Chapter 3: Eyes in the Sky
Somewhere in Orbit Layer Three, high above the Earth's scattered cloud strata and megastructure towers, a quiet room bathed in starlight hummed with a thousand silent alerts.
Within the Lotus Ascendancy's Sky Vault, surveillance feeds stitched together a panoramic view of the world below—city sectors in disarray, cultivation duels igniting on rooftops, encrypted data pulses spreading across black market networks.
And then, there was him.
Kai Ardent.
Frozen in frame. Eyes glowing violet. Veins like nebula threads. A teenager wrapped in an unstable protocol that should never have activated.
"Pause playback," came a calm voice.
The lights dimmed. The projection halted. The violet light of Kai's awakening hung mid-air.
A woman in ceremonial robes stood before the image, her hands folded behind her back. Elder Lys Veradin, Warden of Sector 3 and Custodian of Forbidden Technologies. Her presence radiated elegance—until you saw her eyes.
Cold. Calculating. Like someone who'd long ago forgotten how to blink without a reason.
She turned toward the young man standing silently beside her. No older than Kai, but dressed in the gold-trimmed battle robes of an Ascendancy Prodigy.
"You trained with him, didn't you?" Lys asked.
The boy didn't move.
"I did."
"Tell me about him."
The prodigy exhaled. "Kai Ardent is... incomplete. Reserved. Quiet until provoked. Smart enough to hide his power, but never weak. He passed three simulation rounds before the instructors even realized he hadn't been using a core technique. He walks like someone who doesn't want to leave footprints."
"And his weakness?"
The boy hesitated. "His sister."
Lys nodded slowly, the lights around the projection shifting. Now the feed showed Lina, tucked behind a pillar, trembling but alert. A spark of energy glowed faintly in her chest.
Lys's brows lifted ever so slightly. "Interesting. She's syncing with him. A sympathetic resonance. Blood-bound, possibly accelerated by proximity to the Protocol."
She stepped forward, tapping her fingers against the projection. Kai's image shifted, zoomed, analyzed.
"He's adapting faster than the original projections. Far faster. At this rate, his spiritual lattice will stabilize within the month. Possibly less."
"And then?" the boy asked.
Lys smiled—thin and precise. "Then he becomes a threat."
Silence fell again.
"But not yet," she said at last. "Let him run. Let him grow. A flower cut too early never blooms to its full potential."
"You're going to let him live?"
"I'm going to let him evolve," Lys said, voice like crystal in water. "When the time is right, he'll come to us. And when he does, he'll have a choice—burn like his parents or kneel like a good weapon."
She turned back to the boy.
"You'll keep watching him."
A nod.
"You'll interfere if he becomes uncontrollable."
Another nod.
"But do not kill him, Adric. Not yet."
Adric Veradin—Elite Prodigy of the Ascendancy, Lys's handpicked heir, and once Kai's closest rival—lowered his head.
"I understand."
He didn't say what he was thinking.
That Kai Ardent, for all his silence and secrets, had something no other prodigy had. He remembered it clearly now, in the heat of that fight they once had. The way Kai refused to strike to kill. The way he stepped between Adric and a shattered beam, saving his life with no hesitation.
Kai fought like someone with something worth protecting. And that terrified the Ascendancy more than any weapon ever could.
As Adric left the chamber, the projection flickered once.
Kai. Lina. A ruined alley. One spark of starlight in a world veiled in shadow.
The boy they feared was growing stronger.
And someone—somewhere—was finally fighting back.