Radeon followed the golden dust of fortune. Why it showed itself as dust was not a question that bothered him.
Fortune took the shape people gave it. If enough mouths decided a diamond was a worthless stone, fortune would stop gathering there.
Belief was a hand that pointed, and fate had a habit of leaning where hands pointed.
Giovanni had never been this far northwest of the Ashlime Crag. That put a pebble of unease under Radeon's ribs.
If someone saw Giovanni, they would ask why, and questions like that never came alone.
The passage ended. A wall. No left turn. No right. Just stone and silence.
Radeon paused and drew in a breath. The air was rich with moisture.
That meant water was close, hidden in rock, running somewhere the corridor did not show.
He looked up. Above the dead end the space rose into a tall throat of stone, vanishing into darkness.
No torch light reached the top. Radeon felt it in his bones. This was the way.
He stepped close and ran his hand along the wall. It felt flat at first touch. It looked flat.
Yet the more he tested it, the more he sensed the truth. The wall was slanted at an imperceptible angle, less than a degree.
He understood at once why it had been built that way. For a Gilded Core cultivator, such a slant made air footholds easy.
A wall became a staircase. Each step demanded less qi, and less effort.
"Disappear."
Radeon slipped from sight and began to climb. He drew thin needles and drove them into hairline gaps in the wall, one after another.
Somewhere above, despairing wails brushed his mind, bypassing his ears.
The sound was faint, as if dragged through a long tunnel, yet it gnawed at his bones.
If a mortal heard it, or any cultivator with a weak heart, he would overthink his fears until he could not think at all.
As he climb, the moisture thickens, then his feet met a platform, what met him fast was a water curtain.
Radeon stepped through the first veil without stirring a ripple, qi wrapped around him like a second skin.
The stench of blood thickened at once. The first dozen curtains felt as if he walked through veins, each sheet heavy with the tang of iron.
By the second layer he felt like blood himself, drowned in the scent. The water grew redder with every step.
He understood then. The curtains were there to strain the reek.
Ahead waited a final fall. A broad sheet of water poured in a dark crimson rush, yet Radeon felt no life in it at all.
Voices met him as he stepped through. Dead resentment echoed through his mind.
"You're a demon, witch! Hellspawn!"
"Burn her! Burn him! Down to hell with you all!"
The despair in them was a weight of its own. Their pleas tangled together in his ears, every note begging to be freed.
The great hall stretched out as wide as the largest gladiator coliseum.
Nearly a hundred gilded core cultists sat in wide spacing from one another, each body wrapped in a haze of blood tinged qi.
Their eyes were all shut, faces slack, lost in cultivation.
Between them, Radeon picked out a skeleton seated cross-legged. A quick sweep of his eyes found more dead cultists.
Some still wore pristine robes. Others still had rings on finger bones. The image did not stir his heart, not even a bit.
But instinct warned him of extreme danger from the artifact at the center.
There, three men knelt in a tight circle, each wearing a steel collar as a mark of rank.
Nascent embryo strength burned in their auras, yet their heads stayed bowed like servants.
Lips moved in a low, unbroken murmur, a mystic chant that seeped across the stone and clung there.
Above them an orb the size of a human head turned slowly. Faces swam across its surface, one after another, each feature carved in despair.
'Blood Orb. Full of conscious resentment. Why? Who'd make this? Who'd use it? For what purpose?'
Radeon had seen blood cores before. Most were raised as a foundation for those who meant to step into the gilded core, a brutal shortcut that swelled a cultivator's vitality.
With one, the body hardened faster, wounds knit quicker, and a man could outlast his peers by years that should have belonged to the grave.
The price came due elsewhere. Their qi turned stubborn in the meridians, less nimble, less refined, and for a body cultivator that was often a bargain worth making.
This one was wrong. A true blood core should swell toward the size of a fist as it ripened.
The orb above the chanting men had grown past what was normal, and worse, it wore faces.
Those shifting features were not illusion, not some trick of light on wet stone.
Resentment incarnate, brought alive by the cycles of heaven and earth to make calamity.
Yet they were trapped, forced by an array that demanded chants in exchange for compressing their form.
Radeon's breath stayed steady, but his pulse betrayed him. He was certain now.
This was the treasure even the Skyflight Court had been coveting.
Radeon knew he could not probe the orb. Not here. Not with three nascent embryo eyes half open behind that chanting.
One wrong brush of qi and they would peel him alive. So he did what he came to do. He hunted for something he could take in an instant.
He crouched by a skeleton seated among the living and ran his gaze over the bones.
Radeon kept his face blank and his hands quick. He rummaged through the dead for anything that would not scream its absence.
One corpse yielded middle grade spirit stones, another a stoppered vial of high grade blood pills, another a pouch of mixed poisons that stung his nose even through cloth.
He stashed it all into the hidden pockets of his cloak, the weight settling against his ribs in a quiet profit.
Looking at the haul, it felt like enough, but Radeon was not fond of enough. He preferred a surplus.
He circled the chamber until his cloak could hold no more.
In an obscure corner, Radeon meant to sort it quick and go for another round.
Twenty-seven middle-grade spirit stones, and several bottles of blood pills, each holding hundreds.
He eased his weight back and started to withdraw toward the large water curtain, satisfied with what he had hauled.
Then the hair along his arms lifted. An ominous feeling crawled up his spine, cold and certain, as if the hall itself had turned its face toward him.