Wei Shi Lindon has lived his entire life as a cripple, forbidden to practice the sacred arts that make everyone else so powerful. He is allowed to learn only the most basic breathing exercises, and told repeatedly that nothing he does matters.
He persists, though, and struggles his way through various unnecessary duels with cunning and outright cheating. At the Seven-Year Festival, he will fight in the children's tournament—and he had better win, or he'll make a fool of his entire clan.
Meanwhile, Suriel, the Phoenix, Sixth Judge of the Abidan Court, is looking for her lost peer Ozriel. Or to be more specific, she is finding excuses not to look for him. While Cradle is his homeworld, he would never return, and if he did he would be discovered instantly. On a whim, she searches for crimes fated to occur, and decides to stop one.
At the Festival, Lindon's ill-advised fight against a higher-ranked disciple is interrupted by Li Markuth, the ascendant Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan, arriving to slaughter all the greatest sacred artists in the Valley. Lindon attempts to help... and is instantly killed.
Suriel, however, takes note of his bravery. As she reverses Li Markuth's crimes so that the Festival was never interrupted, she speaks with Lindon, even giving him a glimpse of his most likely fate. It is a good life, compared to what he has now, with a wife and children. That is, until he dies abruptly at middle age when his entire home is destroyed.
Desperate, Lindon asks Suriel for any advice on how to prevent this catastrophe. She suggests she find Yerin, the Disciple of the Sword Sage, who will be able to lead him out of the Valley and into the wider world. A world where the greatest sacred artists of the Valley are considered nothing but children, and where he will have to fight his hardest to survive every single day.
There, perhaps, he will find the power to save his home.
Unsouled is the first novel in the Cradle Series by Will Wight. It is the first of the Foundation collection.
This novel provides examples of:
- Arc Number: "Everything in Sacred Valley can be divided into four." There are four peaks, four schools, four types of techniques, and three clans plus the unaffiliated wanderers.
- Fantastic Racism: Sacred Valley has a very simple attitude towards any unsouled: They are wrong. Period. Speak up to someone else? Wrong. Happened to be nearby when someone was annoyed? Wrong. Win an honorable duel using the few sacred arts they are allowed to learn? Wrong.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Elder Whitehall attempted to make an elixir to prolong his youth. Instead, it simultaneously traps him in the body of a young boy and inflicts him with premature aging.
- Hypocrite: Lindon's own father tells him not to be greedy for demanding part of the spirit fruit. The spirit fruit he fought and bled for.
- It Only Works Once: Subverted; Lindon uses the White Fox boundary flags on the same Kazan boy twice to great effect. He's very surprised it worked a second time.
- Moral Myopia: The Heaven's Glory school murdered a guest in their home in order to steal his treasures, and then had the gall to call his disciple a murderer for fighting back. Their disapproval of Lindon is slightly more justified, but he's still backing the one who is in the right by aiding Yerin.
- Underestimating Badassery: At the end of the book, the Heaven's Glory elders assume that Lindon and Yerin will double back and re-enter the Valley because they can't believe that anyone would be able to survive outside.
- What You Are in the Dark: Heaven's Glory elders speak often of their honor and dignity. Considering that they let outsiders think Elder Whitehall is a young genius, murdered a guest in their home, and treat Lindon as an enemy for daring to win a spot in their school, it seems pretty clear that their honor only applies when someone else is looking.
