City of Sin (Yanyu Jiangnan)

A Cruel Kindling

With the existence of the core oil discovered, Richard looked at his leather bag and then back at Suman with surprise, "I didn’t expect your perception to be this sharp."

Suman laughed, “You thought a treated leather bag would be able to hide something that distorts the laws everywhere around it? Men, come and kill this brat!”

There were eight guards in the hall, and all of them leapt forward in tandem as they aimed their blades at Richard. However, a ring of green light suddenly blinded everyone in the room, and Richard walked past the would-be attackers who fell to the ground.

Suman’s eyes went wide as he stared at Moonlight, slowly picking up the giant axe beside his throne. However, Richard stopped and shook his head, “You’re wrong, Suman. I’m not slightly weaker than you; I’m so powerful you can’t even fathom it.”

He had barely finished speaking before he blinked forward, Moonlight aiming for the man’s throat like a flash of lightning. Suman roared and brandished his axe like a storm, but it was barely a minute later when he howled and the weapon flew out of his hands. He went rigid as Moonlight sat on his throat, capable of cutting his head off with a gentle stroke.

“Bring me to the timeflames,” Richard said calmly.

Unable to decline, Suman brought Richard underground to two stone rooms that contained braziers of different sizes. One seemed ancient and had been burning for hundreds of years, while the other was a little dimmer and reeked of blood.

Richard’s gaze froze over as he looked at the dim brazier, and he turned to Suman, “You used living souls to light this.”

Suman showed no shame, “They deserved to die in the first place! Weaklings have no point other than to be used as food here; leaving their souls would have been a waste.”

"You were a weakling when you first came here as well."

“But I’m a lord now, and that’s enough. Besides, do you have any other method to light timeflames?”

Richard fell silent. Only Chosen had access to tinder that could light timeflames naturally, and this ruthless method was perhaps the only other possibility. Suman seemed to see that hesitation and continued, “These people deserved to die! I only brought it to them earlier, and their sacrifices lit a second veil of order that quadrupled the size of the city! How many people managed to live because of this? What have you done to be upset?”

Richard sighed. Perhaps the grey sky was a theme for everything in the Darkness. Suman definitely had benefited a large number of people, and he himself wasn’t a samaritan by any means. Falling silent for a long time, he eventually answered, “Soulwood can sustain the timeflames after they are lit. I’ll be taking the ones that haven’t dispersed.”

Suman felt an inexplicable chill around him. His perception was powerful, but he couldn’t see the hundreds of souls that gathered towards Richard and merged with his soul.

……

A few hours later, Richard left the city and followed the path towards the Land of Dawn. A dazed Suman was left in his throne room, unable to understand how Richard had spared him and even left the city. He simply couldn’t fathom why someone would want to head out into the forsaken wastelands when one could stay in the city and at least live comfortably.

For his part, Richard understood that Suman wasn’t particularly cruel to the residents of the city themselves. Someone would want to be the lord of such a city regardless, and Suman was at least strong enough to stop a butcher if it charged through the veil of order. Leaving someone like that behind was much better than subjecting the city to turmoil.

The grey sky, fissured earth, and twisted trees seemed to blend into an endless landscape of distortion with no start nor end. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, but Richard continued to walk more than a thousand kilometres a day. He had realised that keeping track of time here was meaningless; while he could track it accurately in the Darkness, it was impossible to know how that mapped to the worlds of order.

He spent the entire journey silently analysing the laws of the Darkness, both by himself and via the souls he had absorbed along the way. He had over a thousand legendary beings within him after going through the two timefires in Suman’s city, and with that assistance his analysis had been boosted greatly. Law after law was unravelled, boosting his power massively by the time he crossed over a veil of formless energy to arrive at the Land of Dawn. Over a hundred days had passed in this time, and he had analysed all the laws of awareness and fifteen laws of control. Only one law was left, and even after tens of days working on it he felt like he was an unknown distance away from an epiphany. He could solve things in the next moment, or it could take months.

Richard had the faint feeling that the Darkness would present itself differently to him the moment he finished analysing this last law. Even now, he found it difficult to describe just what this place was. This wasn’t a solitary plane, nor did it seem to be connected to any powerful mainland. This place was supposedly just outside the Eternal Dragon’s control, ringing the void, but from his experience the void was an incredible expanse. Just how big did a place have to be to surround it?

Lost in thought, he walked into the Land of Dawn, feeling his entire world change in a moment. The place grew much brighter as the monotony of the sky was broken up, with what seemed like layers of clouds moving around. The terrain here also had some undulations, with a significant increase in the number of soul trees. He even saw a small hill forest in the distance.

He saw occasional flashes of presence all over the ground, the inhabitants of the Darkness that included both butchers and many other things he had never seen before. He could only sense them because he had almost entirely resolved the distortion, but one thing was certain; this was a land of life.

He tried to observe these natives on the way, but they seemed to be alarmed whenever he arrived and vanished no matter how stealthy he tried to be. He quickly gave up, deciding to focus on his goals of finding Flowsand and returning to Norland. According to the old man’s route, his journey would bring him to the City of Dawn where he could collect a key ingredient to building the Lighthouse of Time, cyanite. It was a special product of this domain, acting as proof of having gained control of it.

Richard harvested a few soul trees along his route to exchange for some cyanite, and speeding up steadily he arrived at the city in ten days. The place seemed to be able to house tens of thousands of people, and the glamorous veil of order gave off a golden radiance that almost completely suppressed the distortion in the surroundings. Even a saint would be able to live in this place without much issue, and legends would be able to thrive.

He noticed people entering and leaving the city regularly as he approached, a group of people even pushing wagons with goods into the distance. However, his attention faded the moment he arrived at the gates, focusing entirely on a set of statues erected in the plaza. It was a sculpture of three people walking through the wastelands, and even restricted to seeing their backs he felt his heart throb as he recognised them immediately.