Morning came in a veil of pale gold, slipping between the slats of Kai Sen's window. The bells of Jade Pulse Monastery rang five times — the first bell for breath, the second for form, the third for stillness, the fourth for focus, and the fifth for unity.
Kai did not move.
He sat on the edge of his sleeping mat, the events of the night echoing in his mind like they'd happened a breath ago.
The cracked stone.
The shadow-being.
The missing scroll.
The tenth line in the sigil.
And his eye.
He rose slowly and walked to the small polished bronze dish meant for water, kneeling beside it. The eye remained: half his reflection normal, the other side warping like a pool disturbed by wind. It shimmered, mirroring the room behind him more than himself.
He blinked. It stayed.
"They'll see," he whispered. "They'll know."
But when he stepped outside into the courtyard light — nothing. His reflection was whole. His eye, normal. The mirror-eye had receded, hidden somehow beneath the surface.
Only he could feel it, like a second sight he couldn't yet access.
He moved through the courtyard's edge as others stretched and prepared for the Form of Flowing Pulse. No one greeted him. A few whispered, hands half-raised in mock sympathy. Others didn't bother hiding their scorn.
At the far side of the main hall, three students waited — tall, older, and wrapped in gold-trimmed robes that marked them as First Resonants: warriors who had fully awakened their aura.
Reel, the leader of the trio, smirked as Kai approached.
"Still no glow, ghost?" he asked loudly, his voice carrying through the courtyard.
Kai kept walking.
"You walk like you're hiding something," said Soril, the broad-shouldered one, cracking his knuckles. "Found a new Form under your bed? Maybe a scroll that teaches how to be less worthless?"
The third, Jinai, flicked her fingers and let her aura shimmer briefly — a soft pulse of golden light that wrapped her arms like silk.
"Look at us, Kai," she said, voice almost kind. "We Resonate. You're just background noise."
They stepped in front of him.
The old Kai would've stopped. Apologized. Lowered his head.
But something in him had shifted.
His breath moved in ways it never had before — slow, but tight. There was a stillness behind it, like the moment before a storm cracks the sky.
He stepped forward, calm.
Reel grabbed his shoulder. "We're not done—"
Without thinking, without form, Kai moved.
His hand rose—casual, like brushing dust off a sleeve—and touched Reel's chest.
There was no blow. No sound. Just a single ripple in the air, so soft it could've been imagined.
But Reel flew backward three paces, landing hard on the stones, breath knocked from his lungs.
Silence fell across the courtyard.
Soril and Jinai froze. Reel tried to rise but stumbled, eyes wide with something that looked too close to fear.
Kai didn't smile. Didn't speak. He just kept walking.
But as he turned the corner, out of view of the others, he felt it.
His chest pulsed once, and a wave of nausea passed through him. The echo returned—this time louder.
> Do not strike in instinct. The Dead Form consumes.
It does not wound. It unravels.
He fell to one knee, bracing himself against the wall.
Behind his ribs, something vast and hollow stirred. Not power. Not energy.
Something older.
Something missing.
The Dead Form had no shape.
No stance, no breathing rhythm, no initiatory call.
And yet it moved within him, coiling through his marrow like smoke in sealed wood. As Kai knelt in the meditation hall—alone now, the others long dismissed—he tried to still his breath, to find the familiar rise and fall of the Eight Known Forms.
But each time he began, his aura shuddered, as if rejecting the old pathways.
The ninth stance—Pulse of Echoing Water—should have stilled the chaos. Instead, his arms seized mid-flow, fingers twisting into a gesture he'd never been taught.
A hush swept over the air around him, deeper than silence.
Then—crack.
The incense bowl at the altar split clean down the middle.
Kai stumbled to his feet, the breath caught in his throat. He hadn't touched it. Hadn't even faced it.
In the upper chambers, Master Luarin frowned as he gazed down through the circular oculus into the hall below. Behind him, three council members stood in shadow—Resonants who had long since passed beyond the threshold of aura into deeper mysteries.
"He's changed," muttered Elder Veyrin, arms crossed, her voice clipped. "The Void-Touched never glow like that."
"He hasn't glowed," Luarin said. "That's the problem."
Elder Han-Sur, the oldest among them, finally stirred. His voice was gravel. "There is a fragment inside him. Something not of our Realms."
"Then seal him," Veyrin snapped. "Containment before contagion."
"No." Luarin's eyes remained locked on Kai. "Not yet. I want to see what the Tenth will do when it remembers its name."
Back in his quarters, Kai sat in darkness, drenched in sweat. He had not lit the lantern. He feared what the light might show.
He turned his palm upward.
For a moment, he saw it: not an aura, but a fracture in the air above his skin. Light bent around it. Space leaned wrong.
It wasn't an aura. It was a hole.
A memory surfaced—words not his, a voice not heard but felt:
The Tenth does not shine. It devours.
His hand closed. The fracture vanished.
And outside his door, a faint scrape of footsteps. Watching. Waiting.