The day was a frantic, desperate race against a setting sun. The broken head of the Pagoda drone sat on the obsidian table, and for Ren, it was the most complex puzzle he had ever faced. Under the Elder's watchful eye, his training began not with an application of force, but with an act of pure, focused listening.
"Do not try to speak to it," the Elder's voice was a low, steady anchor in Ren's frantic mind. "You cannot hope to replicate a language you do not understand. First, you must learn its rhythm, its cadence. Listen to the echo of the commands it once received."
Ren closed his eyes, his will extending not as a blade or a shield, but as a single, infinitely sensitive nerve. He touched the cracked crystal lens of the drone, and felt… nothing. It was dead. The power source was gone. But the Elder had not told him to listen for power. He had told him to listen for an echo.
He pushed his senses deeper, past the physical reality of the object and into its Aetheric history. He remembered the feeling of the active drone, the hum of its data stream. He searched for the residual signature of that stream, a faint, ghostly impression left on the drone's crystalline matrix. He found it. It was a chaotic mess of fragmented signals, the last dying screams of a machine, but within the noise, there was a pattern. A complex, repeating waveform of high-frequency Aetheric pulses. It was the drone's base command frequency, its carrier wave. It was the sound of its connection to its master.
For hours, Ren did nothing but listen to this single, complex sound, memorizing its every rise and fall, its every subtle modulation. It was like trying to learn a symphony from a single, shattered chord.
"Now," the Elder said as midday passed, "you will replicate it. Not the whole song. Just one note. Hum on that same frequency. Project a single, clean, steady pulse of your will that perfectly matches the carrier wave."
Ren focused his will, gathering his power, and tried to project the complex waveform. The result was a burst of uncontrolled Aetheric static, a clumsy, discordant shout that had none of the signal's precision. He tried again. And again. Failure after frustrating failure. He was a child trying to replicate a master's brushstroke, his own attempts crude and artless.
He was trying to force it, to build the wave from scratch. He was thinking like a blacksmith, hammering his will into the right shape. It was the wrong approach. He needed to think like a musician.
He stopped trying to project. Instead, he created a single, fine thread of his will and simply let it vibrate, like a plucked string. He didn't try to force a frequency. He adjusted the tension of his will-string, listening internally, until its natural vibration resonated in perfect harmony with the echo in the drone's head.
He found it. A pure, clean note that sang in the same key as the machine.
"Good," the Elder grunted, a rare sign of direct approval. "You have learned to hum. Now, you must learn to whisper a single word over that hum. The command for 'ignore'."
This was the true challenge. The Elder provided him with the specific Aetheric packet that represented the command—a short, complex burst of data riding on the carrier wave. Ren had to learn how to inject this 'word' into his own steady hum without disrupting the frequency.
The sun began its descent, casting long shadows across the garden. Time was running out. He practiced injecting the command, his attempts clumsy, often causing his carrier wave to collapse into static. But he was learning. He was learning to weave his intent into the fabric of the signal, a subtle manipulation rather than a brute-force insertion.
As dusk settled, he finally succeeded. He projected the steady carrier wave, and for a full second, he flawlessly inserted the 'ignore' command, a whisper of false data in a silent stream. It was imperfect, a single word in a language he barely understood, but it was a start. It had to be enough.
"It is time," the Elder said.
There were no grand farewells. Ren was given a simple traveler's pack with water and dried rations. He was already wearing the dark, nondescript clothing of a shadow. He cloaked himself in his perfected illusion of powerlessness and slipped out of the Pavilion, melting into the twilight.
The journey into the mountains was swift and silent. He moved with a predator's economy of motion, his senses alive to the world around him. He felt the wild, untamed Aether of the forests, a stark contrast to the ordered hum of the city. He arrived at the coordinates given to him by the Elder near midnight, taking a position on a high ridge overlooking the target.
The outpost was not what he expected. From a distance, it looked like a simple, two-story research building, its lights casting a sterile, lonely glow in the vast wilderness. But his senses told him a different story. The entire facility was surrounded by a perimeter fence, and patrolling that fence with silent, fluid grace were not men, but machines. They were sleek, wolf-like automatons, twice the size of a man, their silver-white chassis gleaming under the moonlight. They were the next generation of the Pagoda's guards.
And beyond them, enveloping the entire compound, he could feel it. A faint, shimmering, wide-spectrum resonance net. Project Aegis. It was already active. He had not arrived before the trap was built. He had just walked up to its front door.