Brennick Estate - Week Two
The work they assigned John was sorting grain.
It was the kind of task that required minimal physical strength and no visual acuity—sitting cross-legged on packed dirt in the storage barn, running his hands through wooden buckets of harvested wheat to separate viable seeds from chaff and debris. The grain felt uniform under his fingertips except when it wasn't—stones that had been caught in the harvesting equipment, bits of stem that needed removing, occasionally the soft decay of a seed that had rotted and needed to be discarded before it contaminated the rest.
Marcus had explained the assignment with barely concealed relief. "You got lucky. Most new slaves get field work—planting, weeding, hauling water. That'll kill you in your condition within a month. But Garrett saw you were blind and figured you'd just slow down the field crews, so he put you on grain sorting. It's boring, but it won't kill you fast."
Won't kill you fast. The phrasing suggested that death remained inevitable, just postponed. John filed that under tactical constraints that needed addressing.
He sat in the barn now, six hours into the day's work rotation, his fingers moving through the grain with mechanical repetition. Scoop up a handful, run fingertips across each seed, identify anything that shouldn't be there, sort accordingly. Repeat approximately four hundred times per bucket. Complete three buckets per day to meet minimum quota.
The work occupied his hands while his mind operated elsewhere.
Escape. That was the primary objective, the foundation upon which all other plans needed to build. This body was weak, malnourished, blind, and marked as property of a man who possessed fire Uncos strong enough to burn down structures. Remaining here meant slow deterioration until the body failed entirely—six months, maybe a year if he was efficient about conserving energy and avoiding punishment.
Unacceptable timeline. Kami Van Hellsin had spent five hundred years trapped in ocean depths, and he had no intention of spending even one year trapped in a slave barn.
But escape required solving multiple problems simultaneously. The physical limitations of this body. The curse mark that Marcus had mentioned during their second conversation. The geographic isolation of the Brennick estate. The systematic monitoring by overseers who had generations of experience preventing exactly what John was planning.
His fingers found a stone in the current handful of grain—roughly spherical, maybe two centimeters in diameter, probably limestone from the texture. He set it aside in the debris bucket and continued sorting.
The curse mark was the most immediate obstacle. Marcus had explained it three days ago while they ate their evening rations—half a bowl of grain porridge each, supplemented with a piece of bread that was more air than substance.
"All permanent slaves get marked," Marcus had said, keeping his voice low enough that it wouldn't carry to where the overseers conducted their evening patrol. "It's an Uncos technique—somebody from the Rune-Crafters Guild comes through every few months and applies them. The mark goes on your chest, right over the heart. You can't see it normally, but if you try to use Uncos or channel mana, it activates."
"What does it do?" John had asked, though he suspected he already knew.
"Blocks your power. Completely. You try to access your Uncos, the mark burns—not enough to kill you, but enough that you stop trying real quick. And it does something else too." Marcus had paused, and John heard him shift uncomfortably. "If you try to leave the estate—like actually cross the boundary markers—the mark paralyzes you. Just locks up your whole body. How long you stay paralyzed depends on how far you got and how weak your body is. Strong person might recover in an hour. Someone like you..." He'd trailed off, leaving implications unspoken.
Someone like John—malnourished, damaged, operating a body that had already died once—would probably not recover at all. The paralysis would persist until exposure or dehydration finished what the mark had started.
John's hands continued sorting grain while his mind mapped the constraint geometry. The curse mark prevented three things: Uncos usage, mana channeling, and physical escape beyond the estate boundary. Three separate locks that all needed solving before he could implement any kind of escape plan.
He'd tested the mark that same night, after Marcus had fallen asleep and the barn had gone quiet except for the sounds of forty-seven other slaves breathing in various states of exhaustion. John had reached inward, trying to access what should have been there—the fundamental energy that every living being possessed, the raw power that could be shaped through will and technique into techniques that reshaped reality.
The mark had activated immediately. Not visible—he still couldn't see—but tangible as heat blooming across his chest, radiating outward in waves that carried clear message: Stop. The pain wasn't extreme by the standards of someone who'd experienced actual torture, but it was persistent and precise, designed to condition behavior through negative reinforcement.
John had stopped. Not because the pain was unbearable, but because confirming the mark's existence and mechanism was more valuable than testing its limits. He now knew three things: the mark responded instantly to mana manipulation attempts, the pain activation was calibrated to discourage without causing permanent damage, and most importantly, the mark's sensory mechanism was tied specifically to mana flow.
Which meant it might not detect other energy systems.
Mana was the foundation of Uncos—the raw fuel that users shaped through emotional resonance and focused will into elemental or conceptual effects. But mana wasn't the only energy system human bodies could access. There were older techniques, methods that predated the Supreme Gods' introduction of Uncos by millennia. Techniques that Mother Nature herself had used before the concept of "divine power" had been invented to justify hierarchy.
Ki. Life force. The fundamental energy that animated living tissue and could be cultivated through deliberate practice.
The Supreme Gods and their Uncos system had largely overshadowed ki techniques because Uncos offered faster results and more dramatic effects. Why spend decades training to enhance your physical capabilities through ki cultivation when you could receive fire manipulation or strength enhancement through Uncos awakening in a moment of emotional extremity?
But ki had advantages that Uncos lacked. It was subtle. It didn't require external power sources or divine intervention. It operated through the body's existing sensory and physiological systems rather than reshaping them. And most relevantly for John's current situation, ki cultivation didn't involve mana flow in ways the curse mark would recognize.
Ki worked through the five senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste—plus the sixth sense that humans called intuition but was actually just refined pattern recognition operating faster than conscious thought. By systematically training these senses to operate at enhanced capacity, a ki practitioner could achieve awareness and physical capabilities that appeared supernatural but were actually just optimization of existing biological systems.
John had studied ki techniques extensively during his original ascension. Had dismissed them as inefficient compared to Uncos development, too slow and too limited for someone trying to challenge gods on an accelerated timeline. But efficiency was contextual. In a body that couldn't access Uncos or mana without triggering a curse mark designed to prevent exactly that, ki cultivation was the only available path.
The irony was sharp enough to appreciate. Kami Van Hellsin, who'd scorned traditional training methods as inadequate for his ambitions, was now forced to rely on the oldest, slowest techniques because every faster option had been systematically denied.
His fingers found another stone. This one was smaller, sharper—probably flint. He set it aside and continued sorting.
Training ki without sight created complications. Visual information was how most humans processed spatial awareness and movement patterns. Removing that sense meant redistributing perceptual load across the remaining four senses plus intuition. Difficult but not impossible. Blind individuals throughout history had developed exactly these compensatory mechanisms, often achieving sensory acuity that exceeded sighted people in specific domains.
John just needed to accelerate the process from the years it normally required to something more immediate.
He'd started three nights ago. After the evening meal, after Marcus had settled into sleep, after the barn had gone quiet except for the ambient sounds of a building full of exhausted humans trying to rest on inadequate bedding. John had waited an additional hour—long enough that even the overseers would have completed their evening rounds—then begun.
The first exercise was basic ki circulation. Lying on his straw mat, John focused on his breathing pattern. Not the shallow rapid breathing his damaged body defaulted to, but deliberate controlled respiration: four seconds inhale, two seconds hold, four seconds exhale, two seconds empty. Repeat. The pattern wasn't arbitrary—it synchronized respiratory rhythm with heart rate in ways that optimized oxygen distribution and activated parasympathetic nervous system responses.
After forty cycles, approximately six minutes, his heart rate had dropped from the anxiety-elevated baseline to something more controlled. His body temperature shifted subtly as blood flow redistributed. And in that state of controlled physiological function, John began directing attention to his remaining senses.
Hearing first, because auditory processing was his most reliable current input. He catalogued every sound in the barn—Marcus breathing in steady rhythm indicating deep sleep twelve feet to his left, someone coughing in the far corner, wood creaking as temperature differentials caused expansion and contraction, something small skittering across the rafters that was probably a rat, wind moving through gaps in the barn wall creating low harmonic tones.
He held all these sounds simultaneously in awareness. Not analyzing them individually but maintaining them as complete auditory environment, three-dimensional sound map that told him where everything was positioned relative to his body. The human brain processed approximately four hundred thousand bits of auditory information per second, but conscious awareness typically filtered that down to maybe forty thousand. By training conscious awareness to expand rather than filter, John could access information that was always there but normally ignored.
The second night, he'd added touch to the cultivation. While maintaining auditory awareness, he focused on every point where his body contacted external surfaces. The rough fabric of his shirt against skin, the texture of the straw mat beneath him, air movement across exposed hands and face, temperature gradients that indicated proximity to the barn wall versus open space. Human skin contained approximately three million touch receptors, each one capable of detecting pressure changes measured in milligrams. Most people only consciously registered a tiny fraction of that sensory data. John worked on accessing more of it.
By the third night, he'd integrated smell and taste. Smell was surprisingly informative in this environment—the distinct odors of forty-seven different human bodies, each with subtle variations in sweat chemistry, the smell of grain dust that permeated everything, the mustier scent indicating proximity to damp wood, even the trace odors from the evening meal that lingered hours later. Taste was less useful in immediate terms but still trained—the metallic taste in his mouth from poor dental health, the residual flavor of grain porridge, the way breathing through his mouth versus nose changed what his taste receptors detected.
Tonight was the fourth night. John lay on his mat, maintaining controlled breathing, holding all four remaining senses in simultaneous awareness while he worked on the fifth: intuition.
Intuition was the hardest to train because it didn't correspond to a specific sensory organ. It was emergent property of the other senses operating at high integration, pattern recognition systems detecting correlations too subtle for conscious analysis. The feeling that someone was behind you before you heard them. The sense that something was wrong in an environment that appeared normal. The instinct that made you dodge a fraction of a second before conscious thought registered the threat.
John focused on the space around him. Not seeing it—that sense remained completely dark—but mapping it through accumulated sensory data. Sound told him where the walls were based on echo patterns. Touch told him the dimensions of his sleeping mat and the texture of surrounding floor. Smell indicated proximity to other people and to the grain storage area. Temperature gradients suggested airflow patterns and structural features.
He integrated these inputs, letting them combine into something that approximated spatial awareness. Not vision—the resolution was far too low, the information too incomplete. But something. A fuzzy impression of the barn's interior geometry. The knowledge that Marcus was twelve feet to his left and hadn't moved in hours. The awareness that the nearest wall was eight feet behind him. The understanding that the barn door was currently closed based on the air pressure differential.
He held that integrated awareness for approximately four minutes before fatigue broke his concentration. Four minutes was progress—yesterday he'd managed three, the day before only two. The neural pathways required for this kind of multi-sensory integration were developing through repeated training, becoming more efficient with each practice session.
John released the cultivation state and let his breathing return to normal. His body was exhausted—not from physical exertion but from neural work, the sustained concentration required to maintain that level of sensory awareness. His hands trembled slightly, and his head felt thick with the particular fatigue that came from mental overexertion.
But progress was measurable. The barn's interior was no longer complete blackness. It was starting to have shape, structure, spatial relationships that he could navigate. Everything was still woozy, still approximate, accuracy nowhere near what he needed for complex tasks or combat. But it was better than yesterday. Better than the day before.
Systematic improvement. Incremental advancement. The kind of patient cultivation that most people abandoned because results came too slowly.
John didn't have the luxury of abandonment. This was the only path available. So he would walk it, one night of training at a time, building ki capacity through repetition and discipline until his remaining senses compensated for the one he'd lost.
Across the barn, Marcus's breathing pattern changed—shifting from deep sleep rhythm to the lighter pattern indicating transition toward wakefulness. Dawn was approaching. Another work day beginning, another six hours of sorting grain, another evening meal of inadequate calories.
Another night of training after everyone else had gone to sleep.
John's fingers returned to the grain bucket in front of him, resuming the sorting work that occupied his hands while his mind continued mapping escape routes and training regimens and the thousand small steps required to transform a blind slave child into something that could challenge gods.
The grain felt uniform under his fingertips. Seed after seed, all roughly the same size and shape and texture. Monotonous work that would have driven someone else to despair.
But John had spent five hundred years drowning in darkness. Six hours of grain sorting was nothing by comparison.
He found another stone. Set it aside. Continued working.
And deep in his chest, beneath the curse mark that prevented mana access, beneath the weak heart that barely sustained this damaged body, something older and more fundamental continued growing.
Ki. Life force. The power that Mother Nature herself had used before the Supreme Gods had arrived and rewritten the rules.
It was slow. It was subtle. It would take weeks, maybe months, to develop to useful levels.
But it was his. And nobody could take it away.