It took about two minutes for Isabella to stop laughing at me, as we weaved our way through more bridges leaning out over the world below and pretty courtyards that were thankfully unoccupied. But by the time her own chuckles had tapered off and we’d reached the bridge right below the Script Wing room, another question had bubbled up in my mind.

  “So is it really okay for you to treat the scythe like that?” I asked as we came to a stop along one of the hanging bridges, staring up the cliff-face that towered over us. “When you tossed it to the side earlier.”

  Isabella shrugged. “If anyone’s got a complaint then they can file it with my boss.”

  “Okay, sure, but it’s safe, right?” I stressed as I slowly traced out a path along the cliff-face that led up towards the wide cut-out gap in the stone above. “You’re not about to lose all your powers as the Reaper and leave us both stranded and dying here if you throw it away, are you?”

  “Nah. I need it to do the Reaping part, but it’s connected to me on a pretty deep level. And it’s got this annoying habit of coming back if I do throw it away. See?” To prove her point, I watched as she took the scythe off her shoulder, and casually threw it off the side of the bridge. I immediately moved over to the railing , watching the Implement of the Reaper Itself fall rather unceremoniously to its doom. Considering how high up we were it actually took a very long minute before it finally disappeared into the mist far at the bottom of the Seven Falls, and with the roar of the falls around and below us, I wasn’t even treated to seeing its eventual-

  Something unpleasantly weighty slammed into the back of my head.

  “Gods above, what just-” I hissed in pain as I clutched at the impact with my free hand, fingers momentarily brushing against something wooden. Then I blinked a few times, watching as the scythe began to fall once more right past my face, this time with an awkward spin that had the scythe’s blade rotating around wildly as it began to fall back towards the bottom of the Falls.

  Isabella coughed in what suspiciously sounded like laughing, again.

  Able to return to its wielder. Not just flying back like a sword or knife, but truly returning. “How many times can it return? Does it turn into a spirit? How does it power itself?”

  “It returns no matter what. It’ll come back a bit faster if I call for it.” She drummed her fingers along the scythe’s haft, and I blinked. I hadn’t even noticed it come back. “As for the what or how? No clue. Didn’t exactly get a manual. Or training.”

  The bitter words told me enough not to pry any further, so I turned away from the falls and back to the cliff above us. “Okay. Sure. Scythe does its own thing. But if it can return to you, you don’t need to carry it, right?”

  Isabella looked up the cliff face, before grimacing. “If you’re thinking we need to climb up, don’t forget that I’m still limited to a single hand. You’re limited to a single hand.”

  “But we don’t need to hold hands,” I pointed out. You caught me with an arm under my legs in the fight. “As long as you’re touching me you can protect me, right?”

  Isabella’s face flickered between a few different emotions. “You want me to carry you up?”

  Huh. “Actually, I was thinking I’d climb up, and have you hang on…” I stared up the fourty feet of rock that separated us from the entrance to the Script Wing’s open air room. I’d done the climb before, and it had been moderately difficult. I was stronger now, which would offset the weight of carrying someone. “Just to ask, when I saw you jumping off the ground along the main road earlier, is that your natural level of strength now? Part of the whole Reaper package?”

  “No, sorry.” Isabella crossed her arms. “I’m not exactly built for carrying physical bodies. It’s one thing to try and catch you before you hit the floor; I definitely can’t pick you up and jump up there.”

  “Then I suppose I’m climbing.” I confirmed the outcroppings that I’d be grabbing onto, before pausing. “The scythe isn’t going to bash my head in again on the way up, is it?”

  “I thought getting hit in the face came with the cultivator title,” Isabella leaned the scythe against the rock wall to our side. “It’s not that far. You’ll be fine. How do you want me to do this?”

  It took a minute to get Isabella on my back in a mostly-comfortable manner, with her arms wrapped around my neck and her legs braced against my sides. In another time and place, I would’ve carried around some of the children of the village like this, providing some momentary relief to their parents as I distracted them by pretending to be some deadly monster.

  And now here I was doing the same to Death herself, to climb on up into the private vault of the Sect to destroy most of their most valuable transports and abscond with another. The absurdity of the situation struck me, though not as much as the utterly crippling realisation that had suddenly entered my mind. This is the closest I’ve ever been to a woman, hasn’t it?

  “Don’t make this weird,” Isabella growled.

  Sorry. I focused entirely on the physical challenge of climbing the wall, doing my best to distract myself from Isabella. It mostly worked, and five minutes of relative calm passed as I navigated from outcrop to crevice to overhang, ascending bit by bit up the wall. I only paused to catch my breath about halfway up, on a wider portion of the cliff that jutted out into the world.

  “So,” Isabella shifted slightly on my back, leaning her head in by my ear. “What’s the plan?”

  I didn’t respond out loud, focusing instead on my breathing. Trying to climb a cliff with someone clinging to your back was more difficult than I’d expected. You mean for the Script Wings?

  Isabella snorted. “We’ve got that part handled. Destroy all but one, fly away on the last. What then?”

  You mean, for figuring out how I can see you?

  “And your promise,” one of her fingers pressed into me as a reminder. “You’re helping me figure out what the hell you cultivators are doing to escape the Cycle.”

  Right. I thought about it for a moment. Well, I guess the best way is to just keep going to different sects, right?

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Another sect.” Isabella repeated. “That’s your plan.”

  Yeah. All the Sects have their own Libraries. The Seven Falls is actually interesting in that it provides open access to any disciple. I began climbing again. So it stands to reason that the ones where you have to pay to access the library probably have a lot of stuff hidden away.

  “And after making an enemy of this Sect, you’re going to go make an enemy of another.” Isabella’s voice was growing progressively dryer by the second.

  Not necessarily! Just another fifteen feet to the top. I mean, lots of Sects have entrance exams, or tournaments. I’ve never been to one, but if we just say we’re an independent cultivator, we can participate! Can’t imagine they’ll complain.

  “Right. And they will, of course, turn over the secrets of Cultivation, and why they can’t die.” Isabella sighed, head rocking forward to lie against my shoulder. “I don’t even know what I expected.”

  If you’ve got any ideas, I’m happy to hear them.

  “I’m not being fair,” she muttered. “It’s better than what I had. There’s a couple of cultivators who tried Soul Anchoring and died. I figured we could find where they died and see what went wrong. If we can’t get the secrets from those who’ve made it, maybe there’s something to discover from those who failed.”

  I paused again, just a few feet from the open room’s ledge. That’s a really good idea.

  Isabella scoffed. “Hardly. I’m not exactly given a map when I take people onto the Cycle. I just appear there next to their souls. Do you know how many of these fuckers die in caves, or underground somewhere? Are we going to dive down every hole we find just to check if there are some burnt bones down there?”

  The problem is obvious, but I think both our plans align. I bet you that most of those caves are a stone’s throw away from a Sect. Don’t suppose you remember any recognisable caves? We can try to ask some disciples if there’s any Grand Cave of Self-Immolation around.

  “Oh, yes, the Grand Cave of Self-Immolation. For the Path of Self-Immolation. Which all righteous cultivators follow.” Isabella snorted. “But you’re right. I’ll see what I can remember.”

  Sounds like a plan. Hold on tight here. I finally grabbed the lip of the floor, and pulled us both up over the edge onto the cold stone floor. I took a deep breath, allowing my muscles to relax slightly, basking in the feeling of a good workout. Okay, you can get off now.

  “Give me a second.” I waited as Isabella slowly got off my back, her hand going back to mine to pull me to my feet. Her scythe was already back in her free hand, as if it had never left. Her focus wasn’t on me, however, as she looked around the room we’d pulled ourselves into. “Huh. Funny looking things, aren’t they?”

  Just like I remembered, it was a room that abandoned the normal opulence that filled the rest of the Inner Compound. The entire space seemed like it had only just been excavated, smooth with the telltale signs of a qi technique, but not so polished as to have been made properly pretty and ready for guests. After all, no one but the very top of the Sect would ever normally be in this room, judging by the massive pair of metal doors at the far end of the room, clearly ready to keep anyone out who wasn’t meant to be here.

  That was all thanks to the rows and rows of Script Wings, lined up against the walls of the cliffside chamber. When I’d previously poked his head into this room, the twenty constructs of paper and gold leaf arranged and folded so peculiarly had only appeared strange and foreign. Now, with the help of the Witch Doctor’s explanations, and some more research in the library on the nature of scripting, I had a better understanding of these strange artefacts.

  And they were works of art. They weren’t just folded in strange ways; they were folded in a precise, deliberate manner, replicating bones and joints just as if they were wings from a real bird. The gold leaf wasn’t merely decorative; it had been so carefully placed, after the paper had been folded, with glittering runes and symbols that encapsulated the very nature of what it meant to fly. The only exception to their nature were the central platforms, the paper forming a comfortable looking nest filled with an assortment of velvet cushions that were clearly the equal for the chairs in the underground library.

  Whatever Doctor Lei might have thought about the Cloud Breaking Sect, it was clear they were masterful craftsmen, and their creations worth every last yuan.

  And here I was about to destroy them.

  “So, how does this go?” Isabella asked, nudging one of the Wings with her scythe. The entire thing jostled at the poke, but it didn’t flex at all, simply moving back a foot before setting again. “They’re pretty light.”

  Experimentally, I tried to lift one of the Wings nearby, the entire construction tilting onto its other wing with only the effort of a finger. Then, with a whole hand, I attempted to pick the entire Wing up just by its very edge. It lifted without complaint, the script even humming softly as it gently hovered there in the air, waiting to do my bidding. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

  I carefully lead it over to the edge of the room, and let go. And without a passenger or anyone else to keep it afloat, it simply fell, nose tipping forward, straight down to the bottom of the falls. Soon enough, it was swallowed underneath the mists of the Seven Falls, never to be seen again. I’m so sorry, little Wing.

  “Don’t feel too bad, it’s not like it has a soul.” Isabella had managed to hook one of the other Wings with her scythe, the blade puncturing through the paper, and with a great swing threw it out into the dark, where its nose even managed to stay up for a while before it, too, plummeted out of view. “I think I got more distance than you did.”

  We’re here to destroy the Wings, not turn it into a competition. Despite my thoughts, I couldn’t help the smile on my face as I grabbed another one of the Wings, hefting it up to grab its base. Besides, you’d lose.

  Isabella laughed. “Ohoh, this rascal dares challenge me? I should slap your face for this insult.”

  Then prepare to spit blood! Behold my Wing Throwing Technique! And out another Wing sailed into the night, in a grand and triumphant display of my throwing superiority. The rest of the Wing’s siblings followed soon after, the poor birds occasionally bumping and jostling against each other as Isabella and I sought to sabotage the other, all of them falling to their deaths far below. My last throw ended up going the furthest, just barely managing to escape the mist of the basin below before the dark of the might claimed it anyway.

  “How much is each one of those worth?” Isabella wondered, leaning against her scythe as she watched that penultimate Wing disappear from view.

  When I asked the Witch Doctor he just chuckled for a few minutes. I thought. He then called me precious, but not that precious.

  “I don’t think I like him very much.”

  He’s actually alright. As he always told me, the dose matters. I sighed, before turning to the very last Script Wing, which looked significantly more lonely without its brethren, its wide wings so small compared to the rest of the open room. Shall we- wait.

  It was right after that thought appeared in my mind that I noticed the doors at the far end of the room had swung open, and that a fireball was rapidly approaching from them. I instantly pulled Isabella down, covering her as best as I could to keep us both from being incinerated.

  I needn’t have worried. Instead, I watched as the last of the Wings went up in flames before us, paper and gold reduced to sparkling ash in a second.

  Just like that, my ticket out of here was gone.

  “Shit,” Isabella hissed underneath me. “It’s him.”

  “This is going to be a mess to explain.” Brother Wenhua Gareth sighed, brushing wisps of flames off his arms as he fixed me with a very intense stare. “You’re a very frustrating man to get a hold of, Ryan.”