The private wing of House Rotchy breathed a different air: quieter, drier, as if even the dust there had learned to keep its voice low. Naoko's chamber was an exercise in restraint—polished obsidian floors that drank the chandelier's light, a single long couch trimmed in silver, and curtains drawn so that the sun came as a thin, respectful strip across the rug. Runes inlaid along the skirting sent shallow, measured pulses through the stone; the whole room felt like a place prepared for decisions and their cold aftermath.
Jin crossed that strip of light without hurry. His steps made no sound on the stone; the ring on his left hand pulsed faintly, a steady little heartbeat that matched the rhythm of his own. Naoko sat with the economy of someone who had honed patience into a weapon—hands folded in her lap, silver hair falling down the back of the chair like a metallic tide. Her face was as always: calm, carved, almost deliberately unreadable. The silver of her eyes reflected the small window of light; there was no warmth there, but there was attention—precise, assessing.
"Sit," she said, without rising.
Jin did. The couch took him and closed around his weight. There was a kind of intimacy in the space—an intimacy governed by hierarchy and command rather than softness. Naoko's voice, when it came, was cool and direct, the sort that arranges reality into units like objects on a table.
"I will put you into a scenario," she said. "Your grandmother, Elizabeth, will select it."
The words landed like an instruction manual and a riddle at once. Jin blinked, the corners of his mouth lifting into a faint, ironic curl that had become his way of asking for clarity without giving up formality.
"What does that mean?" he asked simply.
Naoko's hands remained in her lap. She folded a palm over a knuckle as if feeling the texture of the decision. "A scenario is an engineered—parallel—field. It will place your consciousness in a different plane, parallel to this one. You will feel events as if they are real. We will lock down your usual mana and restrict you to your god-energy alone. The point is to teach you how to command the power inside you without relying on external supports."
Jin's expression sharpened into interest. The notion of training in the rawness of his new core had already tugged at him; the idea that his mother would orchestrate such a trial did not surprise him. Still, he spoke the question that lived on the edge of every such offer.
"So you mean a kind of… astral transfer? I sleep here and dream in a world crafted by someone else, and it will be as vivid as waking? I won't be the hero of it." His words were flat with curiosity and a small, weary humor. He wanted truth, stripped of ceremony.
Naoko inclined her head once as though that had been exactly the point. "You will sleep. The scenario will engage your senses so completely that you will not distinguish the experience from reality. The mind is the instrument. When it believes the body has immersed itself in cold water, the body registers the temperature. When it believes fire burns it, the nerves will flinch. The scenario will manipulate those signals. You will have only the machine-energy in you—the god-core—without other mana to prop or hide your weaknesses. This is how you will learn."
The delivery was clinical, but the implications were not. Jin sat for a long, attentive beat. He thought of Estelle and the way his mother had proscribed certain freedoms in the name of safety. He thought, too, of the weight of being remade—of a heart now foreign and potent within his ribs. The experiment appealed to some private part of him: a desire to understand the new instrument in his chest, to play it without training wheels.
"How long will it last?" he asked. The practical question. The one about clocks and measures and the lie between dream- and real-time.
Naoko's silver eyes did not flinch. "Subjective time within the scenario can be expanded. What feels like a year inside might be an hour in the waking world. For you, it will likely be a long interval—enough to test—while here we will keep it to a narrow window. You will sleep; you will feel; and you will return. You will also be kept under guard—physiological monitors, barriers to prevent external interference. Do not mistake the dream for safety. A wound felt within the scenario might translate into stress on your body here if you give into fear."
He listened to the terms and the coldness in the way she framed risk. No entreaty, no softening for what he might feel. It was both training and trial, a kind of engineered cruelty meant to break the brittle reflexes and leave a refined core behind.
"Why my grandmother's scenarios?" Jin asked. "Why Elizabeth's choice?"
Naoko's face softened for a fraction of a fraction—so slight it might have been projected by the lamp's reflection. "She has experience with constructed depths and ways of folding perception without shattering the mind. She understands how to prune away illusions while leaving the truth intact. Her method is firm. She will choose one that challenges you."
Jin stood and paced the small distance between couch and window. Light lay across the sill in a strip like a blade. Questions hung, most of them practical: Will I remember everything? Will I be changed in ways you cannot measure? He felt the soft, inevitable widen of his chest around the secret of his wife, around the vows and the practicalities of being half-god and half-boy. Part of him enjoyed the prospect—new weapons to the self—but another part, a quieter, more cautious thing, recoiled at being shaped without consent.
"Why my room?" he asked suddenly. The comfort of small rebellions—he wanted to sleep under his own roof, in the place where memories sat like books on a shelf.
Naoko's reply was thin and decided. "My chamber is better for the stabilizing fields. It keeps the runes in alignment. You will not understand the reasons until you are within it." Her voice was the voice of a woman who had learned to close doors to argument. "Prepare yourself."
He did not argue. There was an ease in obedience that had little to do with fear and everything to do with the strange tight fidelity he felt toward the one who had made him what he was. Jin nodded.
"Very well," he said. "Set it up."
She rose like someone who had decided a small reality and meant to set it in motion. The distance between them remained taut but not unkind. She moved with the deliberateness of ritual, and Jin watched the way light played against the iron of her jaw. As she approached the rune-table near the foot of the bed, she traced glyphs in the air with the tip of a finger and the room answered—soft threads of mana folding around them like a net. A low hum filled the chamber, barely felt at first, then steady, resonant under the bones.
"You will be kept in stasis," she said. "You will be sedated gently so that the scenario can connect to your dream-thought. Do not resist the entry. The mind must be pliant."
He lay upon the bed with the ease of someone who had been molded by many rites. The linen took his weight; the lamplight painted a small halo on his cheek. Naoko's hands were methodical as she worked—no tenderness, only competence—gathering small vials, murmuring the low syllables that made the runes flicker like wakeful fish. She leaned close and, in the whisper of a pause she broke only for him, said, with a curious softness that would have been almost lost if one blinked too quickly:
"Stay true to the shape you will choose. Do not let the dream unravel you."
He met her silver gaze and found, for a fleeting instant, something like permission in its coolness. "I will," he promised — and the word felt less like obedience and more like an agreement between two iron things.
The sedative found his veins, and the room softened. The runes above the bed shivered. Naoko's hands laid a final seal across his brow—a delicate web of green-lunar wafting to steady his breath. The world narrowed to the sound of his own pulse and the subtle music of the runes. Naoko watched until his eyes dimmed, the last flicker of curiosity lingering like a moth trapped against glass.
She stepped back then and allowed the machinery of the room to do its work. Monitors breathed a soft green in the dark; warding stones thrummed to a slow, watchful beat. Outside, the palace went about its quiet business; beneath those doors a man's mind slipped along the seam between worlds, ready to be tested and remade.
Naoko remained a moment longer, looking down at the sleeping shape of her son. That expression, impossible to name—a shadow of something like regret and a cool glint of pride—passed across her face and then was gone. She turned, moved to the window and drew the curtains closed so the room would be as a tomb: dark, secure, and exactly what it needed to be for an experiment in courage.
The scenario—Elizabeth's choice—began to fold its blades into the sleeping architecture. Jin's last waking thought, before the dream took him wholly, was a small, half-amused image of whatever challenge his grandmother would conjure: a test not of might but of the way a man holds his own soul. Then the bed pulled him in and the world of waking unhooked its tether.
Outside the closed curtains, in the private wing of Rotchy, runes continued to whisper. The machine-heart within Jin thrummed a steady, unfamiliar rhythm. The scenario would begin.
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Heat: Thank you so much for reading