Morning in that forest did not arrive like it did in Smoke City.
There was no bell. No shouted orders. No carts scraping stone. No distant quarrels that turned into violence simply because someone had woken up hungry and decided the world owed them something. There was only light—soft, constant light that made time feel slower than it should have been, as if the sun had grown tired of rising and setting and decided to simply remain.
That alone made it suspicious.
In Smoke City, anything that stayed warm for too long was either owned by someone powerful… or protected by someone more powerful.
Kael woke with his heart already tight, as if he'd been running in his sleep. He lay still for a while, staring at the wooden ceiling above him, waiting for the familiar drip of water, the groan of weak boards, the little betrayals that cheap shelters always made in the dark.
None came.
The roof did not leak. The wood did not creak. The air did not smell like mold, sweat, or old rainwater that never dried. It smelled faintly of dried herbs and clean wood—like someone had lived carefully here, and the world had not punished them for it.
Kael did not understand that kind of life.
He understood hunger. He understood being kicked awake. He understood learning which alley had fewer rats, which stall owner threw scraps instead of stones, which guards pretended not to see and which guards pretended not to see while still swinging their sticks. He understood that in Smoke City, quiet kindness was never free—someone always wanted something back, and if they smiled while offering it, the price was usually worse.
This place was quiet.
Quiet was not something he trusted.
He sat up slowly, careful with the way he shifted his weight. His missing hand changed everything—small motions, small balances, small habits that shaped how he lived without him noticing anymore. He had learned to move without thinking about it, because thinking about it made it hurt in a different way. He dragged the blanket aside, climbed off the bed, and stood there breathing.
In through his nose.
Hold.
Out through his mouth.
His father's breathing method still existed in his body even when his memories didn't cooperate. That was the strange thing about memory. Sometimes the mind forgot, but the flesh remembered.
He stepped outside.
The forest greeted him without judgment. Cool air washed over his face, carrying pine and damp earth. Somewhere in the distance, birds called to each other as if nothing in the world had ever been cruel.
Kael stood there longer than he meant to, just breathing, because in Smoke City staring into nothing was how you got robbed, but here nothing stared back.
He should have felt relief.
Instead, his chest felt full—like the air was too clean, and his lungs didn't know what to do with it.
He looked toward the massive tree.
Old Master Ren was already there.
He stood beneath the canopy like he'd been there all night, and perhaps he had. His robe was simple. His sleeves were loose. His posture was relaxed. Yet the air around him felt steady—not heavy like the Inner District, not sharp like a blade, but steady, as if the forest itself had decided to behave while he was present.
Kael walked toward him and felt, again, that odd lightness in his steps, as though this place did not demand a toll from every movement.
Ren looked down and smiled.
Not loudly.
Not sharply.
Just kindly.
"You slept," Ren said.
Kael nodded. His throat tightened before he spoke. "Yes, Master."
The word came out naturally, and that frightened him, because it meant part of him had already decided to stay.
Ren did not react like a man who had won something. He reacted like a man who had been worried.
"That is good," he said softly. "You were exhausted."
Kael lowered his gaze. He did not know how to respond to clean kindness—kindness without a hook, without a trap, without a transaction hidden inside it. In Smoke City, kindness was always a deal disguised as mercy. Old Master Ren's kindness felt… inconvenient. Like it did not care whether Kael deserved it.
Ren watched him for a moment, then his eyes drifted briefly to Kael's arm—to the stump where a hand should have been.
Kael stiffened. He waited for pity. He waited for that slow, disgusting softness people used when they wanted to feel merciful.
Ren did not sigh. Did not pity. Did not look away.
He simply looked back at Kael's face.
"Do you remember what I said last night?" Ren asked.
Kael nodded. "About being… blurred," he said carefully. "About being hard to find."
Ren nodded. "And about the other soul."
At those words, Kael felt it again—not a voice, not a presence, but pressure. Like a shelf inside his head that held things he could not reach without cutting himself open. He swallowed. "Yes."
Ren was silent for a while. Then he said, "I told you it would hurt."
Kael's eyes flicked up.
Ren's expression did not change. "It will not hurt like a knife," he said gently. "It will hurt like growth."
Kael did not understand the difference, but he nodded anyway.
Ren motioned toward the flat stone beneath the tree. Kael sat. Ren sat across from him, patient and calm, as if time was something he had too much of.
In that moment Kael understood a truth he would not fully appreciate until much later: Old Master Ren did not rush because he could not be rushed. People who were weak hurried. People who were afraid hurried. People who had deadlines hurried. Old Master Ren looked like a man who had outlived deadlines.
Ren's voice remained soft.
"The fragments you've been receiving are dangerous," he said.
Kael hesitated. "Because they confuse me?"
Ren nodded. "And because they change you without your permission."
That was true. Kael had been hearing words in his head he did not understand. Seeing shapes. Seeing lights. Seeing strange streets made of glass and metal. Feeling emotions that did not belong to an eight-year-old boy starving in Smoke City.
Sometimes he felt pride he hadn't earned.
Sometimes he felt shame that wasn't his.
Sometimes he felt a strange anger toward a world that had never even existed for him.
"They make me feel… wrong," he whispered.
Ren's eyes softened. "They make you feel divided," he corrected gently. "Not wrong."
Then, without dramatic buildup, he said, "I will open them."
Kael's breath caught. "All of them?" he asked.
"Freely," Ren replied. "So you can see. So you can understand."
Kael hesitated. His voice came out small. "What if I don't like what I see?"
Ren smiled faintly. "Then you will learn something important."
Kael frowned. "What?"
"That you are still alive," Ren said mildly. "And the dead life cannot bite you unless you let it."
Kael did not fully understand, but the weight of those words settled into him anyway.
Ren lifted two fingers and placed them lightly against Kael's forehead.
The touch was gentle.
The effect was not.
Kael's vision blurred. The forest tilted. The light cracked. For a heartbeat, he felt like he was falling again—into cold water, into helplessness, into that river that had swallowed him and spat him into Smoke City like waste.
Then the world snapped.
Noise.
Harsh, endless noise. Not birds, not wind—metal and voices and machines. A different kind of city. Buildings rose like cliffs, straight and sharp, made of glass that reflected sunlight instead of swallowing it. People moved fast. Their clothing was strange—tight fabric, stiff seams, shoes that clicked on flat ground. The air smelled of heat and exhaust and crowded bodies.
Kael looked down.
Two hands.
He had two hands.
He stared at them like they were foreign objects.
Then they moved without waiting for his permission.
Writing. Holding tools. Turning pages. Touching keys that made a box glow. Symbols appeared—numbers, diagrams, lines that argued with reality. A structure drawn in a thousand careful strokes. Measurements, forces, moments, materials, failures predicted before they happened.
It felt like cultivation, but it was not.
It was a different kind of discipline—one that demanded precision instead of faith, calculation instead of intuition.
He was seeing through another life.
Not like a dream.
Like someone had poured a person into his head.
A child in a classroom, sharp-eyed, never satisfied with simple answers.
A boy whose stomach growled at night but who still finished his work because failing meant becoming invisible.
A teenager who learned quickly because the world did not forgive weakness.
A young man walking across a wide campus with books pressed to his chest, mind hungry, face tired—yet warmed by the rare moments of being seen when teachers praised him instead of ignoring him.
Then more.
Long nights. Projects. Calculations that grew teeth. Pages of symbols that looked like spells but were only numbers insisting on their truth.
He felt pride—not the shallow pride of being admired, but the hard pride of understanding something difficult and forcing the world to admit it.
Then he saw it.
A certificate.
A degree.
Then another.
A Master's degree in Structural Engineering.
The words burned into his mind like a seal.
His breath shook. For an instant he felt a future opening—bright, straight, and earned.
And then the world corrected him.
The memories pushed forward into work. A hard hat. A clipboard. Steel beams and concrete. A high-rise building reaching into the sky, unfinished, filled with temporary supports that held the upper floors like fragile promises. Radios crackled. Men shouted over noise. A crane swung above—slow and heavy—moving steel like a god that did not understand consequences.
Then a moment of wrongness.
Not dramatic. Not fate shouting. Not some villain laughing in the background.
Just wrong.
A jerk too sharp.
A movement too fast.
A sound that did not match what it should have been.
A radio dropping.
A scream.
The crane arm swerved as if something invisible had kicked it out of alignment. There was impact—steel meeting concrete—and then the sound of a structure losing its agreement with gravity.
The memory did not linger on bodies, because it did not need to.
The terror was in helplessness.
The sensation of falling.
The sudden understanding that intelligence did not matter when the world decided to collapse.
Then cold.
Then silence.
Then a hospital smell.
Then a blank ceiling.
Then a heartbeat that stopped not with pain, but with exhaustion.
A life ended without family at the bedside.
An orphan in a world of steel and light.
But the memories did not stop there, because that life had not stopped living before it died. It carried loneliness that tasted like metal. Bitterness that had no target. And it carried obsessions—escapes that kept the mind from breaking.
Stories.
Endless stories.
Novels about mortals climbing through pain and persistence until they could overturn seas, split mountains, shatter skies, and make the heavens look away. Heroes who grew stronger by bathing in sunlight until their bodies became impossible. Warriors who transformed through will and rage until limitation became something they mocked. People born different—mutations, gifts, curses—who survived because the world punished the ordinary first.
Kael felt the nerd-like joy of it.
The shameless daydreaming.
The late-night arguments about realms, techniques, physiques, bloodlines.
He felt that humiliating hope: If I could be reborn… I would do it right. I would grind. I would suffer. I would win.
And beneath all of it, he felt the truth that mortal life had hammered into that man:
Sometimes effort is not rewarded.
Sometimes the world simply collapses.
Sometimes you die without an audience.
That was why the stories were addictive. They promised a world where suffering meant something. Where pain could be converted into strength. Where fairness existed, if you paid enough blood for it.
Kael's mind screamed as the memories surged—years and years pouring into him at once like a dam breaking inside his skull. His body seized. His breathing broke. His stomach turned. His vision flashed too bright, too loud, too much.
And then he heard Ren's voice—soft, steady—cutting through the storm like a rope thrown into a flood.
"Breathe," Ren said. "Slowly."
Kael tried.
In through his nose.
Hold.
Out through his mouth.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The memories did not vanish, but they stopped being knives. They became weight—heavy, but held.
Kael's eyes flew open.
He was back under the tree. The forest was still there. The light was still gentle.
But Kael was not the same.
Tears ran down his cheeks without him noticing. He lifted his left hand and wiped them away, and then he froze, because his right arm was still missing. For a heartbeat he expected panic, the old panic that always came when reality returned.
Instead he laughed.
A small, broken laugh.
He did not know why. Perhaps because a part of him had just died twice. Perhaps because a part of him had just come back to life. Perhaps because the absurdity of it was too large to fit inside fear.
Ren watched him without interrupting.
Kael bowed suddenly, so deeply his forehead nearly touched the ground.
"Thank you," he whispered, voice cracking. "Thank you, Master."
Ren's hand rested lightly on his head, not pressing, not claiming—comforting.
"You endured it," Ren said softly. "That was the first proof."
Kael lifted his head, blinking hard. He looked like an eight-year-old boy, but his eyes had something behind them now—not wisdom, not maturity, but something more dangerous.
Context.
He swallowed, then spoke quickly, words tumbling out with a boldness that did not belong to the quiet child from the streets.
Kael lifted his head, blinking hard. He looked like an eight-year-old boy, but his eyes had something behind them now—wisdom, maturity, and something more dangerous.
He swallowed, then spoke quickly, words tumbling out with a boldness that did not belong to the quiet child from the streets.
"Master… whatever two tasks you give me, I will complete them. Without fail."
Ren raised an eyebrow slightly.
Kael realized—too late—that he sounded like one of those shameless protagonists from the stories that had flooded his mind. His cheeks reddened. But instead of embarrassment crushing him, a strange boldness rose further, as if survival itself had learned how to smile.
Ren's eyes warmed. "You've changed," he observed.
Kael nodded quickly. "I'm still me," he said. "But I'm also… not only me."
Ren nodded. "Correct. Your soul now has depth—and age."
Kael blurted, unable to stop himself, "Those memories… they're valuable."
Ren chuckled softly. "They are valuable to you," he corrected. "Not to the heavens."
Then, still gently, he added words that made Kael's spine straighten for a different reason.
"I know what kind of world those memories came from," Ren said. "I know what sort of rules it follows. But I do not know what they contain, and I do not wish to."
Kael's throat tightened.
Ren's gaze did not pry.
It allowed.
"You lived those years as if they were your own," Ren continued. "So right now… in some ways… you are not only eight."
Kael's fingers tightened against his sleeve.
He understood what Ren meant.
He did not feel like a grown man. But deep down, he felt like a teenager who had just obtained something so exciting… because he was in a world that respected strength like those novels.
But more than anything, he felt like someone whose mind had been forced to walk roads his body had never stepped on.
Ren lifted a finger before Kael could shrink back into old habits.
"Do not misunderstand," Ren said gently. "A drop can still nourish a seed."
Then Ren's gaze drifted again, briefly, to Kael's missing hand. He did not pity it, and that was somehow more reassuring than sympathy.
"You lost a hand," Ren said calmly. "But 'lost' is not the correct word. The hand is still there. It's just that its existence is even hiding from you."
Kael's face paled.
"I have checked and noticed," Ren continued softly. "It seems as if it was cut off… but it was not. Your hand is there—just invisible, the same way you are invisible to this world. You are there, but you aren't."
Ren's eyes remained gentle.
"I believe that once you concentrate hard enough, and make yourself aware, it will appear—but only to you. Not even I can see it."
Kael's breath caught in his throat.
Ren's voice stayed soft. "You will be given a path. This path is different… and here comes the first task—well, the first half of the task."
Kael nodded hard, jaw clenched.
Ren looked down at him, kind and gentle like a grandfather speaking to a frightened child—yet beneath that gentleness was something older, something unavoidable.
"Stand," Ren said softly, as if it were nothing at all.
Kael stood immediately.
And for the first time, he understood a rule deeper than Smoke City's cruelty.
A master did not raise his voice.
A master only decided what came next.