The morning after the Festival of Rebirth was quiet, a heavy, comfortable silence that draped over the city of Sylaphu. The Elves were sleeping off the celebration, the streets empty save for the drifting petals and the soft hum of the rejuvenated World Tree.
In the private courtyard of the Guest Branch, however, there was no rest.
Briar was moving.
She wore her training leathers, stripped of the heavy armor to allow for maximum flexibility. Sweat slicked her skin, making her pale shoulders gleam in the dappled sunlight. She was moving through the Thorn Art Seventh Form : Weeping Blade
Ignis was a blur of red steel in her hand. She slashed through the air, her movements sharp and aggressive. With every strike, she released a burst of mana, trying to ignite the blade.
Whoosh. Sputter.
"Dammit!" Briar mumbled in annoyance, stumbling slightly as she tried to transition from a vertical slash to a horizontal guard. The fire on her blade flared orange for a second, then died out, leaving a trail of gray smoke.
She gritted her teeth and tried again. She channeled her mana from her core, forcing it down her arm, screaming internally for it to burn hotter.
Whoosh. Sputter.
She sheathed the sword with a violent clang, kicking a stone across the mossy floor. It skittered away and hit the boot of someone watching her.
"You are fighting it," a calm voice said.
Briar spun around, her hand going back to her hilt.
Nyx was sitting on a low branch of an amber-tree, one leg dangling casually. He was wearing loose training robes, and he looked annoyingly fresh. He was holding a small, glowing seed in his hand,not the World Seed, but a common acorn he had picked up from the forest floor.
"I'm not fighting it," Briar mumbled thinking 'Why does he look good in anything he wears.'
She wiped the sweat from her forehead. "I'm cultivating. Or trying to. I've been stuck at the Beginner stage of the Lunar Realm for two years."
She paced the small garden, her energy nervous and jagged.
"In the Human Empire, cultivation is about Capacity and Comprehension. We build our Cores, the mana organs near our hearts, layer by layer. Imagine a pearl. You add a layer of mana, compress it, add another. It's slow. It's painful. And right now... my pearl is hard as a rock. I can't add any more fire to it without feeling like my chest is going to explode."
She looked at Nyx, envy and admiration warring in her red eyes.
"You broke a machine-god yesterday. You rewrite reality by touching it. And Lyra..."
She gestured to the corner of the garden.
Lyra was meditating in the lotus position, floating three inches off the ground thanks to a passive wind spell. Her brow was furrowed in intense concentration, her Whisper-Crystels glowing faintly as she ran mental calculations.
"Lyra is a genius," Briar sighed. "Her calculation speed with those new earrings is terrifying. She analyzes mana efficiency down to the decimal. But me? I'm just a girl with a hot sword. If we go to the Tournament... if we face the Sun-Legion.. I'm going to be a liability."
Nyx dropped from the branch, landing silently on the moss. He walked over to her.
"You are not a liability, you're a genius that's how you reached this realm did you not?" Nyx said, his voice firm. "But you are right. You are blocked."
He held up the acorn.
"I have been analyzing this New power," Nyx said. "The Authority of Nature isn't just about making plants grow. It is about understanding the Flow."
He closed his hand over the acorn. Green light pulsed between his fingers.
"In your system, you treat mana like a solid object," Nyx explained. "You stack it. You compress it. You try to build a wall."
He opened his hand. The acorn had cracked. A tiny, vibrant green sprout twisted upward, unfurling two perfect leaves in seconds.
"Nature doesn't build walls," Nyx said, showing her the sapling. "A tree doesn't strain to grow. It simply follows the path of least resistance. It accepts the energy of the sun and the earth and transforms it. It flows."
Lyra opened her eyes. Her levitation spell faltered, and she dropped gently to the ground. She adjusted her robes, looking at Nyx with keen interest.
"That is theoretically correct" Lyra said, walking over to join them. "But the transition from Beginner to Intermediate Lunar Realm requires a fundamental shift in the Core's structure. The solid mana must liquefy. It must begin to rotate on its own axis, generating its own gravity. That creates the 'Lunar Tide' effect, allowing for continuous mana regeneration."
Lyra sighed, rubbing her temples.
"The problem is Comprehension. You can't just 'decide' to liquefy your soul, Nyx. You have to understand the essence of your element so deeply that your body mimics it. It usually takes decades of meditation to bridge that gap."
"I don't have decades," Briar muttered, crossing her arms. "We have only have a month until the Tournament begins again. If I walk into that arena as a Beginner Lunar... my father will laugh at me before he kills me."
"Maybe I can help," Nyx said.
The two women looked at him.
"Help how?" Briar asked skeptically. "You can't eat my ignorance."
"No," Nyx smiled slightly, a small, mysterious expression that made Briar's heart skip a beat. "But I can connect you to the Source."
He gestured to the mossy ground beneath the massive roots of the Guest Branch.
"The World Tree is the greatest conductor of mana on the continent. I control the Tree now. My nervous system is linked to its roots. I can... create a bridge."
Nyx looked at his hands, analyzing the new power coursing through him.
"I can put you into a trance. A state of hyper-lucidity. I can use the Tree's network to bypass your physical senses and show you the essence of your elements. Not as you imagine them in your human books, but as they are in nature."
Lyra's eyes widened behind her bangs. She stepped closer, her scientific curiosity overriding her caution. "You want to induce a forced epiphany? That's... that's incredibly dangerous, Nyx. If our minds can't handle the influx of raw data from the World Soul, we could burn out. We could lose our sense of self."
"I will be the filter," Nyx promised. He looked at them, his golden eyes intense and reassuring. "I will hold the door open. You just have to walk through. I won't let you get lost."
Briar didn't hesitate. She sat down on the moss, crossing her legs and placing Ignis across her lap.
"Do it," she said. "I'm tired of being the weak link. If burning is what it takes, then make me burn, Nyx."
Lyra bit her lip, doing a quick risk assessment. Then, she sighed and sat down beside Briar.
"Statistically, this is reckless," Lyra murmured. "But... I trust you."
Nyx sat across from them smiling, forming a triangle.
"Close your eyes," he commanded softly. "Breathe."
They obeyed.
Nyx reached out. He didn't touch them physically. Instead, he placed his hands flat on the ground, digging his fingers into the soft earth, connecting with the roots beneath them.
"Commune."
The Second Shackle hummed. A pulse of green light expanded from Nyx, enveloping the three of them.
The world fell away.
Briar closed her eyes, sensing something happening.
There was no darkness. There was only heat.
Briar wasn't in the garden anymore. She wasn't in her body. She was floating in an endless expanse of orange and red.
Usually, fire hurt. Even as a fire cultivator, she felt the sting of heat on her skin when she channeled too much. Fire was pain. Fire was anger. Fire was the weapon she used to keep her siblings away.
But here... there was no pain.
Fire isn't anger, a voice whispered. It sounded like Nyx, but deeper, echoing from everywhere at once. Fire is transformation, It is the energy of change.
Briar looked down at her own hands in the vision. They weren't flesh. They were made of flames.
She saw a forest burning. In the real world, she would have seen destruction. But here, with Nyx guiding her perception, she saw the truth. The fire was turning dead wood into ash. The ash was feeding the soil. The soil was birthing new, stronger trees.
You are trying to push the fire away, the voice guided her. You treat it like a beast on a leash.
Briar felt the resistance in her soul, the hard, calcified shell of her Lunar Core. She had spent years building it up, hardening it to protect herself.
Let it in, She heard Nyx whisper. Do not reject it, accept it and control it.
Briar took a breath. Instead of expelling her mana, she inhaled. She pulled the infinite heat of the vision into her chest. She pulled it into the hard pearl of her core.
It hurt. It felt like swallowing a sun.
But she didn't stop. She let the heat melt the walls she had built. The hard shell of her core cracked. It turned molten.
The static pearl dissolved into a swirling, rotating sphere of liquid plasma.
I am not holding the flame Briar realized, a euphoric sensation washing over her. I am the fuel.
The bottleneck shattered.
Lyra was also going through something similar to Briar during this time,
There was no ground. There was no sky. There was only the endless, rushing currents of the wind.
Lyra stood on a cloud. Around her, the universe was a grid of mathematical lines. She saw the wind not as air, but as vectors. Force. Velocity. Pressure. Variables to be solved.
She was frantically trying to calculate the path of a hurricane forming in front of her. She was writing equations in the air, trying to predict where every molecule would go.
You cannot solve the wind Nyx's voice echoed in the vastness. It was calm, cutting through the noise of the storm. The wind is not a problem Lyra, It is a song.
Lyra watched the hurricane. She saw the chaos. It wasn't random. It was a perfect, chaotic fractal. It was beautiful because it was unpredictable.
You are trying to control the sky with a ruler, Nyx whispered. Put down the pen and feel the drift.
Lyra looked at her hands. She looked at the equations. They felt... restrictive. They were chains of logic binding a force that was meant to be free.
Lyra dropped her mental pen. She stopped doing the math. She stopped trying to predict the next gust.
She stepped off the cloud and fell into the storm.
She didn't crash. The wind caught her. It didn't tear her apart; it wrapped around her. She spun with it, laughing as she realized she didn't need to know where the wind was going. She just needed to go with it.
Her Core, a rigid, crystallized sphere of compressed air, shattered.
It reformed instantly, not as a solid, but as a miniature cyclone spinning in her chest. A perpetual motion engine that generated mana with every breath.
The library of her soul blew open, the pages fluttering in a glorious, liberating gale.
Nyx opened his eyes.
He was sweating. The strain of filtering the raw mana of the World Tree into two human minds was immense. He had held the connection for an hour, carefully modulating the flow so it wouldn't overwhelm their mortal brains. It was like trying to pour the ocean into two cups without spilling a drop.
"Wake up," Nyx whispered, his voice raspy.
Briar gasped. Her eyes snapped open.
They weren't just red anymore. For a split second, they looked like molten magma, glowing with an inner light that illuminated the garden.
A wave of intense heat rolled off her body, singing the moss around her in a perfect circle. It wasn't the uncontrolled explosion of a novice; it was a dense, heavy heat.
"Whoa," Briar breathed. She looked at her hands. She summoned a small flame.
Before, her fire was orange and wild, flickering with the wind. Now, the flame was Blue at the core. It was steady, silent, and terrifyingly hot. It didn't flicker. It waited.
"I feel..." Briar clenched her fist, extinguishing the flame instantly. "I feel dense. My mana pool didn't get bigger, but the fuel... it's richer. More potent. My Core... it's spinning."
"Intermediate Lunar Realm," Nyx confirmed, leaning back on his hands, exhausted. "You have liquefied your core."
Lyra opened her eyes a second later.
The air in the garden swirled around her, lifting her hair and robes in a gentle, localized updraft. Her blue eyes were piercingly clear, the pupils sharpening like camera lenses.
"The vector analysis," Lyra muttered, looking at a falling leaf. "I don't need to calculate it. I can see the friction. I can see the path it will take before it lands."
She looked at Nyx.
"That wasn't just a lesson," Lyra said, awe in her voice. "That was a passing of information. I understand the atmospheric principles of the Intermediate Stage. No... I understand the Advance Stage. My potential has expanded."
She scrambled over to Nyx, grabbing his hands in excitement.
"Nyx, do you realize what you did? You bypassed years of meditation. You are a cultivation cheat code."
"I merely opened the door," Nyx said, smiling tiredly. "You walked through."
Briar stood up. She drew Ignis.
"Ignis Art: Blue Nova"
She slashed the air.
Instead of a wave of fire, a concentrated crescent of blue flame shot out. It hit a training dummy made of ironwood at the far end of the garden.
There was no explosion. The beam simply passed through the dummy.
A second later, the top half of the dummy slid off. The cut was cauterized smooth, glowing cherry red.
"It cuts through steel," Briar whispered, staring at her sword. "Not melts. Cuts."
She turned to Nyx, her eyes shining with tears of relief.
"I can fight," she said. "I can actually fight them now."
She dropped her sword and ran to him. She didn't care about propriety. She threw her arms around his neck, hugging him fiercely.
"Thank you," she whispered into his neck.
Nyx wrapped his arms around her waist with a content smile, grounding her.
"What is there to thank between us," Nyx said softly.
Lyra joined them, placing a hand on Nyx's shoulder, completing the circle.