Tepid breaths caress her face, and a familiar view begins to come into focus. Returning to her senses, all that surrounds her is no different from how she recalls it. The burdenbeast carved of wood by her fellow disciple still leans against the old camphor tree, a little black tuskbeast pressed against it, polishing its tusks. The rough, frayed strands of the bamboo hat's brim brush past her forehead, carrying the familiar smell of damp fiber. Saga is mentally startled, for the monk who paces before her is none other than her head priest. She hurriedly gathers her mind and corrects her posture, but her stiff back forbids her from standing up fully straight. When she first descended the mountain, the young Saga reached only to the head priest's shoulders in height, and now, she is stooped and decrepit by the weight of a hundred springs' rainshowers and a hundred autumns' falling leaves, and once again stands no taller than her head priest's shoulders. 'Head priest, this humble servant of...' The old head priest seems to pay no mind to what she was to say, and simply twists his head, signaling to her to move her legs, then unceremoniously thrusts out a mop. She can only drag her heavy legs, trembling shakily as she avoids it, while stammering in her perplexity. The mop's handle, Saga recognizes—it is the wooden pole with which the head priest fought her in the past. Only, for some unknown reason, it is now wrapped in cloth and given a new life cleaning floors. 'This... This foolish disciple is ashamed, yet I still have doubts for which I must seek answers! 'I travelled on the outside, and it has been a century at present, yet here and now, it seems to grow ever indistinct. When I first descended, I had thought clarity and sense to be given for all things, and indeed the realm abounded such that it eluded me, but in every place all still had answers to seek, and so in the scrolls of Master Dusk did I linger for ten turns of the year, and still felt naught but wonder. 'Yet afterwards, that sense of which I believed in lost all sense. The more I saw, the more I felt that the people and the matters of the realm were all of the same single cloth. Our lives in the realm are no more than a mirror, perhaps reflecting oneself, or others, with color then drawn from every part that paints itself over the figure in the mirror, to mend, to make up, and no more. People paint that mirror full, so dense that no light passes, and believe they comprehend good and evil through, veracity from falsity. I sought knowledge and pursued learning for a century, and here in the end, I ask thee lookest within the bag of my travels, and see all I have obtained is dirtied mirrors. I do not understand. If the state of the realm is all but so, then where can Reason still be found?' Only once Saga has finished speaking does the old head priest cease his handiwork and lift his head to answer: 'If you are a burdenbeast, then you can find it.' Thus he ends, and without waiting for further remark from her, he raises the mop, and strikes straight for her face. It is afternoon when Saga awakes from her dream with a start. Screwing her eyes, she finds it was the burdenbeast she was travelling with, licking at her face with its rough tongue out of impatience. 'Very well! Let us go!'