang had felt the arrangement shift after that refusal. Something had changed in how Lord Ardeth looked at him, a slight recalibration, as if he was reassessing the value of an asset that had turned out to have an unexpected limitation. Yang himself looked at him differently, well aware that Lord Ardeth must be at least to some extent aware of the dangers, he has been a grade five cultivator for decades, and he could make one himself instead of relying on a new fifth-grade cardwright like him.

They had continued working together. The vitality commissions continued. But Yang had been thinking about the endpoint for some months now.

He thought back to the latest commission, a water-resistant multi-pronged long-ranged fire attack card for the Reylan army.

This was the last commission he was willing to complete. A high-grade vitality inscription commission, carefully paced across several sessions, demanding enough to sit at the edge of what Lucien's body could manage without real risk. He had completed it this morning and had no regret about the quality of what he was delivering.

But after this, he and Lord Ardeth had reached the end of what was possible between them.

He could not use soul inscription, and he was increasingly unwilling to use vitality inscription in a mortal body that could not recover quickly from its depletion. They had reached an impasse. Lord Ardeth was a patient man, but he was also a practical one, and a Cardwright who refused the two most powerful inscription methods and worked with the careful slowness that vitality pacing required was not the ally Lord Ardeth had been investing in.

Better to end it cleanly now than to let the arrangement grow strained and complicated.

Yang thought about this honestly. He would miss the access. Not Lord Ardeth himself, but the network the man represented, the introductions and the materials sourcing, and the doors that opened when the Ardeth family name was attached to a request.

He would miss Vadal a little, even the distant version of Vadal that the last few years had produced. There had been something there at the beginning that had been real.

But isolation was not new to him. He had spent years alone in a forest. He had spent around sixteen years in this world, missing people who did not know where he was.

He could manage whatever time remained without Lord Ardeth's network.

Yang took out the commissioned fire prong card from the table's drawer. He held it for a moment, feeling the faint warmth of its completed inscription against his palm, and then placed it carefully in its case.

The letter he had already written explaining his decision to end the partnership sat sealed on the side table. He had written it three times before arriving at language that was honest without being unkind. Lord Ardeth had done what he said he would do. That deserved acknowledgment.

Yang carried the case and the letter to the door of his workshop.

Eleven percent.

However long it took, he would fill it the safe way. He had come too far and given up too much to risk it all when he was so close.

He called for the butler to arrange the delivery. Then he went back to his worktable, sat down, and picked up a blank crystal card.

There was still work to do.

Join my Patreon to read 10 advance chapters.