When Riven listened to his grandfather's torture stories, he imagined a certain level of pain. He discovered—too late—that what he'd taken for a limit was only a step. Everything could be surpassed.
He felt as if his head had been dipped into hot oil. It wasn't pain that came and went. It was a solid presence, smothering thought, crushing words, burning from the inside out.
And then he blacked out.
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Riven woke many hours later, his body heavy and his mouth dry. Through the crack in the bedroom window came a soft, pale light—too timid to be a real day.
Early morning, he thought.
The pain from the previous day was already gone, as if it had been torn out by force and left only the hollow behind. Even so, the memory still made his skin prickle, as if his body had learned a new kind of fear.
That felt like dying. He wouldn't be able to hide it from his mother. Master Hanno had to have some remedy. Something to keep it from happening again.
Yes.
The word sounded inside his head, far too clear to be a stray thought.
Riven froze.
— What the fuck is that…? — he let out in a rough whisper.
And the most wrong part of it wasn't "hearing" it. It was realizing he hadn't thought it. He had… received it. As if he'd spoken to himself and been answered independently, without choosing the reply.
For an instant, he searched for the sensation of "another person." There was none. No foreign will, no emotion that wasn't his. It was… him. Just functioning on two lines at once.
As if his mind had cracked and, instead of emptiness, opened a second track.
Riven could follow two parallel thoughts without one swallowing the other. One stayed trapped in the body—in faint hunger, the discomfort of bandages, the heart still racing for no reason. The other evaluated, organized, concluded with a coldness he didn't recognize in himself… and yet it was still his.
"I'm… slower".
When Riven moved his hand, he had the impression it took too long to reach its destination. It wasn't grotesque, like a turtle dragging a paw. It was subtle, almost deceptive—as if the world had gained a tiny delay.
The conclusion came from that parallel flow, clean and direct, without emotion.
It isn't the body that's slower. It's the mind that's accelerated, creating that false perception.
A chill ran through him.
— What the hell? — he muttered.
And the next idea came with the same unsettling speed.
Did I awaken to Level 0?
If that was true, he could finally become a mage. An old dream, fed since the day he saw magic for the first time and understood, with a tightness in his chest, that there existed a kind of person who could write the world with their own hands.
His thoughts fired off too fast to fit into a single breath. What will my element be? Fire, like Father. Water, like Mother. Wind, like my older brother. As for Earth, it was the one he wanted least—heavy, slow, brute. And besides, it was uncommon in his family. Thankfully.
Riven opened his eyes for an instant, as if staring at the ceiling could keep the idea from turning into hope, but it was too late. Expectation had already lodged inside him, small and dangerous, like a spark near dry straw.
He quickly settled onto the floor, sitting cross-legged, and began— for the thousandth time—following the clan's beginner manuals on mana-absorption meditation. He straightened his back, rested his hands on his knees, closed his eyes, and tried to find the "silence" everyone described.
Pain. Same as ever. I'm still a cripple, he thought.
"I wouldn't even complain anymore about being an Earth Mage, oh 'magnanimous' Gods," he said, his irony uncontained.
As he kept trying to feel something in his body, nothing came in. Nothing answered. No spark, no warmth, no thread of mana offering itself to the slightest command. Only his frail body, his knees protesting, and the same emptiness as always—now watched by two streams of thought at the same time.
But Riven didn't falter. He was used to being frustrated whenever mana was the subject. Nothing new under the sun, he thought.
He got up and went to get ready. He hadn't even bathed after the exhausting two hours of work the night before. Before stepping into the tub, he stopped in front of the bathroom's dreaded mirror. Now the small, frail figure with white hair wore ugly bruises on his knee—marks worthy of the fall in his room.
"Maybe Tissor knows what's happening to me".
Or maybe he won't; he isn't the studious type, he answered himself involuntarily.
But Riven insisted on the thought: he has to know something.
And the parallel mind made another analysis bloom inside him: if Tissor didn't know, Grandpa Oryn would. It was carved into Riven's subconscious—this old man's knowledge was so vast he'd know even the location of ingrown hairs on a Troll, even in the most nefarious places.
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The street was already alive because of the festival. Near the corner, a fruit cart rolled along at an easy pace. The driver looked at Riven and flashed a friendly grin, as if he'd been expecting to see him.
— Morning, kid! Where are you rushing off to?
— The training center. — Riven jerked his chin. — I need to talk to Tissor.
The man seemed to puff up with pride by association.
— Ah, Tissor, our pride… heard he took down a Bear bigger than this cart last week! — he laughed, like he was sharing good gossip. — Hop on, little Ri. I'm delivering these fruits for the festival, and I pass right in front.
"Little Ri."
In Venter City, nicknames weren't intimacy—they were routine. With fewer than Two thousand people, everyone knew everyone's name… and almost always the story that came with it. Even more so among the Estiels, where children were rare; it wasn't unusual for a couple to go their whole lives without managing more than two.
Riven climbed up and settled between the baskets, breathing in the sweet scent of fruit. The cart rocked once, and the strange sensation returned: like his mind arrived before his body.
"It isn't the world that slowed down".
That was the other flow, coldly concluding for him.
A few minutes later, the training center appeared ahead. Riven climbed down, nodded his thanks, and headed straight for the gate.
The sound of a weapon cutting through wind was unmistakable. Riven knew what it was: his older brother's spear, forged by their father, the village's master smith, Vallen.
When he opened the training center's doors, his mind didn't stop for a second; now he caught every detail on a new level.
The yard was cold and half-gray, pale light sliding down from the high beams. In the corner, rows of training dummies—wooden trunks and stitched leather, some with cracked helmets, others covered in blade marks—stood motionless like a doomed audience. There were also impact posts, taut ropes for balance, and a rack lined with practice spears.
Besides Tissor, only two people were training. One in the back, repeating slow, methodical cuts like a prayer. The other sweated near the dummies, punching and stepping back, punching again, the dry thuds striking the silence of the hour.
Tissor was tall, lean, and well-defined—broad-shouldered without looking heavy. His light-brown skin was marked by sun and training.
His hair was dark brown, straight, tied in a high tail; a few strands always escaped and fell onto his forehead. His face was long, with subtle cheekbones and a firm jaw. His nose had a slight bend, like an old blow.
His eyes were brown, narrow and alert, with slightly arched brows that gave him an air of constant judgment. His hands were large, full of calluses.
Two marks stood out: a thin scar crossing his left forearm and an old cut near the collarbone, almost hidden by the light armor he wore, already healed.
His brother was the youngest Master seen in the last three hundred years. A skilled warrior of the wind element. Riven was the young genius's number one fan.
Big bro! — Riven shouted as he called out to him. — I need to talk. It's urgent.
Tissor, who had noticed him before Riven even stepped into the building, looked at him with a faint smile.
— Sure, little Ri. What are you going to teach me today?
Tissor's confusion came from habit: Riven always showed up excited to share his "discoveries" about battle tactics—especially weaknesses, or supposed weaknesses, of the monstrous beasts that lived in the forest.
Riven was Master Hanno's apprentice… or rather, a stubborn little flea who hovered around Hanno every other day. Hanno had never personally invited him. Old lunatic. That was what Riven called him sometimes, whenever he insisted he wasn't his teacher.
But those who truly knew Hanno—and his icy heart—also knew the affection he held for the frail boy.
Master Hanno specialized in alchemy and healing, and he knew the bestiary by heart. "Biologist," that was what he called himself; he said he'd seen the term once in a human book in the archive. He didn't want to be limited to a small box, and that word served him well for it. He was the one who updated the bestiary—the book that catalogued the beasts of the forbidden forest—and raised it to an absurd level of detail, a thankless task considering it was already a celebrated work revised by dozens of Masters over time.
That was why Riven knew a lot about herbs and beasts. Healing wasn't his strength; at best, basic first aid.
As for battle strategies, he learned them from Oryn, his grandfather, and from the books Oryn collected.
It was an attempt to be useful in this world. That… or peeling potatoes. Something he was also experienced at.
— No, brother. Can we go somewhere private? — Riven's expression was serious.
Tissor noticed the unusual seriousness and didn't joke. He simply turned and led him to the small square on the corner of the street; it was still morning, there wouldn't be anyone to overhear them.
— Tell me now, little Ri.
Riven swallowed hard.
— Promise you won't interrupt me, big bro?
Tissor nodded once, firm.
So Riven told him what had happened the night before. The fall. The pain. The blackout. The sensation of his head boiling from the inside. And worst of all, that answer that didn't seem to be his—like his mind had opened a second path.
As he spoke, Tissor's fists slowly clenched, as if every detail about the pain—something common, given Riven's illness—built into a contained fury, born from the helplessness of seeing his little brother like that. But he didn't hug and comfort him, though he wanted to. He didn't cut him off. He didn't interrupt. He knew if it was hard for him to hear, imagine the brother who had lived through it.
When Riven finished, Tissor fell silent.
Real silence.
He keeps his word, Riven thought.
But when Riven reached the part about waking up—his mind running in parallel—Tissor couldn't keep his calm.
— Riven… are you sure about what you're telling me?
Tissor's expression showed nothing but controlled doubt. It wasn't disbelief; it was caution. Like he was trying to measure a phenomenon with the wrong tools.
He didn't have a real "test" to measure someone's processing capacity. So he did what he knew best: he turned doubt into movement.
Tissor stepped back, opening space between them.
— Pay attention.
Without warning, he threw a low kick with his left leg and, at the same time, drove his right fist forward in a straight punch.
Riven—slow as he was—brought his guard up on instinct. And in that microsecond—adrenaline snapping, his heart rising into his throat—something impossible happened.
Like a report, his mind dumped information.
And in an even faster thought, it filtered that excess and left only what he wanted, all of it in the blink of an eye.
"Low kick, aiming at my left knee. The punch probably targets the right side of my jaw. Time to impact: one second."
Riven jerked back in a painful motion, throwing his body away. His hand rose to try to cover the punch. Of course it wasn't enough. He was slow and fragile.
Luckily, Tissor wasn't even close to using an awakened fighter's speed. It was less than that—a "slow" strike on purpose.
Even so, to Riven, it still felt too fast.
At the last instant, Tissor stopped mid-strike, halting the kick before contact and holding the punch a hand's breadth from Riven's face, as if the wind between them were an invisible wall.
Then, with unsettling calm, he asked:
— What did you see?
Riven blinked, swallowing hard. His head felt hot—literally hot—but it wasn't pain. It was, in truth, too much clarity.
— I… I saw the kick coming in low, with your left leg. Aimed at my left knee. — He spoke without realizing he was being too precise. — And your punch with your right hand came above it, straight, going for the right side of my jaw. You shifted your weight through your hip first, and… — Riven stalled for a heartbeat, startled by his own certainty. — And you stopped before you hit.
Tissor's eyes narrowed slightly, attentive.
— And what number did I show with my left hand—the one I kept down? — he asked, like tossing a stone into a lake just to see how big the ripples were.
— How am I suppo— — Riven started, genuinely lost.
Three, something inside him said, flat.
— Three. — Riven blurted the word, cutting off what he'd been saying. Did I really do that? — he thought.
In a flash, he reconstructed the moment with a precision that wasn't normal memory: Tissor had kept his left hand low and, for a brief instant, shown three fingers.
Tissor didn't move.
Surprise hit his shoulders first—a tiny tension—then reached his face, like even his expression took a second to accept it.
— …That wasn't luck. — His voice dropped. — Nobody catches that… not like this.
Tissor stared at his own left hand as if he could still see the three fingers hanging in the air—then looked Riven up and down, like he was trying to see something beneath the skin.
His voice came out low, without jokes this time.
— That… isn't normal.
He drew a slow breath, keeping his face under control, but his eyes were razor-sharp.
— Your read on details, even the ones the brain normally filters out in combat, is better than mine. And your reaction time… — Tissor flexed his fingers, like the word itself irritated him. — It's in adept territory.
He shook his head, disbelieving, and the doubt finally took on a tone of incredulity—not toward Riven, but toward the logic of the world.
— You're not awakened yet… and I don't see any trace of refined mana in you. To be honest… you can't even be an embryo.
Tissor remembered his first lesson about the world's power scale. He still remembered it clearly: in Venter City—and anywhere else—the early ladder was simple. Brutally simple.
First came the non-magic, who couldn't sense mana at all. That was where Riven fit.
Then Level 0—Embryo, when someone could finally feel and absorb mana. For those with an ancestry of mana manipulators, children could enter that level early, depending on talent.
Level 1—Awakened was when mana truly answered, when the body and core "lit up."
After that, Level 2—Adept and Level 3—Master were a different conversation: mastery, refinement, control that separated ordinary people from legends.
And Riven… didn't fit anywhere in that beginning.
Tissor looked at him again, as if the next question was dangerous.
"Little Ri… what happened to you last night?" — Tissor thought.