The small group passed a gigantic stone gate, and as Kilian walked through it, he felt an all-penetrating gaze looking right through him.

  “Did you feel that too?” He asked his companions with a disgruntled expression, “I think every millimeter of my body has been examined and all my secrets have been revealed.”

  "This is the guardian of the capital!" An angelic voice answered him, and when he turned his gaze forward again, he looked into Lilja's beautiful eyes, "She watches over everything here and keeps the peace. No one knows how strong she is or what she looks like, but any fight behind these walls will be punished by death without exception."

  “Nice to see you again! You've been here for a while?” He smiled at the charming elf and stopped with his friends, introducing them to each other.

  "In a few days, there will be a grand tournament to determine who has enough talent and strength to enter the next level of the ruins. You should prepare yourself!" Lilja finally said after getting to know everyone, "But before that, there are a few people you should talk to! You will find many orcs here, and even some cloaked humans from the Enclave of the Shadows; however, we also have our allies! These black cloaks radiate such cold energy, and, unfortunately, we don't know anything specific about them! They all have such a sinister aura!"

  "I've already fought one of them..." Kilian replied in a toneless voice, his hand gliding over the dragon scales hidden beneath his clothing, "They're powerful, I almost died and only survived by chance! But I've learned a few things about them!"

  “Good, we urgently need more information about our enemies!” The beautiful elf nodded contentedly and led her new companions to a large, old estate, “We’re here!”

  “Brenton, you’re here too!” Edana grinned at a young, handsome man with long silver hair, “Did the others make it too?”

  "A part of them. Some are already here, and unfortunately, we haven't heard anything from the others yet!" Replied the member of the human royal house, turning his gaze to Kilian, "I'm Brenton Arian, and you must be Kilian. I've heard a lot about you, and now we're finally meeting! There's something I want to discuss with you, somewhere where there are no listening ears."

  A few moments later, the two sat opposite each other in a large, otherwise empty hall, and Brenton sighed as he closely examined Kilian's features, "You look like the spitting image of an old painting of Grandfather... A few years ago, a great tragedy occurred, and we lost part of our family. Afterward, Grandfather used a blood ritual to try to find out if anyone had survived the calamity, and he did indeed find remnants of our line in the territory of the Kong Clan, but every expedition there has been unsuccessful! If you truly carry my family's blood, you are my cousin!”

  "The Arian royal house... am I really descended from them? I am just a simple farmer's son!" Kilian replied, and after a brief pause, he asked, "Who were my parents? They're already dead, right? I once had a vision of a massacre in a castle."

  "One thing at a time!" Said Brenton, taking a small statue from his robes, "Our family's crest has always been adorned with a noble dragon, and with the help of this golden statue, we can test your bloodline. Drop your blood onto it, and the stronger the reaction, the stronger your bloodline!"

  With the flash of a ring, a small dagger appeared in the young calligrapher's hand, and he stabbed himself in the left pinky finger.

  A thick drop, with an undetectable golden shimmer, disappeared into the mouth of the small statue, which then began to shake violently.

  It was as if it had come to life!

  The wings beat up and down a few times, and a majestic, yet distant, cry of a dragon, as if from another time, made Kilian's blood throb.

  “ROAR!!” He opened his mouth as if by instinct and began to roar as well, and the sound waves, in which the dominance, the forgotten power of the dragons resonated with a spontaneous discharge of Qi.

  Brenton's eyes lit up brightly as two fingers instinctively went into his ears to protect them.

  "Hahahahahaha!" He burst into laughter, slammed both hands firmly on the table, stood up, and patted his lost family member firmly on the shoulders, "Uncle Caellach and Aunt Keena would be proud of you! The dragon statue has awakened one of our bloodline's abilities in you, and there's no doubt you are a true son of the House of Arian! No Qi-Gatherer has ever accomplished that! Not even me! Hahahaha!"

  “What was that?” Kilian asked, his voice now hoarse, confused, but feeling deep down that once his vocal cords had recovered, he could now use this roar as a weapon.

  A small, inconspicuous new passage grew from his Qi-paths to his vocal cords, supplying them with energy.

  "Every member of our family receives such a statue upon becoming a Qi-Gatherer. The hidden powers of our ancestors slumber within them, and if our blood is strong enough, we can learn ancient, otherwise forgotten fighting techniques thanks to them. Without this gift, our family would have long since been ground to pieces by the mills of time!" Brenton began to explain in a venerable voice, casting a serious look at his cousin, "But normally, one learns the first skill as a Qi-Condensator!"

  "Caellach, Keena? Are those the names of my biological parents? What happened to them?" Kilian wanted to know, after considering Brenton's words.

  "Orcs..." The silver-haired Qi-Gatherer answered curtly, and after a brief pause, added, "Probably by order of the Enclave of the Shadows! But why orcs follow the orders of a few humans is beyond me."

  "The Enclave of the Shadows..." Kilian's eyes lit with deep rage, and he continued with a look of disgust, "Let's return to the others! I have some information about the enclave!"

  “Brother Kilian!” greeted the leader of the Kong Clan expedition, Li Kong. He stood up from a chair at a large table and patted Kilian on the chest, “It's good that you're here! Rumors are you've found out something about these hooded figures? All the important people are here. Tell us what you know!”

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  On the table, the human warrior saw many faces he knew and some he didn't know, but he was able to identify them based on the descriptions on the necromancer's list.

  "It's about the Enclave of the Shadows!" He began seriously, slapping the inscribed piece of human skin onto the long table at which the various groups were sitting around, "They seem to have spies all over Terrapin and know all of our abilities! That means they have a significant advantage in the tournament to advance to the next level!"

  “No amount of knowledge in the world can protect you from true power!” Retorted a grim-looking, two-meter-tall warrior with an axe on his shoulder, standing behind Brenton, “The Enclave are just cowards who don’t dare to fight the orcs!”

  “That's not all I've discovered!” Kilian interrupted the irascible man with a gloomy expression, “Among them are necromancers who fight with poisonous Yin-Qi, resurrect the dead as puppets, and are a curse to all living beings!”

  “The necromancers have disappeared along with the dragonlords…” Lilja murmured with a pale face, examining the young human warrior closely, “Are they really back?”

  "That explains why the orcs follow them!" Brenton sighed deeply, "Thousands of years ago, the shamans wanted the necromancer's knowledge for themselves and worshipped them! They must have renewed their old pact!"

  “Well done, Brother Kilian!” Said Li Kong with a serious expression, “Now we can at least prepare ourselves!”

  That night, Kilian slept restlessly, tossing and turning, dreaming of the various events of his life.

  Only the actors of the various plays were ever changing.

  Even Betsy, his old sheep, leaped majestically through the mountains with a dragon's head on her shoulders, roaring and bounding away, while Kegan, once with Master Artos, then with Caydens, and finally with a face unknown to him, followed her, as always.

  The next moment, Kilian was standing in front of the majestic ancestral tree at the center of the Kong Clan, while dozens of hunchbacked figures cloaked in black stood around him, and amidst roaring laughter, hundreds of zombies with every face he had ever seen, consciously or unconsciously, appeared from out of nowhere.

  “Edana, Father, Mother, Lorna, Thrym…” The sleeping warrior murmured in a weak voice as he looked into the familiar faces and finally woke up, drenched in sweat.

  “This must never become reality!” He swore to himself, took some Qi-stones out of his magical ring to train, and finally sighed, "Now that I'm already awake, I'll just get a little bit stronger!”

  Since he circulated the Path of the Ape day in and day out, he had already solidified his foundation as a fifth-level Qi-Gatherer and was working like crazy to become stronger.

  Unfortunately, the problem of his half-broken Qi-paths still held him back, but slowly he learned to channel more and more energy into his blood, which further strengthened his body.

  In deep meditation, the three silver-shining scales in his chest glowed and sank deeper and deeper into his flesh.

  “Kilian! Get up!” There was a loud knock on a wooden door, and Edana's voice tore her brother from his training, “You wanted to visit the market with me today!”

  After a quick wash and a hearty breakfast, the two siblings stood between many different, roughly constructed stalls.

  “Magical herbs! Straight from the first level of the ruins! Brand new! They're already extinct outside of this world!” Echoed a trader's call from one side, and from the other came the voices of various merchants hawking their wares.

  The two members of the Kong Clan's Inner Academy strolled through the market, examining the various goods, almost feeling as if they were ordinary people again, shopping for their families at home.

  Only the things they were looking at would not be found in any normal market!

  Flesh, blood, and skins of magical beasts, fragrant, Qi-charged plants, and various types of rare stones and ores.

  “I should find what I need here!” Said Kilian as he let various metals slide through his hands and recalled their names from the many books he had read, “Deep-sea silver, chaos copper, prehistoric iron, and what is this?”

  He paused, pondering, as an inconspicuous gray stone lay between his fingers, and examined it more closely.

  The unfamiliar material was warm, pulsed imperceptibly with the beat of his heart, and felt almost as if it were a part of him.

  “I want these three different ores. I need at least twenty kilos of iron and about six kilos of the others!” he said to the small, human owner of the shop.

  “Thirty Qi-stones!” The seller replied, and after glancing at Kilian's raised eyebrows, quickly added, “Medium-quality stones! That's three thousand low-quality ones!”

  "The goods are worth ten at most, and you want three times as much? I'll give you sixteen at most!" The would-be buyer began to haggle, and after a long back and forth, Kilian finally sighed, "Okay, twenty-four Qi-stones of medium-quality! You have the monopoly on the goods I need, so I can pay a little more for them as an exception. But I also want this little stone here!"

  “Deal!” The merchant agreed, while he mumbled, “I have no idea what kind of stone that is… I only pocketed it because my pickaxe broke on it… It seems very hard, but otherwise it’s useless to me!”

  With a flash of the ring on Kilian's finger, almost all of the Qi-stones he had plundered in his recent battles, and which had not yet been sacrificed to his training, appeared.

  He parted from them with a pained expression on his face, but inside he was jubilant.

  “Don't start laughing! Otherwise, he'll drive the price of that little stone up even higher... I think I've found a treasure here!” He thought, trying with all his might to calm the twitching corner of his mouth.

  "Edana, let's go back. I got what I needed…" He said in a dejected voice that should have delighted the ore seller all the more, and patted his sister feebly on the shoulder.

  “With all that money, you could have bought yourself a new staff!” She replied as her brother pulled her away without saying a word.

  Just before the two turned a corner, the young blacksmith turned his head back to the merchant's stall and was about to grin broadly in his face when he noticed that the previously occupied space was now empty.

  Surprised, he and Edana returned to the estate, where there was a small forge that he wanted to use to prepare for the upcoming battle, and neither of them noticed that two eyes briefly followed them on their way.

  "The time has come! Chaos will spread across Terrapin again..." Murmured an unheard female voice, and the mysterious eyes disappeared into nothingness again.

  “This little stone is something very special!” Kilian explained to his sister as he tried to split the tiny, round rock with increasingly larger hammers and chisels.

  But only the tools used kept breaking, and the stone remained intact.

  “Now you go into the fire!” Kilian cried with enthusiasm because the harder the stone was, the more secrets were probably hidden within it, in his opinion, and he stuck his little treasure into a bright white ember with a long pair of tongs.

  The minutes passed, and nothing happened!

  The pliers slowly turned deep red, almost beginning to melt, but the small stone didn't move a millimeter.

  “So sturdy!” Murmured the blacksmith, drawing his pen and igniting an even hotter conflagration with a flick of his hand.

  And this time something actually happened!

  The small stone glowed brightly for a very short time, moved back and forth two or three times, and sent out a powerful impulse.

  “I knew it!” Kilian rejoiced and began to speak lovingly to the little stone, “There is Yang-Qi inside of you…but how do I get it out of you and use it for my new weapon?”

  This time, he began to stand within the inferno of his enchantment and, with his clothes already charred, hammered furiously on the unfamiliar material, while muttering over and over again with bared teeth, as if possessed: "I'll crack you!"

  Edana crept out of the forge with her mouth open, completely perplexed by her brother's uncharacteristic stubbornness, "He seems to be going crazy..."

  A few days later, Kilian appeared for breakfast with a satisfied grin and dark circles under his eyes.

  "I did it! My staff is finished. I used the ironpine of my first self-forged weapon for the core, reinforced it with the prehistoric iron, and the two ends are each made of deep-sea silver and chaos copper! And the best part is…" He was about to explain the special features of his staff when he was interrupted by Thrym's tired voice, "We know you're a great blacksmith, and you're excited about your new weapon, but first let's get something to eat! The tournament starts tomorrow, and then we'll see what your staff can do in action!"