Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Chapter 9

What he knew was that something had responded tonight when he breathed correctly. Something that was not elemental and not random and not the product of any technique he had been taught, because he had never been taught anything. Whatever it was, it was his, and it was real, and it had moved.

That was enough to come back tomorrow.

He went to bed, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, he fell asleep without thinking about the water run in the morning.

Ethan found out about the assessment the same way he found out about most things at Skyward Academy — by accident, while doing something else entirely.

He was restocking the outer training hall's supply cabinet on a Tuesday morning when he noticed the pairings board that had gone up on the courtyard notice wall overnight. It listed every outer disciple scheduled for the month-end ranking assessment — a quarterly event where students fought single-round matches to determine their placement in the outer hall's hierarchy. He had seen these boards before and they had never had anything to do with him, so he gave it a passing glance and went back to counting practice talismans.

Then someone behind him laughed, and he looked again.

Near the bottom of the board, in the last slot of the last bracket, was his name. Ethan Grey. Paired against a second-year outer disciple named Marcus Webb.

He stood in front of the board for a moment, then went to find Hobb.

Hobb looked at the copy of the bracket Ethan had written down and turned it over in his hands the way he turned over anything unexpected — slowly, without obvious reaction. "You didn't put your name in yourself."

"No."

"It would have needed a senior disciple to sponsor the entry. Servants aren't barred from participating technically, but nobody ever does because nobody ever enters them." He set the paper down on his desk. "You have a reasonable idea of who did this."

"Cole's the only one who'd think it was worth the effort," Ethan said.

Hobb was quiet for a moment. "I can take it to Administrator Fell. Argue the entry was submitted without your consent."

"And Fell would do what? Remove the entry and leave Cole feeling like he'd been told off on my behalf." Ethan shook his head. "That's worse than just going."

Hobb looked at him with the measured patience of someone who had seen enough of the Academy's social mechanics to know when an argument was not worth having. "The assessment is in twelve days. Marcus Webb is a second-year wind meridian. He placed fourth in his bracket last quarter." He paused. "I'm not telling you that because I think you should fight him seriously. I'm telling you so you know what you're walking into."

"I know," Ethan said. "Thank you."

He went back to counting the talismans, and after a while the morning moved on the way mornings did.

In the twelve days before the assessment, he went to the waste pit every evening without exception.

His practice had developed in the three weeks since he had first managed to feel the void frequency shift. It was slow progress by any measure, but it was consistent — each session built on the one before it, the way learning anything physical builds, through repetition rather than sudden leaps. He could find the stillness quickly now, within a few minutes of sitting down, and holding it had become less like an effort and more like a habit. The void frequency responded to his breathing with something approaching regularity, and on several recent evenings he had managed to gather a small amount of it — not into a meridian pathway, because he didn't have one in the conventional sense, but into a kind of loose, barely-formed pool at the centre of his chest that the Sutra's next lines described as the preliminary state before a void core could begin to form.

He was nowhere near forming a void core. He understood that. But the pool was real, and it was his, and it grew slightly larger with each session.

What he spent the twelve days specifically working on was control — not expanding what he had, but making sure it stayed where he put it. He needed to walk into that assessment and come out of it without anyone noticing what he was carrying, which meant the void energy he had gathered could not be allowed to surface under stress. He spent those evenings practising keeping it compressed and still while he moved around the pit, while he deliberately made himself uncomfortable, while he thought about the least pleasant aspects of the situation ahead of him. It was a strange kind of training, but it was the training the situation required.

Mia noticed he was preoccupied, though she didn't know why. On the fourth evening she sat down next to him after dinner and said, "You're thinking about the assessment board, aren't you."

It wasn't phrased as a question. "Word travels fast," he said.

"Cole told half the outer hall within an hour of putting your name up. He's treating it like a joke he's particularly proud of." She pulled her knees up and rested her arms on them. "Are you worried?"

"Not really." He thought about it honestly. "I'm going to lose. I've made my peace with that. I just want to do it without making it worse than it needs to be."

Mia was quiet for a moment. "I'll be there," she said. "In case it does get worse than it needs to be."

He nodded and didn't say anything more about it, and she let the subject go, and they sat together until the evening cooled enough to go in.