Elias collapsed onto his thin mattress, every muscle aching. The fight with Kallen had awakened something in him—not just the mysterious bloodline fragment, but a hunger. A realization that he could be more than just a courier, more than a debtor, more than prey.
He examined Kallen's sword in the dim light filtering through his grimy window. The blade was standard Brass Tiger Sect issue—thirty inches of folded steel with minor spiritual conductivity. The hilt bore the sect's emblem, a stylized tiger etched in copper. To a true cultivator, it would be barely worth noticing. To Elias, it was treasure.
His fingers traced the edge, and as they did, fragments of knowledge surfaced unbidden. Basic sword forms. Grip techniques. The proper angle to maximize cutting power. Knowledge he had never learned, yet somehow possessed.
"The Mnemonic Meridian," he whispered, testing the words. The concept felt both foreign and familiar, like a forgotten childhood memory suddenly recalled.
Experimentally, he lifted the sword and attempted one of the forms that had flashed through his mind—a simple thrust and parry sequence. His movements were clumsy, unrefined, but something in his muscles recognized the pattern. With each repetition, the motion grew smoother.
After ten attempts, sweat beaded on his brow. After twenty, his arm burned with fatigue. After thirty, the movement flowed like water.
He stopped, staring at his hand in wonder. No cultivator learned techniques so quickly. Even prodigies required days to internalize basic forms. Yet he had absorbed this in minutes.
A knock at his door froze him mid-motion.
"Thorne? You in there?"
Elias recognized the voice—Wei Lin, the noodle shop owner downstairs. Quickly, he hid the sword beneath his mattress.
"Coming," he called, wiping sweat from his face.
He opened the door to find Wei Lin's round face creased with concern. The old man glanced past Elias into the room, then lowered his voice.
"Heard about the trouble with Kallen Reed," he said. "Word spreads fast in the Ashlands."
Elias's stomach tightened. "It wasn't my fault—"
Wei Lin raised a hand. "Not here to judge, boy. But you should know—the Brass Tigers don't forgive slights. Especially not from..." He hesitated, searching for a delicate way to phrase it.
"Trash like me?" Elias finished for him.
The old man winced. "Not my words. But yes. They'll come for you, and in greater numbers."
Elias knew this was true. Debt collectors maintained their power through fear. Anyone who successfully fought back became a threat to their business model.
"I have nowhere else to go," Elias said simply.
Wei Lin sighed, then reached into his pocket and withdrew a small cloth pouch. "For your wounds. Tea bark and spirit herb paste. Not much, but it'll help with the healing."
Elias accepted the pouch, genuinely surprised by the gesture. "Why help me?"
"Been watching you for three years, boy. You work harder than most, never complain, always pay your rent even when it means going hungry." The old man shrugged. "That counts for something in my ledger."
After Wei Lin left, Elias applied the paste to his wounds. The effect was immediate—a cooling sensation spread from each injury, dulling the pain. Real spirit herbs, even low-grade ones, were expensive. The gift represented at least a week's earnings for someone like Wei Lin.
Elias's thoughts were interrupted by a familiar sensation—the precursor to a System trial. His muscles tensed in anticipation.
Instead of pain, however, a calmness settled over him. Knowledge unfurled in his mind like a blooming flower: The next trial would focus on his newly awakened bloodline. The Mnemonic Meridian required cultivation to fully manifest.
As this understanding formed, his perception of his surroundings changed. Faint lines of energy became visible—not the brilliant threads of qi that cultivators manipulated, but something more subtle. Memory-traces, psychic impressions left by repeated movements and concentrated will.
He could see them everywhere—the worn path from door to window, the depression in his mattress, even the smoothed area on the floor where he habitually sat. Physical patterns formed by repetition, now glowing with ghostly luminescence.
Instinctively, Elias reached out and touched one of the brightest paths—the route from his bed to the door. As his finger contacted the glowing trail, knowledge flowed into him. Every time he had walked this path, every emotion he had felt while doing so, every minor variation in his gait. Thousands of iterations compressed into a single moment of understanding.
He gasped, pulling back his hand. This was the true power of the Mnemonic Meridian—not just accelerated learning, but extraction of experience from the physical world itself.
For the next hour, Elias explored his tiny room with new eyes, touching memory-traces and absorbing their lessons. By midnight, he understood the concept intuitively: his bloodline allowed him to learn from experience—his own and others'—at an accelerated rate. What might take months for ordinary people, he could potentially master in days.
As the night deepened, exhaustion finally overtook him. He collapsed onto his mattress, sword hidden safely beneath, and fell into a deep sleep.
His dreams were not his own.
He stood on a battlefield strewn with bodies. The sky burned red with the light of two setting suns. His hands—not his hands, older, scarred differently—moved through complex patterns. Energy responded, not spiritual cultivation but something purer, more fundamental. Bodies rose from the ground at his command, puppets to his will...
A voice spoke: "The Memory Walkers must not be allowed to fall. The bloodline must survive."
A woman approached, her face both strange and hauntingly familiar. "Take the child and flee. They must never find him."
A baby cried in his arms...
Elias woke with a gasp, heart pounding. Dawn light filtered through his window. His body felt different—lighter, more balanced. The wounds from his fight with Kallen had healed significantly overnight, leaving only faint bruises.
The dream lingered in his mind, too vivid to dismiss. Memory Walkers. A world with two suns. A child who needed protection.
He rose and retrieved Kallen's sword from beneath the mattress. The movements from yesterday came to him naturally now, as if he'd practiced them for years. He flowed through the basic form, then added variations—attacks, defenses, counters.
Each repetition improved his execution. Each improvement unlocked new understanding. By the time the morning bustle of the Ashlands began outside his window, Elias had internalized every basic form of the Brass Tiger Sect's Copper-rank sword techniques.
Knowledge without context was dangerous, he realized. He needed to understand this bloodline's origin. He needed to learn why these memories were surfacing. Most importantly, he needed to survive long enough to find answers.
The memory of Wei Lin's warning resurfaced. The Brass Tigers would come for him. He needed to prepare.
Elias dressed quickly, concealing the sword beneath his cloak. The morning crowd would provide cover as he sought information. Whitebrand's lower districts housed many who dealt in forgotten knowledge—hedge-cultivators, failed sect disciples, lore-vendors. Someone might recognize the term "Memory Walker" or know of bloodlines connected to memory manipulation.
As he reached for the door, his reflection in a cracked mirror caught his attention. His eyes had changed—the irises now contained faint golden flecks that hadn't been there before. A physical manifestation of his awakening bloodline.
Another detail to hide, another question to answer.
He stepped into the Ashlands, a changed man walking among the unchanged. Behind him, memory-traces glowed in patterns only he could see. Ahead, the crowded streets of Whitebrand held both danger and promise.
The hunt for his origins had begun.