After sixteen hours of patient waiting while the perimeter scouts crept closer along the northern ridge, a chill midnight breeze rattled the mountain pines as Kaelen Vance leaned over the grotto’s wooden balustrade.
Eleven hundred meters to the north, along the jagged limestone crags, his expanded divine sense tracked the three cloaked figures as they planted their final relay node. They knelt in the dirt, their gloved fingers driving black iron pins into the frozen loam.
Each pin hummed with a sour, metallic pulse that ruffled the ambient Qi.
Kaelen yawned into his sleeve.
Chasing them down sounded like a miserable waste of energy. To sprint across eleven hundred meters of jagged ravines in the middle of the night would require active movement techniques. It would demand focused martial intent.
If I push my legs into a sprint right now, the Fallow Slate will flag it as intense combat exertion, Kaelen thought. My Track 2 timer just climbed past two hundred and sixty hours. Resetting that to zero for three stray scouts would cost me a fortune in accumulated cultivation.
He liked his free multipliers far too much to throw them away on midnight cardio.
Besides, Cold-Spring Grotto had plenty of energetic people who lived to swing weapons.
