Seyun stood beside the chalked stone stand with his open Account Book in his left hand and his ash staff in his right. He met the eyes of the circle and gave an honest accounting of his own limits. In the old sect chronicles, the bearer of a legendary inheritance was supposed to step up to the map table and promise that by the night of the battle he would unveil a transcendent strike to cleave the enemy’s core.
Seyun pointed his brush tip at the inner conducting seam of the lower returning hub and stated the blunt physical truth. At his current realm of Deeper Bronze—further reduced in ordinary stamina by the sealed third pathway beneath his chest bone—he couldn’t cut through the hub’s combined Jade-and-Crown pressure.
Six days ago at the hillside shrine, when he had struck the returning route of a single pale blade at Early Bronze scale, the impact had hurled him backward into the gravel and bruised his braced ribs. Against the packed knot of the entire lower returning hub, a Bronze Answering Edge would simply bounce off the seam.
From the steps beside Ilyra, student Kes pointed out eagerly that Place I beneath Seyun’s left collarbone was already two days into its seven-dawn countdown. Five mornings from today—on the seventy-fifth day, with a full week still leftover before the twelfth night—Ilyra’s Early Jade echo would arrive in Seyun’s channels.
