Chang-li scrambled back out of the Morning Mist shade library as quickly as he could.

Joshi pulled the door shut behind them. "Is that what dealing with shades is like?"

"Actually, the ones in Fai-Lan City were quite helpful," Chang-li said. "I felt like these masters were going to make me join them if we stayed any longer."

"The passage of time doesn't seem to have disturbed them. I'm not sure if they're aware that the sect was destroyed. Or that they care."

Chang-li had to agree. "Maybe the mark of a great cultivator is how they don't care about others. Did you notice how that woman with the Yellow Masks seemed to think of them as tools? It reminded me of Prism Eri."

"Doesn't matter to us right now. Shall we see what's up on the next floor?"

They made their way upward. Chang-li was expecting to find the sect Grandmaster's quarters. He imagined rich, opulent living spaces, perhaps with an apothecary's station or a secret indoor garden growing priceless herbs and natural treasures. Maybe a collection of sacred weapons.

Instead, they found a throne room.

They stepped inside, their feet echoing on cool tile and sent their lights racing forward. The room was ringed with eight tall chairs. Each chair was carved out of a heavy, dark wood that looked almost like stone. In each chair sat a skeleton. The skeletons were dressed in robes like the shades had worn, which Chang-li guessed to be the original Morning Mist design. After all, his own robes had been supplied by the Oaken Band Brotherhood, so there was no reason why they would match. He couldn't tell what colors they had been originally. The hues had faded out of the silk, but the long, three-inch-wide stripes running diagonally across weren't his idea of fashionable.

He and Joshi approached the closest throne. The body there had crumbled to nothing but bone and a bit of dark hair still clinging to the skull. There was no way of telling if it had been man or woman.

They passed around the circle. The next one had a bit more skin stretched across the face and teeth grinning up at them. There was no way to tell how any of them had died.

The fourth skeleton along sat in a chair twice as big as the others. Chang-li somehow felt this one had been male, though he couldn't have said why. On his lap was a book.

Joshi pointed. "Look." There was a crest on a chain around the skeleton's neck. The crest bore the same symbol that was on their signets. Morning Mist. Joshi reached out and lifted the signet clear of the skeleton, barely disturbing the bones, then pocketed it.

With no harm having come of that desecration, Chang-li reached and gently worked the book loose from the skeleton's bony fingers. On the leather cover was again the Morning Mist symbol. There was a clasp on it of silver, black with age, but fortunately, the clasp had been left unlocked. He opened it and a page fell out.

At first, he thought the book was coming apart due to age, and then he realized it had not been bound in the book, merely slipped in. He picked it up, the page already trying to crumble, and deciphered the characters. They weren't in Morning Mist script, but in common tongue, though the old variant. Still, he was able to read the words.

"We have chosen to seal ourselves in and perish rather than submit to the Emperor's rule. He is no kind master but a tyrant who lives for his own gain, not the good of the people. If ever the sect is restored by one of our disciples, and they find their way here, then know that your inheritance is waiting for you in the vault if you dare."

"Where do you think the vault is?" Chang-li asked as they left the disturbing room full of skeletons.

"We'll find it," Joshi promised.

There was one more floor, and the stairs up to it beckoned. Chang-li hesitated. One of the shades had warned against climbing to that floor without permission, but there was no one to get permission from.

"Should we risk it?"

"I think we have to," Joshi said. "We need to learn every secret of this place."

Together, they trod the wooden steps. Considering this place had been abandoned for hundreds of years, it was in beautiful shape, especially compared to the outer ruins. Chang-li had suspicions brewing at the back of his mind, but nothing firm yet.

The top floor of the tower building was the smallest yet. The square walls were only about 20 feet on a side. They walked all around it. There was a single door, black as night. Not painted; the wood was naturally that color. Unlike most of the other doors in this place, it was undecorated except for a circular recess in its center.

Chang-li pushed on the door. It did not budge under his hand. He could feel a faint trace of lux all through it.

"This door is a lux construct," he said. "There must be a way to open it."

Joshi pulled the medallion he'd taken from around the Grandmaster's skeleton. "They're the same size."

Chang-li stepped back as Joshi raised the medallion to the recess on the door. He set it in place, and the door swung silently under his touch. The room inside glowed. Chang-li felt unaccountably nervous. The lux levels were even higher than out here, as high as he'd felt in tower floors.

He and Joshi stepped in, and a projection of light and color blossomed into existence around them. Chang-li gasped as he looked around. He was looking at what was clearly a representation of this valley. There was the river, there the island, and the various structures of the Morning Mist headquarters.

Beneath the representation of the tower, light blossomed. There were channels running from that light to various points around the map. Most were dark. One bright channel ran off the edge of the map toward the outer sect area, and six more lines connected with points around the lake.

"Do you have any idea what this is?" Chang-li asked, and to his surprise, Joshi nodded.

"I think that's the lux well, and it's showing the paths which are open. Look, that channel there is what's feeding the tap that we found on the mountain outside."

"Then the rest of these markers would show where lux used to flow? But the sect is gone, and it's all been shut down."

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"Seems likely."

There were characters hanging above the various buildings. Chang-li focused on them, and they sharpened in his view. It was in the Morning Mist secret language. He had no trouble reading that now. Each floor of the building they were currently on was marked.

He read off the names. Most of their guesses had been correct. The floor below them was labeled the Grand Conclave, and the room they were in, Heart of the Sect. But what interested him most was when he looked at the towers they'd seen earlier. The southernmost tower was labeled Spiritual Refinement Library. The others were Lux Embodiment Library, Lux Domination Library, Lux Endowment Library.

So they had been libraries. He read off the names to Joshi, who frowned. "Those towers were empty."

Chang-li shook his head. "No, no. I think..." He reached out and touched the Spiritual Refinement Library with his lux senses. The projection responded, stirring. Chang-li had an inspiration and channeled green lux between the representation of the headquarters and the Spiritual Refinement Library. As he let his lux dwindle, a line of light connected the two.

"I think that did something," he said.

"Then let's go find out," Joshi said.

All the way down the headquarters building and across to the Spiritual Refinement Library, Chang-li contained his excitement as best he could. He didn't want to get his hopes up too much. Joshi was probably right. The contents were gone, faded to dust or taken away by outsiders. But as they approached the building, he sensed it was different now. He could feel the lux all around.

They stepped inside into a well-lit room, and he gaped. Shelves lined the walls full of scrolls, journals, tablets, all manner of recording devices. He stumbled over to the nearest shelf and took a book at random from it. The title was Modifications of Cycling Technique for Spiritual Refinement Stage. He opened it, flipped through a few pages, then turned to Joshi with his eyes widened.

"This talks about how to learn to adapt your own cycling patterns to more perfectly suit you. At the Peak of Spiritual Refinement and going on from there, we'll be developing our own variations on existing patterns. This tells me how."

He set the book back onto the shelf and took the next one. "Basics of Four-Color Weaves. How to balance them when you're using one physical and two spiritual luxes." Chang-li shook his head in amazement. "This is it. This is everything we needed and wanted. I can spend the next 20 years here."

"Let's try to make it less than that," Joshi said.

"There must be an index, some way to find what we need here. Maybe there's a filing system I can figure out, or…." He ran a hand along his head as he realized the immensity of the task, then turned back to Joshi, smiling. "But think what we can learn here. Everything we're going to need to perfect our foundations before we move along to the next stage of cultivation. We came here hoping to learn how to reach Spiritual Refinement, and we're already there. With the knowledge in these scrolls, who knows? Lux Endowment might not be so far off."

"What I'm hoping," Joshi said, "is that in two days after Wulan has finished explaining to the shades what we're about, they'll be willing to give us some tutoring. Books are all well and good, but I would prefer to learn from a master."

"We should have brought Noren along," Chang-li said, pacing. "I wonder why he didn't want to come. Perhaps he didn't really think there was anything here."

He wanted desperately to pack all of this up and take it with him. He'd been neglecting to work on expanding his soul space. Prison Nai Hong had shown him that a soul space could be as large as he wanted it to be. Could Chang-li stretch his enough to literally store every scroll that Morning Mist possessed? But could he take them from the sect?

"You have that distant look again," Joshi said.

"Just thinking about if I could fit all of these in my soul space and the contents of the other libraries too, then we could take them with us anywhere. But then I'm holding on to all of the knowledge that Morning Mist ever had myself. I don't know that I want to do that."

"Well," Joshi said practically, "we have time to make up our minds. No one is expecting us back any time soon, and I still have to decide where I'm going from here. Let's take this one step at a time."

After their fantastic discovery, it was hard to think about practical matters. Nevertheless, the next morning, Chang-li tore himself away from the libraries for half a day. He and Joshi returned to the nearby village where they were greeted with jubilation from the farmers.

When they asked for supplies, the locals loaded them down with weeks' worth of food. They carried all of their belongings into the inner sanctum and set up a camp outside the library. It didn't feel right to sleep in the headquarters building. It was full of ghosts, not just the shades waiting in the Shade Library, but real ghosts.

Then they set up a schedule. In the morning, they rose, sparred together, and did cycling techniques, ate breakfast, and bathed in the lake. Afterwards, Chang-li headed into the library while Joshi labored to clear overgrowth and the little decay that was there from the island.

Chang-li was just trying to understand the organization so far, but any time he found a scroll that looked like it would be particularly helpful to him or Joshi, he set it aside. In a week his pile held four dozen scrolls; by the end of the second week it was threatening to topple over and bury him if he knocked into it.

After lunch, they would study what Chang-li had found. He was teaching Joshi to read the Morning Mist Cultivator script. Joshi was having a surprisingly hard time of it, considering he was already literate. But now that he was motivated to decipher technique scrolls himself, he had stopped complaining about how the secret characters didn't make any sense. He'd go for longer and longer before interrupting Chang-li's own studies to ask for help.

Then they'd do another practice session before dinner. In between, or in the long evenings, they explored the island searching for the vault. There was no sign of it anywhere.

"We'll find it," Chang-li said, but he wasn't completely confident.

Two days into their stay, they returned to the Shade Library. Only one shade appeared. She introduced herself as Master Amyaya.

"The others are busy communing with our new fellow," she said. "Please don't disturb them just now."

"What did you do with Wulan?" Chang-li asked, anxious for the former scribe's fate.

Amyaya smiled kindly. "He has returned to us. He is settling in. It may take some time before he is able to appear to you again, but never fear. He is Morning Mist for all eternity."

Chang-li shivered at that and made a mental note if he died not to have his shade stored for posterity.

"We're looking for the vault," Joshi told her. "Can you help us with that?"

The shade shook her head. "I'm afraid only the current Grandmaster of Morning Mist is permitted to reveal the location of the vault."

"Yes, well, we don't have one of those anymore," Chang-li told her. "We're trying to restore Morning Mist. Do you have any idea how long it's been?"

"Time means a great deal less when you're a shade," the ancient master said serenely. "And the distortion pattern around this valley increases that dissonance, of course."

"What distortion pattern?" Chang-li had been wondering how it was this place had escaped destruction. Perhaps Amyaya knew.

"The seven obelisks are the focuses for an elaborate weave that hides this valley from even the keenest searchers unless they come in through the accepted path," Amyaya said. "I am not permitted to say more than that."

Now it was starting to make sense to him. Chang-li waited until they had left the library before telling Joshi his suspicions.

"That's the active lux channels we saw. They're going to seven obelisks like the one we saw outside. The others must be placed around the edge of the valley at intervals. A technique like that, though, would have to be worked by someone practically at Prism level. And I can't think of any way to do it without using a great deal of indigo lux."

"We both know that's not a common color," Joshi said. "But lux wells can produce all seven shades. It's possible."

Chang-li bounced a bit in excitement. "I want to take a look at it, but I don't want to interfere with it either. It must have been an incredibly strong weave to have evaded even the Emperor's vision."

"I believe there's more to it than that," Joshi said. "These shades are remarkably confused. I suspect there's some violet lux involved. Didn't you tell me Wulan's journal claimed that the sect was destroyed for using violet lux?"

"It did say that," Chang-li said, but he hesitated. "Only, I'm starting to think that the laws against violet lux are not quite as strict as I'd always been told. Prism Nai Hong granted me permission to use the temporal training chamber."

"Yes, but that was a Tower Reward. All you're doing is refilling it. It's not really using the lux."

Chang-li let the subject drop. He returned alone to stare at the map room, wishing the place would reveal its secrets, but they remained stubbornly hidden.

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