The silence after a massacre is louder than the carnage itself.
Ash stayed still for what felt like hours, clutching Duke Korth's iron coin so tightly that the emblem of the anvil was imprinted into his palm. Around him, the village was nothing but a smoking graveyard. The smell of roasted flesh—livestock, yes, but also the men whose names he had spoken just yesterday—turned his stomach. Yet his eyes remained dry. The source of his tears had seemingly dried up in the heat of the Abomination.
He took nothing from the village. Anything that hadn't been burned was tainted with demonic mana. Only his father's boiled leather cape had survived, a miracle, which he draped over his shoulders to cover the rips in his tunic.
He took a first step south. Then a second.
He didn't know where the capital, Magna Solis, lay. For a child of the Borderlands, the world ended where the Barrier touched the horizon. But one thing he knew: he had to follow the opposite direction of the wind. The wind always blew from the Dark Continent toward the Empire, carrying miasma and cold. Keep the wind at your back, he thought, and eventually you'll reach civilization.
The Price of Hunger
Three days passed.
Hunger was not Ash's first enemy. Light was. As he moved away from the Wall and the Barrier's direct influence, the leaden sky began to crack. It wasn't the sun yet, just a diffuse, grayish light that scorched his retinas. His eyes, used to near-total darkness, throbbed painfully. Every reflection on a stream was like a razor blade in his brain.
On the fourth day, his stomach twisted violently, in a way he had never known. Back in the village, even with little food, they had always had root porridge and dried rat-wolf meat. Here, in the desolate plains that served as a "buffer zone" between the Borderlands and the first provincial towns, the land was dead.
Eventually, he spotted a column of smoke. Not from a massacre, but from a controlled fire.
Approaching with predator-like caution, he saw a caravan of merchants—three heavily loaded carts, protected by half a dozen mercenaries in boiled leather armor. The smell of onion soup simmering over the fire made Ash's mouth water.
He stepped from the shadows of the rocks, hands empty, face smeared with soot from his village.
"Stop!" yelled a guard, raising a crossbow. "One more step, kid, and I'll put a bolt between your eyes!"
Ash froze. He didn't raise his hands. He stared at the guard with his pale blue eyes. In his vision, he could already see the weak point in the crossbow's string and the tension in the mercenary's arm. If he fired, Ash knew all he had to do was move three centimeters to the left.
"I'm hungry," Ash said simply, voice flat, without a trace of pleading.
An older man, richly dressed in a fox fur coat, approached, chuckling. "A survivor from the breach, huh? You look like a ghost, boy. Can you pay for a bowl? We don't do charity here. The road is long, and food is expensive."
Ash produced Duke Korth's coin. The fur-clad man froze. His eyes widened—not in respect, but in greed.
"Where did a rat like you find a token from House Ironbound? Stole it off a corpse?"
"The Duke gave it to me," Ash replied, his boldness overcoming caution. "He said if I survived, he'd remember me."
The merchant erupted in a fat laugh. The guards joined in. "Duke Korth give a patron coin to a mud-covered peasant? And I'm the Holy Mother herself! Guards, take that coin. It's worth more than all our cargo. And give him a lesson for daring to lie in a Duke's name."
The Brutality of Awakening
Two mercenaries stepped forward. Tall, muscular, bored-looking. They saw only a starving kid. They didn't see what Ash saw.
The first reached to grab Ash by the collar. Ash didn't flinch. He visualized the force line in the man's shoulder. With a sharp motion, he seized the guard's wrist and, instead of pulling, pressed precisely where the joint was weak.
CRACK.
The guard's scream ripped through the air. His shoulder had dislocated effortlessly. Ash didn't stop. The second guard drew a dagger. Ash saw the weak point in the cheap metal. He didn't block; he struck the flat of the blade with his fist, focusing all his force on the breaking point.
The dagger shattered. Ash used one of the shards to draw a bleeding line across the guard's cheek before he even realized what had happened.
Silence fell over the camp. The remaining guards raised their crossbows, but the merchant, suddenly pale, raised a hand.
"Wait!"
He looked at Ash differently. This wasn't aura. This wasn't mana. It was efficiency that shouldn't exist in a sixteen-year-old.
"You… you're not a normal peasant, are you?" stammered the merchant.
"I just want to eat," Ash repeated, putting the coin away. "And if any of you touch this coin, I won't just break a shoulder. I'll find the rift in your skull."
The merchant realized he was dealing with an "anomaly," or at least a border savage who no longer knew fear. He served Ash a bowl of soup—not out of kindness, but out of terror.
The Lesson of the Journey
Ash ate in silence, apart. Rufus, the merchant, eventually sat nearby, keeping a safe distance.
"If you're going to Magna Solis with that coin, kid, you won't make ten kilometers without being gutted. Not everyone's as… lenient as me. The Empire is a nest of scorpions."
"I don't care about the Empire," Ash replied between sips. "I'm going to the Academy."
"The Academy?" Rufus laughed nervously. "Do you know how many 'sold-out' kids die on the way? The Academy only takes the best—or the richest. And you don't have a pair of boots to your name."
Rufus explained how the world worked. Currency: Gold Sol, Silver Denier, Copper Sou. Ash learned his iron coin was not money, but an imperial pass—a relic of power.
"Listen, kid. We're short-handed. The Barrier breach has driven local monsters mad. We have to cross the Whispering Forest to reach the first major city. If you serve as our 'trail cleaner,' I'll feed you and take you to the gates of Ironvale. From there, maybe you'll find a real convoy to the capital."
Ash accepted. He had no choice. He had no idea where he was.
The Whispering Forest
The journey resumed. For the first time in his life, Ash saw trees. Real trees. Not the black, twisted trunks of the Wall, but oaks and pines stretching skyward. It was oppressive. These masses of green seemed ready to crush them at any moment.
On the sixth day, danger appeared.
Not an Abomination, but a pack of Glass Wolves. Creatures whose fur imitated quartz, nearly invisible in the undergrowth. Rufus' mercenaries panicked despite their armor, swinging blindly.
Ash didn't look to "see" the wolves. He looked for rifts in the air.
Every movement, every breath, created distortions in the forest's force lines. He drew his broken sword—the iron stub from the massacre.
"Left!" he yelled to a guard.
The guard ignored him. A wolf leapt for his throat. Before its crystalline teeth could close, Ash struck. Not a slash—his blade was too short. He hit the flank with his bare hands at the shimmering weak point.
The kinetic energy transmitted to the wolf's organs. It exploded from within, fur shattering into a thousand crystal shards.
For an hour, Ash was a whirlwind of raw motion. He didn't fight like a soldier. No fancy parries. He slid, struck, and each blow carried disproportionate force, aiming at the "weak atoms."
When the battle ended, the guards watched in horror. Ash was covered in monster blood, hands red, yet unscathed.
"You… you're a monster," one whispered.
Ash wiped his blade on his leather cape. "No. I just know where to strike."
The First Sunrise
On the tenth day, the caravan reached the Silver Crests—the natural border between the March province and the Empire's heart.
Ash's world changed forever.
At the mountain pass's summit, night ended. For Ash, night was natural. But as they began the descent, the horizon bled. A line of burning orange, then gold, then a pink so violent Ash had to shield his eyes.
"What… what is that?" he stammered, terrified. "The sky is burning?"
"It's dawn, kid," Rufus said, a hint of pity in his voice. "Far enough from the Barrier for the sun to finally rise on you."
Ash dropped to his knees. Pain shot through his eyes. Sunlight pierced like spears through his skull. The warmth wasn't from a fire or monster mana, but an infinite source, millions of kilometers away.
He hated it.
He hated how the light revealed every detail of his misery. How it mocked his dead village. The sun was arrogant, a tyrant imposing its vision.
"Ugly," he hissed, eyes watering.
"Ugly?" Rufus exclaimed. "It's the most beautiful thing in the world!"
"No. Too bright. I can't see the rifts anymore."
True. In harsh daylight, the lines of Atom Sight were harder to perceive. Ash realized: to survive in this new illuminated world, he would have to learn to see through the light, just as he had learned to see through darkness.
The Shadow of the City
In the distance, in the valley, lay Ironvale. A provincial town, yet to Ash, a mountain of stone and iron. Smoke rose from hundreds of forges. Empire banners flapped in the wind.
Entering the city with the caravan, Ash discovered civilization's stench: sweat, excrement, heated metal, despair. Children his age dressed in silk, laughing over colorful fruit. Beggars missing limbs, tossed to the roadside like refuse.
He understood: Duke Korth hadn't saved him out of kindness. He'd thrown him into an arena.
"We stop here," Rufus said, tossing a small pouch with three silver coins. "Your pay for the wolves. Enough for a room and a ticket on a passenger convoy to the capital. Advice, kid: hide your eyes. People here don't like those from the Borderlands. To them, you're just ghosts bringing bad luck."
Ash took the coins silently. He watched Rufus ride away with his carts.
He was alone. In a city too loud, too bright, too expensive. He clutched his broken sword under his cape. His instincts screamed to insult anyone staring, but survival told him to stay in shadow.
He found a dark alley, away from the sun's unbearable light. He sat against a cold brick wall and closed his eyes.
Father. Selaphiel. Watch me.
He had no mana. No aura. Only an empty pouch and a cursed vision. As the city's bells tolled, one thought repeated in his mind:
No matter how many suns they force upon me, I will find the rift in every one of them.