Day twelve.
Forty-seven seconds.
That was my new maximum. Forty-seven seconds of sustained mana contact before the core spasmed and the alignment shattered and the pain drove me off the wall.
Up from forty on day eight. Seven seconds of improvement in four days.
Not fast enough.
Hagen's benchmark was sixty seconds. At my current rate of improvement—roughly two seconds per day, with diminishing returns as the holds got longer—I'd reach sixty seconds in approximately six to seven days. Day eighteen or nineteen. That would leave me three weeks before the exam, assuming the corruption didn't accelerate, assuming the tonic kept working, assuming a dozen other variables I couldn't control held steady.
A lot of assumptions. Too many.
But assumptions were all I had, so I wrote them down.
Not literally—I didn't have paper, or a pen, or whatever the equivalent was in this world. I wrote them in my head, in the spreadsheet that Park Jiwon had maintained since age fourteen, the one that tracked everything from convenience store inventory cycles to the exact number of steps from the register to the stockroom. The spreadsheet was getting crowded. New columns every day—hold duration, alignment speed, melt radius, corruption advance, recovery time, caloric intake, sleep quality, pain levels on a one-to-ten scale.
Today's pain: four. Manageable. The baseline grind of the cracked core had become background noise—still there, still constant, but no longer the loudest thing in the room. I was adapting. Not healing. Adapting. The difference mattered. Healing meant the damage was decreasing. Adapting meant I was learning to function inside the damage.
Not ideal. But functional.
I finished my third hold—forty-three seconds on the last rep, shorter than the first because the core was depleting—and slid down the wall to my spot.
The frozen ground was familiar now. I knew the exact angle to lean at to avoid the sharp edge of the stone block behind my left shoulder. I knew which section of the ground was flattest. I knew that if I stretched my legs out at a specific angle, the ache in my knees settled into something tolerable instead of something that demanded attention.
Optimization of discomfort. The Park Jiwon specialty.
The courtyard was quiet. Sixth bell—late morning. The guards had finished their drills and left. The servants had completed their mid-morning rotation. I had maybe twenty minutes of solitude before the estate's afternoon activities began and the yard filled with people who had better things to do than sit on frozen ground and contemplate the mathematics of failure.
I was fourteen minutes into the twenty when the sound reached me.
Not footsteps.
Hooves.
Multiple sets. Moving fast. The rhythmic percussion of horses at a canter, accompanied by the jingling of tack and the lower, heavier rumble of wheels on stone. A carriage.
Someone was arriving.
I couldn't see the main gate from the training yard—it was on the opposite side of the compound, through the main building and past the front courtyard. But sound carried in cold air, and the Ashworth estate was built of stone, which meant every impact resonated through the architecture like a struck tuning fork.
The hooves slowed. Stopped. Voices—distant, indistinct, carrying the particular cadence of formal greeting. Staff voices. The kind of voices people used when someone important arrived.
I noted it. Filed it. Returned to my recovery.
Not my problem.
***
It became my problem three hours later.
I was in my room. Post-tonic. The warmth had spread through my chest and the veins had retreated to their evening minimum—gray traces at the wrists, barely visible. I was lying on the bed, mentally running through Hagen's exam breakdown for the hundredth time, mapping survival scenarios in a fifty-square-kilometer domain, when the door opened.
Not a knock. Not the careful, permission-seeking creak of a servant's entry.
The door opened the way a door opens when the person behind it has never considered the possibility that they might not be welcome.
A young man walked in.
Tall. Taller than me, taller than Hagen, with the kind of height that wasn't just genetic but postural—the confident, shoulders-back, chin-level verticality of someone who had never been given a reason to shrink. Dark hair, longer than military standard, swept back from his face in a way that looked effortless and probably required twenty minutes in front of a mirror. Sharp features—the Ashworth bone structure, refined rather than eroded, with a jawline that could have been drawn with a ruler and cheekbones that caught the crystal light like they'd been designed for it.
His eyes were pale blue. Helena's blue. Not Caelum's gray, not Lyra's gray—blue, bright and clear, with the particular sharpness of someone who found the world consistently entertaining and had never been given a reason to find it otherwise.
He was smiling.
The smile was perfect. Warm, open, reaching the eyes with practiced ease. The smile of someone who'd learned at a young age that the right expression could open any door, disarm any suspicion, and redirect any conversation.
I hated it immediately.
Not because it was insincere. That would have been simpler—a fake smile was easy to categorize, easy to file under "threat" and move on. This smile was worse. It was genuine. He was genuinely pleased to be here, genuinely amused by whatever he was seeing, genuinely confident that the world was arranged in a way that benefited him and would continue to do so.
The smile of someone who had never lost anything that mattered.
He wore the Ashworth crest on his chest—not the collar, the chest, embroidered in silver and blue on a coat that probably cost more than Park Jiwon's entire apartment. A sword hung at his hip. Not a rapier like Lyra's—a proper longsword, well-maintained, with a grip that showed wear from actual use.
"Caelum."
My name in his mouth sounded like a word he'd remembered from a language he rarely spoke. Familiar but distant. The way you'd say the name of a restaurant you'd eaten at once, years ago, and thought about exactly never since.
"You're awake." He said it with mild surprise, the way you'd note a surprising fact about the weather. "They told me you were bedridden. Helena's words—'vegetative,' I think, was the specific term she used."
...
'Vegetative.'
I filed that next to "cognitive difficulties" in the growing catalog of things Helena had said about me to other family members.
"Rowan," I said.
Same as with Lyra—the name came from the body, from the throat, from some stored muscle memory that the previous occupant had left behind. But unlike Lyra's name, which had come out soft and automatic, this one came out careful. Controlled. The way you'd say the name of something you weren't sure was safe to touch.
Caelum's body remembered Rowan.
And it was afraid of him.
"You do remember." The smile widened. "Helena said the core collapse might have scrambled things upstairs. I'm glad to see she was exaggerating. She does that—have you noticed? Everything is either a catastrophe or beneath her attention. No middle ground. Honestly, it's one of her more charming qualities."
He was talking the way water flows—naturally, effortlessly, filling every available space. Not waiting for responses. Not checking whether I was keeping up. Just... occupying the room, the conversation, the air itself with a confidence so total that silence felt like something that existed only because he allowed it.
He pulled the chair from beside my desk—the desk I'd never used, the chair I'd never sat in—and placed it beside the bed. Sat down. Crossed one leg over the other. Made himself comfortable with the ease of a man who had never entered a room and felt unwelcome.
"You look terrible," he said. Pleasantly. The way you'd tell someone their hair was different. "Worse than last time, actually. Is the corruption progressing?"
"It's managed."
"Managed." He repeated the word, turning it over. "Helena's word again. She manages the tonic. She manages the physician visits. She manages you, Caelum. That's what she does."
I said nothing.
He looked at me. The smile softened—not disappearing, shifting, becoming something less performed and more... attentive. The way a predator looks at something it hasn't classified yet. Not hostile. Just interested.
"You're sitting up," he said. "Making eye contact. Speaking in complete sentences. The last time I visited—when was it, eight months ago?—you were facing the wall. Didn't turn around when I came in. Didn't respond when I spoke. I stayed for... four minutes? Five? Then I left."
...
Eight months. His brother had been lying in a bed, facing a wall, unresponsive, and he'd stayed for four minutes.
Then he'd left.
And he was telling me this casually. Not with guilt. Not with justification. With the same mild, pleasant detachment he brought to everything—the observation of a fact that didn't particularly affect him, noted and moved past with the efficiency of someone who had more important things to attend to.
"Something changed," he said. Not a question. "What?"
"Core destabilization. Helena said it—"
"Helena says a lot of things. I'm asking you."
For the first time, the smile was gone. Not replaced by anything threatening—just absent. The face beneath it was sharper, harder, more Ashworth. The face of someone who used charm the way other people used armor: deliberately, strategically, and with full awareness of what it concealed.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
'What do I say?'
The truth was impossible—I'm a dead Korean convenience store clerk inhabiting your brother's body. Not an option. A lie was risky—Rowan was ranked ninth at Astralion Academy, which meant he was smart, perceptive, and trained to detect deception in high-stakes environments.
Half-truth. The safest currency.
"The destabilization was worse than the previous ones," I said. "I don't remember much of the collapse itself. When I woke up, things were... clearer."
"Clearer."
"Like fog lifting. I don't know how else to describe it."
He studied me. Five seconds. Ten. The attention was heavier than Helena's—Helena calculated, Rowan measured, but where Helena's measurements were about cost and liability, Rowan's were about something else.
Interest.
"The fog lifted," he said slowly, "and the first thing you did was start training."
"...Yes."
"With a cracked core and four mana and an endurance score that would make a physician weep."
"Yes."
"And nobody told you to do this."
"No."
"Hm."
He stood. The chair scraped. He walked to the window—the same window I'd looked through on day one, the one that showed the mountains and the compound and the training grounds where people threw fire and forged ice.
He raised his hand.
Casually. The way you'd raise a hand to scratch your ear or adjust your collar. No preparation, no concentration, no visible effort of any kind.
The air between his palm and the window froze.
Not a coin-sized patch. Not a palm-sized circle.
A sheet. A full sheet of ice, two meters wide, half a meter tall, crystallizing out of nothing in the space between one breath and the next. It hung in the air—suspended, floating, catching the light from the window and fracturing it into a hundred pale blue shards that scattered across the walls and ceiling like broken stars.
The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
My mana core lurched.
Not a pulse. Not a soft, tentative reaching. A lurch—violent, involuntary, the way a drowning man reaches for a rope. The cracked engine in my chest recognized the ice, recognized the mana signature, and surged toward it with a desperation that sent a spike of pain from my sternum to my jaw.
I clenched my teeth. Kept my face still.
The ice sheet hung for three seconds. Perfect. Weightless. Each crystal defined and distinct, like someone had painted winter in midair with a brush made of mathematics.
Then Rowan closed his hand, and it shattered.
Not fell. Shattered. Exploded into a cloud of particles so fine they looked like dust, catching the crystal light one last time before evaporating into nothing. The temperature equalized. The light returned to normal. The room was exactly as it had been, except for a faint smell of ozone and the fact that my core was still screaming.
Rowan turned from the window.
The smile was back.
"Ice affinity," he said. "Runs in the family. Mother's side."
...
'Mother's side.'
Not Helena. Their biological mother. The one who was dead. The one whose absence had left a space that Helena had filled with control and precision and the word "vegetative."
"I'm B-rank," Rowan continued. Conversational. The way you'd mention your shoe size. "Mana capacity: two hundred and forty. Control: sixty-three. The ice sheet you just saw used roughly point-five percent of my reserve."
Point-five percent.
Half a percent.
He'd created something that made the room drop ten degrees and my cracked core seize—and it had cost him what I spent in a single heartbeat. What I ground out over forty-seven agonizing seconds against a frost-covered wall, he could do a hundred times over without breaking a sweat.
The gap wasn't a gap. It was a canyon. It was the space between the ground and the sun, measured in units that didn't exist yet because no one had ever needed to describe a distance that large.
"The entrance exam is in three and a half weeks," Rowan said. "I assume you know that."
"I know."
"And you're training for it."
"Yes."
"With your four mana."
"Yes."
He looked at me. The smile was still there, but something behind it had shifted—a gear turning, a calculation completing, a conclusion being reached that he wasn't going to share.
"...Good luck, Caelum."
He said it warmly. Pleasantly. With the same easy charm he'd brought to every word since walking through the door.
And it meant absolutely nothing.
Not cruelty—I'd have preferred cruelty. Cruelty was at least honest. This was worse. This was a man wishing luck to someone he'd already written off, the way you'd wish luck to a child entering a race you knew they'd lose. Polite. Kind, even. And completely, fundamentally hollow.
He walked to the door. Opened it. Paused.
"Oh—one thing. Helena asked me to evaluate your condition while I was here. She wanted a third-party assessment for the Academy registration. Something about verifying your 'fitness for participation.'"
...
"What will you tell her?"
"That you're lucid, ambulatory, and aware of what you're signing up for." He shrugged. "Whether or not you should be signing up for it is a different question, but Helena didn't ask that one."
He left.
The door closed behind him with a soft click.
***
I sat on the bed.
The room was still cold. The ozone smell lingered—sharp, clean, electric. My core was still grinding from the proximity to Rowan's ice, the cracked engine complaining about a stimulus it had desperately wanted and couldn't process.
My hands were shaking.
Not from the cold. Not from exhaustion. Not from the corruption.
From the gap.
I'd known, intellectually, that the distance between me and a real mana user was vast. I'd calculated it. Mapped it. Filed it in a spreadsheet cell labeled "power differential" and assigned it a number that was large enough to be abstract.
But seeing it—feeling it, the core lurching, the air freezing in an instant, the casual, effortless, point-five-percent creation of something I couldn't replicate in a lifetime of frost holds—
That wasn't abstract.
That was a wall. A real one. Not metaphorical, not motivational, not the kind of wall you see in stories that exists to be climbed. A wall that was there because the universe had built it, and the universe didn't care whether I thought it was fair.
I pressed my palms against my eyes.
Breathed.
Fact one: Rowan was B-rank. Mana: 240. Control: 63. The entrance exam would have applicants ranging from F to C, with occasional B-ranks from major families. I would be the lowest-ranked applicant there. Not by a little. By categories.
Fact two: Rowan had come because Helena sent him. The "evaluation" was real—Helena was building a paper trail. If Caelum died in the exam, she needed documentation showing he'd been assessed and cleared. Cover story. Again. Always.
Fact three: Rowan didn't care whether I lived or died.
Not in a hostile way. Not in a calculated way. In the way that a person doesn't care about weather patterns in a country they'll never visit. My existence was a datapoint in his peripheral vision, relevant only when it intersected with something that mattered to him.
I was furniture to Helena.
I was nothing to Rowan.
I was a list of symptoms to the servants.
I was a wet spot on a wall to Hagen.
I was a guilt response to Lyra.
...
I was four mana and forty-seven seconds and a cracked core that had seized like a dying animal at the first taste of real power.
The shaking stopped. Slowly. I pulled my hands from my face. Looked at them—thin, veined, trembling at the edges. The hands of a corpse that hadn't finished the paperwork.
'...Forty-seven seconds.'
'Push to fifty tomorrow.'
'Fifty-three the day after.'
'Sixty by day nineteen.'
'Don't look at the wall. Look at the step.'
I lay back. The ceiling was stone. It was always stone. Dark and cold and indifferent, like everything else in this house.
But I was still here.
And tomorrow I'd press my hand to the wall again.
And the frost would melt.
Coin by coin by coin.
***
The static came at midnight.
Longer this time. Five full seconds. The dead-channel hum filling the dark room like something breathing.
And the rhythm again—tap, tap, tap-tap—but closer. Not behind my eyes anymore. In my ears. In the room. As if the sound had migrated from inside my skull to the space around me.
I opened my eyes.
The crystals on the wall were flickering.
Not dimming. Not brightening. Flickering—on-off-on-off, rapid, arrhythmic, like a signal being transmitted in a language I couldn't read. The pale blue light stuttered across the ceiling, casting shadows that moved wrong. Not following the light source. Moving independently. Moving first.
The shadows from Chapter One.
The same desync. The same half-beat delay in the wrong direction. Except this time, I was watching. This time, I was paying attention. And this time, the shadows weren't just moving early.
They were forming shapes.
Not clear ones. Not letters or symbols or anything I could identify. Just... configurations. Arrangements of darkness that held for a fraction of a second before dissolving back into normal shadow behavior. Like someone was writing on the wall in a language made of absence, and erasing each word before I could read it.
Three seconds of this.
Then the crystals stabilized. The shadows snapped back to normal. The tapping stopped. The static faded.
Silence.
I lay in the dark, breathing, heart rate elevated, core grinding.
'That wasn't random.'
'That was deliberate.'
'Something is trying to communicate.'
'And it's getting closer.'
...
I didn't sleep.
I lay awake until dawn, watching the walls, waiting for the shadows to move again.
They didn't.
But I could feel it.
Waiting.
The way I was waiting.