Glenn sat cross-legged, arms resting on his knees, face slightly tilted upward. A soft sigh escaped his lips as he settled into that new, silent world—not a silence of absence, but of order. A world where only spatial energy existed. No thunder. No weight of gravity. Just... space.
For a brief moment, he wondered how the hell that blindfolded old man managed to pull off such absurd tricks. But instead of getting lost in speculation, he chose the wiser path: enjoy it while it lasted. Silas might be a miserable sadist with a sharp tongue, but he was also a master who truly knew what he was doing.
The night breeze moved gently through the forest leaves, while the rhythmic sound of waterfalls filled the background with a continuous, hypnotic flow. Glenn slowly closed his eyes, letting his body align with the environment, and began drawing in the energy around him.
It entered through his energy pathways like a fine mist subtle but steady. It followed an almost instinctive path, snaking through his meridians until it reached the center of his body, where his mana core rested. Inside, each drop was like dew trickling across the beams of a vast, empty warehouse, dripping with precision until it started to fill the space around it.
With his eyes closed, Glenn focused. More than just absorbing, he sought to feel. And there, where only spatial energy was present, he finally began to notice what Silas had mentioned.
The nuances.
That energy was strange. Alive, but not pulsing. Cold, but not oppressive. It wasn't like electricity, which buzzed anxiously, nor like gravity, which pulled with authority. Spatial energy undulated. It expanded and contracted as if it breathed on its own, disobeying rules Glenn didn't even know how to name.
It was hard to describe. At times, it seemed to slip through the edges of his senses like fine sand between his fingers. At others, it expanded, filling his chest like the breath of a newborn universe.
'So this is it... the noise. The constant distraction from the other two kept me from realizing just how alive this energy really is.'
There, alone, bathed in starlight and surrounded by a magical forest, Glenn finally began to touch the essence of spatial energy. And now, not as a curious visitor—but as a determined cultivator.
Lying in his hammock, eyes covered by a charcoal-black cloth, Silas seemed to be dozing off his expression relaxed, breathing steady, and the cigarette long extinguished between his fingers. But inside, his perception was working like a finely tuned system.
Imperceptible waves flowed from his body at almost symbolic intervals, like the sweeps of a maritime radar cutting through fog. Each pulse was soft, discreet, harmless... but together, they formed a three-dimensional mosaic of everything around him.
Silas couldn't see.
Hadn't seen for decades.
But over time, his body had learned to replace vision with something infinitely more complex—the reading of the world's oscillations.
His technique had been forged through centuries of trial and error, pain, sleepless nights, and lost battles. In the beginning, the world was just a blur of indistinct energy. But with time... ah, with time, he learned to distinguish shapes, intensities, resonances—even emotions.
Through his understanding and long study as an alchemist, Silas had characterized the invisible world of blindness into oscillations that the eyes were simply too limited to perceive.
Now, swinging gently between two trees under the humid warmth of night, he observed—or rather, felt Glenn.
The boy's energy silhouette appeared to his senses like a sculpture in constant mutation. The spatial energy surrounding him entered his body with ease, flowing through the energy channels, branching and snaking as if following its own instincts.
But what caught Silas's attention the most was the sudden disappearance of that energy.
It dissolved into something... hidden.
Into a place his perception couldn't reach. A void, an internal sanctuary concealed beneath dense, organized layers of energy that seemed to shield each other like conscious walls.
Silas raised an eyebrow beneath the cloth.
'Interesting… so they really were hiding some secrets after all…'
His smile returned. Not one of disdain, but of genuine curiosity. After all, it was rare for something in this world to still surprise an old man like him. And Glenn... was becoming an increasingly fascinating surprise.
Logically, what Elian, Lesley, and Selene had kept secret was nothing less than a second energy core.
A mana core something never recorded in the annals of Atlas's history. From the rise of the first civilization to modern times, every awakened one, without exception, had always molded their path with a single core: either prana or mana.
Having three affinities was already enough for Glenn's name to echo as an aberration at the heart of the empire's political sphere. But... what if they discovered he possessed two cores? Mana and prana, coexisting in the same body? That would spell chaos—not just political, but existential.
Silas, of course, already suspected. He was far too old not to read between the lines of what others tried to hide. And though he had no proof, the anomaly forming before his senses left little room for doubt. Even so, whether out of caution or wisdom, he kept his suspicions locked in silence.
A slight smile curved his chapped lips. The hammock swayed gently. Then, with a subtle motion, he snapped his fingers.
Immediately, all the energy-isolating layers Silas had placed around Glenn dissipated. As if a dam had burst, the natural energy that had previously been carefully filtered surged in—a raging avalanche of information.
Glenn barely had time to react. All the elements gravity, electricity, space collided inside him like thunderclaps at war. His newly awakened and still unstable mana core received the raw discharge of the already saturated affinities... and the result was chaos.
"AAARGH!"
A scream tore through the night.
Glenn coughed up blood. Black, thick, still tainted by the hidden wounds of the dungeon. His body trembled, his senses wavered, his eyes rolled back. Before he could curse, protest, or understand, his world collapsed into a blinding white, and he fainted right there—collapsing to the ground like a broken doll.
Silas let out a hoarse, lazy laugh.
"Don't look at me like that."
He turned his head slightly, facing the two Sleipnirs a few meters away. They stood with heads held high and eyes locked on him as if silently judging the old man.
"It's not my fault the kid decided to mix three different symphonies and went off-key on the first note," Silas muttered, raising his hands like someone defending himself in an invisible court.
A loud neigh echoed from the right, cutting through the silence like a verdict. The nearest Sleipnir stomped its hooves once, twice, three times, kicking up dust with irritation. The other, to the left, snorted hard through its nostrils and threw its head to the side, as if to say: _"You overdid it. Again."_
Silas slowly turned his face toward the horses, resting one arm on the hammock while the other groped for his water flask.
"Great. Now even eight-legged horses want to lecture me."
The Sleipnir on the left answered with another sharp whinny, like a mocking laugh. The one on the right joined in, tossing its gleaming mane and stomping the ground — thump, thump — as if to say, "This one's on you, old man."
Silas let out a loud sigh and took a long swig from his canteen before theatrically pointing a finger.
"Listen here, you two are literally horses. H-O-R-S-E-S. I didn't bother living over three hundred years just to get corrected by a pair of mythological quadrupeds with judge complexes."
Both Sleipnirs raised their heads at the exact same time and turned them in opposite directions with an elegant snap — a perfectly synchronized gesture that could only mean: "We're ignoring you. With style."
"Oh, great." Silas ran a hand over his bald head and leaned back again, arms crossed.
"Now they're putting on a little play. What's next? Gonna call a forest tenants' meeting to discuss my behavior?"
The horses stomped again, and one of them huffed loudly, releasing a cloud of hot vapor from its nostrils.
"Yeah, yeah… gonna tell me I'm old and grumpy too, huh?"
Both whinnied. Long. In unison.
Silas shook his head and let a half-smile slip.
"Can't even be a grumpy old man in peace anymore..."
Then he settled back into the hammock, the sound of distant waterfalls cradling his thoughts, with cicadas and night birds composing a living symphony all around him. The humid night clung to his skin, and the fire's smoke danced in the wind under the soft glow of the stars.
"That boy's gonna kill me... or entertain me till the end of my days."
The Sleipnirs huffed in response, as if in agreement — perhaps, for the first time that night.