The Academy's lower layers were never meant to be silent.
There were always the whispers of arcane turbines. The deep, rhythmic thrum of mana reactors. The soft hiss of ventilation glyphs expelling recycled air. A pulse—a system, much like a living thing, always humming beneath the surface of the great fortress-city of Varn.
But now, everything below Level B6 had gone still.
Kael could feel it.
A hush had fallen over the roots of the world.
He huddled behind a panel of cracked maintenance tubing, the white glow in his eyes long since dimmed. He'd stayed in the crawlspace for what he guessed had been several hours, though time moved strangely here—unmeasured by sun, bells, or even the cold chime of academy schedule gongs.
He hadn't heard anyone come looking.
No alarms. No pursuit.
And yet the feeling that something was watching remained.
[System Dormant.]
[No Active Threats Detected.]
[Emotional State: Disoriented. Injured. Evolving.]
He didn't know what that meant, not really.
But he felt different.
Sharper. Frayed at the edges.
Kael sat up, back aching, and flexed his fingers. They trembled faintly, as though his body didn't quite remember how to obey. Something about his limbs felt… misaligned, like the memory of motion was ahead of the muscles.
He'd unlocked something.
Something that had never been meant for him.
The Ashborn Protocol.
The Code of the Broken, the system had called it.
What did that even mean?
Kael was used to being forgotten.
A Nullborn had no place in a world ruled by the Cradle.
The Ascension Code was everything in modern society—it decided social hierarchy, combat potential, genetic matches, even how long you might live. Your first synchronization usually occurred at age ten.
Most manifested basic Code compatibility—an Affinity for flame, frost, kinetic energy, or enhancement. The gifted evolved further, developing Protocols—subroutines of power rooted in the soul's unique signature. These Protocols were inherited, passed down through family bloodlines, refined through generations of combat, meditation, or pact-forging.
Kael had nothing.
No Affinity.
No bloodline.
No right.
Only the branding on his medical file: NULLBORN.
A label, a sentence, a curse.
And yet… something ancient had chosen him.
He rose to his feet with effort, muscles sore from bruising, bones still aching where Garen's boot had struck. But his balance was better than it should've been. And even deeper—beneath the wounds, beyond the flesh—he felt something awake.
Like a second heart.
A heart that wasn't beating… but watching.
[Ashborn Node: Latent.]
[Next Catalyst Required.]
[Trial Status: Pending.]
"Trial?" Kael whispered, the word foreign in his mouth.
The system didn't respond.
He emerged from the maintenance ducts into a forgotten corridor, thick with condensation and layered dust. Moss grew along the walls—rare for a structure so tightly regulated. That meant this place had been abandoned for decades, maybe longer.
The glyph-lights overhead flickered, flicked off, then blinked red for a moment—danger glyphs, usually tied to containment chambers.
Kael stopped in front of a sealed steel doorway embedded with a shattered sigil.
It looked like someone—or something—had scraped the door open from the inside.
He should turn back.
He didn't.
Inside, the chamber was low-ceilinged, circular, and cracked down the middle by what looked like an ancient fissure. Deep black lines spiderwebbed from the faultline across the stone.
At the center of the room floated a crystal—the size of a human heart, pulsing faintly. Not with mana, but with something older, stranger.
Raw intention.
Kael stepped closer.
[Unknown Object Detected.]
[Fragment: Echo of the Hollow.]
[Warning: Interference With Cradle Signature.]
[Touching this object will initiate a Trial.]
He hesitated.
He didn't know what he was doing.
He didn't even have a system like everyone else.
But the world had never opened for him before. And now it had cracked—just a little.
He wasn't about to let it close.
Kael reached out.
And touched the crystal.
The world shattered.
Not visually.
Not like a dream.
Existentially.
Suddenly he was falling through a memory that wasn't his. Screams echoed in a tongue that predated human speech. Cities burned across skies that flickered between timelines. Creatures older than history emerged from caverns of light, and he felt their hunger.
Then, a voice:
"The Cradle lies."
Kael blinked.
He was standing in a mirror of the chamber he'd just been in—but it was whole. Not cracked. Not abandoned. Glowing glyphs lined the walls. A figure stood opposite him.
Tall. Cloaked in the same silver-black mist that had enveloped Kael during the Protocol awakening.
Eyes like dying stars.
A mirror.
A version of himself.
But not quite.
"Who are you?" Kael asked.
The entity tilted its head.
"I am what you could become. I am what was broken before you."
Kael's hands curled into fists. "Then what do you want?"
"A fight," the echo said simply. "Your first Trial. Against the truth."
The duel began without warning.
The echo moved like lightning—its hand carving through the air, summoning shards of frozen memory. Kael dove, barely avoiding the first strike, but was slammed backward by the second—a wave of pressure that bent the space around him.
He hit the ground hard, ribs howling.
[Adrenaline Spike Detected.]
[Ashborn Protocol Flare Engaged.]
[Skill Unlocked: Flicker Guard – Allows reaction to non-linear attacks for 0.3 seconds post-impact.]
Time twitched.
Kael blinked.
The second strike repeated.
But this time, he moved with it.
He wasn't stronger.
He wasn't faster.
But he was learning.
Every blow from the echo left behind residue—data, movement, flow. Kael mimicked the posture, matched the rhythm.
He lunged forward with a strike—not meant to harm, but to interrupt the next sequence.
The echo stumbled.
And Kael saw his opening.
He drove forward, knees low, shoulder-first—and shoved the echo into the crystalline pillar at the center of the chamber.
Light exploded.
Kael woke gasping.
The real room again. Cracked. Cold.
But the crystal had shattered.
[Trial Complete.]
[You have passed the Echo of the Hollow.]
[Fragment Absorbed: Voidlight Core (Passive)]
[Passive Ability Acquired: Null Resilience – Immune to Cradle-based Seals and Branding.]
[Ashborn Protocol Integration: 3.5%]
[New Directive Unlocked: "Survive the Shiver."]
Kael didn't understand what that meant.
But he could feel it.
Something was coming.
Elsewhere.
In a dim fortress chamber beneath the floating continent of Orym, a pale figure sat cross-legged atop a dais of bone.
Her eyes opened.
They were wrong.
Too wide. Too still.
Inhuman.
"They woke it," she said, voice like cracking ice.
A second figure bowed behind her. Covered in thorns, face masked.
"The Ashborn?"
"Yes. A new user. Young. Untrained."
"And the Cradle?"
"They'll move soon. But not fast enough."
She rose.
"We move first."
Back in the academy, the silence was gone.
And Kael could hear the alarms now.
He looked up from the broken trial room.
Boots. Shouts.
Someone had found him.
[WARNING: Multiple Hostile Ascended Detected.]
[Suggestion: Flee. Or Awaken.]
Kael swallowed.
He couldn't fight them. Not yet.
But maybe…
Maybe he could survive.
And in this world, that was the first step toward power.
End of Chapter 2