The world, for Ren, shrank to the size of a single square foot of dirt. The grand ambitions of the academy, the petty rivalries, the very passage of day and night—all faded into an irrelevant background hum. His reality was the space between his focused will and a single, chosen grain of sand.
He began the exercise with the fierce, stubborn determination that had carried him through every trial. He knelt in the dirt, his eyes closed, and extended his senses. He used the same principle as before, creating a microscopic, high-pressure zone beneath the target. His first attempt, calibrated to what he thought was an infinitesimal level of force, sent a puff of dust into the air, scattering dozens of grains. Failure.
He tried again, reducing the pressure. The result was the same. Again, and again. For hours, his only company was the soft sound of his own failures. He learned that the kinetic force he had unleashed on the training dummy was a wild, untamed beast. To whisper when all you knew was how to roar was a form of control he had never imagined. It required a level of focus that made his trial in the Aetheric Font feel like a simple warm-up.
Frustration, a hot and useless emotion, tried to surface, but he beat it back down. This was not a wall to be broken; it was a lock to be picked. He changed his approach. Instead of trying to create pressure beneath the grain, he tried to create a vacuum above it. A tiny vortex of manipulated air. This, too, failed, sending the grain spinning away into the dirt.
The sun reached its zenith, its heat beating down on his back. He did not notice. He was lost in a world of minute forces and catastrophic failures. It was humbling. It was infuriating. And it was exactly the lesson the Elder had intended.
Following the schedule Elder Tian had set for him, he forced himself to stand, his knees stiff, and made his way to the Elder's Pavilion. The GAMA archive was not a grand library, but a single, windowless room, its walls lined with shelves of ancient-looking scrolls and leather-bound codices. The air was cool and dry, smelling of old paper and preserved knowledge. An elderly, stooped archivist with skin like parchment barely glanced at him, simply gesturing him inside before returning to his own quiet study. This was a place of silence, a tomb of secrets.
Ren felt a sense of reverence he had not felt anywhere else in the academy. This was power of a different kind—the power of knowledge. He ran his fingers along the spines of the books, their titles written in an archaic script. A Bestiary of Rift-Born Terrors. The Alchemical Properties of Corrupted Aether. Histories of the Fallen Sects.
He didn't know where to begin. His own identity was a blank page. The Elder had mentioned "Primordial bloodlines." He started there, pulling down a heavy, dust-covered tome titled The Sundered Lineages: An Inquiry into Pre-Imperial Bloodlines.
The text was dense, academic, and filled with speculation. It spoke of the Age of Harmony, a mythical era before the Eldorian Empire, when Spirit Masters supposedly commanded powers that dwarfed modern cultivation. They spoke of bloodlines that could commune with mountains, bloodlines that could weave starlight into their souls, and bloodlines that were born of the Aether Weave itself—the Primordials.
Most of the text dismissed these as myths, exaggerated legends from a less enlightened time. But one passage, in a chapter discussing the so-called "Elemental Primordials," caught his eye.
Of all the fabled Primordial lines, the most volatile and poorly documented were the Raijin, or 'Thunder-Gods'. Legend states they did not merely wield lightning; they embodied it. Their souls were not housed within their bodies but were said to be one and the same as the raw, chaotic energy of a storm. They were described not as cultivators, but as living tempests, their presence capable of disrupting the Aether Weave and causing spontaneous atmospheric phenomena. The few surviving records from the Sunken City of Ouros speak of the Raijin's 'Aetheric Dominion', an ability to command ambient energy without the need for internal circulation, treating the world's Aether as an extension of their own body.
Ren's breath caught in his throat. Command ambient energy without the need for internal circulation. It was a perfect, terrifying description of what he had done in the training yard. It wasn't a technique he had invented; it was an echo of a forgotten bloodline. A name now had a whisper of a claim on him: Raijin.
The text concluded with a grim finality. No verifiable member of the Raijin bloodline has been recorded since the Great Cataclysm that ended the Age of Harmony. The line is presumed extinct, its volatile nature likely ensuring its own destruction.
Extinct. The word felt both like a final judgment and a challenge. He was a ghost, a remnant of a power too dangerous to exist. The knowledge didn't frighten him. It armed him. It gave his struggle a context, a history. He was not just a freak; he was the last of his kind.
He returned the book to its shelf, his mind reeling with the implications. He left the silent archive and walked back out into the bright afternoon sun, the world seeming both sharper and more mysterious than before.
He returned to his spot in the garden, to the square foot of dirt that was his true classroom. He knelt down, the weight of a lost history settling on his shoulders. He looked at the single grain of sand, but he saw it differently now. It wasn't just a speck of dirt; it was a part of the world he was destined to command.
He closed his eyes, and this time, he did not try to force anything. He reached out with his will, with the newfound sense of his own nature, and he whispered to the Aether around the grain of sand. He didn't command it to push or pull. He asked it to create a perfect, balanced harmony—a tiny pocket of stillness where the weight of the world was precisely, exquisitely, negated.
For a single, breathtaking second, the grain of sand lifted from the earth. It floated, unsupported, a mere hair's breadth above its fellows, trembling slightly in the air.
Then, his concentration wavered, and it fell.
But it was no longer a failure. It was a beginning.