A carriage lined with five hundred spirit stones was nothing more than a bedroom with wheels.
The mined reef passage and cautious tides had held the Sanctuary cutters outside the harbor while Kaelen’s slow carriage crossed the coastal road. The garrison had spent the intervening twenty-nine hours keeping the boom closed and the civilians clear of the shore.
Kaelen Vance lay stretched across the cushioned bench, his feet propped on a velvet bolster. The carriage swayed gently over the coastal highway, rocking him in rhythm with the team of six armored earth-oxen. Beneath the padded cedar floorboards, dense spiritual energy rose in cool blue wisps, bathing his meridians.
In his sea of consciousness, the Fallow Slate kept a steady, tireless vigil.
[The Fallow Slate] [Stage 5: Hibernation Compression Active] [Environmental Resonance: Mobile Spirit Array] [Track 1 (Cultivation Vessel): 178 Hours (179x)] [Track 2 (Martial Combat): 178 Hours (179x)] [Track 3 (Alchemy): 178 Hours (179x)] [Track 4 (Comprehension): 178 Hours (179x)]
Kaelen flipped the page of Tears Over the Flour Mill with a flick of his wrist.
On page ninety-four, the runaway baker Master Zhou was fleeing an arranged marriage and confessing his forbidden love to the miller’s widowed daughter while three bags of rye flour burned in the brick oven. The dialogue was clumsy, the drama was artificial, and the villain was an obnoxious grain merchant with an eye patch.
