Nyth kept its lessons short and efficient. It taught survival as an arithmetic: give this, receive that; offend too often, and the ledger balances in blood. Kael had always been quick at sums. Now he was learning a new currency.
The rumor that Lerras had made a mistake was a tidy thing. Lerras—the name slipped through the east quarter like a greasy coin. He was small-time but efficient: an operator who sold oblivion to those desperate enough to buy it. He kept safe routes, borrowed favors, and paid the right people until he was left with only those who could not collect what was owed. His profit came from other people's soft edges—boys who wanted to forget, men who wanted to forget the prices they paid to forget. He owed no particular loyalty to anyone. That kind of business left heavy echoes.
Kael watched Lerras for a week the way a surgeon watches a pulse. He noted the opening hours, the guards' patterns, the man's favorite chair, the way he tapped the ash from his pipe when impatient. He mapped the thinnest places: a servant who kept late hours, a back door that jammed at dawn, an accountant who trusted the same handwriting. Knowledge was a knife with many edges; Kael filed them until the shape fit his hand.
He did not plan to kill for vengeance. He planned to kill as one might take over a factory—quietly, by acquiring its patents and consolidating its market. Lerras's trade was a potential minefield of echoes. Harvested properly, it could feed a small, efficient furnace of power.
On the night Kael moved, rain made the cobbles glossy and reflective, like a ledger newly inked. He wore the same plain clothes a hundred anonymous hands had worn before him, the ones that blurred a face into the crowd. He did not carry a blade loud with ornamentation. He carried intention.
He began at the back gate, as every map had taught him. A cart blocked the alley, a convenient accumulation of shadows. He slipped past the servant who was drunk enough to pretend sleep and precise enough to wake if inconvenienced. Kael's approach had the patience of a thing that measured time not to waste it but to conserve advantage.
When he stepped into Lerras's room, the stench hit him first: oil, stale tobacco, the chemical-sweet smell of the product itself. The man was bigger than his reputation suggested—fleshy and comfortable on a chair that had seen better coin. He half-turned, eyebrows lifting in the practiced surprise of someone who lived by being only occasionally surprised.
"You're early," Lerras said, and his voice had the small, barked humor of a man who liked to think he controlled the calendar.
Kael's reply was a question he never voiced aloud. He watched the merchant's microexpressions, the rhythm of breath, the way his hand hesitated near the drawer where he kept his ledgers. The pathway—sin energy—sat in him like a new instrument. It hummed faintly, answering the man's minor violations: the patron's habitual cheating of apprentices, his exchange of children's futures for a pothole of forgetfulness, the way he justified his trade as necessity.
Kael did not need the pathway to tell him that Lerras was cruel. He needed it to measure how cruel, because cruelty translated into resonance. He tested with a practiced thought: a tiny extraction from the merchant's trailing arrogance, a pinprick of stolen credit. The energy came, small and warm, and his muscles tightened with a readiness that was not entirely physical—his hearing cleaned, his vision steadied.
The first lesson was not in combat. It was in accounting.
He pulled a coin from his sleeve and dropped it onto the table between them. It was small, ordinary, worn. Lerras's eyes flicked, the vanity of small men. He opened his mouth—an invitation to the ritual of exchange—and Kael struck.
The movement was not dramatic. It had the inevitability of a line crossing a margin. A hand, flashed; a throat, slit; a body collapsing that made no sound because the city had already agreed to that kind of silence. Kael did not scream. He did not deliver a speech. He did a job, precisely and coldly, and then he read the residue the deed left behind.
This was the first time he took a heavy echo: long-term exploitation harvested whole, the practiced justifications, the nights of small cruelties stitched into a blanket of entitlement. It tasted of coin and rust; it saturated him like a patient with a fever. The pathway burst its seams with a new register—far stronger than the petty remainders he had been collecting. His vision sharpened to a ridged clarity. The world simplified into vectors of gain.
It was also the first time he felt the pathway ask for payment in a way that was not calculation but cost.
There was a thinning in the corners of feeling, a narrowing of the muscles that had once reminded him what pity felt like. He noted it clinically, like a surgeon watching vital signs. He could not say he regretted the loss—regret was an indulgence and indulgences required time and a safe account. He made a mental note: larger draws from the ledger required colder ledgers in return.
He did not leave immediately. He rummaged through Lerras's records—piles of paper, crude ledgers, the rough inked maps of suppliers and clients. He catalogued the revenue streams, the favored routes, the hidden stashes. He found the names of debtors, the amount owed, the favors traded. These were not mere items; these were futures. He adjusted his mental map of Nyth to include a new sector: a market he could step into, if he chose.
Before he left, he did one more thing. He sat in the dead merchant's chair and watched the room as if it were a model of a system. The pathway responded—not by giving him a full skill, but by clarifying a nascent perception: when someone has been the author of another's small deaths, their defenses follow a pattern. There is arrogance, yes, but arrogance that conceals hubris built on a repeatable script. That script had points of pressure.
For the first time, something like an instrument flashed in Kael's mind—a perception that recognized the script of another's weakness. It was raw, a filament of sight rather than a completed eye. He could see, in flashes, the fissures in people's resolve as glowing seams: a name that caused fear, a memory that sharpened guilt, a touchstone that collapsed lies. He labeled it privately: the shape of weakness. It was not yet the Eye of Discernment; it was an embryo of that faculty.
He left Lerras's den with pockets that were thin but useful: a small bag of coin, a handful of names, and a ledger that would let him buy influence slowly and with precision. More important than material loot was the realization that the pathway responded most when fed on organized cruelty. Lerras had been a system, not an accident. Systems bled rich echoes.
Two nights later, a corner of the east quarter was alive with movement. A small crew took over Lerras's routes, politely and efficiently. Kael had left instructions, carefully placed, that let the right people find the right goods. He had not chosen to run the operation himself. He was not yet ready for the attention that came with being a visible leader. Instead, he let others flourish in the niche he had opened, and watched the way the market adjusted. People are most useful when they do not know they are tools.
In the days that followed, Kael refined what he had learned into practice.
He learned that the conduit of gain had a gradient: petty sins produced small, frequent yields—useful for sharpening reflexes and training patience. Systemic sin produced large, infrequent yields—useful for expanding capacity and buying leverage. He learned to design actions that maximized output while minimizing exposure: inciting a rumor here, facilitating a theft there, all with the necessary distance to remain a shadow.
He also practiced the filament of perception—the seed of an eye—on small targets: a cocky debt-collector whose pride glowed like a sore, an old woman who hid a shame under a laugh. The flashes of seam-sight came and went, inconsistent and maddeningly partial. Sometimes they revealed a vulnerability so clearly he could exploit it without effort. Other times they were blind and left him as naked as anyone else.
That frustration, Kael decided, was an acceptable cost. Denial had its own curriculum. Skill required repetition and hunger.
One evening, a boy from the neighborhood came to him with a question. He was not the sort who asked questions lightly. He had watched Kael take what he needed like a man who never wasted motion, and he wanted to learn the shape of such motion for himself.
"Why'd you kill Lerras?" the boy asked, and his voice had the small, brutal curiosity of a child who had not yet learned that men sometimes lied to themselves.
Kael considered the question as an accountant considers a ledger entry. He could have said anything: revenge, justice, necessity. Instead he chose the simplest truth, stripped of drama.
"To make the market better for my purposes," he said. He watched the boy's face, cataloguing the comprehension and the pity and the envy that passed like weather. None of those things moved him; they were instruments to be noted and left in the box.
"Will you ever be forgiven?" the boy asked softly, as if forgiveness were currency to be spent.
Kael looked at him and for a fraction of a second felt a shape he could not name—an echo of his mother the night she died, the ledger closing—but it passed like a wind. He folded it into a lesson.
"Forgiveness is not a thing you wait for," he said. "It is a thing you decide not to need."
The boy's mouth rounded as if to ask more, but Kael rose and left, his steps precise, his mind already measuring the next margin.
The pathway within him hummed contentedly. It had been fed, and it wanted more. Kael smiled then, a slight and unreadable movement. The beginning of a campaign is always quiet. The first lesson had been simple and absolute: the universe's wrongs could be used as capital, and capital could be made to buy options.
He had learned how to find seams. He had learned to choose which seams to cut. He had learned the cost.
He had not yet learned the extent of what cutting them would demand.