Kael's life in Aethel settled into a rhythm of crushing monotony, a rhythm he embraced with the patience of a mountain. By day, he performed the grueling, invisible labor of the mortal underclass. He hauled refuse, scrubbed floors, and polished the crystalline fixtures of the Lyceum until they shone. The other mortals saw him as quiet, perhaps simple-minded; a boy who did his work without complaint and faded into the background. They did not see that every task was a calculation. Every load of stone he lifted was a measured repetition to re-awaken the strength of his Adamantine Body. Every moment of quiet was one of intense observation.
His new sight was his teacher. The Lyceum was a living textbook, and he was its most diligent student.
He watched the disciples practice their elegant sword arts in the courtyards. To others, it was a dance of steel and light. To Kael, it was a lesson in Qi dynamics. He saw how a "genius" would draw the ambient Metal Qi into their blade, creating a structured, harmonic flow that resulted in a sharp, clean cut. He saw how a struggling novice would fumble, their Qi flow turbulent and inefficient, dissipating uselessly into the air.
He stared for hours at the great Luminite crystals that anchored the academy to the sky, seeing the incredibly complex and ancient formations etched deep within them. They were like divine engines, their interlocking runes pulsing with a steady, serene power that regulated the flow of Qi throughout the entire island. He was a janitor looking at the blueprints of creation.
His duties eventually led him to his sanctum sanctorum: the Lyceum's Grand Library. It was a cavernous space, its shelves stretching up into the gloom, filled with countless scrolls and tomes. To Kael, it was a forest of light. Each book, each scroll, hummed with a faint aura of the knowledge it contained—the older and more profound the text, the brighter its glow.
He could not simply sit and read. A mortal cleaner in the sacred library was already an anomaly; one caught reading texts on cultivation would be arrested and "interrogated" within minutes. So he developed a method born of subtlety and desperation.
His hands would shake slightly as he cleaned near a shelf, "accidentally" knocking a scroll from its perch. Or he would be tasked with clearing out a bin of old, damaged pages meant for disposal. In the moments it took to kneel, to gather the "mess" with his rags, his eyes would scan the text. His memory, honed over a hundred lifetimes, was a thing of supernatural power. He didn't read; he absorbed. A diagram of a basic energy-gathering array, a page describing the resonant frequencies of different crystalline structures, a paragraph on the flaws of the human meridian system—all of it was captured and stored in the perfect, silent library of his mind.
It was during these stolen moments of learning that he first saw Lyren.
Lyren was a star. Even among the gifted disciples of the Lyceum, he was exceptional. Tall, handsome, with an aura that blazed like a miniature sun, he moved with the unthinking confidence of a man who had never known failure. He was the embodiment of the Theocracy's ideals: pure of spirit, immense in talent, destined for greatness.
Kael often observed him in the library, not studying, but holding court. Lyren would scoff at the foundational texts, loudly proclaiming that true understanding came from instinct and a powerful root, not from dusty scrolls. "The grammar of Qi is for those who cannot feel its poetry," he once said, earning admiring laughter from his clique.
Kael, cleaning dust from a corner just feet away, silently committed another page of that very grammar to memory. He saw the brilliant light of Lyren's soul, but he also saw its structure. It was powerful but artless, a bonfire compared to the intricate, controlled flame Kael hoped to build.
His precarious existence was reinforced one afternoon. A hawk-faced Prefect, a cultivator of the Soul Manifestation realm, saw Kael kneeling to wipe up a spilled ink pot near a table of anatomical charts. Kael had been staring intently at a diagram of a cultivator's Spirit Core.
"What are you looking at, filth?" the Prefect's voice was sharp as ice.
Kael looked up, his face instantly becoming a mask of slack-jawed incomprehension. He blinked slowly, his eyes vacant. He pointed a grubby finger at the diagram. "Pretty... light," he mumbled, his voice dull.
The Prefect's lip curled in disgust. The boy's aura was so dim it was barely visible, a pathetic flicker. A soulless, rootless mortal, no better than an animal. "Get back to your work. Your filth contaminates this sacred place."
Kael bowed his head in a gesture of cowed stupidity and went back to scrubbing, his heart hammering against his ribs. The drain from the parasite felt a little stronger in that moment of fear. He was a mouse living in a house of eagles.
Weeks later, his patience paid off. He was tasked with clearing out a section of the "Proscribed Archives," a vault containing texts deemed heretical or dangerous. Among the scrolls destined for incineration, he found it. A tattered volume titled On Unnatural Constructs.
It was a historical record of failed attempts by ancient, "barbaric" cultivators to create artificial spiritual roots. The Aeridorian author wrote with contempt, detailing each failure: constructs of flesh and blood that became cancerous growths; mechanical devices that shattered under the strain of Qi; alchemical grafts that poisoned their hosts. The text concluded that all such attempts were doomed, for they lacked the "Divine Spark," the ineffable gift of the heavens that resided in a true root.
The author intended it as a warning. For Kael, it was a revelation.
He saw their mistakes with perfect clarity. They had all tried to replicate a natural root. They were trying to build a bird out of straw and mud and force it to fly.
Kael didn't want to build a bird. He wanted to build an engine. A forge. A contained, controlled, violent reaction. Something that didn't mimic life, but harnessed power through pure, brutal mechanics and metaphysical law. The failures of the past were not a warning; they were a roadmap of what not to do.
That evening, as his shift ended, he saw Lyren in a training courtyard. With a flick of his wrist, Lyren manifested a sphere of brilliant, perfect light, effortlessly holding it aloft to the applause of his peers. He was a poet of Qi.
Kael stood in the shadows, his cleaner's rags in his hand, his mind ablaze with diagrams and forbidden theories. The poet had an effortless gift. But Kael, the heretic, the mechanic, now had the blueprint for a power that would tear down the sky.