Chapter Text
Lindon came to consciousness to find himself at the foot of an orus tree. The distant future, his recent past, came to him in broken flashes. Entire sectors completely destroyed in a Vroshir push. Trillions dead, the Way in tatters. His fellow Judges coming together, funneling their combined power through the mantle of Creation in an attempt to turn back time for all realities. That he was here meant that their desperate gambit had been at least a partial success. He could only hope that the others had made it back as well.
Examining himself and his surroundings, it took no more than a moment to determine his time and place. He was all the way back in Sacred Valley, on the day he and Mon Teris had their first confrontation. The day that started everything. He could even hear the distant rustling of leaves as Teris chased his ill-gotten prey.
Lindon turned to the tree that he knew from experience to be an ancestral orus tree, his own prey. Knowing which tree he needed meant that he didn't have to waste the time carving the script to find it, and the orus spirit fruit hung there waiting for him to take it. Getting to the fruit he needed had been unpleasantly difficult, but avoiding Teris with his prize had been like taking scales from a Copper. Well, that would probably be pretty hard for him, as he was now.
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Back at his family compound, Lindon secreted the fruit away to his room, making excuses to his family about the tree having already been harvested. As far as they knew, it was entirely likely, and it wasn't like any of them could sense the fruit.
The fruit was promptly devoured, the taste nostalgic. He hadn't had a chance to eat any orus since months before his ascension, and tasting again was a stark reminder that it was definitely an acquired flavor. The fruit's power filled him, and he cycled it to his core, fuzzy and indistinct at the Foundation level. His body and spirit currently couldn't handle the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel, so he had to use a lesser cycling technique that while not particularly powerful, but still more efficient than what the locals had by an order of magnitude.
The power flowed into his fuzzy not-quite-core and settled filling him with strength. Not enough to advance to Copper, but his estimate, honed by over a year of experience teaching new students, told him that he'd need only two or three more fruits of similar quality. Easily manageable. He could steal that many by the end of the week.
Plans began to flow through Lindon's mind, low level scripts that would act as a veil to hide him from the Jades that guarded the groves, weapons that would even the playing field using only local remnants for parts. With only what was available to him, he could leave the clan on its knees and head to Heaven's Glory for his meeting with Yerin with his head held high, instead of having to trick Jin Amon with underhanded tactics. Sitting at his desk, Lindon pulled out the few tools that he had and got to work.
Three days later Lindon, wearing a shroud of scripted cloth, snuck out of the closest Fallen Leaf orus grove holding a bundle of orus fruits, also hidden from Jade senses by script.
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Kelsa was beginning to worry about her brother. He had never been the most socially outgoing person, but he had become more and more secretive over the last several days. Every day since his failure to find a spirit fruit, he'd been finishing his chores and oyher duties with a fervor that he'd never shown before, only to then disappear and do... something.
The change in him had even troubled her sleep. Lying awake at night, she had been in the position to hear someone moving within the building. Having dressed and left her room, she had just barely caught sight of her brother as he snuck out of the house.
And now she was here, in the forest, at night, following her brother to some mysterious location for unknown purposes. She lost track of him several times during the journey, his mysterious ability to avoid her senses combined with the significant distance she kept to avoid detection, making her self-appointed task that much more difficult. Whenever she caught direct sight of him, he'd disappear around another tree.
After nearly an hour of trekking through the forest in the dark, Kelsa was contemplating giving up and just confronting him tomorrow. That was, until she reached the end of the meager trail her brother had left. There, in the middle of nowhere deep in the forest, there was a small hut situated at a bend in a small river.
Approaching slowly, as quietly as she could manage, she had almost reached the tiny poorly constructed building when something reached her nose. A particular, pungent scent that she recognized from her own experience with it. Impurities, purged from the body. She quickly rounded the corner, coming face to face with her younger brother, shirtless and to the waist in the river, wiping himself of foul substance.
Lindon looked directly at her, his gaze powerful, and somehow different. Alien. This wasn't her brother. She realized that she had been staring when he spoke. "I was wondering if you were going to catch up. After all, you went through the effort of following me for so long."
"How?"
It was the first thing that popped into her head. Kelsa always tried to be measured with her words, but her shock at the situation and Lindon's change in bearing forced the question out. The alien feeling coming from Lindon's eyes deepened, and he responded slowly.
"I was visited. Given a vision from the heavens. I was shown a future disaster that would lay waste to our home, and I was shown what I would need to do to avert it. How to advance. How to leave."
The response startled Kelsa's mind back into functionality. "Leave? Why would you want to leave if you can finally advance? With this, you won't be Unsouled anymore!" By the end, she had been close to shouting. Whether he had really been visited by the heavens or not, her brother had found a way to advance!
"I'll never pass Jade if I stay. I have to leave the valley to reach Gold, and to go beyond." Beyond Gold? Was that even possible? Lindon continued, but he had a clearly visible reluctance as he said, "You can come with me. You can be the most powerful person to ever walk the Path of the White Fox, but you'll have to come with me, and you'll have to do as I say."
The offer shook her, and Kelsa paused for a long moment. She weighed the options in her mind. On one hand, she was the heir of the Shi family, with the family's reputation and honor riding on her shoulders. On the other hand, Lindon was offering the possibility of reaching higher than anyone had in the known history of the clan, with his own advancement acting as his evidence.
Making her decision, Kelsa briefly bowed and responded with, "It would be an honor to accompany you, Teacher."
As she spoke the last word, Lindon grimaced.