Morning came thin and gray, like ash smeared across the sky.
Nika woke before the bell, not because he felt rested but because his mind had never really slept. Plans had churned there all night—shards of memory from the novel, numbers, dates, the shape of streets, the rhythm of disasters that had once unfolded on the page and would soon happen in front of him.
He sat at the desk beneath the cracked window. The turtle lay bundled in a folded shirt, a makeshift nest. Its breaths were shallow but even. When Nika touched its shell, the creature twitched, then settled. Alive. Barely—but alive.
First rule: don't die.
He said it in his head, then wrote it with a stub of pencil on a stained scrap of paper.
He wrote another line beneath it.
Second rule: don't let the turtle die.
The words looked childish. He didn't care. Principles were anchors, and anchors were what people clung to when the sea tried to eat them.
He drew three columns on the paper, their edges crooked and smudged.
Short-term (7 days)
Mid-term (30 days)
Long-term (beyond)
He stared at the blank columns for a long time, listening to the slow drip in the corner, to the faint voices of students turning in their sheets, to the world breathing on the other side of cracked plaster.
Then the floodgates in his memory opened.
He began to write.
Short-term (7 days)
Stabilize the turtle. In Chronicles of the Gate, this model of weak summon—catalogued as Chelonus Minor, Type–Shelled, "fragile variant"—wasn't supposed to live long without treatment. Its organs were underdeveloped; its shell fissures drained mana the way a cracked gourd leaked water.
There were three cheap remedies in the city:
Pondheart Moss (restores vitality in aquatic familiars; grows in wet, foul places).
Bone-lac Tonic (coats a shell with a brittle, temporary lattice; bitter, causes lethargy).
Pilgrim's Pearl (rare—accelerates shell knitting and siphon-seal; usually found in wet rifts).
He underlined Pondheart Moss and Pilgrim's Pearl. The second was the prize.
Hide what the turtle really is. Nobody must connect sick turtle with anything worth stealing. A sack, a wrap, a story: "It helps me focus." He'd make it look like superstition.
Secure food and water access. The dorm ration was barely enough for a human, let alone a beast. He needed scraps, broth, mineral brine. He remembered a side character—an alchemist apprentice—selling off-cuts behind the training hall. Name: Rill. Habit: chews licorice root, hates loud voices, appears evenings.
Body basics. He couldn't fight well yet, but he could learn to move. Footwork and guard. If he was going to live past the coming F-rank Gate incident, he needed fewer wasted steps than most. He wrote: Shadow-heel, narrow stance, conserve breath; protect head; never turn back; turtle always left side.
He swallowed, the motion clicking in his dry throat. He flexed his thin fingers and wrote into the next column.
Mid-term (30 days)
Trigger the turtle's first evolution route (Guardian line). In the novel, the hint sat in a footnote: the Guardian line wasn't born of violence but of burdens carried. The material catalyst was a mineral seed called a Staleward Kernel, often dropped by carapaced vermin in wet tunnels—low E-rank, sometimes F if stunted. Combine with Pondheart Moss and a constant weight-bearing regimen over seven nights; reinforce with daily mana infusions.
Defense-first training. He wouldn't win anything by trading blows. He needed a shield—not a nice one, just wood with iron rim. Learn three drills: walling, wedging, peel-and-turn. He'd bribe the quartermaster with extra cleaning duty if needed.
Map the city's weak seams. Gates didn't tear randomly; they followed stress lines—old water, deep iron, neglected wards. In Chronicles, a small wet rift opened near the Old Rustwater Substation after heavy rain. Date… his mind flipped through pages he'd practically memorized. Twelve days after the Academy's Awakening. If today was Day 0, then Rustwater would drip open on Day 12, at night, after a second rainfall.
He circled that in dull graphite until the paper dented.
Long-term (beyond)
Abyss route. The Guardian line could split later, if exposed to abyssal brine and pressure. Dangerous. Not yet.
Reputation shell. Become the idiot who survives. The dull gray weed no one bothers pulling. Let the spotlight stay on the golden-haired hero and his lion. Let villains sniff the air and look elsewhere. Reputation was a cloak and a lie you wore until you were ready to burn it.
Stolen chances. Identify events that belonged to the protagonist but could be nudged. Small first. Then bigger. Not the divine trials—that would paint a target on his head—but the unattended side rooms of destiny. Keys, tonics, minor sigils, friendships that could be made before the "correct" scenes arrived.
He put the pencil down and pressed his palms to his eyes until fireworks popped in the dark. The plan trembled there like something newborn and wet, vulnerable to the slightest draft.
He looked at the turtle. "We'll make it," he said, and the turtle made a faint sound, a breath through a reed.
He needed information and supplies. Libraries and trash.
The academy library opened at eighth bell, but the eastern stacks—the ones with old bestiaries—were rarely checked. He slipped in when he could, moving like a ghost. He found the slim volume he half-remembered, its spine cracked, its pages water-warped: Taxonomy of Lesser Companions and Their Improper Uses.
He traced a fingertip over an inked diagram: a small, pitiful turtle with hairline fractures drawn across its shell.
Chelonus Minor (Shelled Variant). Commonly dismissed. Applies to apprentices who lack talent. Do not expect battlefield contribution. Note: specimens show rare resilience under prolonged burdening. See folio 63: "On Guardianship."
He flipped to folio 63. Margins were annotated in angry handwriting.
Guardianship: Not a trait, a training. Place weight, remove weight, place weight again. Patience breeds plate. Feed with pond flora; trace a ward-circle of 'Hold' on the shell nightly with owner's low mana.
He memorized the ward, the angle of each line. It hummed like something true. He mouthed the syllables to feel how they sat in his mouth.
When the librarian coughed, he slid the book back and left as if he'd only been passing through.
He found Rill that evening behind the training hall, exactly where the book had said he might. A thin boy with straw hair and the perpetual frown of someone who'd finished being surprised by disappointment. He was breaking bones with a mallet over a basin, extracting marrow for some tonic.
Nika stood back, waited while two older students haggled too loudly, then stepped forward when they left. He didn't smile. He didn't plead. He put two dorm ration vouchers on the table and said, "Shell scraps. Bitter is fine."
Rill eyed the turtle bundle slung against Nika's side. "That thing's dying."
"It's stubborn," Nika said. "Like me."
Rill chewed his licorice root, then shrugged and scooped a jar of gray slurry. "Don't feed it straight. Brush a smear along the fissures, not into the mouth. If it retches, you wasted it."
"Thanks."
Rill grunted. Transaction done.
On the way out, a pair of boys shouldered Nika hard enough to stagger him. He tucked his chin and kept walking. No one worth convincing would be convinced by a flared temper.
Night. The dorm muffled. He lit the smallest lantern and laid the turtle on the table. With a cloth and careful fingers, he brushed the slurry over the cracked shell. The turtle flinched, a tiny, strangled hrrk, but didn't pull away. He whispered the ward he'd learned, drawing thin lines with the edge of a thumbnail—Hold, hold, hold—like telling a door to stay on its hinges.
When he finished, he leaned back and let his breath out. "We'll make your shell a wall," he murmured. "Then a rampart. Then a world."
The turtle blinked. He could have sworn the line of its breath smoothed a fraction.
He ate cold bread without tasting it and lay awake again, counting raindrops in his head, counting days until Rustwater.
On the third day, he slipped from drills to the quartermaster's shed and offered to scrub rust from a stack of practice shields no one had cleaned in months. His fingers bled by the second shield, but the quartermaster—a scarred woman with a face like unpolished stone—grunted at his persistence and finally pushed a cracked buckler across the bench.
"Rim's loose," she said. "You'll learn to keep your forearm tight, or it'll bite you."
"I'll learn," Nika said.
He did, in the empty yard, practicing with a stick and the buckler, learning to let blows slide along his guard instead of striking it head-on. Walling. Wedging. Peel-and-turn. The words became motion. The motion became habit. When his lungs burned, he stopped. When his hands shook, he fed the turtle and sat until they steadied.
He didn't rise. He accumulated.
On the seventh night it rained again, hard enough to drum on the dorm roof and turn the lanes to black rivers. The city swallowed rain like a drowned man swallowing air. Nika listened with the attention of a hunter curled in tall grass.
Rustwater Substation was an old brick square with a rusted fence and a warning sign everyone ignored. Once, it had pumped clean water. Now it coughed iron into the underground. In Chronicles, after the second big rain, a thin seam tore in the floor of its maintenance tunnel. A wet rift, barely F. Negligible to real hunters—and the perfect nest for the thing that grew Pondheart Moss and sometimes birthed a Pilgrim's Pearl under the moss's belly.
In the novel, the hero's party stumbled into it on their way back from a different job. They'd laughed at how "pathetic" it was and still left with a lucky pearl and two jars of moss—the kind of effortless windfall fate handed to heroes to keep their pockets jingling and their bones whole.
Nika rolled his pencil over the plan and tapped the line he'd written there: Take it before they do.
He wrapped the turtle against his side with cloth and a rope sling he'd stitched from an old sack. He pulled on his patchwork cloak, lifted the buckler, and tucked a knife into his belt. Not much. Enough to run, at least. He checked the lantern, then decided against it. Wet rifts liked to eat flame.
He waited until the bell chimed curfew, until footsteps thinned and doors ceased practicing their small arguments with hinges. Then he slid from the dorm like a shadow shedding itself from a wall and moved through alleys that smelled of wet stone and old water.
No one stopped him. Who would? He was nobody.
At the substation, rain rattled on the fence like a handful of nails. He climbed where the wire had sagged. The brick walls sweated. A metal door leaned inward on a broken hinge, peeling back a strip of dark.
He slipped inside.
The maintenance tunnel exhaled rot, iron, and the sour sweetness of standing water. He kept his shoulders narrow, the buckler hugging his ribs, his steps testing before committing. He knew where the rift would be—the memory of a paragraph and two sentences that described a "thin seam opening where the drip refused to dry." He followed the drip. It was a patient sound.
The turtle pressed against his ribs, warm beneath the cloth sling. He touched it once through the fabric. "Almost there," he breathed.
He rounded a bend. The floor dipped. Water gathered in a shallow basin, black and trembling. In the center, where broken tiles showed their teeth, the air puckered—like heat above a road, but colder, and wrong. The hair on his arms lifted.
The wet rift quivered open with a spiderweb sigh.
On its lip, fat and slick and faintly luminous, a carpet of Pondheart Moss breathed.
Nika knelt and let out a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
I found it first.
He untied the cloth sling, set the turtle carefully on the dry tile, and crouched lower, knife in hand, breath slow, eyes on the trembling seam.
"Okay," he whispered, voice barely there. "We take the moss. If there's a pearl, we take that too. Then we leave before anything with too many teeth asks questions."
The tunnel dripped. The rift shivered.
Something moved beneath the moss—just a swell, like a sleeping thing turning over.
Nika set the buckler between himself and the black water and reached.
The first chance was here, humming like a wire in the rain.
And this time, it would not belong to the hero.