Your most dangerous opponent sometimes eats lunch three tables over
DragonLab had five year levels, from Year One's Exploration Phase to Year Five's Active Deployment. With hundreds of students, researchers, instructors, and support staff, it was a whole ecosystem underground.
Lin Jin had been there less than a week when he learned a basic survival rule: the people worth watching find you first.
Jonas Vett — German, Year Two, Lightning-class — was the kind of person who made an entire cafeteria quietly adjust their posture when he walked in. Tall, blond, with a steady measuring look that made you feel like you'd just submitted yourself for grading.
He sat down across from Lin Jin on day three.
"All-class." He placed his tray down like he was setting down a negotiation offer. "I expected it to be more impressive."
"I've been here three days," Lin Jin said.
"I know. I came to see if you're worth the space you're taking up." He picked up his fork. "Do you know how many students have been sent back to the surface in the last three years?"
"No."
"Forty-seven. Uncontrolled cores, core rebound events, and psychological fracture. This isn't a school, Lin Jin. A rare attribute doesn't protect you."
Lin Jin looked at him steadily. "And you came here to tell me that... why?"
Jonas was quiet for exactly one beat — the first real pause Lin Jin had seen from him. "I'm testing your reactions. All-class lineage has a fifty percent historical rate of core detonation before age twenty. I want to know if you'll become another..."
He stopped.
"Another Lin Cheng-yuan?" Lin Jin said.
Something moved in Jonas's eyes. Quick and gone. He stood, picked up his tray. "My father worked alongside yours," he said, back turned. "He said Lin Cheng-yuan was the most capable lineage operative he had ever met." A pause. "Also, the last person who sacrificed everything trying to crack the Dragon Core Code."
He left.
Lin Jin sat there with half a tray of food and a new phrase crashing around in his head.
Dragon Core Code.
If Jonas was tension in human form, Shen Mengyao was something else entirely — a Year Two Shadow-class operative who was so quiet in rooms that people forgot she was there, and then couldn't stop noticing her once they did.
She came to find Lin Jin because of Ayesha.
"I heard about your team's trial performance," she said, appearing at the training bay entrance one afternoon. "I'm running a research project on dragon-core energy interference frequencies. The All-class attribute might give me a data dimension I don't have. Interested?"
The invitation was so precise and respectful that Lin Jin said yes before he'd finished hearing it.
Shen Mengyao's research, he learned slowly, was on one of the most forward — and controversial — questions in DragonLab: whether dragon cores carried memory. Specifically: whether a powerful operative's core memories survived death or disappearance, and whether they could pass to descendants.
When she first explained this, Lin Jin felt the ancient awareness in his chest shift.
As if to say:
Yes.