Blake only spent the bare minimum amount of time getting acquainted with his room. He didn’t trust the Silk Fans, so he didn’t unload anything important, but he was going to need a new backpack soon. The old one was getting awfully tattered, and with how much dead stuff he’d kept in it for the past few months, he was surprised it didn’t smell worse.

  Still, for the first time since he arrived, he opened it. “River, you can come out now,” he said. “It’s safe.”

  She poked her head out of the backpack. At first, she was invisible, but her watery form shimmered back into existence after a few seconds.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “Blake has not had any spare food in a while.”

  “Sorry,” Blake replied. “We’ll see if we can find you something in the city. If you want to stay here, though, you can. But you’ve either gotta stay invisible, in my backpack, or in this room. I’m sorry, but it’s too risky—for you—any other way.”

  “They’ll eat me?”

  “Or something?”

  “What about the ring and the old man?”

  What, does she want to eat me? Ethbin stressed. You’d better not let her stick my ring in her mouth.

  “I thought Eiknir were an auspicious sign or whatever,” Blake replied.

  Not when they try to consume you.

  “What is the old man saying?” River asked.

  Tell her I am not that old, Ethbin replied.

  “You’re the one who calls yourself grandpa,” Blake replied softly. “Either way, I need to head out again. We’re going to get signed up for the tournament. And by we, I mean me.”

  They wouldn’t know what to do if I participated, Ethbin replied.

  “Sure. Anyways, River, come if you want. Otherwise, don’t get yourself eaten.” He opened up his bag for good measure, and sure enough, she bounded back in and curled up like a cat.

  “No way am I missing food. Blake will forget if I don’t come.”

  “You have too little faith…” he muttered, then sealed up the backpack and pulled it over his shoulders. “I can’t wait until Core Formation, and I can turn you into a storage ring,” he told Ethbin.

  He left his room and first, he took a quick tour around the Silk Fan headquarters while looking for Stone Moon. He was going to need directions.

  Most of the compound was reserved for the housing of guild members. It wasn’t nearly as spread-out as the Hunter’s pavilion, but with them being a trading guild, there was no need for sparring pits or other martial training infrastructure.

  Despite that, most of the Silk Fan traders were low-stage Core Formation cultivators. Had they advanced without experiencing combat? Was that the benefit of living on the manaship?

  Although Blake couldn’t sense the strength of the ambient mana, it had to be more powerful up here, making it much easier to cultivate. Heron was normal for this place. A guy who’d come from the manaship, spent his whole life here, basking in the immense resources and the comfort of the Steerman’s family.

  But when it came to resources, Blake passed a counter on his short tour of the compound, where a pair of Cohongs stood, filling small trays with resources. They placed vials of glowing turquoise elixir next to a pair of pills.

  “What do those do?” Blake whispered.

  The turquoise elixir is a standard mana elixir, Ethbin explained. It will simply increase the amount of mana they hold in their body. But those two pills are far more useful. They’re proper, high-quality channel reinforcement supplements—a supply of Soul Matter, which you can use as well. Your body will take it and reinforce your channel system.

  After passing the counter, he still hadn’t found Stone Moon again. Eventually, he gave up and was about to set out on his own, when he spotted the sweeper scraping his straw broom across the longboat landing platform, clearing away the daily dust from the comings and goings of cultivators.

  Blake took his chance and walked out to meet the man. He wore a rank seal, indicating that he was at stage one of Core Formation. His robes were yellow like the rest of the Cohongs, but the closer Blake looked, the more discrepancies he found. The lower workers like this sweeper had plain robes made of yellow silk, but the more important employees of the guild, like Stone Moon, had golden embroidery on the collar and cuffs.

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  “Hello, sir,” Blake said.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Blake,” the sweeper replied. “How can I be of assistance?”

  “Could you tell me where I can register for the Iron Hide Tournament?”

  The sweeper laughed, but he didn’t stop whisking the dust off the landing platform. He worked slowly toward the entrance, and Blake shuffled along with him to keep up. “It is run by the Nords. Head to the government hub and speak with a clerk. You will find it at the very center of this Indent-City.”

  Indent-City had to be the formal name for the cutouts with buildings inside them. Blake thought they were more like fungal growths in the hollow of a dead tree, and that they were more like a town. Calling it a city was stretching the word, but he didn’t complain.

  “Thanks,” Blake said. “Hey, I didn’t catch your name. But you were awfully mysterious when I first met you, down in the city.”

  “You may call me Dust Broom,” he replied.

  “That’s it?” It was pretty anticlimactic. Hell, Blake could’ve guessed that.

  “That is what I am called.”

  “Alright, Dust Broom. You said we’d speak earlier. Was there something you wanted?”

  “I did not say when we would speak, but that it would be in the future.”

  Blake sighed. “Alright, then. See you around.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Instead of taking a longboat, Blake walked along the pathways through the city, exploring and asking for directions to the government hub. The ‘very center’ wasn’t horribly descriptive. Was it at the bottom of the indent and central from looking down? Or—

  Blake stopped himself halfway. He was overthinking things. Sure, he couldn’t afford to be super carefree anymore, but he couldn’t afford to get so lost in the details that he crippled himself.

  Following the walkways, he just explored. Most of the buildings had a clean wooden facade, and the upright log pillars on the corners had a golden filigree inlay without exception. There were shops, street vendors, houses suspended on stilts or scaffolding, and the closer to the center he got, the more it covered the walkway entirely. Hanging lanterns lit everything with a warm gold light, duelling with the eerie turquoise bubbling up from below.

  As the sun set and the sky darkened, massive braziers descended from the top of the cutout and whooomphed to life, shedding flickering light on the entire Indent-City. Buskers emerged from the shadows, and the alleys grew seedier. In the darkness, he was pretty sure he spotted a pair of glowing eyes.

  Most people left him alone. Their eyes drifted to his redcloak, and despite a few murmured comments about him being a fiend-Blend, they minded their own business.

  When he reached the central government hub, it was unmistakable. A statue of the Steerman stood in the center of the plaza, facing a building with a steep, shingled roof and a central spire. Candlelight flickered behind its windows, and Nord workers scurried about. There was a small army of female secretaries in dresses, who stacked papers and used some kind of mana-powered sorting system to manage the bureaucracy.

  Blake entered the hall through a pair of massive front doors, then approached the front desk. A young woman worked at the desk, shuffling papers around, yawning and tending to a candle to help herself see. She seemed to be using some variation of a Smite technique to sort forms all across the table, sending paper flying with a flick, slotting it into drawers or a neat pile, then pinning them together with small daggers that acted as staples.

  It seemed like a massive waste of a Core Formation cultivator, but then again, not everyone was a fighter.

  She glanced up after a few seconds and cleared her throat, then said, “To your health, young master. How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to sign up for the Iron Hide Tournament,” Blake said.

  She raised her eyebrows, then took another look at him. “We don’t get many Blended up here, and certainly not one so newsworthy.”

  Blake swallowed. Of course everyone would know him. The fiend-blend in a redcloak who’d killed the Steerman’s son in a duel. But Prince Arald’s pardon was enough to keep him safe—for now. “Can I enter the tournament or not?” he asked.

  “Admissions are almost closed,” she said. “You’re just in time. A few days later, and you wouldn’t have made it.”

  “How can I register?” Blake asked.

  “I’ll take your name down, and I’ll need you to fill out a form. You’ll pay the admission fee for processing—and you’ll have to pay the skim fee for our hub—then I’ll send the form off and you’ll enter the qualifying round.”

  “Fees…” Blake muttered. “You don’t happen to take late entrance fees?”

  “No,” she droned. “The fee is what allows us to process the entrance. No fee, no entrance.”

  Blake winced. He’d get his allowance from the Silk Fans at the end of the month, which meant in the meantime, he needed some other way to get hacksilver. “How much is the fee? In total, with all the skim and whatever,” he asked.

  “Twenty pounds of hacksilver, or a pound of hackgold.” She tapped a sign hanging on the front of the desk. Blake couldn’t be blamed for not seeing it; it was hidden among nearly twenty other signs and paper notes. And it was all written in Nord script.

  “Right. Sorry. When’s the deadline?”

  “You have three days. It closes at midnight—any form after that won’t make it to the ship’s central indent in time.”

  “Got it,” Blake said, turning away. “I’ll be back, don’t you worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” she droned. “Have a pleasant evening.”

  Blake walked out of the government hub, then folded his fingers together. He was going to need some new way to make money. Something other than the regular allowance the Silk Fans afforded him.

  And twenty pounds of hacksilver was nothing to scoff at, either.

  It was a good thing that, as he walked out of the hall, he glanced sideways at a board just inside the door. Something called a ‘mana-rat bounty’ was advertised as a government program, among other endless services and declarations.

  A pound of hacksilver for one mana-rat tail. That was exactly what he needed.