The first week in the Voidstone Chamber was a descent into the self. Stripped of all external stimuli, I was forced to confront the raging, chaotic symphony within me. My goal was simple and seemingly impossible: I had to learn how to conduct it.
From my analysis, I knew the core of the problem. I possessed a power source—the Dragon Heart—that operated on the principle of Supremacy. And I had a vessel—my human body and its mana circuits—that operated on the principle of Mastery through Limitation. I wasn't going to invent a new Path from scratch; that was the height of arrogance. The original Lancelot was a genius for figuring this out, and the novel made it clear his final Path was a masterpiece. My task was to recreate his work, to find the bridge between these two warring philosophies.
I decided to start with the most basic test. What happens when I try to use the power with no framework at all? Just pure will. A test of the Dragon's Path in its rawest form.
I stood, took a breath, and simply… let go. I didn't try to shape the mana or guide it. I just willed it to manifest, inviting the full force of the Dragon Heart to answer my call.
It was a mistake I would not repeat. It wasn't a flow of power; it was a hostile takeover. A supernova of white-hot mana erupted from my core, imbued with the dragon's ancient, primal arrogance. My own consciousness was drowned in an instant under the sheer weight of its will to dominate. My body locked up, muscles seizing as my mana circuits were scorched by an energy they couldn't hope to contain. The world dissolved into a static of pure, agonizing power before mercifully going black.
I woke up on the floor, my body aching with a deep, cellular exhaustion. The lesson was stark. Raw power is not the same as usable strength. Without a framework, without a discipline to give it shape and purpose, the Dragon Heart was nothing more than a self-destruct button. I needed a human Path to act as a container.
After a day of recovery, I turned to the only discipline Lancelot had truly known: the basic martial forms of the Ashworth household guard. The Path of the Body. It was a simple framework, designed for a Tier 1 Awakened to circulate small amounts of Aether to reinforce their strikes. It was a pathetic container for what I held, but it was the only one I had.
I moved to the center of the chamber and began the first kata, a slow, deliberate sequence of blocks, parries, and strikes. As I moved, I focused on drawing mana from the Dragon Heart and circulating it through my body along the same channels Lancelot had used for his Aether.
It was like trying to route a flash flood through a delicate network of garden hoses.
The moment the high-density draconic mana entered my Tier 1 circuits, the form shattered. My controlled lunge became a clumsy, overpowered stumble. A river of searing energy, far too much for the channel to handle, overflowed, causing a sharp, burning pain in my shoulder. The mana that did reach my fist was unfocused, dissipating in a harmless, albeit bright, flash of blue light before I could even complete the strike. I fell out of my stance, clutching my arm, the familiar feeling of it being scorched from within returning.
For the next week, I tried again and again. I slowed the form down, focusing on drawing only the tiniest trickle of mana. I could complete the movements, but the power was negligible. The moment I tried to draw upon even a fraction of the Dragon Heart's true strength, the framework would fail, the channels would overflow, and the pain would force me to stop.
The martialist's framework was too rigid, too fragile. It couldn't handle the sheer volume of my power source.
Frustrated, I shifted my thinking. What if the problem wasn't the physical channels? Mages controlled vast amounts of power. Their Path was one of the mind, of will and intellect. Maybe I didn't need a physical framework, but a mental one.
For the next several days, I sat in meditation, focusing on a single goal: a [Mana Strike]. I didn't perform any physical movement. I simply gathered the mana in my core and tried to use pure mental force to shape it, compress it, and hold it in my fist, just as a mage would shape a fireball.
Slowly, painstakingly, it began to work. I could feel the energy pooling in my hand, a roiling, unstable sphere of light. It was chaotic and difficult to contain, but it was there. This was it. This had to be the key.
With a surge of desperate hope, I tried to "cast" the strike at the far wall of the chamber. I willed the energy to launch forward.
Instead, without the anchor of a physical form to guide it, the unstable energy collapsed. The sphere of mana didn't shoot forward; it detonated in my hand in a violent, concussive POP. The backlash sent a jolt of psychic static through my head and threw me back onto the floor, my hand numb and ringing.
That was the final piece of the puzzle. The martialist's Path provided a necessary physical structure but couldn't handle the power. The mage's Path allowed for greater power but lacked the physical grounding to give it stable form.
Neither Path was the answer. Both were.
I lay on the cold floor of the void, bruised, exhausted, and bleeding from the nose for the second time, but for the first time, I felt a spark of genuine clarity. The original Lancelot's genius wasn't in choosing one Path over the other. It was in realizing he needed to fuse them. He needed the physical framework of a martial artist to ground the power, but that framework needed to be fundamentally different, rebuilt from the ground up to operate in sync with the primal, overwhelming nature of the dragon's energy.
The problem wasn't the dragon, and it wasn't the human. It was the discord between them. And as I sat up in the crushing silence, I became aware of the two separate rhythms of my own existence. The quiet, steady beat of my human heart. And the deep, powerful thump-THUMP of the Dragon Heart.
It was a symphony of discord. And I, somehow, had to become the conductor.