The Fourth Secret: A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure (Divine Apostasy Book 4) A. Kay (best management books of all time .TXT) 📖

needed to stay focused on making it to the summit so he could test to become a master. Hopefully, one or more Founders would be there to meet him and welcome him to the path of a Grandmaster.

Surely both Founders would be there at the summit, waiting to fight over Ruwen, or maybe offer him both Grandmaster paths like they had for Sift. Ruwen just needed to get there.

Ruwen left the glade and moved uphill. His palm read ninety-three minutes, and there was no time to waste.

Chapter 32

Ruwen moved quickly through the bamboo. The Elder Viper’s blood, or maybe its head, proved to be a potent deterrent, and he had to go out of his way to kill any nearby snakes. Each one provided a valuable minute. He moved as fast as he could, keeping his eyes open for fruit.

Half an hour from the Journeyman’s Glade, the fog began. As Ruwen climbed the mountain it grew thicker, until he could only see ten feet in front of him. Pine had warned him about this Bewildering Mist and other dangers. He didn’t feel bewildered, though, and kept his steady pace upward.

A figure appeared out of the mist, a woman hanging between two bamboo trunks and wrapped in vines like a victim of some sort of bamboo spider. Her white hair barely reached her shoulders, and her eyes were closed, likely in meditation to stop her clock. Pine had also warned against snares. Ruwen stopped and studied the area. Then he ate one of his six remaining red sorrow fruits and looked again.

It took almost the full minute of increased perception to figure out the trap’s mechanism. Satisfied, Ruwen approached the woman and easily sliced through the vines with his Elder Viper tail. She landed hard on the ground and he winced.

Ruwen kneeled next to her. That she hadn’t woken up meant she must be deep in the third meditation. He didn’t like going that deep, as he preferred to always stay aware of his surroundings. Picking up her left palm, he read her remaining minutes: eleven.

Eleven minutes might be enough in the daylight to find some fruit, or some vipers, which were much rarer here in the mist. But it really wasn’t much time at night. Ruwen looked at his own counter: eighty-six minutes. Despite the thirty minutes of traveling, he’d only lost seven minutes thanks to the vipers who had become his prey.

Ruwen bit his lip and wondered again what constituted a test and what might be real. If they were tests, he didn’t understand their point. The Steps were not about right and wrong or morality or ethics. They were about perfection of movement, efficiency, and balance. Maybe if he’d trained in the traditional way, these situations would make sense.

Ruwen remembered Sift’s reaction to the bully Slib and his bodyguard Juva in the Spirit Realm. The pair had both been savagely torn apart, but Sift had shown little empathy for them. He had said you died like you lived, and these two had tried to kill them multiple times. To Sift, the Universe had given them what they deserved.

As Ruwen thought about this, he wondered if he might actually be hurting himself by helping people. The Steps measured your ability, each one taking you further along the path as you proved your mastery. Right and wrong didn’t exist in the Steps themselves, but surely how they were used mattered.

Ruwen gritted his teeth. Learning the Steps like he had left him unprepared for these scenarios. The others here had likely followed traditional learning paths, and what did their actions tell him? Pine, a Master, had attacked Ruwen without provocation. Three Adepts had told Ruwen to hand over an old man so they could harvest his minutes.

Aggressive, winner take all behavior, and suitable for a Viper. But that logic didn’t help him, since Bamboo behavior would center on non-interference and would only react if necessary. In truth, Ruwen probably wasn’t acting in the spirit of either path.

Ruwen’s counter ticked down to eighty-five. He didn’t like this train of thought. The Steps must be more than the primal or basic natures of their namesakes. There had to be a hidden or higher meaning. He’d already wasted a minute kneeling here thinking, and worse, there was no way to know the truth. Like he’d done before, he went with what his gut told him.

Bending down, Ruwen placed his head near the woman’s neck, lifted her left hand, and repeatedly tapped his chest, transferring some of his minutes to her.

A strangled scream from the woman made him sit up. He realized his Elder Viper helmet had been directly over her face. Probably not how you’d want to exit your meditation. Her eyes were wide, and completely black. She had an alien beauty, and it took him a moment to realize why she looked familiar. The woman vaguely reminded him of the Plague Siren he’d killed in the Spirit Realm.

“Sorry,” Ruwen said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She pushed herself away and stood. After a moment of studying Ruwen, she looked down at the vines on the ground and then at her left palm. She faced Ruwen again. “Why would you help me?”

A question Ruwen didn’t have a good answer for. He shrugged. “They make for better beginnings.”

Ruwen flashed back to his first meeting with Sift. Sift had almost killed him with a poisoned hisser, and that had turned out okay. Which just provided more evidence against being nice.

The woman looked down for a moment before locking eyes with Ruwen. “Thank you for seeing more than my Infernal side.”

That confirmed Ruwen’s Plague Siren observation. “Don’t judge a book by its cover and all that.” He smiled awkwardly. “The snares are easy to spot if you know the pattern. The bamboo is further apart and there are four clumps of dead leaves between them.”

She smiled, revealing two fangs. She brought her finger up, sliced it open on the fang’s tip, and stepped up to