Power tastes like copper and ambition.
Like blood in your mouth after biting your tongue. Like metal heated too long over forge fire. Like the moment before you realize you've made terrible mistake and there's no going back.
It coursed through him now, this new addiction, this liquid fire that made every nerve sing songs about transcendence and agony in equal measure. His heart pumped energy where only blood had flowed before, and his body screamed at him that this was wrong, impossible, too much.
His body was an idiot.
The pressure of manufactured death lessened as his will took hold. But the centipedes still clung, twenty-seven of them burrowing into his flesh, marking limits he fully intended to transcend.
Twenty-seven.
That number had haunted his previous life like persistent ghost, showing up in grain counts, in days between failures, in the exact measurement of every limitation the universe saw fit to impose. Cosmic signature on every boundary, cosmic joke he'd never learned to laugh at.
He closed his eyes and the world transformed.
Five Fissures materialized in darkness behind his eyelids, suspended like impossible doorways to realms that shouldn't exist, hanging in void like wounds in fabric of reality itself. Each one burned with different frequency, different color, different hunger.
The Hall of Fissures.
He focused on Vitae first, muscle memory from five centuries, the door he'd walked through a thousand times before. The old companion. The familiar path.
And it slammed in his face.
No.
Not slammed. Invaded.
It rushed through him like malignant fever before he could brace himself, his body sweating then shivering then sweating again, every cell dividing and dying and being reborn at nauseating speed, sweet sick smell of decomposition mixed with violent freshness of new life, something moving under his skin that might be parasites or might be his own cells rearranging themselves or might be cosmic joke about what "life" really meant.
Agony. Pure cellular agony.
He pulled back, gasping, mind fragmenting under the assault.
What's happening?
Now it rejected him like stranger. Like enemy. Like something it recognized and recoiled from in horror.
No. Try again.
He reached for Vitae once more, desperate, and the rejection hit harder. Nausea, vertigo, his body trying to turn itself inside out, every organ staging rebellion.
Gone. It's gone.
Panic clawed at his throat. Actual panic, not performance, not control. The kind that came from five centuries of knowing exactly what should be there and finding only void.
The Upstream Drifter didn't just move consciousness. It burned bridges. Erased paths. Took everything I built and...
Frustrated, chest heaving, Nalla turned to Caelum, and it opened like unlocked gate, like coming home.
Recognition without memory. Familiar without reason. Like meeting someone you'd loved in a dream you couldn't quite remember.
Infinite sky revealed itself, constellations dancing in perfect mathematical patterns, birds of light and shadow flying through folded dimensions, leaving trails of visible time, past and future intertwined like threads in cosmic loom. He watched his hair gray and rejuvenate in cycles, watched himself die and be reborn, watched centuries compress into moments and moments expand into eternities.
There you are.
Familiar. Almost comfortable. Almost home.
But wrong. Different. The resonance was off, like hearing a familiar song played in wrong key, like recognizing your own face in mirror but the expression was never yours.
Why?
Why had his affinity changed? Vitae to Caelum. Blood Path to... what, exactly?
The Upstream Drifter.
The answer came cold and certain. The Intention didn't just move consciousness, it rewrote the foundation and changed the rules at a fundamental level.
Cost. There was always cost. He'd known that abstractly. Now he knew it in his bones, in the void where Vitae used to be, in the screaming sensation of paths sealed and doors barred.
He'd walked Blood Path within Vitae for decades. Decades of mapping which Intentions to acquire, which techniques exploited blood affinities, which enemies had vulnerabilities he could leverage through Life manipulation, through cellular dominion, through the intimate knowledge of how bodies worked and how to break them.
All of it assuming Vitae. All of it built on mastery of that Fissure.
Now he had Caelum. The most inexplored. No established techniques he'd memorized. No documented paths he'd memorized through five centuries. No roadmap at all except theory he'd never bothered studying deeply because why waste time when Blood Path offered such concrete, proven advantages?
Starting from scratch. Worse than scratch, starting in complete darkness. While Allen played games and clan politics shifted and threats he'd planned to counter with blood techniques emerged anyway, and he'd have to rewrite everything, rebuild everything, start everything over.
Pain. So much pain. And I did this to myself.
The thought arrived with stomach-dropping certainty.
He forced himself to test the others anyway, needed to understand the scope of damage, needed to know if this was total catastrophe or just catastrophe-adjacent.
Elementum anyway.
Hit him like fist to stomach, waves of impossible heat followed by cold that burned, his skin crawling with thousands of insects marching beneath surface while taste of rusted metal flooded his mouth and laws of matter screamed in his ears and his actual physical flesh standing in the centipede lake began to blister and freeze simultaneously.
He gasped, stumbled, nearly fell back into writhing mass of centipedes.
Pulled back just in time.
Tried Physica before sense could stop him, desperation making him reckless.
The world came apart. Up ceased to exist, left became yesterday, forward turned into colors he couldn't name, his depth perception collapsing as reality folded like paper being unfolded in wrong dimensions, nausea rising not from movement but from existence itself breaking, his body too confused about which direction was toward mouth to vomit properly.
Much pain is sign of much stupidity, as my mother used to say.
And it was true. He was being stupid. Testing wounds by pressing on them. But he needed to know the extent of the damage. Needed to understand if this was just Vitae or if the Upstream Drifter had poisoned everything.
Finally turned to Mentis as final desperate test, and the door slammed in his face so hard his teeth rattled. Five centuries had taught him persistence if nothing else, so when he pressed closer anyway, fragmented images flickered through the rejection, crystalline corridors where translucent creatures moved in patterns that violated geometry itself, whispers in languages that had never existed making his teeth ache, each syllable rewriting something fundamental in his skull, tingling creeping up his neck like alien fingers editing his thoughts from within, editing his memories, editing the core of who he was.
He pulled back before his brain started leaking, before he forgot who he was entirely.
The other Fissures. All sealed. All rejecting.
Only Caelum remained open, and even that might be temporary mercy the universe would revoke once it remembered who he was, what he'd done, what price remained uncollected.
Nalla took several deep breaths and pulled himself back from cosmic horror show. His hands were shaking. Actually shaking. When had that started?
Externally, centipedes still clung to flesh, and to watching crowd he stood frozen in lake's grip, just another candidate struggling with measurement. But inside, entire worlds had opened and slammed shut.
Mentis slammed shut.
Elementum slammed shut.
Physica slammed shut harder.
Vitae recoiled before he even touched it properly, like touching a hot stove and learning not to touch it again, except this stove was the foundation of everything he'd built, and now he couldn't touch it at all.
Slammed. Slammed. Slammed.
Only Caelum remained open, pulsing like seductive heartbeat inviting him deeper. Almost beautiful, if cosmic forces could seduce. They probably could.
Without deciding, he let himself be pulled along it, his consciousness drawn into the internal walls of pulsing red muscle.
His heart, now changed, now other.
Inside, walls vibrated with sound like grinding gears in machine designed by sadist who understood rhythm, each beat resonating with flow of power in ways that made pleasure and pain indistinguishable. He couldn't tell whether the sensation was a warning or an invitation.
Probably both. Usually was.
Connected to Fissures was his Heart of Intentions, and structure was anatomically identical to human heart. Four chambers, arterial connections, familiar shape that any butcher would recognize. But where muscle should have been red with blood, walls pulsed with black striations, dark veins carrying energy made visible, power running through pathways that had never existed in mortal flesh.
This transformed heart beat with different rhythm now.
Same rhythm. Different song. Different price. Different everything.
Inside, his personal reservoir drained completely, not empty, but filled instead with the energy of his primary Fissure, mixed with chaos grains, white energy with copper undertones flooding the chambers like liquid starlight. He'd seen this exact configuration in another life, had stared at it in meditation until eyes bled, had mapped every channel and tested every limit.
Recurring nightmare. Comfortable old scar. Choose your metaphor.
Mostly, Caelum's essence filled the space, only scattered grains of pure chaos swimming through it like dark stars in a colored sky, like flaws in an otherwise perfect crystal, like reminders that nothing pure ever stayed pure for long.
Carved into inner walls, symbol dominated his vision, rings of iron spinning like gears of cruel machine, each turn grating in his mind with sound of metal against metal, of prison doors closing, of locks clicking home.
Light emanating was silver, cold, absolute.
As he observed, wave of emotions invaded without permission. He drowned in essence of restriction itself, desperate need to contain bleeding into desperate need to limit bleeding into desperate need to hold things in proper place, boundaries that must not be crossed pressing against his ribs from inside while his throat closed and chest compressed and overwhelming compulsion to say "no further" made reality itself obey.
He could touch the architecture of prohibition.
Almost.
Almost, but not quite, because even touching it was restricted.
A barrier.
Of course. Of fucking course.
Same sensation that had slammed Vitae's door in his face. Same crushing weight of cosmic refusal, same architectural signature of "no." The universe had barred him from his old companion and now carved that same rejection directly into his heart.
Poetic, really. If you liked cruel jokes.
The symbol pulsed with rhythm of restriction itself, heartbeat of cosmic "no."
To the left, something that almost was a symbol pulsed, forms refusing to maintain single configuration, absorbing energy like hungry wound that never filled. When he focused on it, strange sensation took hold, like being hungry but not for food, hungry for knowledge, for certainty, for answers to questions he hadn't learned to ask yet. His hands tingled with urgency, and for moment he glimpsed desperate movement, something running, fleeing, pursuing, escaping, hunting, all at once in pattern that made no sense.
Desperation tasted like copper in his mouth.
To the right, the third symbol struggled to exist, oscillating between real and ethereal, like a candle flame in the wind. He focused on it and world exploded in sensations, suddenly crying tears that weren't his, feeling rage from nowhere, love so intense it hurt his chest, grief and joy and terror and ecstasy all bleeding together until he couldn't tell where one emotion ended and another began.
Vision fragmented, symbol flickered, unstable.
This, he thought despite nausea and confusion and the way his mind wanted to shatter, is mine. Whatever this is, whoever I'm becoming, this is mine.
Nalla gathered himself and the pressure before him became a solid wall, an absolute boundary, a line drawn in cosmic sand.
Could take no more steps forward. Just like his previous life. Just like always. The universe saying no in the language of iron and rejection and sealed doors.
He smiled anyway.
Another chain, this one forged from cosmic rejection and physical limits and the universe's quiet insistence that some doors stayed closed. But he understood it. Had spent centuries learning to carry it. Had made peace with weight pressing down on shoulders, or something close enough to pass for peace.
At least this one was honest about what it was. Didn't pretend to be anything other than limitation. Didn't whisper false promises or offer false hope. Just: no. No further. Stop here.
In a way, that was almost comforting.
When he opened his eyes, the chamber came back into focus. Stone pressing down. Torches burning. Centipedes still clinging to flesh like twenty-seven little reminders that he'd already hit his limit, that the universe had already decided exactly how much he got and no more.
In the alcoves, elders leaned forward. Counted. Recounted.
Lian's face went carefully neutral, always a bad sign, the kind of neutrality that meant calculations happening behind eyes. Moren looked away first, with a look of disappointment or embarrassment. Even the clan head's expression closed like door slamming.
"You can't go any further?" Academy elder's voice cut across chamber, holding onto thread of hope.
Pathetic thread. Already fraying. Would snap any moment.
Nalla turned and walked back through lake without answering.
Answered with actions. Actions were cleaner. Actions didn't lie.