The world ran on Aetherka—Life Energy.
It wasn't just a concept whispered in rituals or drawn in children's books. It was reality, woven into the fabric of everything: the air we breathed, the soil beneath our feet, the water we drank, even the rhythm of our blood. The elders said it was the pulse of creation itself, a current older than stars, flowing from the bones of the world into all living things.
For the fortunate—the twenty percent born attuned—it moved through them like a second heartbeat. Subtle but undeniable. They spoke of it as others might speak of sight or taste, an extra sense bound to their will, their emotion, their intent. When they reached for it, it answered. When they pushed, it flowed.
For the rest—those like me—it was silent.
They called us Hollows. Empty. Faulty. Weak.
A word used like a weapon. It meant you were born wrong. That you'd never amount to anything except a laborer, a servant, a shadow on the edge of a world that belonged to others.
But I never believed that. Not truly.
"If Aetherka exists in all things," I thought, "then I am not empty. I'm just… closed."
The idea gnawed at me, even as a child. It felt wrong to think of myself as broken when every night, lying awake on my straw mat, I could feel the world humming. Maybe not the way the Weavers did. Maybe not the way the Bearers did. But it was there—the rustle of the wind, the low thrum of the earth, the faint vibration of my own pulse.
I began watching.
I watched the Weavers, those born with the ability to shape elements. They would stand at the edge of the training circle, palms open, and the air itself would bend. Flames flickered at their fingertips. Water leapt like snakes from the well to coil at their command. Even the earth groaned, shifting in subtle tremors beneath their bare feet. They were artists with raw reality, painting the world with color and force.
I watched the Bearers, their bodies corded with muscle, moving with a grace no normal human could match. They pulled the energy inward instead of outward—channeling it into their bones, their reflexes, their breath. A Bearer could outrun a horse, leap a wall twice his height, or crush stone with bare hands.
And yet… no one ever questioned how it worked.
The villagers believed in talent. In divine gifts. In fate.
To them, you either had the channels or you didn't. It was as simple as that. If the slab glowed on your fifth birthday, your path opened. If not, it closed. Forever.
But I had lived another life. I had studied systems. I had watched the way human beings explained their own mysteries—how magic became science, how superstition became method. Even in my first life, I'd seen children with no privilege rise through sheer discipline and adults with natural brilliance collapse under their own arrogance.
Fate was a story we told ourselves when we didn't understand cause and effect.
I believed in systems.
So I began cataloguing what I saw. Small things at first—rituals, postures, breathing rhythms, even the words Weavers chanted as they worked. My mind, though housed in a child's skull, was sharp and practiced. Numbers and patterns had been my trade once; now, they became my secret survival.
Observations:
Bearers enhanced their physical bodies—but only after years of conditioning. They did not wake one morning able to lift boulders. Their power came in increments, shaped by repetition, pain, and focus.Their rituals involved synchronized breathing, body postures, and focus—primitive, but methodical. They called it tradition. I called it training.Weavers used chants and symbols—cultural overlays that likely helped trigger mental states needed for Aetherka manipulation. A mental switch disguised as religion.The energy responded to resonance—like tuning forks vibrating in harmony. When their voices, breath, and posture aligned, the air seemed to answer.
I filled the gaps with questions. If Bearers conditioned their bodies, what exactly were they conditioning? If Weavers relied on chants, what happened when they changed the chant? Did the energy itself care about the words—or just the pattern?
Each answer pulled me further from despair and closer to curiosity.
So what if I was on a different frequency?
The thought came one evening as I sat by the edge of the field, watching a group of older boys practice. They sparred with wooden staves, their feet sliding into positions I recognized from the Bearers' breathing drills. Every strike was punctuated by an exhale, every block a sharp inhale. The rhythm of it entranced me. It wasn't random. It was music.
And music meant resonance.
Aetherka was not a gift. It was a signal. A waveform running through every living thing. The attuned could pick it up naturally, the way some people are born with perfect pitch. But just because I lacked that pitch didn't mean I couldn't learn to tune myself to it.
Hypothesis:
My body doesn't reject Life Energy. It simply doesn't process it like others. Their "natural channels" were open at birth. Mine were closed. But what if… I could build my own?
It was a heretical thought. No one had ever spoken of such a thing. Hollows were Hollows. That was the law of the world.
But laws could be broken.
I clenched my small fists, feeling the rough calluses already forming on my palms from carrying buckets and splitting wood. My body was weak compared to theirs, yes—but not empty. My heart beat. My blood flowed. The earth thrummed beneath me. The wind brushed against my skin. The current of life moved everywhere, even here, even in me.
I had seen enough in my first life to know this truth:
Systems can be reverse-engineered.
Gates can be forced open.
Frequencies can be tuned.
The villagers thought me broken.
I thought myself unfinished.
That night, lying on my straw mat beneath the cracked ceiling of our cottage, I stared at the shadows of rafters stretching like ribs across the roof. The man they called my father snored heavily in the other room. My mother's breathing was shallow, strained.
I listened past it all—to the crickets outside, to the shifting of the wind, to the slow beat of my own pulse. The world whispered in patterns. I just had to learn the language.
So I began to plan.
No one would help me. No one would teach me. If I was going to survive, if I was going to rise, I would have to do what no Hollow had done before.
Not mimic the Bearers. Not mimic the Weavers.
But build something entirely new.
A path not of inherited channels but of constructed resonance.
A path no one had walked.
A path only I could create.
And as I lay there in the dark, listening to the hum of a world that had rejected me, a single thought flickered through my mind like a spark:
If they will not let me be part of their flow,
I will learn to shape my own.