Chang-li watched from the sidelines as Joshi battled the Golden Locks cultivator. He wanted to help, but Joshi had asked him to wait, so he and Min stood to the side, ready to move to assist.

The enemy seemed entirely focused on Joshi, which was a strategic mistake. Still, the edges of her Intent crashed down hard on them. Chang-li kept himself and Min protected. Hiroko didn't seem to be as affected by the Intent as Min was. She had concealed herself on the other side of the clearing and was weaving a blue lux technique against the enemy cultivator.

Chang-li spun another technique while analyzing the enemy. Though she had an impressive red lux armor clinging to her body and encasing her head, she didn't feel like she was skilled with physical luxes. Not to the extent that any Lux Embodiment cultivator ought to have been. At this stage, the red lux armor she was wearing should have melded itself to her body, part of it, rather than simply being a carapace she wore draped over herself.

The emerald green slippers on her feet were an artifact of some sort, similar in quality to the cultivator's mirror that Chang-li had stored in his sole space, even now, waiting for an opportunity to observe. So was the red fan in her hand. Even as he watched, she snapped the fan open and, with a flick of her wrist, sent another red dragon toward Joshi.

That was not all the fan could do, Chang-li sensed. He itched to get his hands on it, to examine it. Such a crude attack from an artifact of that kind of power didn't seem right.

Joshi was sweating, glistening drops running down his bald head. Chang-li could see the tension in his shoulders as he ducked Mai Yen's attack and swiped at her with his clawed gauntlets. She was several inches to the side and behind where he had attacked.

That was an odd mistake for Joshi to make. Chang-li studied him. His next attack was similarly off by just a bit. He wasn't truly seeing where Mai Yen stood, Chang-li realized. The other cultivator was using blue lux to confuse him.

"Hiroko!" he shouted. "Can you cut her blue lux?"

Hiroko gave an answering shout. "What do you think I've been trying to do?" she snapped.

"I have this," Joshi grunted, while Mai Yen laughed.

"Foolish children! Wait there until I'm ready to deal with you."

She sent out a pulse of her Intent. Chang-li bowed his head against it. Min was knocked back against a tree with a loud "oof!" "I'm fine," she assured Chang-li rapidly as he turned to her.

Hiroko had interrupted her technique. Now she started it again, and Chang-li resumed his own technique weaving. He would let Joshi take the lead, but he would not allow his friend to risk death, not even if it meant reaching Lux Endowment.

He studied the enemy, preparing to leap in when Joshi asked. She was strong in spiritual luxes, using them with grace and deftness. Her red and orange techniques were powerful, but somehow hesitant, like she was still having to think about them rather than them being part of her. That was a weakness.

Min's arrows wouldn't be able to get through her armor, not even with his help, but if Joshi could crack it, maybe they could follow up.

Something in Joshi's posture changed. A second later, Chang-li spotted it. Joshi had been staring just past Mai Yen's shoulder in his previous attacks. Now, his eyes were locked onto hers.

Mai Yen still wore a smirk as she skipped, vanishing from where she was to a place twenty feet away. Joshi whirled. He threw out another Binding Chains, catching the woman. She laughed. "Those pathetic chains will never get through my armor!"

But Chang-li knew what she had missed. Joshi was seeing through her illusion now.

Joshi watched the woman as she wove another heavily blue technique. She favored the spiritual luxes. So far, he had managed to block most of them with conveniently placed red lux shields. The one that had gotten past his guard early on and confused him still told him he was facing his brother on a dueling ground surrounded by all of their kin. He could feel its tendrils creeping into his mind, whispering, but he ignored that and focused on what Magen showed him was truly there.

Mai Yen stood beside and just behind his brother, her arms raised as she flung another dragon attack from her fan, not in the same posture as Temaj. That had been confusing at first, but he saw through her tricks now. Like Hiroko, this woman was a master of illusions.

She was also two tiers higher than him. He could not take this threat lightly. Joshi urged Magen into position. Then he unleashed his attack.

He yanked hard on the Binding Chains, forcing her to take three stumbling steps forward. At the same time, he launched his Thousand Fists technique. Racing forward, he struck several blows to her chest armor, while Magen reflected more at her helmet. The blows struck against the lux, cracking but not destroying her armor. She was stronger than him, and even with his carefully timed attack, cracking her armor had been the best he could manage.

But a crack was a crack. All he had to do now was exploit it.

He danced back as she sent out a new technique, still heavily blue, but this one layered on with orange. He raised a shield. It struck and exploded.

He realized too late she had counted on him repeating his same defensive move. A thousand tiny orange nails slammed against his shield, cracking it and shattering it the way he'd hoped to destroy her armor. Most of the rest of the nails were destroyed by his lux defenses, but that was still dozens of orange spikes crashing against his face and chest.

She followed up with a hit of Intent so hard it knocked him back and to his knees. Joshi wrapped his own will and Intent, a will around himself, stiffening it with what he thought of as his inner truth: "I will not be bound."

But it didn't help him. Not here. How could it? He wasn't facing an enemy seeking to bind him, though the illusions in his mind might count if he had a moment's breather to focus on that.

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No, this enemy wanted to destroy him.

His half-formed Intent gave him no help there. His allies were here on either side, waiting for him. He could sense their eagerness to help. He should give up, allow them in. With Chang-li's help and Min and Hiroko pelting her from the edges of the grove, he was certain they could take this woman. Lux Embodiment or not, she was shaky, with holes in her technique they could exploit.

But that also meant she was the perfect partner to practice against, just as Sun Wukong had been.

Remembering his training with the trickster, Joshi's mind returned to his dilemma. He needed to advance. He needed to figure out what his Intent should be. Sun Wukong had insisted that was the secret. But Chang-li had said differently, said it was about mastering his understanding of lux.

Joshi trusted Chang-li more than Sun, but the trickster did know a great deal about cultivation, after all. And he was becoming sure Sun was right. His Intent felt hollow, like a shadow.

That was it. A shadow wasn't a real thing. It was just something caused by a thing, shaped by that thing but lacking substance and color.

It came to him in an instant. Not being bound was merely rejecting what others might do. It said nothing of what he, himself, would do, would be. How could his Intent be passive?

He felt something twitch, and his Intent shook. Mai Yen cried out triumphantly. She slammed against him hard with Intent and a technique he couldn't begin to comprehend. He stumbled back onto it. His mind reeled.

His brother was there, taunting him. The crowd jeered. They wanted to see his blood.

"You are not of our people," Temaj shouted. "You are worthless. You are nothing."

Joshi felt anger, frustration, not at this image of Temaj, but at himself, for these doubts he'd thought he'd already handled, coming back once more. As the woman smiled triumphantly, he shoved at her with his Intent, hard as he could.

To his surprise, she stumbled backward several paces and looked shaken. She began another technique. Joshi needed time, needed space. "Chang-li!" he shouted. "Give me a moment's respite!"

"About time you asked," his friend shouted, and a script circle erupted under Mai Yen's feet.

Joshi didn't have time to watch what happened. He turned and ran for the edge of the grove, the edge of the crowd, where he saw Hiroko, wearing the outfit of a Darwur bride. No. Wearing her proper climber's clothing, standing between two trees, or in a knot of his older female relatives.

Blinking hard he reached out to her. "Help me," he called, and felt another note as his Intent strengthened again.

She reached out, placing both of her hands in his, and gasped. She looked around. "I see!"

"I'm close… It's just, this isn't right," he said through gritted teeth. "She's trying to trap me."

"In your own mind, yes," Hiroko was saying rapidly. "In your nightmares. But it's not working because," she paused, looking around, "because this doesn't match you anymore, does it? You haven't quite outgrown these thoughts, but they can't hold you in place anymore. You're not worried about living up to your father's or brother's expectations anymore."

He nodded, gritting his teeth. As the pain became more intense, his temples pounded. Everything was fading, reality was fading, leaving him with the illusion.

He had to make this stop.

Farther away, he heard Mai Yen shouting as she ripped through the scripts Chang-li had bound her with, the twang of a bow as Min shot arrows at the woman.

"It's a nasty technique, worse than I thought. Now that I'm touching you, I can see it better," Hiroko said. She looked into his eyes. "Do you trust me?"

He didn't even hesitate. "Absolutely."

Hiroko wove a rapid set of blue and green, combining it with a hint of orange and yellow, and then, before he could react, smashed the technique she was holding in both her hands against his forehead.

It was like she'd cracked a pot over his head. Something cool ran down his face, like water or oil. He gasped. Around him, the world fractured. His jeering, taunting brother dissolved into points of lux, and he was back in the clearing.

There in the center, Mai Yen was tearing her way through the trap circle Chang-li had left.

"Do you want more help?" Chang-li called. His tone and face clearly said he expected the answer to be no.

"Hell yes!" Joshi shouted, before racing toward the woman. He smashed his Intent down hard against hers, and this time, it was hers that broke.

He spoke, trying to put this new Intent into words. "I choose!" he shouted. "I choose to accept the bonds of love and friendship and loyalty my friends have offered!"

His Intent and will smashed against the enemy cultivator. Her lux armor shattered, falling from her in chunks. She shrieked and began trying to summon a lux weapon, but her control of red and orange lux was shaky.

Chang-li tossed a smoke variant of a Firepot in her face, further distracting her as Min shot arrow after arrow into her.

Her core absorbed the lux. She was close to overloading, Joshi knew. "I commit! I bind myself to Morning Mist," he shouted. "My sect! I bind myself to my friends! I bind myself to my brother, Chang-li, who has stood beside me all this time without ever demanding I give any sort of oaths!"

His Intent crystallized into place, and now he saw it, for what it truly meant.

The oaths he made himself were more binding than any chains could ever be. He wasn't captive. A slave. He was more free than ever before. Now he had friends he could rely on. It had taken this fight to help him clear things from his mind. Of course, he had no hope of defeating a cultivator two tiers up on his own.

But he wasn't on his own. Chang-li was here, crafting scripts much too advanced for Joshi to manage, to box this woman in, give him a breathing spell, go through her weak points.

Min, with her bow and her steady support.

And Hiroko. Hiroko, with her love and her faith in him.

He formed his gauntlet around his fist once more, feeling it slide in like a glove round his fist, and, by instinct, spun lux together into a brand-new technique.

He threw himself forward, moving impossibly fast. The spikes on the gauntlet on his hand lengthened, merged, became a single, two-foot-long spear. He smashed it against Mai Yen's chest.

The spear stabbed into her core and snapped off, embedded inside her. He brought his fist up under her jaw, knocked her back twenty feet.

The woman fell to the ground in a crumpled heap. She was not dead yet, though. But Chang-li raced forward, his blade in hand, and followed up Joshi's spear with a second stab. The woman thrashed and twitched as the lux fled from her channels.

Joshi could see as Chang-li sucked it up, maybe without even realizing. He took a deep breath and strode forward to look down into the dead face of their enemy.

Chang-li looked up at him and grinned. "Congratulations," he said.

Joshi blinked, realizing it wasn't the fight he meant. "Yes," he said in wonder, letting his gauntlet dissolve. "I reached Lux Endowment." He called up lux and squinted. "I still can't see a hundred and twenty-eight colors."

"You don't have to," Chang-li said. "It's different between the two of us. I have to understand something in order to persuade it, uh, is that the best way to say?" He made a gesture like a fist squeezing. "You're ordering the lux to work together in the way you want it to, forcing your will on it."

Joshi considered, then nodded. "I think you may be correct. Perhaps it's like a general exerting his power. He does not need to order the smallest details. He trusts his lieutenants to handle that. But when he says, charge that hill, it's done."

Chang-li considered that for a while before nodding. "Maybe so."

He bent and took the slippers from the enemy's dead feet. They expanded in his hand till they were large enough that they'd have fit Joshi. "I was wondering if that would happen," he said. He held them out. "I think these are yours."

Joshi stared. What the woman had been able to do with them was impressive and would be incredibly useful to him. But— "Those are women's slippers," he said flatly.

Hiroko and Min joined them. "Maybe we can dye them," Min suggested.

"They'd still be women's slippers."

"Women's slippers that will fit your feet and let you transport yourself to stand beside an enemy thirty feet away in the blink of an eye," Chang-li said.

Joshi stared at them with a long sigh before reaching out. "Fine. I'll wear them. But no one can ever, ever let my brother know."

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