Four months had passed in the mortal world.
Inside the pocket-dimension the Supreme Dragon Lord had spun for him, time felt softer — elastic, warm. Days bled into nights without the cutting edge of the outside world. The air here tasted of old rain and new leaves; qi came like a steady, unending tide, unharried by armies, messengers, or the hungry eyes of gods. It was a place designed to be a wound's salve: to let torn meridians knit, to let a cultivator's mind unknot after battle.
Kael woke in a bed of grass that hummed with energy. He breathed, and the feeling of the world aligning with his ribs steadied him. His chest still ached from the last blows; his palms still trembled from the memory of Dreadfang's test. For a long moment he simply lay there and let the new world — the quiet dimension — press its quiet upon him.
Then he rose.
Training in the pocket-dimension began simply. The space was generous and strange: a small mountain to the west, a lotus lake that never cooled, a ring of standing stones that leaked soft, golden qi. Kael made the stones his dawn altar and the lake his night rest. He walked a set of movements Dreadfang had hinted at — not a dragon's kata but an exercise in restraint, a way to teach his lungs to hold the tide of power that would later need to surge and ebb on purpose.
Each morning he opened a new meridian with deliberate patience. No furious, arrogant thrusts as in the trial where he'd battered himself against monsters; here he allowed the smallest things: breath counted to a hundred, the circulation of qi through a single finger, the slow warming of a bone. His progress surprised him and didn't; the Immortal Book's mark pulsed faintly in the marrow of his chest, and that pulse made his body accept more, absorb more, adapt. Yet the mark gave no instruction. It hummed like a lamp with fuel, but no guide lit it.
That absence of guidance bred questions that would not quiet.
On the fifth day his meditation unspooled into a memory that did not belong to him.
Not a memory — an image like a shard of someone else's life: a sky that was not this sky, bones taller than palaces, a lake made of stars and burning songs beneath it. He saw a great shadow—a being who moved at the center of creation as if the world were his cloak. For a breath the image filled him, not as belonging, but as possession: he had the knowledge of what the creature had done, the terrible acts of making and unmaking, but he had not lived them. The sensation was wrong in a way he could not swallow.
When he opened his eyes he found Dreadfang standing on the ridge above the lotus lake, the dragon's human form watching like a sentinel.
"You look troubled," Dreadfang said, voice like distant furnaces cooling.
"It wasn't mine," Kael said, not looking away from the ripples in the water. "The vision the Supreme Lord showed me — it felt… staged. Not memories. Not something I had lived before. I have memories from the loop I remember, things I did differently. This… this was not part of that." His hands trembled more from confusion than fatigue.
Dreadfang watched him a long moment. When he spoke, his words were soft as ash. "You said you were a regressor."
Kael's jaw tightened. "I remember the life I lived before — the same world, the same faces — but the stakes shifted. What the Supreme Lord showed was older, older than our records, older than a single life. It could be a past life, but it could be something else — an echo impressed upon you because of what you carry."
"An echo," Dreadfang repeated. "Not the original voice."
Kael's mind chased at the dangling thought. Regressors — people who slipped back along their own timeline — often retained the bone-structure of memory. But echoes of lives they had not lived… that was different. It suggested manipulation or an overlap of souls. In the pocket-dimension's quiet he felt the mark pulsing differently: not demand, not instruction, but recognition, as if the Book itself had detected a note in him from another chord.
"Then I'm not who the Dragons said I was," Kael whispered. "I'm… a mistake?"
Dreadfang's molten eyes did not soften. "You are what the Book chose. That is a fact. What remains is how you become what it desires."
The dragon's mouth drew into a thin line. "There is another truth you must accept: what was shown to you may have been a prism, not a portrait. The Supreme Lord does not lie; he sees differently. He sees cause as much as effect. He glimpsed a life-thread that intersects with yours. He did not say that you were that thing. He said the Book recognized something. Your discomfort is reasonable. But it is not proof of error."
Kael turned that over in his chest like a raw nut. The quieter Dreadfang grew, the more his own voice intruded. I am a regressor, Kael reminded himself. He could remember his loop: the failed alliances, the face of his father in the trial grounds, the small kindnesses of his mother. None of those details matched the grand tableaux of an ancient, star-born dragon. But memory could be fractured. Some threads were missing.
If he could not trust the vision he'd been shown, then his path would have to be rooted in a different thing entirely: practice. Sweat. The stubborn friction of hours behind the lotus. If the mark answered him only with hunger and not with instruction, he would respond with action.
So he worked.
---
Training in the pocket-dimension became ritual. He took the lotus lake as his teacher for the first month: sit, breathe, sink. He learned to take the Book's resonance and let it trace his dantian without letting it flood him. He forced himself to feel the boundaries between his spirit and the mark. He mapped his qi like a cartographer mapping a new land.
Three months into his stay — a blur of discipline and small breakthroughs — the outside world shifted unpleasantly. News came not as news but as an ache: the pocket-dimension did not block all sound of the mortal realm. Once a week Dreadfang allowed a whisper in, and Kael's ears filled with fragments: "clans… children… death… war."
Outside, things worsened. The secret reports that slid through the crack between realms bore the shape of ruin: the clans had bled their heirs in the concussive trials. Enmity flared where grief had burned hottest. Old debts became new reasons to test blades. Small border disputes steepened into siege plans. Kael's heart tightened at each despatch, but he had little power to change anything from within a pocket-dimension. He had insisted on the clone condition; Dreadfang had required Tier Three before he would fashion a simulacrum that could step into the world.
One whisper rose from the noise and lodged like a splinter: the Princess.
Four months. That was the span the world gave him; four months the princess had been hollowed by worry and fury. The whisper told of a night three months before — a meeting in the Azura gardens that had ended in blood.
The picture hardened cruelly the night Dreadfang allowed Kael a clearer window: Darius, emboldened by the absence of his brother and resenting the princess's favor, had come to the palace three months prior. He had appeared at the threshold with the brazen insolence of someone who expected fortune to fall into his hands. In the hush of court, he had lied — cold and practiced — spoke of Kael's death in Mystica and then pressed his request for marriage upon Elira. He wore grief like a garment and offered his hand as if fate demanded reward.
The princess had not reacted like the court expected. Her eyes — sharp enough to shave — had cut through his lies and lit with a fire that had nothing to do with decorum. She'd told him to leave her alone. He had not. He'd reached. He'd thought the path cleared when many believed Kael dead. He misread love for a prize.
When he dared to force his touch, the princess did not scream for guards. She acted.
Darius did not come back the same man. He lost his right hand — severed with royal will and the edge of a blade Elira never let leave her side. The rumor spread like oil across water. Some said she cut his hand herself to mark betrayal, some said high priests did it to show the world that the Azura line would not be toyed with. In any case, the image was brutal: Darius, left with one hand and a perfect mask of grief.
Three months had been enough to twist the contortions of court into something uglier. The clans smelled weakness and moved to feast. Border skirmishes flared into pitched battles. The continent's factionalism erupted into open war where the dead of Mystica had once seemed a tragedy; now they were a casus belli. Kael listened to this and felt the weight of it as if a bell had been struck inside his chest.
He also felt, under a lower layer, the small poisonous thrill of being missed. The princess' fury had been a furnace that might have saved him: the stories said she'd ordered the Veynar crest protected, negotiated with Azura's ministers, and turned vengeance into policy. That might have saved the Veynar clan from an immediate collapse. But the war had not waited for kindness.
Whatever the outside world became, Kael had a mission in the dimension: reach Tier Three.
The final weeks of his month-long regimen condensed into a single, concentrated push. Dreadfang visited but rarely, offering instruction in the language of restraint — how to temper a surge so it did not explode the vessel that held it. Kael learned to pull at the Immortal Book's resonance with two fingers, to crack a seam of power and then hold it closed like a surgeon sealing a wound.
On the twentieth day of his last month inside the pocket-dimension, the pressure hit him like an avalanche. He'd spent the dawn tempering the stream of qi into his lower burners. He'd spent noon biting the taste of ash and iron. He sat by the lotus lake as dusk came, the water blackened to a sheen that reflected the core of his being.
He stepped into the meditation circle and began the final phase Dreadfang had given him: "Consolidate your current, and then hammer it into the bone of your dantian until the marrow heats."
He breathed and held the breath; he called the qi and let it roll up his spine like a tide; he felt the Immortal Book's pulse quicken as if it were breathing with him. Lines of internal pressure crawled along his ribs. His mind sharpened to a pinprick. Pain flared and then blossomed into a clarity he had never tasted.
The breakthrough was not a sound but an ungluing. A seam in his chest opened — not violent, but deep, bone-honest. Qi cannoned into a new configuration. His dantian expanded. A new core bloomed within him, not a star but a furnace, and heat poured into every vein.
For a single, suspended moment Kael felt the universe tilt: the lotus lake held its breath, the stones hummed, and Dreadfang's silhouette froze on the ridge like a statue.
Then the pressure broke.
It was like surf hitting cliffs: he collapsed to his knees, laughing and crying at once. The pain had been enormous; the reward was the same. When he opened his eyes the world looked crisper. Colors had a sharper edge. His hearing admitted new harmonics: the faint whisper of far-off clashing blades, the thin hum of the Book within him aligning to a new register.
He had reached Tier Three — the middle.
The triumph was private and small, but it changed everything. Dreadfang descended and placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. The dragon's fingers did not crush; they anchored.
"You have done well," Dreadfang said. There was no praise of the melodramatic kind; just a notation of fact. "Tier Three middle is sufficient. I will craft the vessel."
Kael's chest tightened with more than relief — a terror spiced with hunger. The vessel would allow him to set a simulacrum outside: a body to walk between courts, to touch his family's hands without the gods feeling the immortal scar. But the path from earthen body to spirit transfer was fraught. The clone would be limited — a shell with his presence dimmed — but it would be visible and useful. It was not the same as walking himself into the world, but it was the nearest thing.
Dreadfang's eyes probed him. "There is one thing," the dragon said. "Once the vessel is made, you will not return to it if it becomes compromised. The gods will know the surface is false if you display divine pressures. You must learn the art of false breathing: emulating lesser qi signatures while your real self remains hidden."
Kael nodded. The tasks were technical, practical — the sort of small sacrifices that meant survival. He had been reborn into this game of shadows and gods. The Book had chosen; now he would prove it by practice.
When he lay that night on the lotus grass, sleep came easily. His last thought before the dark was not an answer about the strange non-memory. It was steadier, more urgent: the world out there needed him. The clans bled; the princess was an ember of wrath and love that could either burn or shelter them. Darius, maimed and proud, still schemed beneath the mask of one-handed grief. War roared like a beast the world could not calm on its own.
He had a new core. He had time, precious and careful, to teach it to obey him. He would be the one to live the next lines of his life, not a ghost of some grander being, not a puppet of echoes. The regressor in him would learn anew: memory could guide, but it would not be a master. He would be.
At dawn he rose and began the next cycle — a new set of meditations, breathing the soft green of the pool, sharpening until even the silence had the sound of readiness. The footsteps toward Tier Three late would become steps to something more: the making of a body that could face kings, the crafting of pretense to walk among gods' shadows. And beneath it all the odd, intrusive memory waited — patient, inscrutable — like a page of a book stuck between chapters. He had not the time to pry it free yet. There would be time later. For now the world awaited him, and the book that had chosen him hummed, as quietly as a heart.