Time in the infirmary didn't move in seconds or minutes. It moved in the slow drip of herbal tinctures and the shifting shadows of the sun across the stone floor. For Kael, who was used to the fast-paced life of an Academy student, this sudden stillness was its own kind of torture.
Because his body stubbornly refused the "blessing" of healing magic, Kael was forced to recover the way humans did centuries ago. While other students who suffered training injuries were back on their feet in an hour, Kael remained pinned to his bed. His ribs were wrapped in thick, unyielding bandages, and he had to rely on foul-smelling poultices that stung his skin.
Mina Everlight visited him every day after her classes. She would bring him his shared notes, though they both knew they were useless to him. The lectures were all about mana-flow, elemental compression, and the nuances of Rank D incantations. To Kael, reading them was like reading a manual for a machine he would never be allowed to touch.
"The Academy feels different since the excursion," Mina said one afternoon, sitting by his bed. She was tracing the patterns on a wooden tray she had brought. "The professors are tense. They're calling it an anomaly, but some of the older students are whispering about the barriers. They say the mana-beasts are getting restless."
Kael looked out the window. From his bed, he could see the distant spires of the High Council buildings. "Everything in this world is built on mana, isn't it? The lights, the heat, the floating carriages... even the way we heal. We've forgotten how to do anything without it."
Mina nodded slowly. "That's why everyone is so afraid of people like... well, of the mana-less. It's not just that you can't use magic. It's that you remind them that the world could stop working if the mana ever ran out. My father always says that a mage without mana is just a corpse in waiting."
Kael felt a cold knot in his stomach. That was the reality of Primordia. The social hierarchy was a pyramid of power. At the bottom were the Rank D students, the workers and servants who used small sparks of magic for daily chores. Above them were the C and B ranks, the soldiers and scholars. At the very top were the Rank A and S mages, like Mina's family, who held the fabric of the Empire together. To be mana-less was to be outside the pyramid entirely. You weren't even the base; you were the dust beneath it.
During those long days, Kael had a lot of time to observe. He watched the healers work on other patients. He saw a boy with a broken leg walk out perfectly healed after ten minutes of emerald light. He saw a girl with severe burns laugh as the charred skin was replaced by fresh, pink flesh in seconds.
For them, pain was a temporary glitch. For Kael, pain was his only companion.
He started to notice something strange, though. When the healers used their magic near him, the air felt "crowded." It was as if the magic was a physical presence, a noisy, vibrating force that tried to occupy the same space as his body. But whenever it touched him, that silence within him would rise up, and the magic would simply fail. He didn't understand it, and it terrified him. He felt like an island in the middle of a roaring ocean, and the water couldn't reach his shores.
One evening, a different kind of visitor came to the infirmary. It wasn't a student or a healer. It was a man with a heavy tread and shoulders so broad they almost blocked the light from the doorway. He didn't wear the silk robes of a professor. He wore a simple, sleeveless tunic made of rough leather, revealing arms covered in thick, white scars.
The man didn't go to the other beds. He walked straight to Kael and stood there, looking down at him with eyes that felt like cold iron.
"You're the one," the man said. His voice was deep, like the grinding of stones.
"Who are you?" Kael asked, trying to sit up despite the flare of pain in his side.
"I am Grael. I run the pits," the man replied. He didn't use the word 'Department' or 'Academy.' "The healers say your body is a void. They say you're a waste of a bed because their light won't fix you."
Kael flinched, but he didn't look away. "I'm healing. Just... slowly."
Grael leaned in, his face inches from Kael's. He didn't smell like ozone or incense. He smelled like sweat, iron, and old earth. "Slow is good. Slow is honest. In this Academy, everyone wants a shortcut. They want a spell to make them strong, a charm to make them fast. But when the mana fails, they're nothing but wet paper."
The man reached out and gripped Kael's forearm. His hand was like a vice, calloused and powerful. Kael expected a surge of mana, a test of his core. But there was nothing. No magic. Just raw, physical strength.
"You have no mana, boy. That means you have no shortcuts," Grael said. "When you can walk again, come to the lower grounds. Most people here think I'm just a relic of the past. But I'm the only one who can teach you how to stay alive when the world stops singing its magic songs."
Grael let go and walked away without another word.
Kael watched him go, his heart racing. For the first time, someone hadn't looked at his mana-less status as a curse. Grael had looked at it as a starting point.
Over the next week, Kael's recovery became his training. He practiced breathing through the pain. He forced himself to sit up, then to stand, then to take a single step. Each movement was a victory. While the rest of the world lived in a blur of effortless magic, Kael was relearning what it meant to be human, one painful inch at a time.
By the end of the second week, the bandages were finally removed. His skin was pale and marked with faint bruises, but his bones had knitted back together. He was thin, and he felt weak, but he was standing on his own feet.
Mina Everlight was there to help him pack his few belongings. "You don't have to go to the lower grounds, Kael. You can just... stay in the library. I can help you with the research papers. You don't have to put yourself through more pain."
Kael looked at his hands. They were empty of magic, but they were his.
"I've spent my whole life waiting for a spark that never came, Mina," he said softly. "I'm done waiting. If the world won't give me power, I'll have to build it myself."
As he walked out of the infirmary, Kael didn't look like a hero. He looked like a boy who had survived a disaster. But for the first time since the ceremony, he wasn't looking for a way to fit into the Academy's pyramid. He was looking for the path that led down, into the dirt and the iron, where the magic couldn't follow.