I stepped through the heavy cathedral doors and back into the vaulted corridors, the sharp click of the oak latch echoing behind me. Lysander was leaning against the opposite stone pillar, his knuckles white as he nervously gripped the hilt of his weapon, but the moment his eyes locked onto mine, he let out a massive, ragged breath of relief.
"Astraeus," he whispered, stepping forward quickly. "What happened in there? The whole plaza is whispering that the unsealing altar suffered some kind of localized collapse. The instructors were panicking, and four elite sentries sealed the northern wing."
Before I could answer, a sudden, blinding spike of absolute heat exploded right behind my sternum.
My lungs seized, my throat tightening as a cold sweat broke instantly across the back of my neck. Deep within my chest, my physical Mana Core violently contracted, expanding its newly unsealed pathways to accommodate the sudden, heavy traction of the five-day companion countdown. The core was acting like a secondary muscular pump, aggressively siphoning the raw essence circulating through my veins to incubate the slumbering cosmic presence inside. It was the signature Ignition Fever—a brutal, biological filtration process that boiled the blood and tested a commoner's cell resilience.
I didn't blink. I forced my posture into a straight line, locking my facial features into an unreadable military wall. Lysander was a trusted ally, but showing physical vulnerability in a public corridor was an invitation for every predator in the area to test my limits.
"The crystal simply overloaded under the initialization sequence," I replied smoothly, my voice flat, carrying zero traces of the internal fire burning behind my ribs. "The regional director verified my transit papers. We are cleared for the capital transports. Move."
Lysander blinked at my absolute composure, entirely oblivious to the fact that my internal channels were burning at a hundred degrees, but he fell into step right beside me. We marched out of the vaulted cathedral halls and descended toward the heavily fortified transport depot cutting through the southern edge of the frontier outpost.
The depot was a grim, high-security fortress courtyard lined with raw obsidian plates and unyielding basalt battlements. Docked inside the stone stalls were three massive, iron-reinforced carriage transports. These vehicles were monolithic armored boxes wrapped in thick, overlapping plates of black celestial ore, explicitly engineered to withstand low-echelon ambush vectors and pack attacks from mutated predators once the wheels cleared the perimeter gates.
"Transit papers," a scarred, retired vanguard soldier grunted, his hand resting casually on the pommel of a single-handed shortsword as he blocked the iron carriage door.
I didn't waste a single gesture. I reached beneath my woollen cloak, pulling out the silver-plated carriage passport Gregory Vane had handed me, and held it before his eyes. The soldier checked the Fifth Echelon authority stamp, his bored expression instantly hardening into a look of sharp, clinical respect. He stepped back immediately, swinging the heavy iron door wide.
"First cabin. Find your benches," the sentry muttered.
The moment my boots crossed the threshold and stepped inside the pressurized iron cabin, a heavy, uniform pressure slammed directly onto my shoulders. The carriage interior was lined with active gravity arrays, designed to force a student's unsealed veins to continuously adapt to extreme physical drag during the long journey to the capital. To an ordinary commoner, the sudden doubling of their body weight would cause their heart rate to spike and their knees to buckle under the sudden compression.
I absorbed the heavy torque effortlessly. My flat twenty-five attributes in strength and endurance provided a dense, flawless physical foundation that allowed my muscles to align against the drag with zero wasted movement. I walked down the narrow aisle with the smooth, balanced stride of an executioner, completely unbothered by the gravity.
The cabin was already half-filled, and the atmosphere inside was thick with immediate social tension. Sitting across the reinforced iron benches were the pampered young generation of the minor provincial noble houses. They were already clad in pristine, green-tinted iron plates, their fingers tracing the fine hilts of family-gifted rapiers. The moment we entered, their sharp eyes scanned our faded woollen cloaks and nameless travel gear, instantly identifying us as commoner students with no ancestral bloodline titles to our names.
To these high-born youths, the carriage was the first boundary of the Institute—a lawless jungle where the strong were fully expected to put their boots directly onto the faces of the weak to establish the hierarchy before the transport ever reached the capital gates.
"Hold on, peasant," a lazy, arrogant voice drawled from the middle bench.
It was a youth wearing a tailored silk tunic over his green iron chest-plate, his expression twisted into a cold, mocking smirk. It was the third son of Viscount Corin. He deliberately extended his heavy, leather-bound riding boot across the narrow aisle, completely blocking the path to the remaining empty seats, attempting to force a psychological submission.
Beside me, Lysander stiffened, his breathing turning ragged under the combined pressure of the high-gravity room and his commoner instincts urging him to cower and apologize to avoid drawing the ire of a noble house.
My dark eyes narrowed, tracking the exact micro-angles of the noble youth's posture. My perfect memory instantly triggered a lethal fragment from my past life. In the old timeline, this arrogant idiot had sat by the vanguard trench fires, drinking stolen military wine and bragging to his peers about his family's hidden financial scandals. He had openly laughed about how his father had illegally hoarded three hundred Bronze coins from the frontier garrison taxes to fund his private shortsword masteries, entirely blind to the fact that the imperial auditors would discover the fraud two winters later and execute his entire lineage.
I didn't throw a loud, childish tantrum. I simply let my hands rest calmly beneath my cloak.
Moving with optimal movement efficiency, I took a single, calculated step forward, my boot planting itself firmly right over the extended leather obstacle. I dropped into the empty iron bench opposite him with zero wasted motion, leaning back against the cold basalt frame as I looked him dead in the eye.
"Your father's private ledger is currently short by three hundred Bronze coins from the northern border garrison tax, Corin," I said, my voice quiet, carrying an icy, terrifying psychological weight that cut straight through the humming roar of the carriage's gravity arrays. "If I were you, I would spend less time stretching my legs in a public cabin, and more time praying the imperial auditors don't review the frontier tallies before the winter frost sets in."
The noble youth's smirk instantly shattered.
His face drained of all colour, turning a stark, sickly white beneath his expensive green iron helm. His chest-plate rattled against the iron bench as a cold sweat broke across his brow, his hands trembling frantically as he stared at me in absolute horror. He couldn't comprehend how a nameless, frontier commoner peasant holding a simple travel passport could possibly know the deepest, most treasonous secret of his family's bloodline. The surrounding noble students went dead silent, their arrogant glares instantly evaporating into a state of tense, bewildered confusion as they looked between my calm, unreadable expression and their petrified peer.
"Lysander, sit down," I commanded calmly.
Lysander swallowed hard, his eyes wide with absolute shock, but he dropped onto the bench right beside me without a single word. The heavy iron door of the transport carriage violently slammed shut from the outside, the massive locks clicking into place as the heavy wheels began to grind aggressively against the dirt road. The five-day journey to the capital had officially begun, and before the noble heirs had even cleared the outpost gates, the first predator of the jungle had already been silently dismantled.