"Kaevryn!"The sharp voice pulled him out of the darkness."Are you planning to sleep through my entire lesson?"A few students laughed.Kaevryn opened his eyes, his breathing uneven and his heart pounding.For a moment, he could still hear explosions echoing across a battlefield. He could feel the weight of his golden spear and remember the terrifying entity that had descended beyond the shattered sky.But there was no battlefield.He was sitting in a classroom.A teacher stood before him, arms crossed."Since you seem so comfortable sleeping, perhaps you can answer the question I just asked."Kaevryn stared at him before slowly looking around.Rows of desks filled the room. Students in purple touniforms watched him with amusement, while sunlight streamed through the windows.Everything seemed ordinary.Yet something felt terribly wrong.He lowered his gaze to his hands.They were clean. No scars crossed his knuckles, and his fingers bore none of the calluses he remembered from years

Kaevryn woke before his alarm.For several seconds, he lay still, listening to the quiet room and waiting for the strange pulse he had felt the night before. Nothing stirred inside him. The memory of the hairline crack across the Shattered Core remained, but he could not tell whether it had truly happened or whether his tired mind had invented it.He got dressed and began his morning exercises.His muscles still ached from yesterday. He reduced the number of repetitions rather than forcing himself through them, then stretched and practiced the basic movements he had attempted at the training grounds.Step. Turn. Shift his weight. Recover his balance.The movements were simple, but the memories in his mind kept trying to make them faster and more complicated. He resisted the urge. A technique performed badly at high speed was worse than a simple movement performed correctly.After several minutes, he noticed something.Whenever he imagined an opponent approaching, he instinctively plac

Kaevryn shut his bedroom door and sat on the edge of his bed. His body could barely keep up with a basic sparring exercise. Knowing how to fight was not the same as being able to fight.He closed his eyes and tried to sense Aether again. He followed the breathing exercise taught in class, searching for the faint current he was supposed to feel. Nothing came.Then a familiar pulse stirred beneath his chest.The sensation seemed to come from the strange fragment buried deep within his spirit origin. It was not like the Aether he had been trying to find. The pulse came again, and his room blurred around the edges.For one frightening moment, he felt as if he were falling. Then his feet struck something solid.He stood in a vast space beneath a grey, starless sky. A smooth silver surface stretched in every direction, and distant shapes rose from the darkness.“Where am I?”A low vibration passed through the space.A figure stood several paces away. Its body was shaped like a person, forme

Kaevryn returned home with one thought fixed in his mind: sensing Aether was only the beginning.For days, he had struggled to notice the faint current. But the moment he tried to draw it closer, the sensation slipped away.He opened his notebook and reviewed his observations. Forcing the current made it disappear. Relaxing his breathing helped him notice it. The brief resonance from the Shattered Core had also made the sensation clearer.That last detail mattered.Kaevryn shut the notebook, sat on the floor, and focused on the fragment within his spirit origin.The Core answered with a familiar pulse.Silver light swallowed the room.He appeared on the smooth ground beneath the strange grey sky. Aether currents flowed through the space, invisible to him at first. But now his awareness caught them: faint streams crossing the air and passing through the ground like rivers beneath clear water.He had sensed them before. This time, he could recognize them.Kaevryn stood very still, afrai

The months passed faster than Kaevryn expected.His phone became part of his routine. It woke him before sunrise, stored his training records, displayed school notices, and helped him compare each Core session with the time that passed outside. He confirmed what he had suspected: time inside the Shattered Core moved differently. He could spend hours training there while only a fraction of that time passed in his room.He still attended classes, completed assignments, trained with Lucien, and slept enough to recover. The Core could give him more practice, but it could not make exhaustion harmless. Whenever the pressure behind his eyes grew too strong, he stopped.Inside the silver space, Kaevryn refined the process of Body Forging. He began with small amounts of Aether, guiding them through familiar pathways before gradually extending the circulation. Each successful session strengthened his foundation.He kept detailed notes on his phone and reviewed them before entering the Core. If