The first thing Aaron learned about training under Sirath Vael was that the old mage had very little patience for complaints and unlimited patience for questions.
Complaints: "This hurts" or "I'm tired" or "Can we stop" — these were met with silence or, occasionally, a precise two-sentence explanation of why stopping was inadvisable. The silence was worse than the explanation.
Questions: "Why does the element flow counter-clockwise through the left meridian?" or "What determines the absorption rate in the dantian, and can it be improved deliberately?" — these could pull Sirath into discussions that lasted hours, the old mage's voice growing more engaged, more alive in Aaron's head as they went deeper into the theory, until Aaron forgot he was cold and the sun was setting and his legs had gone numb from sitting on mountain rock.
He exploited this shamelessly from the third week onward.
"You're redirecting me," Sirath observed, on one of these occasions — Aaron was twelve by then, midway through the four years, and had gotten very good at the redirection — "by asking questions you already know the answers to, in order to extend the theory discussion and reduce the practical training time."
"I'm asking questions I mostly know the answers to," Aaron corrected. "Your answers fill in gaps I didn't know I had."
"And conveniently, while I am filling them, you are not doing the breathing cycles."
"The breathing cycles give me time to think. Sometimes the best thinking happens when you're doing something else."
A long pause. "That is true," Sirath admitted. "It's also a rationalisation."
"Both things can be right."
A sound from Sirath that might, in a different man, have been a laugh. "Continue the cycles."
Aaron continued the cycles.
— — —
The four years did not pass quickly. They passed the way mountain seasons pass — slowly, each day distinct, marked by small changes that accumulated into large ones. Aaron tracked his progress the way he'd once tracked grades in his past life: with obsessive attention to the numbers and a deep suspicion of any improvement that felt too easy.
The compatibility level rose in stages, each stage harder than the last.
Low to Medium happened in the first eight months. He barely felt it.
Medium to High took another year and a half. There was a day — he was seven and a half, sitting in a thunderstorm on the summit because Sirath had pointed out that atmospheric disruption increased elemental density — when something in his dantian shifted like a door easing off a rusted hinge. He sat in the rain and felt silver light moving through him with a smoothness it hadn't had before, and thought, very quietly: oh.
High to Exceptional would take the remaining time, and be the hardest.
"This is the part," Sirath told him, "where most people who are trying to do what you're doing give up. Not because of failure. Because of proximity to success. You can see the barrier. You know you are close. And the work that remains looks identical to the work that already passed, and your mind begins to whisper that you've been cheated somehow."
"And what's the solution?"
"The solution is to understand that the barrier is not a wall. It is a membrane. You will not break it by force — you will saturate it, slowly, until the pressure on both sides is equal and it dissolves."
Aaron thought about this. "So it's not a test of strength. It's a test of patience."
"No. It is a test of whether you can apply strength patiently." Sirath's voice was careful. "There is a difference. Patience alone is just waiting. You must continue to push, every day, while accepting that the result is not yet visible."
— — —
During those four years, Aaron also watched.
This was the other training Sirath hadn't formally assigned but never tried to stop — Aaron's habit of observation. The village went through its rhythms and Aaron catalogued them. Social hierarchies. Resource flows. Who deferred to whom, and why. The way the village chief interacted with the mage association representative who came twice a year to collect records. The way the nobles' carriages passed through on the road below the mountain and the farmers stepped back without being asked.
"You're studying the world," Sirath observed.
"I'm studying the empire," Aaron said. "So that when I leave the village I don't do anything that marks me as someone from a village. Knowledge of how power works is worth as much as magic, in most situations."
A pause. "That is a sophisticated reading of social dynamics for someone who is ten years old."
"I was older than this in my previous life." Aaron was quiet for a moment. "And where I came from, power worked differently. It took me a few years to map the differences."
Sirath asked, occasionally, about Earth. Not with the insatiable curiosity of someone desperate for novelty, but with the quiet interest of a scholar — specific questions, precise, building a model in his mind of what that world was like. He never revealed what he did with those answers. Aaron suspected he was cross-referencing, finding patterns, filing information the way Aaron filed it.
"You approach magic the way a scholar from your previous world would approach a natural phenomenon," Sirath said once. "As though it is a system with rules, and the rules exist to be discovered."
"Isn't that what it is?"
"Yes." A long pause. "But most mages approach it as though it is a gift to be accepted, not a system to be understood. The difference in outcome, compounded over a lifetime, is considerable."
— — —
There was one conversation, near the end of the third year, that Aaron returned to often afterward.
He had asked about the Ten — not about their power, not about their techniques, but about them. Who they had been. What they had wanted.
Sirath had been quiet for so long that Aaron thought he might not answer.
Then: "We were ten people who reached the limit of what this world allowed, and could not accept that a limit existed."
"What do you mean, 'what this world allowed'?"
A careful pause. "Every world has a ceiling. The highest rank in this empire's understanding is 'god-level.' Beyond that — they simply say there is nothing. The path ends." Sirath's voice was level, but something ran underneath it. "We discovered that the ceiling was not a ceiling. It was a boundary. Between this world and what lies beyond it."
Aaron went very still.
"And the ten of you tried to go beyond it," he said slowly.
"Yes."
"What happened?"
"That," Sirath said, in a voice that closed like a door, "is the story with context. That requires trust." A pause. "Ask me again when you reach the Five Element Academy. By then, I'll have had time to decide how much to tell you, and you will have had time to prove you can handle it."
Aaron sat with that for three days before he could let it go.
— — —
On the morning of his ninth birthday, Aaron climbed the mountain before dawn.
He sat in his usual spot on the summit, watching the sky turn from black to grey to gold, and ran one final compatibility cycle. He could feel the barrier — that gossamer membrane that had resisted him for so long — trembling, not from exhaustion, but from saturation. Every single cycle he'd run in the past six months had loaded more pressure against it, particle by particle, until the barrier was stretched thin as paper.
He waited for the exact moment the sun crested the horizon.
Then he breathed in, gathered everything he had, and pushed.
Not explosively. Not with a shout. He simply exhaled and allowed the accumulated pressure to equalise.
The barrier dissolved.
Silver light flooded through him — not painful, not dramatic, just the steady warm clarity of something fitting into its proper place. His dantian filled and settled. His breath came easily. The space element moved through him the way blood moves, without effort, as though it had always been meant to.
Sirath said nothing for a long time.
Then, quietly: "Exceptional."
Aaron looked at his hands. In the morning light, he could almost see the silver in the air around them — clear now, no longer faint or tentative, but constant.
"One week until the test," Sirath said.
"I know."
"Are you nervous?"
Aaron considered this honestly. "No," he said. "I know exactly what I'm going to show them, and exactly how much I'm going to hold back. Being nervous would require not knowing."
Sirath's voice held something he rarely let into it — something that took Aaron a moment to identify as warmth. "Let's go back to the village," the old mage said. "Rest. Tomorrow the real work begins."