The smell hit him first: sweat, unwashed bodies, mildew, and something sour underneath that he couldn't name and didn't want to. The main room was too large, with high ceilings that made every sound echo, and half the fluorescent lights overhead were dead, leaving the space in uneven yellow light and long shadows.
Rows of cots lined the walls, some occupied and some empty. People sat on the floor, leaned against walls, or lay curled under thin blankets that looked older than Makun. A woman in a torn jacket muttered to herself in a corner, an old man coughed, wet and rattling, and two young men by the door argued in low voices.
No one looked at him. He was just another body, another person the world had chewed up and spat out.
He walked deeper into the room looking for an empty cot. Most were taken, and the free ones looked worse than the occupied ones: stained mattresses, missing legs, one with no mattress at all, only bare springs. He found one in the back corner, away from the door and the lights. Its sheet was torn and stained with things he chose not to think about. It didn't matter. He was too exhausted to care.
He dropped his bag on the cot and sat. The frame groaned, and the sheet was rough and scratchy against his skin, as if it had been washed a thousand times and never properly dried.
The room was full of noise, coughing and snoring and muttering, someone dragging a cot across the floor, a broken heater humming as it struggled to warm a space too big for it. He lay down, pulled the bag close and wrapped both arms around it. The book inside pressed against his ribs, warm and heavy.
He closed his eyes. The noise didn't stop and the discomfort didn't fade, but exhaustion was heavier than both, and within minutes he was asleep.
Elsewhere, in an ordinary modern room, everything was clean and organized, the kind of space that no longer existed in Makun's world: hardwood floors, a desk with a closed laptop, a chair, a bed with real sheets tucked tight. Low instrumental music played in the background, smooth and rhythmic, filling the silence without asking for attention.
And on the wall at the center of the room hung a mirror that was not a normal mirror.
Its frame was heavy and ornate, dark wood carved with patterns that looked almost floral from a distance and wrong up close, too sharp and too deliberate. The wood was old and stained nearly black, and tarnished silver inlays twisted along its edges like vines, or chains. Small, thin spikes jutted from the corners like the railings of an old church, rusted and forgotten.
The glass itself was dark. It didn't reflect light the way glass should; it swallowed it and gave back only dim shapes and shadows that seemed to move even when the room was still. Faint smoke curled inside it, constantly shifting, though no incense burned and there was no fog in the room, as if the smoke lived in the glass, trapped and waiting.
Along the inner edge of the frame, small precise symbols were carved in an old script, binding marks meant to hold something in, or to let something through. When the light caught them, red glinted in the carvings like eyes watching from inside the wood.
This was not a mirror you bought in a store. It was a mirror you earned, or stole.
In front of it sat a man, tall and lean but solid, with the kind of build that came from training rather than genetics. His shoulders were broad and his posture straight even sitting down.
His dark hair was cut short, clean and practical without being military. His face was sharp, with a defined jaw and high cheekbones, and his eyes looked older than the rest of him, as if he had seen things that aged him from the inside. He wore a plain black shirt and dark jeans, and his fingers tapped a slow, impatient rhythm on his knees.
This was Zack York, and he was deep in thought.
The incident at the Night Market had cost him. The Silver Guards had dragged him to the threshold and held him there while the masked figure decided his punishment. Violence in the market was forbidden, and everyone knew it; first-timers got warnings, and regulars got bans. Zack was neither. He was known, he had connections, and he paid his debts, so they gave him a choice: pay now, or pay later with interest. He chose now.
It cost him three years. Three years of his vital energy were siphoned straight from his spiritual core and fed into the market's foundations, and the debt was cleared. He could feel the loss, a hollow space inside him that left him lighter and colder. He would never get those years back. But it could have been worse. It could have been his sight, or his access, or his name.
He had known it could end that way when he acted. He wasn't stupid; he knew the rules and their consequences. But he needed that book. He had been stuck at the third grade of Adept for two years and could not break through.
The step to the Elite tier demanded more than meditation and rituals; it demanded understanding, a framework, knowledge that wasn't written in the common texts, and The Goal of a Mystic was one of the few books that could give it to him.
He had spent months researching and consulted Elite-tier Seers who charged fortunes just to open their mouths, and they had all pointed him to the same place: the Night Market in Old Town, on a Friday, where a veiled woman would have it.
He went. He saw it. He made his offers. And some nobody, some street rat with barely any spiritual presence at all, walked away with it instead.
Zack's jaw tightened. Someone had taken what he had spent so long searching for, and he was going to get it back, whatever it took.
That was why he had made the effort to leave a mark on Makun. The mark would act as a bridge between them, with the mirror as intermediary.
The mirror worked much as he had described it to the veiled woman: you could watch anyone you chose, as long as something connected the two places, something belonging to either the watcher or the watched. Blood, hair, a personal object, or in this case, a mark. He had placed it deliberately, letting his blood fall and attach, and now it was a tether the mirror could follow.
That was its basic function, and the price was small: a thin thread of spiritual energy, a few hours of focus, some discomfort, headaches, and nausea if he pushed too long. Manageable.
The advanced functions were another matter. You could reach through the mirror and send pain, or sickness, or worse, but doing so meant offering a piece of your own soul as collateral, and if the target resisted, if they had protection, if the ritual failed, the mirror took the collateral anyway, permanently. Soul entrapment was the mildest outcome, and even that could end in death.
Zack wasn't ready for that. Not yet. He would watch Makun, find out where he was, and then go there in person and finish him for the book. Simple, clean, efficient.