The silver lines in my room used to glow like living nerve endings before the tower outside went dark. Now, they appeared as nothing more than dead, gray veins. Looking out the window, I saw that the magnificent silhouette of the Academy I was so used to seeing had been replaced by a pitch-black void. The stars were there, but they were dim, as if they had abandoned us, hoarding their light for the outside world alone.
"My head is like a boiling cauldron," I said aloud. My voice echoed in the empty room.
Kagetsu didn't answer for a while. I could feel his presence as a heavy coldness on my chest. Finally, he spoke as if waking from a distant dream.
"It's normal for it to feel like a cauldron. The entire system just 'recognized' you. This isn't like a librarian shining a lantern on the one faulty book in a library, Hyoga. This was more like the library burning its own shelves just to read that one book."
"What was that gray thing?" I asked, perched on the edge of my bed. "A soul? Or something like you?"
"No. It wasn't a soul. It was the 'immune system' of this massive mechanism. A diagnostic echo. It measured you, weighed you, and..." Kagetsu gave a short laugh. "And it realized you aren't a 'virus,' but a typo made by the system at the very beginning. An unerasable error."
I stood up and touched those grayed lines on the wall. It was cold. But I felt a vibration in my fingertips. A deep hum coming from below, from the heart of the Academy. It was as if a massive beast were growling in its sleep.
Last night's lockdown wasn't just a procedure. It was a process of digestion. The Academy was trying to eliminate this foreign object it couldn't swallow—me—by keeping me waiting in the dark.
At that moment, the seal on the door dissolved with a heavy thud. The door, which usually opened with a soft click, creaked open this time as if metal were grinding against metal. It was Ardent who entered.
His cloak was wrinkled, and the bags under his eyes made him look like he had aged ten years in the last few hours. He held a silver tray, but it didn't hold food; instead, a small crystal sphere sat upon it.
"I didn't bring food," Ardent said, his usual authoritative tone cracked. "Because I don't think your stomach could take anything."
"What's happening outside?" I asked, looking directly into his eyes.
Ardent set the crystal sphere on the table. The sphere glowed faintly and resonated with the grayed lines in the room. "The Council has convened. A debate lasting nine hours. Riku's father and the other senior overseers want you 'Liquidated' immediately."
"Liquidated? You mean they're going to kill me?"
Ardent walked to the window and looked out into the pitch-blackness. "Liquidation is worse than death in the Academy, Hyoga. They hook you up to a power source. They erase your consciousness and use only that 'resonance' inside you. Like a battery. They want to burn you to relight the tower."
A stone settled in my gut. "Will you allow this?"
Ardent turned to me. For the first time, I saw fear in his eyes. "What I allow no longer matters. The Academy has marked you as 'Point Zero.' That silhouette you saw earlier... it was a fragment of the Grid's founding will. It had been asleep for a thousand years."
"Kagetsu said it was a diagnostic echo."
Ardent's eyebrows shot up. "Kagetsu is right. But he's not telling the whole story. That echo didn't provide a report to the Council when it returned. When that echo returned, it locked the system's main core. The tower didn't go out because you were there, Hyoga. The tower decided to go out so it could synchronize with you."
The air in the room grew heavy all at once. The gray lines on the walls began to darken slowly, and the floor started to tremble slightly.
"Look," Kagetsu said. "They think they want to eat you, but they're actually afraid of being eaten by you."
Ardent picked up the crystal sphere from the table. "I've left a door open. The overseers will be here shortly to take you to the lower vaults—the battery rooms. But if you come with me now..."
"Where?"
"To the heart of the system. Deeper than even the archives. If we understand why that silhouette measured you and why it retreated, I can tie the Council's hands."
"What if you're wrong? What if I go there and you throw me directly into that energy pool?"
Ardent gave a faint smile. It was a bitter one. "I can't enter there alone, Hyoga. My key no longer works. The Academy's doors no longer respond to my commands, but to your presence. I need you."
I didn't have time to think. The sound of heavy armored footsteps began to come from the end of the corridor. The overseers were coming. They were coming with those silver handcuffs to turn me into an object.
"Fine," I said. "Let's go."
Ardent made a gesture, and a hidden compartment in the floor of the room slid open. This was a narrow stone staircase used only for maintenance and secret inspections, which the students never knew about. As we descended the stairs, the air grew even colder. The seals on the walls were no longer silver, but the color of raw copper. Older, more primitive.
"We call this the 'Root Canals'," Ardent whispered. "Where the Academy draws its mana from the earth."
As we descended further, Kagetsu's activity within me increased. He was excited, but it was a frightening excitement. Like a hunter returning to an old hunting ground after a long time.
"I remember this place," Kagetsu said. "There was blood here. There were screams here. Now, there is only a dusty spell poured over it."
At the end of the stairs stood a massive metal door. There was neither a handle nor a lock on the door. Just a handprint cavity in the center.
"Try it," Ardent said.
I slowly placed my hand into the cavity. As soon as the seal on my right hand touched the cold metal, it glowed like a coal. From inside the door came not the sound of gears, but a heartbeat. A deep, powerful THUMP-THUMP.
The door didn't slide open to the sides; it pulled back, melting as if it had turned liquid. Inside was a massive void. A thin stone bridge stretched toward the center, and at the end of the bridge, a black-and-white sphere hung in the air, constantly shifting form.
"The Grid Core," Ardent murmured.
We began to walk across the bridge. The bottom was invisible; there was only that endless hum coming from below. As we approached the center, I realized that the black-and-white sphere was actually a storm of light and shadow.
"Look," Ardent said, pointing to a panel next to the sphere. "The data here... the system doesn't see you as an outside threat. It perceives you as an 'update.' Like a piece it has been waiting for for a thousand years."
At that moment, red lights erupted everywhere in the void. One of the massive doors at the back opened with a loud crash.
"Stop!" a voice echoed.
It was Riku, followed by five overseers. In Riku's hand was an authority staff that overrode the Academy's seals. His face was deathly pale, and his eyes glowed with hatred.
"Traitor Ardent!" Riku shouted. "You brought him here, to the heart of the core! Do you want to destroy the system entirely?"
"Riku, you don't understand," Ardent said, stepping forward. "The system is already being destroyed. Hyoga is the only solution."
"Hyoga is a mistake!" Riku struck his staff against the ground. A wave of light from the staff shook the bridge. "My father was right. People like you will not be able to taint the purity of the Academy."
The overseers drew their swords. But these weren't ordinary swords; they had black runes on them that absorbed mana. They surrounded us.
Hyoga saw the pure fear in Riku's eyes. That fear made Riku dangerous. He had the uncontrolled aggression of an animal cornered.
"I don't want to fight, Riku," I said, spreading my hands to my sides. "I just want to understand what this thing is."
"There's nothing left to understand," Riku said, pointing his staff directly at me. "The liquidation process will begin here, by my hands."
A white energy chain erupted from the tip of the staff and lunged directly at me. The chain coiled like a snake in the air, aiming for my wrists. Kagetsu roared within me.
"Enough of these tamed games! Show them real power, Hyoga!"
Just as the chain was about to touch my wrist, a pitch-black wave erupted outward from the seal on my right hand. It caught the chain in mid-air and shattered it like a piece of glass. Riku and the overseers were thrown back several meters by the impact.
But the real change wasn't in me.
The Grid Core behind me—that black-and-white sphere—reacted to the energy I produced. The sphere began to spin rapidly, the lights inside merged, and it started to suck in all the mana in the room. Ardent's face was filled with horror.
"Hyoga, the seal... your seal is resonating with the core! You must stop it!"
I tried to stop it. I wanted to pull my hand back, to trap the energy inside me, but the door had already been opened. Black arms emerging from the core began to spread across the bridge.
Riku rose from the ground, wanting to raise his staff again, but his staff crumbled like a grain of sand in his hand. "What is this?" he shouted, his voice trembling.
Everything in the room began to vibrate. The copper seals on the walls were melting, and the ceiling creaked as if it were about to collapse on us.
"Finally," Kagetsu said. "Finally, we are opening the door to the true owners."
A sound rose from the core. A noise like the collapse of a building, not a scream. And from within that noise, hundreds of silhouettes began to appear—similar to the gray one from before, but this time much clearer and much larger.
They were all looking at me. They all whispered a single word at the same time. That word exploded like a storm inside my mind:
"SAVE."
The tower shook once more. This time the light didn't go out. The tower hurled the first black light in its history into the sky. It pierced the night like a pillar of darkness.
Ardent fell to his knees. Riku tried to flee, but the doors were locked.
I stood in the middle of the bridge, right in front of the core. I reached my hand toward the sphere. I was no longer afraid. I only felt a great void.
When my fingertips touched the core, the Academy was no longer the place we knew.