She paced the narrow strip of floor between her bed and desk for another ten minutes, replaying the price tag of an elemental attunement pool over and over in her head, then sank onto her mattress with a heavy, defeated sigh.
There had to be another way. There was always another way, if you were cheap enough and stubborn enough.
She prodded her beat-up wrist terminal until the contact list flickered into view. There was only one person she could ask about this—only one person she knew well enough to bother with a question this specific. Lyra Voss.
Halfway across the city, in the gilded sitting room of the Voss family townhouse, Lyra was sprawled across a velvet sofa staring at the ceiling, bored out of her mind, when her communication rune chimed. She glanced at the name glowing on the surface and jolted upright so fast she nearly fell off the couch.
She fumbled the rune active. "Laia? Is that really you?"
"It's me."
The words came tumbling out before Laia could even finish speaking. Lyra ranted about stuffy family dinners, about her mother's endless lectures about proper noble demeanor, about how boring it was to be home for the break instead of staying at the academy. She prattled on for a full five minutes before she paused, breathless, and remembered to ask why Laia had called.
"Hey—sorry, I got carried away. What's up? Did you need something?"
Laia's voice came through flat and practical, as always. "Do you know anything about elemental attunement pools? How to get one without buying the card."
Lyra blinked. "Oh, those? Super popular right now. The market price has shot up to six hundred thousand crystals last I heard. Total craze, everyone at Third Tier wants one for their subjects."
Laia made a quiet, pained sound on the other end of the line. Six hundred thousand. Even worse than the textbook had said.
"Is there any other way?" she said. "Any way that doesn't cost half a million crystals."
Lyra tilted her head, thinking hard. "Hmm. Well… if you can't afford the card, the other way is elemental fruit. You know, the ones that grow wild in the void border zones? If your realm's elemental density is high enough to spawn elemental slimes on its own, and you feed one of those fruits into your core, a natural elemental spring forms right in the middle of your realm. Works just like an attunement pool. Better, actually, because it's tied to your realm's own rules instead of a card's artificial—"
"Got it," Laia said, cutting her off mid-explanation. "Thanks. I'll look into it. Gotta go."
"Wait—Laia! Wait, the natural springs have rule-bending properties, you should know—"
The line went dead.
Lyra stared at the dark communication rune for a second, then flopped back onto the sofa with a huff.
Rude, she thought, but fond. Typical. Always in a hurry, never sticking around for the details.
Laia set her wrist terminal down on the nightstand and exhaled slowly, relieved to have escaped the conversation before Lyra could tangent for another twenty minutes. That was exactly why she didn't call people often. One question turned into an hour of small talk, and she had better things to do with her time.
Like figure out how to get an elemental fruit.
She knew exactly what they were. Rare, highly regulated, found only in the deeper parts of the Exile Marches. Officially, selling them was banned. Officially, no Third Tier god was supposed to go anywhere near the deep border zones alone.
Officially, she also wasn't supposed to have slipped through her own realm veil and wandered around the void for three hours her first year, either.
She leaned back against the wall, staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling.
The rules were there to keep people from getting themselves killed and turning into fallen gods. She got it. It was a mess for everyone when a god went rogue out in the void. But she wasn't some reckless noble kid with more money than sense. She knew what void fog felt like. She knew how to move quiet, how to stay low, how to leave before anything big noticed her.
And it wasn't like she had a lot of options. Six hundred thousand crystals might as well have been six million, for all the good it did her.
She glanced at the tattered paper calendar taped to her desk. The semester break was three weeks away.
Three weeks. She'd have time to prepare. Time to pack supplies, map out a route, grab a few of her best scouts. It'd be fine. She'd run in, grab a fruit, run out. No heroics. No fighting anything bigger than Second Tier. Easy.
It was the respectful thing to do, really. Put in the actual work for the assignment instead of just buying her way through it. Lord Thorne would probably appreciate it.
She nodded to herself, satisfied with the plan, and pulled the covers up to her chin.
First things first. Sleep. Everything else could wait until morning.
Deep in her divine realm, far below the surface of the world, the human capital's research hall hummed with quiet, focused energy.
King Theron stood over a heavy stone workbench, turning a small, glistening void crystal between his thumb and forefinger. It pulsed faintly, deep violet, hard as diamond. No steel blade could scratch it. No ordinary magic could leave a mark. Only the raw, ordered energy of the realm's core could interact with it at all.
On the other side of the bench, a tiny Maxwell's Demon bounced gently in a glass enclosure, its wispy form pulsing softly. It had just finished disassembling a Second Tier void spawn down to its base components, piece by piece, reversing entropy like it was sorting pebbles. The crystal was the end result: pure, condensed void essence, stripped of all corruption and chaos.
Theron smiled, quiet and sharp.
Fascinating little thing, the demon. It solved energy problems no mortal engineer had ever even dreamed of. It could pull usable heat out of thin air. It could purify corrupted material. It could take the most chaotic, dangerous substance in existence and turn it into a clean, stable crystal.
It had limits, of course. Only Second Tier, for now. Anything stronger than that was beyond its reach. And the energy it produced was still trivial, compared to what a god could wield.
But it was a start.
He set the crystal down on a velvet cloth and glanced at the demon, which had curled up in the corner of its enclosure for a nap.
Give it time, he thought. Give us time. When the realm grows, when it grows stronger… who knows what we'll be able to build with this?
He thought of his god—quiet, scruffy, always worrying about coin, always underestimating just how much her realm was changing, day by day—and chuckled softly.
She'd find out eventually. For now, they'd keep building. Keep experimenting. Keep getting stronger.
Surprises were good, every now and then.
Back in the dorm room, the other three girls had fallen quiet.
They'd been whispering and giggling about Laia's early bedtime, teasing her for being the only Third Tier student in the whole academy who actually slept at night instead of pulling all-nighters cultivating with essence crystals.
"Thought the top student would be grinding 24/7," the girl in the bed across had murmured, snickering. "Maybe talent really does beat hard work, huh?"
Then they'd felt it.
A soft, steady pulse of divine energy, rolling off Laia's sleeping form in slow, warm waves. At first they'd thought it was just a dream, a random surge. But it didn't fade. It grew. Steadier. Stronger.
The faint, familiar pressure of Late Third Tier… shifted.
The girl closest to Laia's bed held her breath.
No way, she thought. No way she's breaking through in her sleep.
But it was happening. Right there in front of them, under a frayed wool blanket, snoring softly, Laia was crossing the threshold into Fourth Tier. Not with grand rituals, not with expensive crystals, not with any fanfare at all. Just… sleeping.
The three roommates exchanged wide-eyed, stunned looks.
No one laughed anymore.
Outside the window, the moon hung high over the academy spires, silver and quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a night bell tolled once.
And in the cheapest dorm room in the whole building, the tournament champion slept right through her own breakthrough, completely unaware that she'd just left every other Third Tier student in her dust.