The Fourth Gate: Chapter Seven

As he spoke, the curator lunged forward, his palm connecting with my forehead, and I felt waves of information crashing through my brain. It was neatly folded and organized, though not as adaptive as the flower of information that Aerde and Orykson had created. As I processed through the pile, I came to realize that the man had given me knowledge about one hundred and thirty-seven of the headstones, broken down in several different ways. 

Orykson had warned me to search for compatibility with either personality or magic, but ideally both.. The curator’s description seemed to make it clear that was important as well, so I began to flip through the entries, ignoring anything that seemed to have no connection to my magic or personality. 

The first headstone to leap out at me was that of the Grove Matriarch, an ancient Occultist who once ran a Great Sect in Feng Chui. She had been both powerful and exceptionally deadly, as she used a unique connection with the grove of a Purestar tree to cut down forests of her enemies, leaving none in their wake. According to the information, her brutality was only matched by her skill with plant and beast magic. It seemed likely to me that she’d be an excellent match in terms of magic, but I doubted I’d be a good personality match. Her plant and beast combat instincts could be useful, but I wasn’t especially brutal as a person. I moved onto the next headstone, but marked her down as a possibility. 

The next headstone to catch my interest was essentially the polar opposite of the Grove Matriarch, an old man known as the Jade Owner. He had run a roadside inn for nearly a hundred and eighty years, and he only battled when the peace of the inn was disrupted. He’d advanced slowly, over years, rather than in great bursts that brought lots of attention to himself. Even his legacy had gone into reinforcing that, eschewing the standard gates in favor of a continual sloping gradient of mists that were much harder to clear the deeper one went. During his life, he’d been unmatched in defensive magic, and had used his skill at wards and armor spells enough to keep his passivity and protect his inn. It made it a decent match for me, given that I did use some armor, and I thought that I could find a personality match with someone who appreciated peace, even if I tended to not take the slow route for things. 

The next one I bookmarked was another case of right magic, wrong personality: the Spirit General. He’d been the right hand man of the Storm King for nearly four hundred years, before being killed by his wife. According to the information in the report, the Spirit General was a master of tactics, and had the ability to contain hundreds of ghosts within his body, drawing on their unique strengths and dominions at the perfect time. It made him incredibly flexible, and as he’d advanced, he’d been able to unleash them on rebels and heretics. Despite his title as general, he’d also used his ghosts to maintain an entire spy network, ferreting out dissent in order to crush them. While I thought I’d hate him as a person, there was no denying that my ghost magic could be useful for rounding out my arsenal, and the skill in wrangling more of them would be nice.

I paused for a moment when I stumbled across an entry for the Refiner. I’d heard of her before, and knew she was truly capable of incredible feats of miracle-working alchemy using even meager and basic ingredients. Her potions were the only method I’d ever heard of that allowed someone to undo a false ascension, outside of a deep mana imprint. The information packet I’d been given didn’t have much detail about her personality, but it did note that she preferred economic and ability based contests over military or subterfuge. That suggested a degree of spell compatibility and personal compatibility, at least around my plant magic. Except, I wasn’t an exceptional alchemist, merely a decent one. I didn’t think the headstones could pass on training, only instincts. Would having better alchemical instincts actually help? Would it be as valuable as other headstones? If my opponents all took combat related headstones, then I’d have almost thrown away my chance at a spellbinder rose for nothing. I bookmarked the idea for later, and decided to look up any that the collection had related to the library, and was pleasantly surprised to find a few. 

The first was the Autumn Weaver, who had been the first head of the Central Daocheng Librarian Sect. He’d later been killed by the Storm King for stealing royal secrets, but he had a truly unique skill in managing dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of disparate autumnal magic based fabric constructs. It wasn’t a legacy either – just raw skill. It made him uniquely capable of coordinating across countless constructs, spell anchors, and connected locations all at once. I already had one spell that would let me create a temporary clone, and split my attention between various spots for things like my plant, ghost, and even spatial anchors. This was a case where the instincts and subconscious understanding of that sort of splitting would be incredibly useful. The Autumn Weaver had also been an autumnal mage, which meant that the mana types would roughly match, even if there was little to no spell crossover. 

The next library based one had been received in a trade, giving the Library access to a more combat focused headstone in exchange for one of their more research focused ones. The headstone had belonged to someone called the Broker, who had some sort of deal-based legacy, but who had required fairly elaborate setups to channel the synergy between deals and actually take advantage of it. They’d built their power around those deals, using dozens of experimental spells and items on themselves, until they’d eventually blown a hole in their own soul and died. That was… uncomfortably familiar to me. I thought the personality would be a great match, and since the information within did discuss synergy, I thought there was a nonzero chance that I’d be able to utilize it to improve a lot of my garden, albeit in a very non-specific way. Then again, was further emulating someone who had eventually blown their spirits to bits really the direction I wanted to go? I noted the description and moved on. 

Those were the only ones linked to the library that I could find, so I was about to turn to looking for mana-based connections when a new one shoved itself into my head, the knowledge energy twisting weirdly to make itself known. I sensed none of the deep manas acting, though, and thought it had to be a result of the headstone’s long-dead creator, more than it was anything else. That was only further confirmed when I started to process the information. 

It belonged to a woman named Sima, whose title had been The Prankster. Despite the relatively benign sounding title, in life, the woman had failed to understand or care that other people didn't find it funny when her pranks endangered their lives, ruined their financial stability, or utterly destroyed long-built relationships. I was tempted to dismiss it out of hand, but she was also an extremely talented mental, spatial and time mage. Her legacy had let her become intangible like a ghost, and by weaving them together, she’d continued her dangerous pranks as she advanced, even becoming a threat to international stability. The Storm King had personally driven her out, and only after years of exile had she finally learned to see through others' eyes. In the end, she’d left behind a message that simply said she was sorry, along with a headstone. Though, even then, she couldn’t help herself, and had placed her headstone right beside one of the busiest crossroads in all of Daocheng, along with an extremely powerful and lasting confusion spell that got those entering lost, compelled to reenact her pranks, or simply disappear for months or years. It was another fifty years before the road had become useful again. 

I didn’t know if the turn to sorrow in the end would be enough to let me connect with her, and given the fact that she’d still locked away an entire busy road… I doubted it. But much like the Grove Matriarch, it represented a good match for my actual magic, even if not a personality. I marked it among my list of maybes and moved on, ignoring the Blade as his light and swords attempted to connect to me just because we both disliked the Storm King. There were plenty of people who didn’t like the Storm King, and I’d bet I wasn’t even in the top fifty. It wasn’t worth the attention, since I wasn’t a sword or light mage. Instead, I turned to compatible mana types, and while looking through them, I found another one that interested me.

It belonged to the Fiddler, a wandering Occultist whose headstone had wound up claimed by Central Daocheng after a fight had broken out trying to collect it. In life, he’d been a life and tempest mage, who had defined himself  heavily within philosophy. All people who ascended to fifth gate had to do something of the sort, of course, but he’d done so more than most, channeling the inner spirit of a farmer’s need for hard work before self-gratification. He’d used his spellcraft to spread seeds across fields, grow them, and then harvest the crops with a scythe of wind. A fortunate encounter with a bloody warrior poet had left him with an excellent fiddle that eventually became the focus for his magic. It grew with him, until it had eventually become the centerpoint of his magic, a constant song of growth and harvest. He was only a partial match in mana, and a partial match in personality, but I still thought it was worth putting down as a maybe. 

I moved on to looking the beast headstones, cycling through the list until I’d picked out two additional maybes. 

The Light of the Depths had been a deep sea dragon with a cycling, charging breath weapon kind of like Mantle Dragonfyre, and the body of a beast. He’d mostly avoided politics on the surface, preferring to hunt the monsters that swam in the depths of the sea, and his headstone. It wasn’t a perfect mana match, but I figured that the combat instincts would be useful, and that if I was able to direct a lot of the growth to my full-gate spells and Mantle Dragonfyre, I’d be able to punch up the already impressive spell. 

Was devoting all of my headstone worth empowering just those spells, though? I honestly couldn’t say for sure. If I had to fight someone like Ivy or Cai Dao, then having the extra power in that one spell would be better than having a general boost, but it still might not be enough to match them if they did something similar. 

Meanwhile, the Ninetails was such a legend that even I’d heard of them growing up. A kitsune, huli jing, gumiho, or some other variant of the nine-tailed fox who had supposedly climbed all the way to magi, using illusions and shapechanging, in an age that had been long lost to history. If they’d existed at all, then it would have been at least a thousand years before the Storm King’s birth, in a time that was more . The myths and legends were all contradictory. Sometimes they were a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes neither, sometimes both at once, and more. Some had worshiped them as a sort of guardian spirit, while others saw them as a trickster figure. Whatever they were, they had certainly been quite the mythical figure. Even the Storm King didn’t know if the Ninetails headstone in his collection was actually that of the mythical figure, as it had resisted attempts to date it from multiple different spells, and the kingdom he’d conquered and taken it from hadn’t known either. 

It was admittedly a very cool sounding headstone, but I wasn’t sure that it was actually useful. I had two spells from a huli jing, and I didn’t know it would extend to being able to boost my other fox spells. There weren’t direct parallels between different fox breeds, like there were between different species’ dragon breath spells. Or rather, there were, but it was more limited – a gumiho could doubtless work with a huli jing. But that didn’t mean it would work with a blink fox. Furthermore, its personality was all but a mystery. They could turn out worse than the Spirit General or the Grove Matriarch. 

I sighed and flipped back to the start of the list I’d bookmarked, trying to sort through and pick out the best fit for me in terms of both magic and personality.