The years between birth and his fourth birthday passed with a particular texture — long days and short seasons, the accumulation of a child's life assembling itself around the fixed point of what he knew was coming.
He read constantly. The Draeven library was modest but not negligible, and he worked through it with systematic attention. Military history. Agricultural theory. Regional politics. The three texts on cultivation theory that were available — introductory works, the kind meant for noble families to understand what their children might be assessed for, not the technical treatises he had accessed in his previous life, but useful for calibrating what the household knew versus what he knew.
He observed Tutor Aldis with particular interest.
Aldis had been the Draeven family's court Mage tutor for fifteen years — a small, dry, precise man with a Journeyman Mage's cultivation and a scholar's instinct for detail. He was teaching Mira her first spell theory, which Mira was approaching with the focused seriousness of someone who had decided this was important and was therefore going to master it completely, objections of the material to the contrary notwithstanding.
Kaelith sat in on these lessons.
No one had specifically invited him, but no one had specifically uninvited him either, and he was small and quiet and sat in the corner with a book on his lap that he appeared to be reading, so Aldis had simply continued teaching and not commented on the additional presence.
What he was actually doing was watching Aldis's hands.
The way a Journeyman Mage moved mana was visible to trained observation — a faint shimmer in the air, a slight temperature change, the particular quality of attention that a cultivator's body expressed when it was working. He was cataloguing it. Filing the observations against the theoretical framework he carried from his previous life's reading. Building the picture of practical application that texts described but could not fully convey.
He was preparing.
The cultivation window was still two years away when Mira, at age five, had her Awakening test.
Tutor Aldis had brought a crystal — the standard Awakening assessment tool, a sphere of compressed mineral compounds calibrated to resonate with spiritual energy — and placed it in Mira's palms with the particular formality of someone who found ceremony useful for managing the expectations of all involved parties.
Mira had held it with the focused concentration of someone taking a test they intend to pass.
The crystal had blazed orange-red.
Fire affinity. Strong. Not legendary grade — the color was solid rather than the luminous, almost living quality that legendary-grade affinities produced — but genuinely excellent. High Rare at minimum, possibly Epic. Mira would be a formidable Mage if she worked at it, and working at it was, given what Kaelith had observed about his sister's character, essentially guaranteed.
His parents had been visibly, quietly overjoyed. His father had shaken Aldis's hand for slightly too long. His mother had hugged Mira with the particular tightness of someone trying to express something that doesn't have a clean verbal form.
And Mira had looked at her little brother across the room with the expression she would always use when she had accomplished something she was proud of — the one that said *I hope you saw that* without saying it — and Kaelith had smiled at her with the particular warmth he reserved for her alone.
His turn would come.
He could be patient.
He had been patient for twenty-three years in his previous life without understanding what he was being patient *for.* Patience with context was an entirely different and considerably more manageable experience.
---
The Season of Mists came — the third month of the year, when the lowland plains of southern Ashveil breathed cold fog every morning and the estate smelled of woodsmoke and damp stone — and Kaelith turned four.
His birthday was a quiet affair. His parents gave him books, which he received with the genuine pleasure that adults sometimes found slightly alarming in a small child. Mira gave him a drawing she had made of the estate from the upper window, which was actually quite good for age six and which he kept with careful attention to its preservation.
That evening, he sat cross-legged in the center of his room.
And he reached inward.
Not yet — the window hadn't opened, the System hadn't signaled. But he reached anyway, just to feel the shape of what was there. And it was there. It had always been there. The seal was gone and what remained in its absence was like stepping into a room that had been locked for two decades and finding that the furnishings were not only intact but had been accumulating throughout the entire period, quietly, in the dark, patiently waiting.
It was enormous.
He had understood this intellectually. He had read the System's assessment, had processed it, had incorporated it into his plans. But understanding a thing intellectually and encountering it experientially were different events, and the encounter required a moment of simply being present with the scale of it.
The System notification came at dawn.
---
**[ CULTIVATION WINDOW OPEN ]**
**Host Age:** 4
**Status:** First cultivation window now available.
**Recommendation:** Simultaneous Aura Core + Mana Channel formation.
**System Note:** Dual formation at this stage is unprecedented in recorded history. System stabilization protocols active — risk to host: minimal.
**Estimated duration:** 72 hours of focused meditation.
**Estimated result:** Iron Knight *(Peak)* + Apprentice Mage *(Peak)*
**Breakthrough to Bronze Knight and Journeyman Mage:** Available immediately upon completion.
**Note:** Your affinities will be felt. Control is essential. The Primordial Flame does not burn quietly.
---
He dressed, ate breakfast with his family, and told his mother he intended to spend the day in his room practicing the breathing exercises Tutor Aldis had begun teaching him.
Lyrea had regarded him for a moment.
"All day?" she said.
"I might sleep," he allowed.
"Mm." She handed him a bread roll. "Knock on the wall if you need something."
He thanked her, went upstairs, locked his door, and sat down in the center of his room.
He reached inward.
The System guided him — not with words but with direction, the sense of a steady hand indicating *here, not there, this way, feel this.* He followed it with the focused attention of a man who had spent four years preparing for this moment, and the twelve years of his previous cultivation of patience and discipline served him now in ways he hadn't fully anticipated.
The Aura Core formed first.
A grain of compressed energy in the center of his chest, behind his sternum, and even at that smallest scale it burned with a heat that had no business being attached to Iron Knight cultivation rank. The Primordial Flame recognized its first proper home and settled into it with the satisfied quality of something that had been displaced for a very long time.
The air in his room warmed. He controlled it. The discipline held.
He spent the first day stabilizing the Core — feeling its boundaries, understanding its rhythms, establishing the relationship between his will and its output that would determine how all future development proceeded. It was not difficult. It was the most natural thing he had ever done. It was like learning to breathe after a lifetime of something that approximated breathing but had always been subtly wrong.
On the second day, the Mana Channels.
Different in every quality from the Aura Core — where the Core was heat and intensity and inward pressure, the Channels were opening and reaching and the particular sensation of becoming permeable to something vast and external. The mana that flowed through his newly forming Channels was cool and violet-edged — the color of deep space, of the Void, of the thing that defined the shape of everything else by being its absence.
On the morning of the third day, as dawn broke, both formations completed simultaneously.
The resonance between them was a thing that had no precedent in his reading. Two separate cultivation systems in one body had always been described, even theoretically, as discordant — two separate rhythms that the cultivator spent years learning to harmonize. His were not discordant. From the first moment, the Primordial Flame and the Void-Current were not competing rhythms but two parts of the same one — as though they had always been meant to coexist, as though his specific soul was the instrument they had both been designed for.
He opened his eyes.
The candles on his desk had melted entirely while they were still in their holders.
The air in the room smelled of warmth — not smoke, not burning, just warmth itself, the smell of summer air still holding the heat of a long day.
He pulled up his status:
---
**[ STATUS — KAELITH DRAEVEN ]**
**Age:** 4 | **Body:** Child
**Knight Rank:** Iron Knight *(Peak)* ★★★
**Aura Core:** Primordial Flame | Grade: *Mythic*
**Aura Arts:** None yet acquired
**Mage Tier:** Apprentice Mage *(Peak)* ★★★
**Mana Channels:** Void-Current | Grade: *Mythic*
**Spell Arts:** None yet acquired
**Skills:** Sovereign's Eye *(Passive/Active)* | Path Recorder *(Passive)*
**AVAILABLE:** Bronze Knight breakthrough | Journeyman Mage breakthrough
**System Note:** Both breakthroughs available simultaneously. Estimated time to complete: 6 hours. Recommended: proceed when rested.
**System Note:** Primordial Flame Aura Core is already registering at advanced Bronze Knight heat output despite Iron Knight formation stage. Your base is not normal. Plan accordingly.
---
He sat with this for a moment.
Then he allowed himself exactly one long, slow exhale that carried in it twelve years of a previous life and four years of a new one and the specific feeling of a man who has just done something that was supposed to be impossible and found it easier than breathing.
He went downstairs.
His mother was in the kitchen. She looked at him with the expression she kept for moments when she couldn't quite identify what she was looking at.
"You're warm," she said.
"I ran," he said.
She looked at him. Then at the window, where the morning was still cold and grey with early fog.
"In your room," she said.
"Yes."
A pause.
"Are you hungry?"
He was, in fact, ravenously hungry. Formation had cost an enormous amount of energy. "Extremely."
She fed him. He ate enough for three people. She watched him do this with the expression of a woman filing an observation away for later review.
He was going to have to be more careful.
---