Dawn in Clockthon was always grey.
Smoke from sleepless factory chimneys painted the sky a leaden hue, muting the newborn sunlight into a pale whisper that day had changed. I stood in the middle of my room in the Crow's Nest, wearing a new uniform. The dark gray wool felt stiff and foreign against my skin. The emblem of the Royal Military Academy, a winged sword piercing a book, was pinned to my collar, a cruel irony.
Grisa Rash waited for me outside.
Our journey to the academy passed in the same silence as always. The Fravikveidimadr armored vehicle glided smoothly over cobbled streets, its metallic interior offering no comfort. I attempted to ask a few questions about the academy, its curriculum, its factions, the key figures among the faculty.
"All relevant information is in the student handbook you'll receive," she replied without turning, her eyes locked forward. "Your job is to study, not to gossip."
I asked no more.
The wall between us remained as thick as ever, but now a crack had formed on its surface. A crack I had made with Euler's equation. She knew I wasn't just a child, and that uncertainty made her even more vigilant.
The Royal Military Academy of Clockthon was nothing like I imagined.
No glittering towers of arcane wonder. No majestic gates guarded by statues of griffins. It was a colossal fortress of black granite, built centuries ago to repel barbarian hordes and now repurposed as an institution of learning. Its high, thick walls were dulled by acid rain and industrial soot. The wide courtyards were filled with cadets marching in synchronized rows, their uniforms forming a monotonous sea of gray.
The air didn't reek of wonder and knowledge, but of discipline calcified into power.
It was the embodiment of disappointment.
A grand institution that, from the outside, looked more like a rusted bureaucratic machine than a center of learning. Just like the murim sect in my first life—an illustrious name reduced to an empty husk of its former glory.
Grisa handed me over to a pudgy, sour-faced middle-aged administrator.
My registration process took a full hour, triplicate forms and bureaucratic stamps. I was merely a line of data, a numbered file slotted into an endless cabinet drawer. To them, I was "Welt Rothes, gifted orphan from Caledon." A convenient fiction.
Eventually, I was escorted to the junior cadet dormitory.
It was just as massive and expressionless as the rest of the academy. My assigned room was on the third floor, cramped, with two iron beds, two desks, and a shared wardrobe. The air smelled of disinfectant and damp socks.
My roommate was already there.
He sat on his bed, reading a thick, leather-bound book. He looked my age, maybe a year older. Jet-black hair, neatly cut. Eyes the same gray as Clockthon's sky.
When I entered, he looked up. Calm, sharp eyes. He wasn't surprised to see a ten-year-old here. He simply observed, assessing.
"You must be Welt Rothes," he said, his voice soft and clear. "I'm Roshtov. Roshtov Valerius."
Valerius, a minor noble house from the southern territories. I merely nodded, dropping my bag, just one spare set of clothes on my bed.
"I saw your name on the notice board," he continued, eyes returning to his book, though I knew his attention remained on me. "Emergency admission. Rare enough."
I didn't respond. I simply began arranging my meager belongings.
The silence between us was a game. He was probing, trying to unveil my background. I gave him silence, forcing him to play his card first.
"Caledon, huh?" he asked after a moment. "I've been there. Peaceful province. Didn't know they had an academy branch."
"They don't," I answered curtly. "A talent scout found me."
I recited my cover story, knowing full well how flimsy it sounded.
Roshtov gave a thin smile, one that didn't reach his eyes.
"A very lucky scout, then." He closed his book.
"Welcome to the Prison, Welt Rothes."
"The Prison?"
"They call it an academy," he said with a shrug. "But we all know what this place is. A machine for separating wheat from chaff. A factory for taming troublesome noble heirs and manufacturing obedient officers.
Hope you enjoy your stay."
He returned to reading. The conversation was over. I had met the first interesting person in this place.
Roshtov wasn't ordinary. His cynicism ran too deep for someone our age.
He was an observer, just like me.
My first class was 'Introduction to Essence Control.'
A large hall with high ceilings and arched windows overlooking the training grounds. Around thirty other students sat at wooden benches, all teenagers. I sat in the back row, my small presence barely noticed.
The professor was a man named Sirus, a middle-aged Evolver with a bloated gut and tired eyes.
He spoke in a monotone, outlining basic concepts of essence visualization and channeling. It was all painfully elementary, material I had surpassed in my first week at the Crow's Nest.
The first exercise was to light a candle on our desks using only Essence.
One by one, students concentrated. Some produced faint sparks. A noble girl from a prominent house managed to ignite her candle steadily, making the flame dance with flair. She earned a nod of approval from Professor Sirus.
Then it was my turn.
All eyes turned to me, the prodigy from a backwater province. I could feel their expectations.
I stared at the candle, closed my eyes, and feigned concentration.
I reached inward, into the stormy sea of my Void Essence. But I wouldn't reveal my true power. Instead, I aimed for calculated failure.
I released the tiniest fragment of my Essence, a flicker, unstable and imprecise. I didn't try to light the wick. I merely nudged it toward the candle.
The result was exactly what I wanted.
The candle trembled violently for a moment. Its shadow on the wall stretched and twisted into bizarre shapes, then returned to normal. No flame. No light. Just a strange, useless phenomenon.
I opened my eyes and gave the professor a frustrated expression.
"I can't do it, Professor."
Professor Sirus sighed.
"Oneiric Path, I see. Always troublesome. Your Essence lacks thermal or kinetic properties. Difficult for standard tasks. Keep practicing your visualization. Next."
He moved on without another word.
Whispers rose among the students. Disappointment. Scorn.
The prodigy had failed.
My reputation as a weak, talentless oddity began to form, just as planned.
Being a non-threat was the perfect camouflage.
Inside, I smiled coldly.
They saw a ripple on the surface, never realizing I hid a tsunami within.
The day ended.
I returned to my room. Roshtov was already there, still with his book.
"I heard you put on an interesting show in Professor Sirus's class," he said, eyes never leaving the page.
"I tried," I replied.
"Shadow distortion," he mused. "Not a common manifestation. They'll have a hard time classifying you. Could be an advantage, or a curse."
I didn't answer.
I just climbed into bed, turned my back to him, and pretended to sleep. That night, I didn't rest. I expanded my awareness, feeling the web of Essence that cloaked the academy. Every student, every teacher, every guard pulsed with faint energy. This place was a complex ecosystem, full of predators and prey.
And then I felt it.
Far below, in what I guessed to be the archives, or perhaps deeper, came a pulse. A faint Essence pulse, yet familiar. Not pure Void Essence like mine, but it resonated with the same chill, the same alien ancientness.
Something that should not exist was buried beneath this fortress.
This was the world Dales had hidden from me. This was my true first lesson.
Days turned into weeks.
I kept my facade, a clumsy, average student. I earned middling scores in theory and outright failed in practice. I became a ghost in the academy, an oddity everyone chose to ignore.
Grisa's surveillance remained tight. Every night, I reported to her at a designated spot.
"Nothing happened. The lessons are dull. The food's awful."
I repeated the same litany, designed to lull her into complacency.
Beneath the surface, I worked. Each night, after Roshtov fell asleep, I slipped out, not physically, but through my awareness. I had learned to pass through the Throne of Nothing unnoticed. A thread of Essence would slide through shadowed corridors, down stone staircases, chasing the faint pulse I had sensed that first night.
It was excruciating work. Controlling such a delicate thread at long distance demanded immense concentration. Time and again, it snapped—sending sharp stings through my mind.
But I persisted. Night after night.
Finally, after weeks, I succeeded. My awareness reached the source.
It wasn't in the archives. It was far deeper, a sub-basement not marked on any academy map.
Through my Essence's 'eyes,' I saw a vast circular chamber, in its center floated a glass orb the size of a human head.
Inside the orb was… something, hard to describe. A shard of pure darkness, a hole in reality that twisted and changed shape constantly. The pulse came from it.
It was held in place by intricate machinery connected to the orb, generating a blue energy field that kept it suspended. Several technicians in white lab coats, the same worn by Elias, moved around, adjusting dials and taking notes.
This was Fravikveidimadr's secret laboratory, hidden right beneath the academy. And at its core, they kept something eerily similar to the source of my power.
Then I saw something else. On one side of the chamber were containment cells, inside one sat a man. He wore an orange prison jumpsuit, his hair was long and disheveled, and he stared vacantly at the orb in the center.
My Essence thread drew closer. When I 'saw' his face, a memory that wasn't mine, one from the original Welt Rothes, no, from Grime, flashed in my mind. A memory of hunger, of cold, and this man giving a child a piece of bread in a back alley of the Slum District.
Grime, so named because he was discarded by his parents as filth.
This man had cared for Welt Rothes before I took over his body.
And now he was a prisoner in Fravikveidimadr's secret lab, the pulse I thought came from the artifact, part of it came from him.
Somehow, he was connected to it.
I withdrew my awareness quickly, heart beating faster, the situation was far more complex than I had imagined.
Fravikveidimadr wasn't just watching me, they had studied this phenomenon long before they found me, the man in the cell was their previous subject.
This academy wasn't merely a cage for me, it was a chessboard far greater in scope, and I had just realized—I wasn't the only piece carved in strange colors.