The last of the rings was the only one Kaz was really interested in, and now he picked it up. It was a simple, wide silver band, thick enough that the top of the inset stone was flush with the metal surface. The gem itself was a rich blue, a few shades darker than Kaz’s fur, and the bottom tip of the cut end just protruded through the inner surface of the ring, so when he held it up to a light, the stone shone deep azure, but when it was on his finger, it only caught stray glimmers of light, appearing almost black.

He slipped it onto the middle finger of his left hand, where it fit perfectly, then took it off again and handed it to Lianhua. The human turned it over a few times, smiling as she realized that the half-hidden stone was meant to be held up to the light. As he’d hoped, she created a small ki orb, this time far smaller than the first, and held the gem up to it, admiring the cerulean gleam.

Kaz motioned for her to look more closely, and her brows lifted, but she did so, leaning forward to peer through the stone. Kaz waited, tail twitching, until she turned it just right and gasped, before letting out a yip of laughter.

“Is that… a rune? My rune?” Lianhua asked, staring from the ring to her ki orb in fascination. The rune inside the stone was miniscule, and Kaz doubted anyone who hadn’t at least started refining their eyes would be able to see it as anything except a blotch in the otherwise perfect stone.

Kaz nodded, and now his tail began to wag in earnest. “It shows runes for almost anything you look at that has ki in it. I was using the light of a red crystal to examine it, and when I looked through the gem, I saw a strange rune directly over the crystal itself. At first, I thought the rune had been carved inside the gem somehow, but no matter how I moved it, the rune was directly over the ki-crystal. Then I thought to look at one of these others,” he gestured to the bulging bag, “and realized that each color of crystal caused a different rune to appear. So, of course, I made my own light.”

He drew a quick rune in the air and filled it with ki, the warm, flickering glow of fire pushing the steam aside. Lianhua turned the ring toward it and gasped softly. Shifting, she pointed the gem toward Li, then Kaz, and even through the hovering fog, he could see that she grew a shade paler.

Silently, she dismissed her ki orb and handed the ring back to him with fingers that shook slightly. All his amusement fled as she said softly, “Kaz, what do you think this ring is for?”

He gave a half-hearted shrug, now slightly worried. “Training? You said once that your sects have tools to identify what kind of ki a student can use, so they know the best way to teach them. I thought this might be one of those. Or maybe it’s to help people learn the runes? I know all the ones for the various colors of ki now, though they change a little depending on what I look at, and if the person or object has more than one kind of ki, it shows something completely different, depending on the combination.”

Linahua shook her head. Picking up one of the reeds she had removed from her wet hair, she began winding the long, damp strands back up, as if she needed something to do with her hands.

“When I looked at my ki-light, that’s exactly what I saw,” she told him, pinning one coil of hair with a practiced stab. “The rune was the original Diushi symbol for ‘Life’, with the bars indicating ‘Triple’. The modern version is simpler, but if a scholar looked at it, they would immediately know what my ki elements are.”

Twisting the other half of her hair, she pinned it on top of the first, creating an elegant style spoiled only by the fact that it was slightly lopsided and had small loops and tendrils protruding from it, which was far from her usual tidy appearance.

“What do you think I saw when I looked at Li?” she asked, turning awed eyes on the little dragon, who preened beneath the look.

Kaz tilted his head, ears perked with interest. “Not ‘dragon’, then? I wondered, because you showed me that rune once, and it looks very similar.”

Lianhua gave a small snort of laughter, but shook her head. “The two runes are very close, and for a long time, scholars thought that ‘dragon’ meant something very different, which is why they were confused when some of our oldest scrolls said they were eating people and destroying villages. No, Li’s rune is ‘Divine.’ She’s exactly what I once suggested you might be; a divine beast.”

Li gave a hissing click, unsure if she was being complimented or insulted, and Lianhua laughed again, color returning to her cheeks. “The term just means that the creature started out as a beast, not that they still are one,” Lianhua reassured the dragon. “In fact, divine beasts are more feared and respected than any common cultivator, and are very powerful. Many of them are also quite old and wise, so a cultivator will sometimes go on a quest to find one and ask their advice about what to do to restart their cultivation when it stalls.”

Her lips twitched. “It is something of a last resort, because most divine beasts are at least as likely to eat you as to aid you, so taking them an exquisite or rare gift is highly recommended.”

Li settled back, looking pleased, then turned an accusatory gaze on Kaz.

He held up his hands in a placatory gesture. “I don’t have anything like that to give you.”

Her golden gaze turned to the gem-encrusted ring lying on the stone between Kaz and Lianhua, and Kaz shook his head. “You’ll get the ki-crystals, I promise, but leave the other things alone. We don’t know everything they do yet, and while feeding them to you wouldn’t be a waste, exactly-”

She hissed, and he stroked her head, gently scratching the itchy place right behind her budding horns that she always had trouble reaching. “I’ll find you a hundred treasures to eat, I promise. Or you can eat me, if you decide they’re not good enough.”

She sent him an image of a golden dragon chomping on a blue kobold, then spitting him out again, followed by a dramatic performance of cleaning her mouth out as if she’d bitten into something foul.

Kaz laughed. “Then I guess I’m safe, at least as long as I make sure you don’t get too hungry.”

Li hissed softly, but seemed satisfied enough with this.

Across from them, Lianhua shook her head, quietly mumbling, “I will never get used to that.” Then, growing serious again, she asked, “What do you think I saw when I looked at you, Kaz?”

Kaz shrugged. He held up his hand, looking down at the ring. “I know it’s different from Li’s rune. Simple.” He sketched it in the air. A single stroke up, followed by a widening stroke back down, at a slight angle from the first. Sitting on top of the two was a horizontal bar that was narrow at the left, and wider on the right, with a slight flick upwards.

Lianhua nodded. “It is simple, but there’s a reason for that.” She drew the rune in the air, gently pushing ki into it as she did so, so Kaz could see it.

“It’s very similar to the runes for all kinds of basic things like table, or chair. For a while we thought it was a generic term, but the context was strange, and it looks too much like the one for the foundation stage of cultivation.” Lianhua wiped away the first rune, then drew several more, ending with one that did, indeed, look very similar to the first, except that the top line was the same width all the way across.

Wiping this one away as well, the human redrew the first symbol, saying, “Then the emperor donated some documents from his family to a museum in the capital. Once more scholars were able to examine and discuss them, we realized that they were extremely old, probably from the founding of the Diushi empire. They used this symbol over and over, and we finally realized what it really meant. It’s the foundation, the basis of everything, the first emperor himself.”

Kaz’s jaw dropped. “The first emperor was a kobold?”

Lianhua gave a startled bark of laughter, and her hand flew up to cover it when she saw his ears droop. “Oh! Kaz, no. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that there are a hundred extant paintings and statues of First Emperor Long, and he may have been many things, but he wasn’t a kobold. Actually,” she looked embarrassed, “he looked a bit like me. He had white hair and purple eyes, with very fair skin. He was much taller, though. He’s described as being well over six feet tall, possibly as much as seven feet.”

Kaz’s ears went back up, and he looked at her curiously. “Long? And he looked like you?”

Ducking her head, Lianhua admitted, “My family claims direct descent, as does the current imperial family. Emperor Long had many wives, and ruled for one hundred years before passing the throne to his first-born son, who also had many wives, and even more children. By now, a good number of the citizens of the Sheng empire are probably related to him, especially those of the ruling class. But yes, while my coloring is unusual, it’s highly prized among certain people, who believe it’s proof we bear a more direct line to the emperor.”

Leadership of kobold tribes changed on a regular basis, and while a daughter of the chief was more likely to be strong enough to lead the next generation, that wasn’t guaranteed. Kaz was realizing that humans had a very different system of determining who would lead than his people did, but he wasn’t sure what that system was. He knew ‘king’ and ‘emperor’ meant a chief of chiefs, and the kobolds in the Deep had chiefs who controlled not only their own tribes, but many others, so the concept wasn’t too strange to him. Still, there was something he was missing, and he didn’t know what it was.

“So this emperor had all five colors of ki as well?” he asked.

Lianhua blinked, then her expression grew excited as she said, “That’s probably exactly what it means. The runes show ki type, so obviously there’s another layer of meaning to the rune we’ve been interpreting as ‘First Emperor’. There’s no doubt that it’s used to represent Emperor Long, but when the second emperor was crowned, he used a slightly different rune.”

She drew another rune, this one with the crossbar passing through the upward and downward strokes, rather than resting on top of them. Indicating the crossbar, Lianhua said, “This bar moves downward with each emperor, so we assumed it simply represented how many generations they were from the First. All of the emperors were cultivators, so they each stepped down voluntarily, rather than dying. Each ruled for a century before passing on the throne to one of their sons, usually the eldest. That means there were eleven emperors, though the last ruled for only a decade or so before the Diushi vanished.”

Kaz was struck by a thought, and said, “Does that mean some of them are still alive? If Zhangwo was from the Diushi empire, and these emperors were also powerful cultivators, doesn’t that mean more of them could still be around?”

He was thinking of Nucai, who actually looked a great deal older than Zhangwo, and had the same white hair and amethyst eyes as Lianhua. Was it possible that he, or his dead master, was one of these long-ago emperors?

Lianhua bit her lip. “This is actually a matter of some debate among scholars. Once each emperor steps down, he’s never mentioned again. There are no records of expenses related to caring for retired emperors, like there are for their wives as they grew old, and no personal letters have been found, either. It’s incredibly rare for someone to achieve a high enough cultivation level to live that long, though.

“A regular human might live a hundred years, while someone with a Tin rank body could easily live to be a hundred and fifty, and they would be in good health for nearly their entire lives. Iron rank brings you to three hundred years of health, while peak Rhodium could make you theoretically immortal. But along with body cultivation comes spiritual cultivation, and so far as we know, it’s impossible to achieve Rhodium without also developing a core, and most people fail to do so. My grandfather is one of only three that I know of in the entire Sheng empire. After Golden Core is Nascent Soul, and once the spirit is transformed, the person is no longer human, but divine. They usually ascend to the next stage of existence, and are never seen on this plane again. Most people assume that the Diushi emperors ascended, and that’s why they seem to vanish after they leave the throne.”

Kaz rubbed the little horns forming on the back of Li’s skull thoughtfully. “What if they didn’t?” he asked. “Or not all of them, anyway. What if one or more of them came here? Rather than where all the Diushi went when their empire vanished, maybe their emperors came here when they were done ruling, and they simply created a whole new empire, inside the mountain.”