Talent.
What was talent? What did it mean? Who had it—and how did one find their talent?
In the world Azriel and Jasmine came from, talent was the rank a person could reach by absorbing only the mana in the air—no mana cores taken from humans or creatures slain. To measure that ceiling, humans built a device called a mana orb. The stronger the glow, the higher the potential rank.
But potential does not mean attainable. Most people give up long before it; the work is arduous and numbingly slow—night after night, breath after breath, drawing in the thin river of the world.
The highest known rank reachable through such pure absorption was Saint, and even then few ever tested high enough to dream of it. Rarer still, in a handful of cases, the mana orb flared beyond the Saint's radiance—toward a place no public record claimed a human had reached.
