The return to the Bronze Wing felt different. Every step through the vibrating industrial corridors seemed to echo with the weight of the obsidian shard hidden against Ken's ribs. The guards didn't just escort him; they shoved him, their armored gloves clinking against his bruised shoulders. They treated him like a piece of malfunctioning equipment being returned to the basement.
When the door to Block 99 finally hissed shut, Ken didn't collapse. The moment he was alone, the "shivering" stopped. His breathing leveled out into a rhythmic, predatory calm. He moved to the center of the room and reached into his tunic, pulling out the Void-Coded Key.
In the dim, flickering light of his dorm, the shard looked like a hole in reality. It didn't reflect the light; it seemed to pull the shadows toward it.
"Selene," Ken whispered, tapping the encrypted receiver behind his ear. "I have it. But the Architect touched my thread. He knows the drones weren't destroyed—he knows they were dismantled."
There was a burst of static, then Selene's voice came through, sharp and cold as a winter morning. "I saw the feed, Ken. You were sloppy. You left the screws. A thief breaks things; a god undoes them. The Architect is a builder—he recognized the difference immediately."
"It was a calculated risk," Ken countered, sitting on the edge of his thin mattress. "If I had blown them up, the mana-trace would have stayed in the air for hours. De-fragging them left zero residue. By the time he realizes what that means, the shard will be integrated."
"He's already moving," Selene warned. "He didn't believe your 'sleepwalking' act for a second. He's running a deep-scan audit on every student's mana-signature from the last hour. He's looking for the vacuum that shouldn't be there."
Ken looked at the terminal on his desk. "Then we give him something else to find. Use the back-door we installed in the Silver Wing's registry. Transfer the energy-spike from the vault's sensors to a student in the Silver Wing. Someone with enough ego to make it believable."
There was a pause. Ken could almost hear the gears of Selene's mind turning, calculating the social and political fallout of the move.
"Dorian?" she asked, her voice tinged with a dark, plotting amusement.
"No," Ken said, his eyes narrowing. "Dorian is too obvious. The Architect knows he's too blunt for a heist this clean. Frame Kaelen Vance. He's the head of the dueling society. He's been bragging about his 'untraceable' phase-step technique for weeks. It fits the profile."
"Done," Selene replied. "I'm rerouting the sensor logs now. By morning, the Architect will be breathing down Vance's neck. But Ken... the shard isn't just a battery. It's a key. You need to interface with it before the Academy's morning pulse-check, or the dampening field in your room will trigger an alarm."
Ken ended the transmission. He placed the shard on his desk and knelt before it. He didn't use mana—he couldn't. Instead, he let the Null-Core in his chest expand. He felt the cold, hollow hunger of the void reaching out, sensing its sibling in the obsidian.
"Eye of Truth: Convergence," he muttered.
The three silver rings in his right eye began to spin with such velocity they blurred into a single, blinding circle of white light. The room around him vanished. The walls, the desk, even his own body dissolved into strings of raw, glowing code.
He saw the shard for what it truly was: a Patch. It was a piece of the original world-script that had been "deleted" by the Empress's ancestors to create the current Dominion. It contained the blueprints for the Academy's gravity-well.
Ken reached out with his mind, grabbing the strings of the shard's code and weaving them into his own internal architecture. The pain was immediate and absolute. It felt like liquid nitrogen being poured into his veins. His Null-core flared, turning his skin ashen and causing frost to bloom on the metal walls of his dorm.
He didn't scream. He simply gritted his teeth, his silver eye weeping a single drop of blood as he forced the two conflicting realities to merge.
0.1%... 15%... 60%...
The progress bar in his mind ticked upward with agonizing slowness. Every percent felt like a year of his life being consumed. Just as the integration hit 98%, the dormitory's overhead light turned a harsh, flashing red.
WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ENERGY DENSITY DETECTED. SECURITY SWEEP INITIATED.
"Not yet," Ken hissed, his fingers clawing at the edge of the desk. "Just two more seconds..."
The door began to hiss open—the automatic override for a security breach.
100%.
The shard vanished. It didn't just disappear; it folded into Ken's soul. The cold vacuum in his chest suddenly stilled, becoming a deep, silent well of absolute potential.
The door swung wide. Mike stood there, flanked by his two thugs. He wasn't wearing his uniform; he was dressed in a workout tank, his muscles rippling with the dull orange glow of his fire affinity. He looked annoyed, his eyes scanning the room for whatever had tripped the alarm.
"Vaelstron! What the hell are you doing?" Mike barked, stepping into the cramped space. "The whole block just got a surge warning from this room. If you're messing with the power conduits to charge a forbidden device, I'll break your—"
Mike stopped. He looked at Ken, who was slumped against the wall, his face pale and his breathing shallow. The room was freezing—literally. A layer of frost covered the terminal and the bedframe.
"Why is it so cold in here?" Mike asked, his bravado wavering for a second. He looked at the desk, but it was empty. The shard was gone.
Ken looked up, his eyes dull and "scared" once again. The silver rings were buried deep behind a mask of exhaustion. "I... I think the ventilation broke. I was just trying to sleep. Please... make it stop."
Mike scoffed, though he didn't step any closer. The cold was unnatural, even for the Bronze Wing. "You're a jinx, Vaelstron. A walking 0.8 disaster. If the alarms go off again, I'm tossing you into the turbine pits myself."
Mike slammed the door shut.
Ken stayed on the floor for a long time, listening to the retreating footsteps. He reached up and wiped the blood from his eye. He felt a new weight in his mind—a map of the entire Academy, every secret passage, every hidden vault, and every weakness in the sky-fortress's armor.
"The key is turned," Ken whispered to the dark.
Tomorrow, the lessons would begin. But Ken Vaelstron had already passed the only test that mattered.
End of Chapter 6.