There is a fine line between insanity and brilliance. Our Prince uses that line as a skipping rope. -A common phrase in the old Lanyue Kingdom.

Battling our way through the streets was brutal. Spirits hounded us at every turn, and it made progress slow as Satoro, Lin, and I all fought to carve a path to the armillary.

"How much further is it?" Lin shouted from the ground. He swung his sword, slicing clean through a spirit which dispersed in a burst of qi.

"It's around the corner," shouted Satoro with a flourish of Heixin, "which you'd know if you got out more!"

I hoped that was true. The lack of silver qi in the air was worrying. If we were so close, then there should have been traces of light shining in the air, even if in the midst of the blackout. Yet, only void qi swallowed my vision, blotting out everything around us.

Eclipse thrummed under my feet. I urged it higher, drawing an arrow back on my bowstring. Piercing light erupted from the arrowhead as it streaked forward like a star in the night to end the life of a particularly dense shadow before it could creep up behind Satoro.

The Oni Prince was a sight to behold, just as he always was. His glaive swung in wide arcs around him, glimmering with the jade qi of his path. Every spirit that fell was dragged into the blade, their qi trapped and siphoned into the oni with every swing. What injuries he sustained were quickly healed as he waded through the shadows. Such was the essence of his path: the Path of the Unrelenting Warrior.

Yet, for all his skill and endurance, he wasn't at his full strength, far from it, in fact. Compared to the Ascendant I'd fought and been beaten by a dozen times during my own ascension, this oni was slow and feeble. Too many blows made it past his defenses. Claws cut into skin that should have been able to resist a sword, blisters formed from void qi that should never have touched him, and through it all, his own strikes, though perfectly acceptable for the enemies we faced, would have been easily blocked by anything beyond the rank of Salt.

"You're getting slow, old man," I called, releasing another arrow to finish off a spirit he'd clipped before it could bite his leg.

A murderous flash of fury ignited in Satoro's eyes. A flash of jade arced between us, and I was forced to dive close to the ground, only to have Heixin's backend forcefully jabbed into my ribs.

"Like you're one to talk, Pipsqueak," he growled back. "You're not the only one who's had to make sacrifices to remain out of the limelight."

"Will you two focus?" Lin shouted.

I glared at Satoro one last time before pulling another arrow from my quiver and nocking it to the string. The arrow shone bright as I urged Eclipse higher off the ground. Aiming at the ground, I loosed it, triggering the Heaven's Rain technique. True to its name, twelve arrows of pure light rained down on the street below, slamming into the ground and breaking the wall of shadowy spirits enough for Lin and Satoro to pass on foot. Once they were through, we rounded the corner, and I took a moment to land, drawing Eclipse back into my free hand as we witnessed the horrible scene before us.

The square before us was illuminated by the dying light of a great sphere at the center of a grassy plaza. A great dragon, carved from metal twisted its long body around the sphere, but it was still and dark, its power faded entirely. Though I couldn't see the array that should have shone beneath the orb, I was quite certain that it, too, was dim and dying.

"Behold, one of the last armillaries of Half-Moon Hearth," Satoro said. "You know what happens if too many of them die, right?"

Of course I did. What kind of question was that? I might not have known every detail of their design, but I knew what they were for.

The purpose of the armillaries was two-fold. First, they were to provide anchor points throughout the city that would hold the fabric of this dimension together like stitches in fabric. Second, the light they provided acted as a shield, preventing external threats from gaining access to those taking sanctuary within. The complex array network was such that, should any one armillary be damaged or destroyed, the rest of the twenty-nine armillaries across the city would make up the difference so that the city was always perfectly protected.

The image of the city as we first entered it stuck in my mind. Of the twenty-nine stars that should have shone brightly across the city, only thirteen remained. If the fourteenth district was lost, as well, it could be the tipping point that shattered the whole system.

If it went dark…more than just this district could be in jeopardy.

"The spirits seem to be gathering around the orb," Lin said. "How are we going to push them back enough to repair it?"

"Help me get there, and I'll do the rest," I answered. Eclipse was already hovering at my side. I stepped onto the blade, putting my hand to the string of my bow. Next to me, Satoro's Heixin glimmered with qi as it, too, began to hover next to him.

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Lin sighed. "I guess I'll take the ground, then."

Together, we raced for the light. Satoro took the left, flying high before taking his glaive in hand in a vicious dive towards the ground. Spirits fell and were consumed into him in a brilliant flash of qi in the darkness. On the right, I zipped and dodged between the attackers, closing my eyes and letting Flash Forward guide me through the onslaught of enemies. Once I was at their center, I launched myself off Eclipse's blade, twisting in the air and firing a shining arrow at the ground at the void spirit cluster. Light exploded around it as blades of shining silver erupted from the ground to shred our foes. And, at the center, was Lin. Grounded as he was, he was closest to the grass that covered the ground of Armillary Square. Where his feet tread, the grass flourished with emerald qi, entangling spirits as they tried to reach him. Tangled as they were, they had no defense before they were cut down by his blade.

For every spirit and shade we cut down, three more took their place. Though we carved our way through ground and air to the armillary, the path soon closed behind us, filled in by a dozen horrors that wanted nothing more than to inflict their pain on us.

"Get that light back on, Pipsqueak!" Satoro shouted, landing on the small dais that supported the armillary's auxiliary array structures.

Lin flung a handful of seeds at the base of the dais, urging them to grow in record time. They shone with the adaptive qi of his core, growing into a resilient wall of vines and leaves that resisted the corrosive touch of the void. When his wall was complete, his eyes met mine and he nodded.

"We'll hold them here. Do what you need to."

I nodded, sheathing Eclipse while I examined the dais.

Nothing seemed wrong. The qi arrangements were still in place, carved deep into stones that had been enchanted millennia ago to resist the weathering of time. The circles were still sharp, the lines still straight, and the characters still clear in the stone surrounding the central orb. The only thing missing was the spark of qi that should have flowed through the intricate array from the orb above.

That meant the problem was in the orb, not the arrays, which was fortunate. I was far more familiar with its workings than the dais beneath my feet.

I reached upward, letting qi flow freely from my fingertips into the orb. The armillary reacted immediately, recognizing my qi signature. Threads of dim silver traced through the air, wrapping around me and into me. I closed my eyes, letting that light carry my mind upward.

My insides wrenched sideways, and the fragile connection wavered. Something was wrong. It was like I was being squeezed, stretched, and pulled through a reed. I opened my eyes, only to see the threads of silver buried in my skin. The pure moonlight wove and twisted into my chains, binding and entangling me until I could barely move.

"Yoru?" Lin called. I couldn't answer. The air was being squeezed from inside me.

"He's fine," Satoro answered. "He's just accessing the system."

"He looks like he's in pain."

The oni laughed. "Of course he is. He's a void spirit, just like these things." He sliced through another foe to prove the point. "The difference is that he's a vain bastard whose qi provides a good imitation of a flesh being. The system may well unravel that imitation in order to establish the connection."

"That sounds dangerous. Why didn't you say so before!?" Lin protested.

"He knew what he was getting into."

I wanted to protest, saying I most certainly did not know what I was getting into. How was I supposed to know that a void spirit would be eaten by my defenses?! I never used them after I was turned into one!

But, there was no getting out of it. My body was dissolving, being pulled inch by inch out of my form and into the orb above. After a long, painful minute, the connection stabilized, and I was gone.

Or, at least, my physical form was gone. My qi, my core, my mind and soul were all in the armillary. From there, I could feel the ancient qi that fueled it. The light of an age long past was flickering, and from within, I immediately could see why.

It was starving. Moon qi was strongest at the full and new moons, where the twin aspects of reality were each at their strongest, but what if there was no moon in the sky? The qi of this armillary had been severed from the primal source and would dwindle and die without an alternate source.

This doesn't make any sense, I thought. So long as I live, moonlight should be drawn in, even here.

Something…or someone…had cut it off.

Suddenly, it all made sense. No wonder I had passed out on arrival to the Black City. The armillary system was greedy for any drop of my qi it could get. When the voidlight eclipse had shone in the sky above, it was like striking the system with a bolt of lightning, giving it enough power to last for several more weeks.

That trick wouldn't work twice, though. Aside from the fact that I couldn't command the eclipse at will, the arrays within the orb that acted as redundancies to the energy input, those which certainly channeled my voidlight on the day we arrived, had all been damaged. It was distinctly likely that it was my own qi, altered by the destructive nature of untamed void, was what caused the damage.

But…how to fix something so simple, yet so complex, as this? It needed qi, but I didn't have enough to safely give. I had no way to repair the auxiliary arrays, not without resources and a fair bit of help from an expert.

Shi Reili would have known what to do, I thought miserably.

She always knew what to do. I might have been the Tsuyuki child gifted with a bountiful mind, but my brilliance had nothing on hers. She was a true genius. When Lanyue was suffering from the qi drought, and people were dying in the streets, it was Reili who came up with the solution.

Granted, her solution was to remove her core, fuse it with mine, and turn me into a voidspawn, but at least, it had worked for a while. My qi had exploded in potential, fused with the limitless expanse of the void to become voidlight, which was both moon qi and void qi, yet neither at the same time…

I paused. Was the solution really that simple? Was Reili still a brilliant genius even thirty thousand years after her death?

The armillary was dying because it lacked the moon qi to maintain a stable system. It needed more qi to function, and what did we have lots of?

Void qi.

It would be risky. I knew more than anyone the dangers of mixing void qi with lunar qi. Even now, I didn't have a complete grasp on what voidlight truly did, but whatever vile misfortunes it could conjure couldn't possibly be worse than the entire district falling to darkness, right? Perhaps what helped us back then could help us now…

From within the armillary, I opened my mind, listening for the void's insistent call. Some of the voices spoke of safety, of sanctuary. Perhaps those would help me achieve the impossible.

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