Yuki sat rooted to the spot until his legs went numb. Eight hours had passed in the void—or at least eight hours by his sense of time—during which he had been suspended between sleep and a waking trance. Cultivation had a way of stealing the rough edges of the world and leaving you hollow, receptive, like a cup after a storm. His mind felt clean and raw, as if someone had scraped away the rust.
When he finally opened his eyes, the world looked sharper. Colors held more edge; air itself tasted like metal and rain. He flexed his fingers. There was a faint buzzing beneath his skin, a tail of the ocean he had touched within the cultivation: a braided current of warmth and cold that now pulsed in order instead of chaos.
"How long have we been here?" he asked aloud, more to pierce the fog than to expect an exact answer.
Faunus, perched on his shoulder like a pitch-black ornament, preened a feather with deliberate calm. "In thirteen minutes it'll be twelve hours, not eleven and a half," he said, in that voice that liked to correct and provoke. He blinked once, as if that tiny correction were a delight.
Yuki snorted despite himself. "Of course you'd know."
"You've got ten minutes before the world thinks you slept a full half day," Faunus said. "Not bad for a first attempt."
The crow's humor faded into something more solemn. Yuki noticed the change. Faunus seemed distant—tired, like a candle that had burned too long. Yuki's throat tightened. The memory of Carl's head in that crate still stung like an open wound, but he pushed the thought down, turning it into fuel.
"I want answers," Yuki said at last. He had more questions than a library, but one had been gnawing at him since the last memory: Aoi's smile. That impossible, serene smile when everything else had been wreckage.
Faunus cocked his head. "You mean about Aoi?" His beak ticked faintly. "Or about me?" The crow's eyes shone like coals.
"Both," Yuki replied. "Start with Aoi. Then tell me what you are—who you were. Who is Faunus Linwood? Why will you not tell me anything?"
For a long moment Faunus did not answer. Then, with the same casual impossibility he used to pull up tea in a void, he folded space open and set a small lacquered table between them. Soundless steam rose from two cups. The absurdity should have angered Yuki, but the gesture felt like an offering, a bridge.
"Sit," Faunus said. "Drink. Then we will talk."
Yuki sat. He drank. The tea had no name, but it warmed him to the bones and anchored his breath.
"About Aoi," Faunus said softly. "Her smile… people smile for reasons that death cannot take. Sometimes it is gratitude. Sometimes it is acceptance. Sometimes it is a small triumph over fate. You want the truth like a ledger entry. Life is not a ledger. I can tell you this: she was not afraid at the end. That is enough to fuel you."
Yuki swallowed hard. A fragment of answer, but not the whole tapestry. He wanted specifics—who she had been, what bargain she had struck—but the crow kept the map folded.
"And my magic?" Yuki asked, shifting ground. This, at least, could give him something solid.
Faunus's eyes brightened. "Now there is a question. That I can answer." He hopped down and landed lightly on the floor, wings folding into a cape. "You carry dual affinities. You tasted fire and ice. That fusion you felt—the third light—that is your signature: crimson-ice, an unstable hybrid. Rare. It favors both destruction and preservation. In practice it gives you two modes: one that burns away structures and one that freezes and slows. When you braid them properly, you gain a third output—stasis: a pressure that can lock motion and heat simultaneously."
Yuki pictured it: a strike that seared and then numbed, an aura that could freeze limbs as it scorched will. His fists tingled at the thought. He wanted to test it.
"Show me," he said.
Faunus opened a slit of shadow, revealing a practice arena untouched by reality: packed earth, three wooden dummies, training sticks, and a target post.
Yuki summoned fire into his palm first—shallow, like dying coals. It burned without burning, a metallic taste in his mouth. Then he summoned frost into the other hand. Crystals licked his fingertips, numbing them with sharp pain. He brought them together.
The collision did not cancel out. Heat and cold birthed an odd silver glow: brittle, shimmering, making the air tremble. He pushed it forward, and the nearest wooden dummy shattered into splinters, as if time itself had been bent and snapped.
The force left Yuki trembling. Sweat rolled down his temple. That one strike had drained him more than eight hours of meditation.
"Good," Faunus said. "The weave holds, but your control is clumsy. Like hammering a jewel with a sledge."
"Teach me, then."
And so the lesson began.
Faunus barked orders, his tone sharp as steel. Yuki obeyed: breathe in, thread heat into the right arm, channel cold into the left, let them meet at the centerline, pulse—don't shove. Relax the shoulders. Stop imagining destruction; imagine a lattice. Don't grip the mana; guide it.
Each correction cut deep, but Yuki adapted. Soon the unstable blast grew steadier. Instead of chaotic splinters, the dummies fractured with precision. He learned to smear the power into a ring that froze joints while scorching the ropes that bound them. His attacks gained shape.
"Now speed," Faunus ordered.
Yuki tried the vanishing step he had once stumbled through before. This time, infused with crimson-ice, it became something else. Hot pressure in his legs, cold glass in his ankles. He stepped—and the world slid. The first attempt left him dizzy. The second blurred him past a dummy in a gust of winter flame, leaving afterimages that smelled faintly of ozone.
By the end, he could loop attacks: vanish behind an enemy, strike with pulses of crimson-ice that seared and froze, then vanish again. Far from perfect, but terrifyingly effective.
When exhaustion finally dropped him, it was like falling into the sea. His chest heaved, his limbs screamed, but it was a clean ache—the kind that felt earned. He lay on the dirt, sweat pooling beneath him.
Faunus hopped to his side and pecked his temple in something almost affectionate. "You did well. Don't strain. Cultivation is a staircase, not a cliff. Build slowly. For now: daily meditation, weaving drills, sparring at dusk. Never reach for that sealed thing inside you—it's a debt not yet owed."
Yuki smiled faintly through the exhaustion. The grief still lingered, but it no longer consumed. It had been tempered into fuel.
"When I return… will people notice?" he asked. "Will my presence feel heavier?"
"They will," Faunus said. "The sensitive will fear. The clever will be intrigued. Use it wisely. A god's presence in the wrong place draws knives."
Yuki chuckled weakly. "Good. I like knives."
The barrier between void and waking thinned. Faunus's eyes gleamed with something like pride—and something far older.
"Rest now," the crow said. "Tomorrow, we refine the weave. Solid foundations first. Empires are built on nothing else."
Yuki let his lids fall, body heavy, breath tasting of iron and rain. The last thing he heard before the void dissolved was the crow's voice, softer than it had ever been:
"Steel yourself like a city. Then, and only then, you can burn it down if you must."