“Uncle?” Dongwu said, her eyes downcast as she drew closer.

  “Have you been speaking to the intruders?” Nucai asked. His eyes, which were so like Lianhua’s in color, were entirely absent of the warmth that made hers so lovely.

  Dongwu’s hands clenched briefly into fists, then relaxed again as she shrugged. “The little Magmablade used to visit my forge. She brought them by. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Send them away,” Nucai said, but sighed. “I suppose it’s only what I should expect. You’ve always been too soft. It’s why you weren’t able to ascend, even before we became…this.” His lip lifted, revealing too-sharp teeth, then settled back down into his false mask of humanity. With his all-concealing robe and long hair, he was by far the most human-looking of Qiangde’s servants, but now that Kaz was here in person, he could see that besides the teeth and the extra digit on his fingers, his skin had the subtle sheen of almost invisible scales.

  Dongwu bowed. “I’m sorry, Uncle.”

  Nucai waved her words away. “It doesn’t matter. Soon enough this place will be nothing but a memory.” Turning to Kaz, he held out his hand. “Give me the pouch.”

  Fairly certain that Nucai couldn’t use it, Kaz did so, and the long fingers curled around the deceptively small bag. Nucai turned it over, examining it closely, then turned and walked away without another word, only waving briefly for Kaz and Dongwu to follow.

  As soon as her uncle vanished into the shadows, Dongwu lifted her head, glaring at Kaz. The look seemed to demand he explain what he was doing there, and Kaz just glared back, silently asking her the same question. After a moment, she looked away, then walked after Nucai, leaving Kaz to trail along after her.

  After spending so long winding through the shelves with Dat, Kaz half expected to repeat the experience, but quickly found Nucai and Dongwu standing just outside a door that almost perfectly matched the one Dat had brought Kaz through. The only real difference was that while that one had been filled almost to overflowing with Metal ki, this one was as inert as a normal door. There was something almost unnerving about its very unremarkableness, here in this place where everything was remarkable.

  Nucai gave Kaz the briefest of glances, then faced the door, splaying his long fingers out against the precise center as he said, “Hurry up. I don’t like to leave the vault open.” With that, he did…something, and the door creaked open, releasing the brightest, most sun-like illumination Kaz had ever seen inside the mountain. It was so brilliant that Nucai, then Dongwu, seemed to fade to slivered shadows as they passed through. Drawing in a breath, Kaz did the same, though he allowed his fingers to trail against the now all-but invisible door as he did so. It felt like wood until he was about halfway around, when it shifted to something smooth that tugged at his skin, almost like ice, but without the cold.

  As soon as he was all the way into the space beyond, the door closed behind him with a rather innocuous click. Kaz blinked against the light, wishing he still had Raff’s darklenses, but those had been lost in the river that first carried him to Heishe. At this thought, he had to focus so as not to touch the snake where she still lay against his waist. So far, no one had noticed her, and Kaz would like to keep it that way.

  “Come along,” Nucai’s voice said, and Kaz tried to shift his eyes to focus on ki so he could ‘see’ what was around him. He was extremely disoriented to find that other than himself, Dongwu, and Nucai, there was no ki around him at all. It was like suddenly finding himself floating in emptiness, except that he could still feel that smooth, clinging sensation beneath his paws.

  “My eyes,” Kaz managed, covering them, and the sound of footsteps paused.

  “Hmm. I am sorry. It has been quite some time since I had a guest here, including my lovely niece,” there was something horribly derogatory in the way he said ‘lovely’, and the Dongwu-shape flinched slightly.

  “Lights down,” Nucai said, raising his voice ever so slightly.

  The light immediately faded, leaving black spots floating in front of Kaz’s eyes, but at least he could see again. He tried to be subtle as he looked around, but Nucai gave an odd, hissing laugh. “Don’t be shy,” the male said. “I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like this room. No one has.”

  After this rather smug statement, Kaz didn’t bother hiding his fascination. He stared around, noting as he did that Dongwu was doing the same, though she had a look of mounting realization on her face.

  Every aspect of the space was white, which explained why the brilliant light had been so blinding. There was no lack of surfaces for the directionless glare to reflect off of. Walls, ceiling, floor, the back of the door, even the simple furniture were covered in the same glossy coating. Besides the disorienting sameness of it, there was the effect Kaz had noted earlier. Not a single bit of ki or mana could be seen or felt in this space, other than what was contained in its three occupants.

  “You did it,” Dongwu breathed, staring at her uncle. “But how? The number of cores it would have taken-”

  Nucai shrugged. “And what do you think I’ve been doing for the last thousand years, niece? What do you think Qiangde did after you decided to stop being our tame genius, for that matter? Admittedly, quite a few were wasted in perfecting the process, but now I can extract every bit of wei from any core. Not that I need any more.”

  Dongwu was clearly horrified. “The amount of imbalance this would cause is…I don’t even know what it would do. Theoretically, it’s possible that the Gate could grow larger than this entire world, and then it would just cease to exist.”

  Kaz stared at her. “The Gate, or the world?”

  She shrugged. “Presumably both, since the Gate only exists to balance this world. Without a world to balance, no Gate would be necessary.”

  The female was speaking in riddles, and Kaz stared at her until she clarified. “This world, this plane, is only one among many. Possibly an infinite number, though how that would be determined, I don’t know. When the power level on this world gets too low, things from higher planes come through the Gate - which is actually a possibly infinite number of Gates - to bring it back up to the correct amount of ambient power. Of course, the same goes the other way, where a being that has grown too powerful for this world sometimes goes to another plane in order to balance it.”

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  That…didn’t quite sound correct, or perhaps it was just that Dongwu had misunderstood something fundamental about why this happened, but Kaz nodded.

  “But,” Dongwu said, growing more animated as her hands jabbed at the air to emphasize her words. “In studying the power that causes these shifts, I came to the conclusion that there are at least seven different kinds. Or, not entirely different, but more like different frequencies.” One hand dove up and down through the air. “Most humans use one, which seems to be, ah, noisy, in a way. It’s all the kinds of power there are, just all screaming at the same time.

  “So that’s one, but of course something like that is bound to be terribly inefficient. Then there are six kinds that can be ‘cultivated’ out of that, and each of those is far more effective than the first, which I call yen. Unfortunately, unlike yen, not everyone can use all of them, and most people can use only one or two. They’re also limited in what they can do, unlike yen, which is very adaptable.”

  As Dongwu spoke, Nucai carried the pouch he still held over to the white table and sat down in the white chair. He reached into the space hidden beneath his long white beard and removed a book that was disturbingly similar to those Lianhua used. He began to write, but not without some difficulty. His long fingers, with their extra joint, seemed to make holding the pen awkward. Dongwu was still speaking, however, and Kaz listened to her while he watched Nucai examine the pouch.

  “Now, cultivators already named these five types of power, though they tend to group them all together as ‘ki’. I don’t think that’s right, however. I think that these, like the seventh, are actually remnants of ancient powers that came through the Gate. It’s just that unlike the last, these have been…integrated into this world, in some way. Perhaps they’re so prevalent that they’ve simply merged into yen, but I don’t think so. If you look at the level of ambient yen compared to the available quantities of what we call ki, you’ll find that these five - commonly known as Earth, Fire, Water, Metal, and Wood - are in perfect balance. That simply doesn’t happen in nature.

  “And then you have the final frequency, which I call wei, which absolutely doesn’t act like any of the others. For one thing, there’s far less of it, and for another, it’s never used by beasts at all. In fact, beasts with cores seem to convert it into the five forms of ki, while humans accumulate it instead. Gathering too much without figuring out how to form it into a core seems to be what stalls or breaks cultivation, causing the practitioner to-”

  “Enough,” Nucai said, looking up from his book. “You go on about this to anyone who will listen, and I’ve already gained as much from it as I can. Be silent or leave, Xion.”

  Dongwu snapped her mouth shut, almost as if she’d forgotten they were in Nucai’s white, silent den, and not back in her house, sitting at the low table, drinking tea. Bowing, she murmured, “I’m sorry, Uncle. You’re right, of course.”

  Nucai huffed a small hiss that reminded Kaz uncomfortably of Li, then put away his book and pen before standing and holding the pouch out toward Kaz. “Empty it,” he said, and Kaz had to clench his muscles to keep his tail from wagging.

  “Are you certain?” he asked, taking the pouch. “I don’t know what all is in it.”

  Nucai waved a hand. “Yes, yes. What have you used it for? Clearly not acquiring some proper clothing. Have you shoved some meat and bugs into it? Perhaps some of your primitive medicaments? Now empty it, so that I can finally retrieve the last core.”

  The last core? There was a core in Kaz’s - Qiangde’s - pouch? Why? And with that much information, could Kaz retrieve just the core? He thought he could, though it might take a while. But Nucai had asked Kaz to empty his pouch, and so he would. Taking hold of the top of the pouch, Kaz pulled it open, resisting the urge to lean away from what he knew was coming. Then he poured power into the device, and, in return, objects poured out.

  At first it was the things Kaz expected. He hadn’t realized just how much moss, fungus, and meat he had tucked away until the water poured out after it and everything began to float. Distantly, he could hear Nucai telling him to stop, but it was done now, and Kaz wasn’t certain he could stem the flow if he tried. He didn’t try, however.

  During his time in Cliffcross, Kaz had picked up a number of interesting things. He wasn’t even sure what some of them were, but they were the right size to fit into the pouch, and no one else had seemed to want them. Kaz was still trying to find the limits of the bag at that time - though he had given up before they left the city - and so he had simply shoved in anything and everything.

  A great deal of the things that spilled into the knee-deep water stank quite badly. Kaz had found them shoved into side streets and shadows, which humans seemed to use like waste crevices, and they formed a spreading brownish slop that caused Dongwu to gag, though Kaz had already cut off as much of the ki going to his nose as possible.

  After that came things Kaz had gathered during the trek to Cliffcross. He picked up a bit of anything he didn’t recognize so he could ask one of the humans about them later. He now knew what many of them were, though others remained a mystery, and he rather regretted seeing them float away. These were joined by the objects he’d picked up in the Deep, chief among which was a surprising amount of raw ore, mostly gold. Once he’d realized how valuable the metal really was to humans, he’d used the Woodblade to cut out long, pouch-sized pieces of every vein they came across. Which, in the Deep, was quite a lot.

  He flinched when the last few pieces of the collars used by the mosui landed with a muted splash, barely sinking below the surface of the water thanks to the many other things that had come out before them. Kaz had to take a step up onto the growing mound after that, or it was possible he would have been buried beneath the apparently never-ending outpouring.

  There were, of course, a great quantity of crystals, all of which began to release their own form of ki into the previously ki-less space. Nucai definitely didn’t like that, but Kaz was watching Vega’s deep red core roll down the hill of debris, and hoped that that, at least, would be well and properly lost. Truthfully, he’d forgotten he even had it, along with the filigree-covered box and the scroll he’d taken from Zhangwo, and meant to give to Lianhua as a parting gift.

  And then, at last, Kaz’s collection was complete, and Qiangde’s began. It turned out that the ancient dragon had had the same tendency to gather things as Kaz. Of course, his items tended to be of much higher quality, while also being no less random. Fabrics that rivaled those Lianhua wore flowed out like water, along with things that Kaz now had enough experience to be almost certain were probably fruit. These were followed by many, many food items, most of which Li would have been overjoyed to try, but he suspected they would be ruined by the relative junk that had preceded them.

  On and on it went. Weapons, armor, clothing, more food, and books upon books, most of which had bright covers with pictures of humans performing unlikely acts painted on the covers. There were more ki-crystals, though here Qiangde’s were far inferior to Kaz’s. Had the crystals become stronger since the dragon’s time? It seemed quite likely, from what little Kaz was beginning to guess at how they formed.

  The room filled, sweeping Dongwu, then the furniture, and finally Nucai away. Kaz still had no idea just how much the pouch could hold, because the sheer whiteness of the room made it difficult to judge its size, but the space inside the pouch and the cavern had to be roughly the same size, because when the flood finally ended, Kaz was crouched atop a pile of trash and riches that very nearly touched the ceiling.

  Alert! This is not a drill! I plan to write the last chapter of The Broken Knife today (Thursday), which will put it at 368 chapters total. Two of those chapters will be only, so TBK will end on or around the 28th of March. But fear not! I will immediately start publishing my next series, Lucky Rabbit, which is a more light-hearted isekai LitRPG Lite (minimal stats) story, and will have slice-of-life vibes. readers will be able to access the rest of TBK, as well as get a head start on Lucky Rabbit. Note that my middle-tier, which is currently USD$3 will be going up to USD$5 soon , but existing patrons will not be affected by the change.