Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Every morning at Skyward Academy started the same way for Ethan Grey — before the bells, before the disciples were even out of bed, he was already halfway up the eastern path with two wooden buckets hanging from his shoulders and the mountain cold settling around him like a second coat.

He had been making that climb since he was eleven. Six years later, the buckets hadn't gotten any lighter, but he had at least stopped counting the steps. There were three hundred and twelve of them, carved into the cliff face between the eastern spring and the outer training hall, and somewhere around year two he had decided that counting them was a habit worth dropping.

The path wound through a stretch of pines where the mist collected thick in the early hours, and on most mornings that part of the climb was the best part of the day. The air smelled of resin and damp stone, the light came through the branches in slow, grey pieces, and the only sounds were his own footsteps and the occasional bird call drifting in from deep in the tree line. It was the one stretch of his day that felt fully unobserved, before the Academy woke up and he became visible again in the particular way that people become visible when there are tasks that need doing.

He was about halfway through the pines when he heard them coming down behind him — three sets of boots moving fast on stone, not especially concerned with what might be in the way. He recognised the pattern without looking back and stepped aside, pressing close to the cliff wall and shifting the buckets to keep them level.

They swept past without slowing. The tallest one — Cole, a third-year outer disciple with a wind meridian alignment and the social awareness of a falling rock — clipped Ethan's shoulder hard enough to knock water over the rim of the left bucket and straight down into his boot.

"Watch it," Cole said, without breaking stride or turning around.

Ethan looked at his soaked boot, then at Cole's back disappearing around the lower bend of the path, and decided, as he had decided many times before, that saying anything would cost more than it was worth. He adjusted his grip and kept walking.

Mia was already on the low wall at the courtyard's eastern edge when he arrived, working through a basket of herbs she'd gathered before sunrise. She did that most mornings — the best plants were easiest to find in the early light, she'd explained once, before the older gatherers got to them. She had a system for everything, which Ethan had always found reassuring, partly because it worked and partly because it meant she was reliably where he expected her to be.

"Cole?" she asked, glancing at his wet boot without looking up from the herbs.

"Who else." He laughed, brushing the whole thing to the back of his mind.

"He does that on purpose. He times it." She held a stem up to the light, examined it, and set it in the left pile. "You should say something to Administrator Fell."

"Fell would send me to clean the meditation chamber drains for a week and tell Cole to watch where he's going," Ethan said, sitting down beside her. "I'd rather stay invisible."

Mia made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite argument — the sound of someone who thought he was probably right but didn't particularly enjoy saying so. She reached into the bottom of her basket and produced a small paper package. "I made extra rice this morning. You skipped dinner again last night."

He took it without arguing. Inside was a rice ball with a pickled plum pressed into the top, slightly squashed from sitting at the bottom of the basket. They ate together for a while in easy quiet, watching the courtyard fill as the morning bells rang from the upper hall.

The disciples came in groups, falling into warm-up routines with the easy confidence of people whose bodies had long since memorised the movements. Qi moved between their hands in practiced arcs — gold for wind, deep blue for water, the slow warm pulse of earth. Ethan watched without thinking much about it. He knew the forms, had read every cultivation manual left out in the common room, every theory text left unattended in the outer hall's reading corner. He could describe the mechanics of a wind-strike or a fire compression technique well enough to pass a written exam.

None of that meant anything without a root to draw on. Knowing how a river flows doesn't mean you can make it rain.

"What are you thinking about?" Mia asked.

"The second water run," he said, which was not entirely a lie, and stood to go.

Ethan had been tested for a spiritual root at ten, the same as every child who came through Skyward Academy's gates. The examiner, a dry-faced elder called Crowe, had pressed two fingers to Ethan's sternum and held them there for nearly a full minute — longer than he'd held them on anyone else that day, which Ethan had taken for a hopeful sign at the time. Then Crowe had removed his fingers, written one word in his ledger without any expression, and moved on.

Null.

No fire, no wind, no water, no earth, no lightning. A perfect absence. He should have been sent home, but his mother had died that same winter and there was no home to return to, and the groundskeeper Hobb had quietly arranged for him to stay on as a servant. That was six years ago. Since then, the Academy had given him a bunk, two meals a day when he remembered to collect them, and the unofficial designation of hollow — the word the disciples used for someone born without a spiritual root, delivered in the tone of a category rather than a deliberate insult. It wasn't cruelty exactly. Cruelty would have required them to register him as worth the effort.

He had made his peace with it, more or less. There were days when he found the arrangement almost workable: a place to sleep, predictable work, Mia's rice balls when he forgot to eat. It wasn't the life he would have chosen, but he had long since learned that spending energy on what you couldn't change was its own kind of waste.

The second water run finished without incident. He went to find Hobb.

The rest of the day ran in the familiar pattern — drainage channels behind the inner hall had partially blocked after the week's rain and needed clearing, then two hours of general maintenance across the outer grounds, then the midday meal eaten quickly in the servants' annex before he and Hobb started on the afternoon supply deliveries from the outer gate.

Hobb was a quiet man in his sixties who had been at Skyward Academy longer than most of the elders had been cultivating. He asked few questions, offered few opinions, and ran his supply routes with a steady efficiency that Ethan had come to appreciate. They worked through the afternoon without talking much, shifting crates and logging inventory while the light went copper and long across the mountain.

By the time the lower bells rang for the evening meal, they were down to the last load.

"Last run's yours," Hobb said, marking his ledger. "Outer gate to the inner hall annex — four crates by the western post, two herb supplies, one equipment, one general. Main corridor has a wax floor drying, so take the second-tier path around the back."

Ethan nodded and went to collect the crates.