The preparatory course for Celestial Ascent Academy was held in a district known as the Ashen Quarter, a place where the city's aspiring elite came to grind themselves against the whetstone of ambition. The building was sleek and modern, but it carried the faint, ozone-tinged scent of expended mana and desperation.
Arlan walked through the automated doors, his stipend-paid tuition secured. He wore simple, dark training gear, doing nothing to stand out. The lobby hummed with nervous energy. Dozens of teenagers, most seventeen or eighteen—the final age for academy entry—clustered in groups, comparing affinities, boasting about their Order progress, their Status Windows flashing subtly as they shared screens in the accepted social ritual.
"3rd Order, Rank 4! My fireball can melt standard alloy plate!"
"Please. I'm a 2nd Order, Rank 8 Hydro-kinetic, but my control is refined. I've already mastered dual-stream manipulation."
"My uncle's a 5th Order General in the Skyguard. Says my wind affinity's pure enough for the Stormrider track."
Arlan kept his eyes forward, his own Status set to private. He felt like a ghost moving through a landscape of vibrant, living color. His mana pool read 18/100—a pathetic trickle. He hadn't tried to touch the spatial power again, following the shadow's initial, silent directive: Let it sleep. Feed the other.
Feed the other.
The "personal system" had been quiet since that night, a silent, obsidian pane in his consciousness. But its presence changed everything. The world looked different now. He saw not just objects, but the shadows they cast—their depth, their texture, their potential as places to hide. The lecture hall he entered was bright with mana-lights, but his eyes instinctively cataloged the pools of darkness beneath the tiered seating, behind the lecturer's podium, in the corners of the high ceiling. They weren't just absences of light; they felt like material. Like cloth waiting to be gathered.
"Find a seat. Quickly." The instructor's voice cut through the chatter. She stood at the front, a woman in her forties with severe features and hair pulled into a tight silver bun. Her aura was a controlled, dense pressure that settled over the room like a blanket. Commander Blythe, her nameplate read. A 4th Order, no doubt. She hadn't yet chosen a Class, but her bearing screamed military.
"Most of you are here because you have talent but lack discipline. Or power but lack control. A few," her sharp eyes scanned the room, lingering for a millisecond on Arlan, "are here because of legacy considerations. Regardless, for the next twelve weeks, you are raw ore. My job is to see if there's enough metal in you to be worth the Academy's forge."
She began the lecture on Mana Theory Fundamentals. Arlan knew it all. He'd been tutored in this since childhood. The nature of mana particles (Ambient Aetheric Resonance Units), the process of absorption through the core, the circulation through the twelve primary meridians. It was basic, soul-numbing stuff for anyone with an awakened core.
For him, it was a taunt. He could recite the theories backward, but his core remained a dormant, icy stone in his gut.
"Do not listen with your conscious mind," the voice whispered, not as a sound, but as a thought that bloomed from the obsidian screen in his head. "Listen with your grief. The theory of light-based mana absorption is a song for the content. Your channel is the silence between the notes."
Arlan blinked, keeping his face neutral. He let Commander Blythe's words wash over him, and instead focused on the emptiness the lecture created. The boredom of the other students. The flicker of shadows as someone shifted in their seat. He felt a strange pull, not from the ambient mana in the room, but from those shadows. A cool, subtle energy, like the breath of a deep cave.
Experiment. Draw from the shadow beneath your own chair. Not to absorb. To notice it.
Following the instinct, Arlan subtly shifted his perception. Instead of trying to pull energy into his core, he imagined the shadow beneath him as a sheet of still, black water. He imagined a single thread of his awareness dipping into it.
A shock, cold and clean, jolted up his spine. It wasn't mana as described in the textbooks. It was thinner, sharper, more… intelligent. It didn't flood his meridians; it seeped into them, coiling in the pathways usually reserved for spatial power. His Universal Status flickered.
```
Mana Pool: 18/100 → 19/100
```
The increase was minuscule. But it happened without drawing on ambient light-aligned mana. It happened from the dark.
He did it again, this time from the long shadow cast by the student in front of him. Another thread of cool energy. 20/100.
A third time. 21/100.
It was agonizingly slow, but it was progress. A secret, illicit progress that thrummed with a dark satisfaction. He was stealing energy from the unseen, right under the nose of a 4th Order Commander.
"Thorne." Commander Blythe's voice snapped him back. The class was watching. "Since you seem to find the fundamentals beneath your attention, perhaps you can enlighten us. Describe the catalytic process for a fire-affinity Awakened breaking through from 2nd to 3rd Order."
It was a middle-difficulty question. One he'd known at fourteen. But the attention, the expectant, slightly sneering looks from his peers—it froze him. The old shame, the fear of the dormant prodigy, rose like bile. He opened his mouth, but only a dry click came out.
Someone snickered.
"The son of Captains Thorne," Blythe said, her voice devoid of mockery, which made it worse. It was pure, clinical disappointment. "Theoretical knowledge is a foundation. If you cannot communicate it, you do not truly command it. Sit."
He sat, his face burning, the cool shadow-energy in his meridians feeling like a lie. The brief triumph evaporated.
The rest of the day was physical conditioning—mana-enhanced obstacle courses, reaction drills under simulated rift-spawn attacks using holograms. Here, his lack of an active affinity was a glaring, brutal handicap. Others used gusts of wind to boost jumps, sheets of ice to create slides, bursts of flame for propulsion. Arlan had only his baseline, unaugmented body. He was strong from years of recommended physical training, but compared to the others, he was a lumbering relic.
He finished the agility course dead last, his lungs burning.
A bulky boy with earth-manipulation affinity, who had literally tunneled under part of the course, clapped him on the back with a force that staggered him. "Hey, don't feel bad, legacy. Some of us are just late bloomers." His smile didn't reach his eyes.
At the end of the exhausting, humiliating day, Arlan walked out into the Ashen Quarter's twilight. The towering spires of the main city glittered in the distance, a world of power and light that felt further away than ever.
"You are looking at the wrong metric," the shadow-voice intoned as he walked. "You finished last in their race. But you completed the course using only 2% of your secret mana pool. They expended 30%, 40%. Efficiency born of scarcity is a lesson they will never learn. Now, your real training begins."
A new prompt appeared on his obsidian screen.
```
**Shadow Protocol - Quest Updated: The Veiled Ascent**
**Sub-Objective: First Lesson of the Unseen**
- Traverse the entirety of the Ashen Quarter using only shadow-leaning surfaces for cover.
- Do not be perceived by any 2nd Order or higher Awakened.
- Return to your domicile before midnight.
Reward: Skill Unlock - [Shadow-Slip (Basic)]
Failure: Mana Drain for 24 hours.
```
Arlan stopped in the middle of the crowded sidewalk. The Ashen Quarter was miles from his home in the quiet Valor Heights district. On foot, sticking to shadows, avoiding notice… it was impossible.
"The impossible is merely the untried path," the voice murmured. "Begin."
He took a breath, the familiar cold of grief and resolve settling in his chest. He stepped off the main thoroughfare into an alley. The sun was nearly down. The shadows were long, deep, and hungry.
He looked at a particularly deep pool of darkness between two dumpsters. Yesterday, it was just an absence of light. Today, it looked like a door.
He stepped toward it, letting the cool shadow-energy in his meridians resonate with the darkness ahead. The world didn't go black. Instead, the edges of the shadow seemed to welcome him, the contrast softening. He moved into the alley's gloom, and his footsteps made no sound. The raucous noise of the street faded to a muffled murmur.
He was still visible, he knew, if someone looked directly. But he was… less. A smudge on reality. A afterthought.
Heart pounding with something that wasn't fear—it was focus—Arlan Thorne, the failed prodigy, melted into the arteries of the city, beginning his first true lesson on the path of the Umbral Void.
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