During his journey through the levels controlled by the mosui, Kaz had picked up a few things, and now he laid them out in front of Lianhua. One after another, he pulled out one mithril ingot, one ingot of adamantium, a small container covered in delicate metal filigree, a short, squat scroll that glowed deep blue and gold in his ki-sight, a single red crystal half the size of his head, a gleaming white hoyi egg, a simple pouch made of some unfamiliar fabric, three rings, another pouch, this one leather and bulging, and, at last, six halves making up three slave collars.

Lianhua, who had watched, fascinated, right up until the end, drew away from the collars. She tucked her hands behind her, as if that would keep the innocent-seeming things from leaping into her grasp.

“What are you doing with those?” she demanded, voice a little too high. “I thought they decided to destroy them all.”

He huffed a little laugh and peered at the set before picking a particular one up. “They didn’t,” he told her. “But they tried to offer me all kinds of things as a reward for killing Zhangwo, and I exchanged them for a promise that they would destroy every last collar, and all of the control wands. They wanted to collar the last of the mosui, and then a few of their own people who had helped the mosui more than others, and then some kobolds who had taken advantage of the fact that the mosui didn’t care what their captives did so long as the work got done.”

Lianhua’s lips formed an ‘o’ of realization, but she didn’t speak.

“But I don’t need anything from them.” He grinned, indicating the neat row in front of him. “Nothing I didn’t already take. I’d rather they don’t know what I have, anyway.”

“So you told them you only wanted the collars gone?”

Kaz nodded. “The husede are too used to the collars, even though they were made by someone else originally. I thought if they still had them, they’d just keep finding more reasons to use them on more different people, and pretty soon, they might become just as bad as the mosui. They kept offering me crystals and more ingots, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the ones I already have, so I asked for the collars instead.”

“Are these the last ones, then?” Lianhua asked, finally pulling her hands from behind her back, though she didn’t accept the collar piece Kaz held out toward her.

“I guess a lot of them were destroyed before, when the place they were stored caught on fire.” Which was also at least partially his fault, but he didn’t feel the need to mention that. “I didn’t keep a control device, but these work with ki, so I thought they might be useful to study. Plus, this one saved your life.”

Turning the half-circle, he showed her the small gouges where Zhangwo’s claws had been stopped by the extremely hard metal. There were still flakes of dried blood in the little divots, and Lianhua stared at them before unconsciously reaching up to touch the faint scars on the back of her neck.

“There are records indicating that the Diushi used slaves, or perhaps indentured servants,” Lianhua admitted. “It was rare, but when someone committed a crime, they sometimes had to serve the state or the people they wronged for some period of time. We don’t - didn’t - know how that was enforced, since the perpetrators were often cultivators, and keeping cultivators confined is nearly impossible, much less convincing them to humble themselves day after day.”

Looking down at the collar, Kaz said, “This takes all five kinds of ki to unlock, and Thabil said that mana, at least, has a ‘signature’, something that identifies who it belongs to. I was able to unlock these, so I don’t think they need any particular person, but I was curious-”

He picked up the other half of Lianhua’s collar and clicked it together. Seeing her wince at the soft sound, he twitched his ears apologetically, but held out the circle toward her.

“Would you put your ki in here? Just a little. You don’t have red, so I think it should be safe.”

Slowly, looking equally fascinated and repelled, Lianhua stretched out a finger. With a tap, she passed a tiny amount of her gold, blue, and black ki into the collar. It glowed softly, but didn’t heat up, so Kaz gently nudged Li, who was staring at the huge red crystal he’d laid on the ground with an avaricious gleam in her eye.

Li gave Kaz a calculating glance, then gave up on the crystal, at least for now. She sent white ki into the collar, and Kaz followed it with a minute burst of red power. Beneath his fingers, the metal began to heat, but it didn’t click open. Kaz drew the collar back, and the two females ceased infusing it with ki. When it stopped glowing completely, the ki inside diffusing into a harmless gray mist of mana that vanished into the air, Kaz pushed all five colors into it by himself. The collar quietly snicked apart, one half falling to the ground with a sweet chime.

Now Lianhua’s scholarly interest began to overcome her distaste, and she reached out for the fallen piece, but snatched her hand back just before she touched it. Then, with a deep breath and a glance at Kaz, she picked it up, gripping it firmly as she turned it over, examining every side.

Stroking her finger over the perfectly smooth ends, she murmured, “There’s no lock. No mechanism of any kind. And it only opened when one person provided all the ki.” Her brow furrowed. “What does that mean, though?”

Kaz shook his head. “I don’t know exactly. That’s why I wanted to keep one. You said it was very rare for anyone to have all five colors of ki, and as far as I could tell, Zhangwo didn’t have any at all. He used mana, and his rings converted it to ki when he needed it.”

He set the half-collar down, and Lianhua did the same with the piece she held, her fingers moving away with the relief of someone who had accidentally gathered duyu when they meant to pick yumao, and were just glad it hadn’t poisoned them before they realized their mistake.

There was far more interest in Lianhua’s gaze as she turned to look at the rings. “Were these his?”

Kaz twitched guiltily, then scratched his muzzle, glancing away. “They all belonged to him, yes, but this one,” he indicated a silvery one with a simple blue stone inset in the band, “was in the alcove when I grabbed your pouch. It was probably too small for him.”

Next, he pointed to a golden one encircled by moonstones, obsidian, sapphires, rubies, and topaz, the pattern repeated three times in order to reach all the way around. “There wasn’t actually much left of him, but I was able to sniff out a few pieces. This was on one of his thumbs, I think.”

The third ring was far less ostentatious than the second, but not as simple as the first. It, too, was golden, which seemed to be Zhangwo’s preferred metal, but it only had three gems; one smoothly rounded obsidian, an equally smooth chrysoberyl, and a large, faceted sapphire set neatly in between. The band itself was delicately carved, though the edges of the carvings were worn down by use and time.

“This was on the pinky of the same hand. The other rings were all melted and broken, but these two survived,” he told her.

He had half expected Lianhua to look as disgusted by the rings as she had by the collars, since she seemed to find death in all its forms distasteful. To his surprise, she showed no hesitation when she reached out to pick up the three rings.

First, she examined each one carefully, then she slipped the gaudy one over her thumb, where it hung loosely. With a small smile, she placed it back on the ground, then nudged it a little further away when she saw Li’s fascinated eyes track the motion.

“I don’t know what that one is, though I can sense its power,” she told Kaz. “I took a course in studying artifacts, but I was far more interested in preserving and translating written works. When we get to a human city, you can ask a crafter, and they might be able to help you figure out what it does.”

Kaz just nodded again, but he had already played with the ring a bit. The stones lit up when he pushed ki into them, but the power quickly dissipated back into the gray fog of mana. It was still an effort to compress and weave ki into mana, but he had managed a little, and when he fed it into the rings, the stones drank it down greedily, quickly refining it back into the ki he had originally used to create the mana.

There was noticeably less pure ki in the end than he had started with, so the process was inefficient, but so long as all five kinds of ki were mingled into the mana offered to the ring, it refined that mana back to ki, which could be useful for almost anyone who wasn’t Kaz. Kaz had a suspicion that this ring, or something like it, would allow a mana-bearer to use ki, and would probably serve quite well to do things like opening ki-locked collars, though he hadn’t actually tested that yet. He didn’t want to lie to Lianhua about not having a control device for the collars, and so long as he didn’t know for sure that this ring could be used for that, he wasn’t.

Lianhua had already turned her attention to the three-stone ring, and she was peering closely at the faded carvings. After a moment, she summoned a bright, clear orb of light, which flared with painful brilliance as she used it to examine the markings.

Absently, she reached for her waist, then stopped when she remembered she’d left her pouch with the rest of her clothes. This also served to remind her that she was wearing only a very large towel, and she’d just created a light that chased away the concealing darkness and steam. Flushing, she banished her light and set the ring down with a click.

“The runes are definitely Diushi,” she said, ignoring the deep red color that was threatening to overtake her face. “And I’d say early first century, at that. Over time, as more and more countries were absorbed into the empire, there was a good deal of natural language transfer. The Diushi insisted that all official events and documents be in their language, but people retained their original oral and written language as well, leading to a dilution of-”

Li yawned, her tongue flickering out to taste the perfumed mists, and Lianhua stopped, then tugged at the top edge of her towel uncomfortably.

“Yes,” the human female said, “well, you can tell the age of the runes by the change in graphemes, subtle as they are. This is quite worn, but the height of the ascenders and the width of the vertical stems tells me it’s very early Diushi. I see the runes for water, wood, and earth, which isn’t surprising given the color of the gems, but here,” she turned the ring to show the inside of the band, directly across from the stones, “you see the rune ‘shu’, which usually refers to books, or something written. I’ve certainly seen these in conjunction before, but only in larger works, with a greater variety of-”

Kaz’s tail swept gently across the floor behind him. “You can have it,” he told her.

Startled, she looked up, but her fingers were already closing around the band. “But Kaz-”

He shook his head. “It has your colors on it, and I don’t need it. Among kobolds, if a member of a tribe finds something unusual, it goes to the tribe member who can use it for the good of the group.” Or the chief, he thought but didn’t say, as Lianhua smiled and slipped the ring on her forefinger. It was a little loose, so she shifted it to her thumb, where it sat as snugly as if it was made for her.

Li hissed her displeasure at Kaz giving away something that could just as easily have been fed to the dragon if he really didn’t want it. Kaz shook his head and reached out, upending the larger of the two pouches, which was full to bulging. Crystals spilled across the ground, a glittering cascade of black, white, yellow, and blue.

The dragon’s head spun as she stared up at him incredulously, and Kaz took great satisfaction at managing to surprise her. She had been so distracted by tracking Lianhua and making sure no one noticed her that she hadn’t paid any attention when he darted back into the level where the yumi reeds were processed.

He had found a yellow crystal in a passage on that level, and once he found the stairs, he realized that he might never have another chance to get more crystals. Li had already eaten several red crystals by then, and he could feel how they filled an empty space in her belly that all the meat he’d given her hadn’t touched. He just couldn’t miss the chance to get more of the stones, especially since the husede were off fighting the fire he had inadvertently started on the previous level.

Down the passage, he had found literal piles of red crystals, neatly sorted by size and some ineffable quality that he didn’t quite understand, but next to those, in small bowls, were these stones. There weren’t many of each color, but he threw them all into his pack before racing back to the stairs.

Picking up a medium-sized yellow one, he handed it to the dragon, who snatched it greedily with her clawed feet, shoving it into her mouth. It was nearly too large for her to swallow, but somehow she managed, and both Kaz and Lianhua winced as they watched the solid object travel down the long, slim throat.

Once the last trace of the crystal worked its way into Li’s stomach, she opened her mouth for another, but Kaz shook his head. “These are for you, so you can take your time. I think it’s better to only eat one at a time, and let your body process it.”

Sure enough, a flush of golden ki was expanding from the dragon’s core, and Kaz felt the warmth of it trickle through their bond. He knew the single stone had sated her hunger, but she still held out her paws, waggling the fingers impatiently.

Sighing in fond exasperation, Kaz gave her the smallest yellow, then began putting the rest of the crystals back in the pouch. There were at least three dozen, and while yellow was the most common, there were some of every color, including blue. He could keep her happy and healthy for a while if he waited until she was actually hungry, though he suspected she’d have at least one more growth spurt as a result.