Blake searched the underbelly of the Indent-City for another hour, but no more mana-rats were showing themselves. They weren’t as common as he was hoping.

  We still have a few days, Ethbin said. Get back to the compound. You have a big day tomorrow.

  Part of Blake wanted to stay out all night looking for mana-rats, but Ethbin was right. So he took the next stairway he could find, ascended back to ‘street level,’ which seemed to be the accepted network of wooden walkways, then followed a main thoroughfare back to the Silk Fans’ complex.

  It was a short walk, but when he arrived, the main gates were closed. With a quick leap, he passed over the front wall and found himself on the landing pad. He stepped away from a landing longboat, then rushed inside.

  After a few twists and turns, dodging skeptical Silk Fan members, he made his way back to his room. The other members of the sect glanced at him, but it seemed that most of them knew why he was here. Besides, he wasn’t too worried about feuds with them. They weren’t supposed to be fighters. They were merchants.

  Don’t let your guard down, Ethbin said. They may not be fighters, but they’re still strong.

  Like Master Golden Locust, most of the traders wore their hair in a queue, with a dagger wound into its tip. They surely had some combat ability.

  So Blake made sure to wedge a blanket up against his door once he was inside, and he buried the five mana-rat tails beneath a set of spare yellow robes at the bottom of one of the drawers.

  Shutting the windows, he laid down on the bed. He kept Ethbin’s ring on his finger, and the old knight promised to keep watch.

  There was a sunwatcher on the desk beside him. He’d never seen one in person before, but he had an idea of what it would do. It was a sphere with a tiny arrow of Shaped sun-aspect mana trapped inside of it. The little yellow needle always pointed at the sun, allowing the user to keep track of the time.

  Better yet, it had an alarm. When the arrow reached a certain point, a tiny rune-covered bell would resonate with the mana and chime. By raising or lowering the bell, he could change when the alarm went off. There was a marker, indicating when Sunrise Bell would usually sound.

  He set the alarm for well before sunrise—he had plenty of plans before he visited the Grand Lodge. Within seconds of setting his alarm and reassuring himself that he wasn’t going to oversleep, Blake had passed out.

  ~ ~ ~

  In the morning, Blake woke up to his alarm well before the sun rose, and he immediately set off in search of the inter-guild technique library. He hadn’t spotted anything in his explorations last night, so he figured he was going to need help.

  But he couldn’t exactly go around asking every guild member he stumbled across. They’d think he was being too forward—that he was just here for the techniques. It may have been true, but he didn’t need his reputation to drop off a cliff.

  Instead, he asked about Stone Moon. As the deputy guildmaster, he was the second in command, and at least he partially had some idea what Blake was after.

  “He is in his office, Mr. Blake,” one of the traders said. “He rarely sleeps anymore.”

  “Thanks.”

  It took a few minutes to find Stone Moon’s office, which was a room just outside the landing platform. The man sat at a desk, sorting papers and scanning ledgers. Without looking up, he said, “Mr. Blake. You’re early. You don’t need to be at the Grand Lodge for another two hours.”

  “I came looking for you. I wanted to browse the technique library.”

  “So soon?”

  “Do I not have access to it yet?”

  Stone Moon chuckled. “I suppose you do. You will find the inter-guild technique hub in Iron Hide Central, though.”

  “Iron Hide Central?”

  “It is the largest Indent-City at the core of the manaship. The only city that isn’t a blighted growth on the vessel. It is also where we will find the Grand Lodge.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Take a longboat, of course. I will accompany you for the first day.”

  “You don’t have…work to do?”

  “I have all day to finish reviewing the import logs. And I have already been awake for three hours.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “It’s like five in the morning still,” Blake said, rubbing his eyes.

  “Whatever that means to you means nothing to me,” Stone Moon replied. “When you get as old as me, you will find it difficult to sleep. The burdens of life catch up to you. Most of us in the Silk Fan Traders were martial cultivators at some point in our lives. Some have suffered nearly crippling spiritual injuries. Others grew exhausted with the martial world and retired here.”

  “You also don’t have to sleep as much as you grow stronger,” Blake muttered, cutting through Stone Moon’s wistfulness.

  The man gave him an unimpressed stare then said, “With me, Mr. Blake.”

  They stepped out of his office onto the landing platform, where they strode toward a landed longboat. It was smaller than the one that Blake had taken up to the Indent-City, and it only had a single crew member at the helm. She bowed as they approached and said, “Silk Fan taxi service, at your command. Where do you wish to travel?”

  “You guys run a taxi service?” Blake whispered.

  “One of Master Golden Locust’s many business ventures,” Stone Moon replied. “It is still operating at a loss, but he hopes it will pay off in the coming years. Of course, Silk Fan members don’t have to pay the fee if we are travelling through the manaship. We still have to pay a fee from the ground yards to get up. Paperwork processing and all that.” He raised his voice and said to the taxi operator, “Take us to the Inter-Guild Technique Library. Iron Hide Central."

  “Yes, Stone Moon.” She nodded, then jumped over the longboat’s gunwale and activated its engines. Unlike the rest of the Silk Fans, she wore formal Nord attire—a brown gambeson and shoulder cloak. Otherwise, by all appearances, was a regular human—aside from being at Foundation Seven. But, since her eyes weren’t turquoise, Blake assumed she was from Earth originally.

  It turned out the turquoise glow was more unique to offworlders than he thought. Something caused by exposure to high levels of ambient mana from birth, which the people of Earth didn’t have yet. Their eyes would only glow if they actually used a technique.

  The longboat rose up, exited the Indent City, then rose up to the very top of the manaship. It was flat atop the ‘tag’ of the key, save for a massive hole in the hull at the center. The longboat descended through the hole, entering the inner sanctum of the manaship. The interior was empty.

  Buildings clung to the walls and hung from the ceiling like stalactites. Smoke from torches and candles clouded the air, turning everything foggy and making it smell like tar and oil. Everything reeked.

  The architecture was much the same as the outer indent cities, except the houses were smaller, and there were taller buildings reminiscent of apartment towers. Some went from floor to ceiling, and were probably about seventy storeys tall.

  At the very center, a circle of marble walls demarcated a section of the central city directly beneath the opening at the top, which sunlight poured into, illuminating estates and gardens. The Steerman’s house had to be somewhere in there, but there were plenty of administrative buildings as well—not just palaces.

  The longboat sailed directly toward the central district, aiming for a landing platform just outside a marble building with a steep, shingled roof and pillars out front.

  “This is the technique library,” Stone Moon said. “There will be some technique slates here, but you will likely have to put in an order to find something suited to you—having heard the stories about your abilities.”

  “We’ll see,” Blake replied. “Uh, after all, it’s normal lightning. Tinged by black fiend-i-ness. It’s just visual.”

  Stone Moon gave him a skeptical look. Blake couldn’t keep it hidden forever, of course, but he may as well keep up the lie as long as he could.

  As soon as he jumped off the longboat, a group of mana cultivators rushed from the edges of the platform. They wore iridescent cloaks and long hauberks of chainmail. Helmets covered their faces—with an eyepiece carved with fish scales.

  “Identification, please,” one of them said, holding out his spear.

  Stone Moon held his hand out, using a storage ring to produce two slips of paper. One for him, and one for Blake. “This is our employee.”

  The guards stared at the form for a few seconds before nodding and handing the slips back. One guard, a man with a purple pauldron and a deep scar down his face, pressed the identification slip up against Blake’s chest and said, “Hold it yourself next time, thrall.”

  Blake took the identification slip and rolled his eyes, then said, “Didn’t even know we needed these.”

  “Watch your mouth, boy,” the second guard snapped. “Don’t get too cocky.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Blake shook his head, then walked away toward the library. He didn’t wait until they were out of earshot before asking Stone Moon, “Who’re they?”

  “The Scaleslingers Sect,” Stone Moon replied. “Up here, they are the Steerman’s personal sect—one he started himself. Scaleslingers are official city guards, soldiers, whatever he’d like them to be. As official as it gets with Nords.”

  “And this identification?” Blake held the paper slip out and stared at it. There was a picture of him—black and white, almost like it had been sketched—which he had no idea how the Silk Fans had gotten, and a list of information that was mostly accurate. An estimate of his age, height, eye colour, hair colour.

  “It marks you as a thrall, but it indicates that you are allowed to be here and have an employer. Show it if they heckle you.”

  Blake tucked the identification slip into his pocket as they stepped through the library doors, passing another pair of Scaleslinger guards who made no move to stop them. Inside was a single grand hall with a maze of shelves and stone technique slates stored on them.

  Much like the Hunters Sect’s technique library, it was divided up into sections—and each section was divided by the common aspects stored in each.

  Mouth agape, Blake said, “Yeah, okay, I think we should probably ask a librarian.”

  It is a horrible lie to call these libraries, Ethbin remarked inside Blake’s head. I used to know libraries as a place to loan and learn techniques, and then return them back for public use. Not a place to buy them outright.

  With Stone Moon present, Blake didn’t dare to reply to Ethbin. They found a librarian, and a half-hour later, after sorting through a bunch of Blake’s requests, the librarian said she’d put in an order to the Storm Harvester Guild on some planet whose name he didn’t recognize. Not like he would’ve recognized many. They would request a specific Shaping technique that Blake thought he could work with.

  “That will cost you two thousand pounds of hacksilver,” she said finally. “Import charges and all.”

  Blake winced. “I understand.”

  “It will arrive in three weeks.”

  His allowance wasn’t going to be nearly enough. The winnings from this tournament better help, otherwise he was going to be in trouble.

  He just gave the librarian a smile, hiding the stress of the mounting challenges beneath a grin. “Sounds good. Thanks!”