Jin Mu had grown accustomed to the rhythm of Aurelius. Its skies did not turn the way skies should. Sometimes, when he woke at dawn, he found the sun clinging stubbornly to the horizon, as though it refused to climb higher, bathing the city in endless amber. Other mornings, there was no sun at all—only pale, crystalline light that seeped from towers carved into impossible angles. He had stopped asking why. The city had its own logic, and he had learned to live inside it.
Still, there were days when something tugged at the edges of his mind. A warmth that brushed the scar of his chest like a ghost of a hand. It was faint, so faint he could mistake it for the fever-dream echoes of his fractured selves. Once or twice, he paused mid-meditation, certain that someone had whispered his name. But the sound always dissolved into silence. And so, he learned to shrug it off, burying the strange pull beneath the hard layers of training.
Trauma was not a thing that left him. It seeped into his bones, waiting behind every quiet moment. When he closed his eyes too long, he saw the boy he hadn't saved, the burning brands on slaves' wrists, Shen's missing arm, Camellya's calculated eyes, Su's trembling voice. They lived with him still, wrapped around his lungs, suffocating. But Aurelius was patient. Eleanor's palace was patient. And little by little, the jagged edges of his pain dulled—not gone, but smoothed enough for him to breathe without choking.
Today, he was not with Eleanor. Today, he was with her younger sister.
Seraphina.
Where Eleanor was composed grace and regal wisdom, Seraphina was fire caught in human form. She carried herself like someone who had been told all her life she was second to a throne she did not want. Her hair was the color of late autumn—deep auburn streaked with gold that caught every shaft of Aurelius' strange light. Her eyes were sharp, green like fractured glass, and her voice had a lilt that teased and provoked without apology. Where Eleanor had offered Jin Mu sanctuary, Seraphina had demanded proof of his worth.
"Again."
The word cracked across the courtyard, sharp as a whip. Seraphina stood with her wooden practice blade angled low, her stance neither noble nor refined but brimming with dangerous confidence. Sweat slicked her brow, yet she grinned, daring him to falter.
Jin Mu adjusted his footing, the obsidian-black currents of his cultivation humming under his skin. He had grown stronger here, his dual pathways knitting into something alien but stable. Seraphina had been the first to recognize it—not as a blessing, but as a challenge.
He lunged.
Wood met wood with a crack that reverberated through the empty yard. Seraphina twisted, her smaller frame slipping under his guard, the blunt edge of her blade grazing his ribs before he pivoted and blocked. Her laughter rang out, light and mocking.
"You fight like a man dragging corpses behind him," she taunted, circling him. "Is that what you're carrying? Dead weight?"
Jin's jaw tightened. "You wouldn't understand."
"Then make me understand."
Their blades collided again, faster this time. Seraphina moved with wild unpredictability—each strike reckless, yet calculated in its recklessness. Jin countered with precision, his movements sharp, honed from battles where a single mistake meant death. But this was no battlefield. This was Seraphina's game, and she played it with a spark in her eyes that forced him to keep up.
For the first time in a long while, Jin Mu found himself…breathing differently. Not the ragged breath of survival. Not the suffocated breath of nightmares. But the burning lungs of someone alive in the moment.
Minutes bled into hours. Their spar was not just training; it was conversation in another language. Her laughter needled him, her strikes demanded his attention, and his counters forced her to adapt. She was reckless, but she was not careless. And somewhere between the clash of wood and the grit of determination, something shifted.
When they finally broke apart, both panting, Seraphina leaned on her blade and smirked.
"You're not as broken as you think," she said.
Jin Mu wiped sweat from his brow. His chest heaved, but he did not look away. "And you're not as reckless as you pretend."
Her smirk widened. "Careful, Jin. That almost sounded like a compliment."
He allowed himself the smallest ghost of a smile. It felt foreign, strange on his lips—but not unwelcome.
The trauma still lingered. It would always linger. But here, under Aurelius' fractured light, with Seraphina's fire pushing against his shadows, Jin Mu felt the faintest flicker of something he hadn't dared claim in years.
Not hope. Not yet. But the memory of it.
The spar ended, but Seraphina didn't leave him in peace. She rarely did. She paced around him like a hawk circling prey, tapping her practice blade against her shoulder, eyes narrowed in a way that made him feel as though she were peeling him apart.
"You hold back," she said finally. "Not because you can't do more—but because you're afraid of what happens if you let yourself go."
Jin Mu frowned. "Afraid?"
"Yes." She planted the blade into the sand, leaning against it. "You carry power like a dam holds water. Too much pressure, too much weight, and it breaks. But there's another way."
Her words were sharp, but beneath them was something else. A quiet, knowing concern.
Jin Mu said nothing. He wasn't sure he could argue.
That night, he meditated alone in the guest wing. The air of Aurelius shimmered oddly when he breathed deeply, as if the city itself were stitched into the veins of transcendence. He fell into a rhythm of silence, his dual pathways unfurling within him like two rivers forced into the same channel. For months, he had endured their turbulence, the Black Emperor Pathway's suffocating shadows colliding with the alien sigils of the second. It had been agony to balance them.
But now—something stirred.
A thought. No, not a thought—an acceleration of thought.
It began small. His mind split one calculation into two, two into four, four into sixteen. His awareness widened, not in physical space but in cognitive reach. He saw every angle of his stance in the courtyard, every possibility of Seraphina's strikes, the way Eleanor's voice had carried a hidden tremor when she dismissed him days ago. Threads of cause and effect wove themselves into patterns that, just hours before, had seemed impossible to follow.
Hypermind.
That was the only word that came to him, pulled from somewhere between instinct and the fragments of old teachings lodged in his broken memories. He was accelerating his thinking, fracturing his awareness into countless layers, each processing streams of information, then folding them back into one.
And with it came pain.
The weight of memories pressed harder. Every face he'd seen in battle, every scream, every betrayal—they surged, layered upon each other until his skull felt as though it would crack. His dual pathways surged wildly, energy overflowing as if trying to keep pace with his racing mind.
He forced himself deeper.
One sequence within him—the Black Emperor—expanded, its sigils unfurling like wings of obsidian. The other followed, jagged and reluctant, but unable to resist the current of his will. They churned together, not fusing, but circling, spiraling, feeding each other's fire until something shattered.
Jin Mu's body convulsed. His breath ripped from his lungs. He clutched at his chest as a new sigil carved itself into existence upon his soul—a mark of progression he had not planned, not prepared for. A breakthrough. Forced, violent, but undeniable.
His mind screamed. His body burned. But through the torment, clarity emerged.
He saw.
Not with eyes, not with senses, but with the hypermind. He glimpsed the currents of Aurelius itself—the way the city fed on transcendence, the invisible laws shaping its skies, the subtle threads that separated it from the outside world. He saw Seraphina's fire, Eleanor's patience, the endless trauma buried inside himself—all at once, in infinite layers of possibility.
And then it ended.
Jin collapsed forward, drenched in sweat, his chest heaving as if he had clawed his way out of drowning. His thoughts slowed, but not to where they once were. The hypermind had left its imprint. He knew he could call upon it again, though at great cost.
A knock sounded at the door. Seraphina's voice followed, sharp but tinged with something softer.
"You're shaking the whole damn wing. Either you're dying in there, or you've done something insane. Which is it?"
Jin Mu, still trembling, managed a rasp of laughter. "Both."
For the first time since awakening in Aurelius, he didn't just feel like a guest in a gilded cage. He felt…closer to something more. Power. Understanding. Perhaps, even the faintest outline of the person he was meant to become.
And Seraphina, impatient and fiery, might have been the only one who could draw it out of him.