The ash never settled in Arc Spire.
It danced like restless ghosts between the needle towers, drifting across broken bridges and blood-washed alleyways. Fires burned in silence here, swallowing stone and steel alike, but never quite managing to devour the sky. The Spire had always been like this—a city dying loudly and living quietly.
Kael Veyr moved through the smoke with the practiced silence of someone who had learned early that sound meant attention, and attention meant death.
He pressed his back to the shattered wall of a collapsed merchant guild, fingers wrapped around a rusted dagger too blunt for a clean kill. The mana smog here was thick, glowing faintly green with residual discharge. Somewhere ahead, he could hear the hum of a broken core, still leaking energy—just enough to be valuable, just enough to get him killed if anyone else found it first.
"Come on, old beast," he muttered, scanning the fractured atrium beyond the arch. "Sing for me."
The atrium was a cathedral once, long before the Empire had turned it into a weapon factory. Statues of the Twelve Ascended stood cracked and hollow, their faces burned off by the Mana Reclamation Wars. Now, only the choir chamber remained untouched—domed ceiling intact, lined with golden acoustics and old glyphs no one dared translate.
Kael didn't believe in old gods, but he believed in mana. And right now, it whispered.
The source was a ruined conduit at the altar. Embedded in its cracked marble was something rare: a living core, pulsing with chaotic energy, wrapped in bands of ancient silver.
He grinned.
"Jackpot."
But the smile died when the air shifted.
A low resonance hummed through the stone beneath his boots—like the prelude of a song unsung. He turned slowly.
The glyphs on the choir walls were glowing.
Not passively. Actively. Reacting.
Kael stepped back, raising the dagger instinctively, though it would do little against what came next.
---
> [SYSTEM SYNCING… ERROR.]
[Legacy Code Detected.]
[Manual Override Required.]
---
"What…?"
The air split like parchment.
From the shadows behind the altar stepped a figure cloaked in ash-gray robes, face masked in bone. In one hand, he held a tuning fork etched with runes. In the other—nothing. Yet the very mana in the chamber bowed to him.
Kael froze. He'd heard rumors. Myths of a secret order that listened to the world's heartbeat and silenced it with a gesture.
The Silent Choir.
"You trespass upon hallowed cadence," the figure said, his voice like wind through hollow bone.
Kael took a step back. "Look, I didn't know this was your song. I'll just—quietly leave and pretend I never heard anything hum, alright?"
The figure raised the tuning fork.
"Your blood hums louder than any relic, Veyr-born."
Kael barely had time to blink before the fork struck stone—and the air exploded.
Sound tore through the chamber like a blade, fracturing stone and rupturing the core behind the altar. Kael was thrown back, slammed into the base of a statue, ribs snapping on impact.
Pain. Real. Crippling. Beautiful.
Because in that moment of agony, the world paused—and something ancient woke inside him.
---
> [SYSTEM REBOOTING… SUCCESSFUL.]
[REQUIEM BLOODLINE CONFIRMED.]
[Mana Signature: Kael Veyr.]
[UNLOCKING BASE FUNCTIONALITIES:]
— EXTRACT
— MERGE
— ECHOFORGE
— REALITYFOLD
Warning: System is unstable. Ascension Path is fractured. Begin recalibration?
---
The pain faded, replaced by warmth. Not fire. Song.
Kael's veins lit with symphonic magic. He saw threads of light weaving through the air—vibrations of mana itself, humming in visible frequency. The statue beside him wept golden dust. The broken blade at his side reshaped, humming, tuning itself.
He stood.
The Choir mage stepped back in alarm. "Impossible… The Song was severed."
Kael looked down at his hand. It glowed with a pale blue fire, notes dancing between his fingers.
"You wanted silence," he said softly. "But I'm the last verse."
And then he sang.
---
The chamber erupted in harmonic fury.
Notes spun into blades, slicing through mana fields and carving glowing arcs into the stone. Kael moved like he'd known the dance his entire life, instinct guiding him as the Echoforge function awakened in his soul. Weapons crafted from resonance appeared in his hands—a blade of chimeglass, a buckler of suspended rhythm.
He clashed with the Choir mage in a duel not of strength, but tempo.
The mage unleashed Sound Collapse, a spell that compressed frequencies to implode space. Kael countered with Pulse Overdrive, a burst of percussive magic that reversed the air pressure and snapped the spell apart.
With every parry, he grew faster.
With every wound, the System adapted.
---
> [MANA THREAD ABSORBED: SOUNDCOLLAPSE (Rank B)]
[SKILL MERGE INITIATED… SUCCESSFUL.]
[NEW SKILL: CHOIR FRACTURE — Break defensive harmonics with tempo inversion.]
---
By the time Kael's blade struck the mage's throat, he didn't feel like a survivor.
He felt like a weapon.
---
The Silent Choir mage collapsed, robes unraveling into dust. The tuning fork clattered to the ground, silent at last. Kael stared at it, breathing hard, heart still echoing with rhythm and light.
The System whispered.
---
> [Level 2 Achieved.]
[Ascension Path: Echoborne Initiate]
[Access to deeper functions pending core stability.]
---
Outside, the sky cracked with stormlight. Somewhere far above, the Imperial Mana Grid flickered. The world had felt him awaken.
Kael turned his eyes toward the dark beyond the cathedral.
They would come now.
The Guilds. The Empire. The Choir. The cursed ones.
Let them come.