The ground beneath Cael's body gave way like paper soaked through with rain. One heartbeat he was sprawled on the fractured floor of the abandoned temple, pain gnawing into his ribs, the next, the world tipped, and the stones yawned open beneath him. A sharp jolt of panic gripped him as gravity tore him downward, swallowed by the darkness that had waited in silence for centuries below the ruin. He didn't scream. He couldn't. The air was stolen from his lungs, replaced by a thick, cold pull that gripped him tighter than fear.
He slammed onto something solid. It should have broken every bone in his body, but instead he gasped, the pain crashing through him like a wave and then gone—just gone—as if taken, devoured by something in the dark. Cael lay there for a moment, blinking rapidly. There was no light. No movement. Only silence—and the kind of silence that felt like it was watching.
He pushed himself up slowly, his breath shallow and shaking. A soft sound crawled across the stillness, barely more than a whisper, but it wasn't in any tongue he knew. Yet somehow, he understood every word. The voice slithered past his ears and into his mind like it had always lived there, buried and waiting.
Do you hear it now, ash-born? The pulse? The wound in the world? Take it before they bury it again.
He turned slowly, heart pounding, and saw the glow. Faint at first, but steady. A purplish-black shimmer bled from cracks in the walls and spread toward the center of the space he had fallen into. It was a chamber—not a natural cave, not a collapse. This was carved, shaped with intention, with fear. Glyphs ran like scars across every inch of the stone, old symbols that shifted the longer he looked at them. The magic here didn't sleep. It breathed.
And at the heart of it all, above a small raised altar of ancient stone, hovered a sigil. It wasn't made of ink or fire or blood—it was made of absence. It floated, impossibly still, an intricate spiral of symbols made of void itself. It spun slowly, casting no shadow, yet it bled power that clung to the bones of the temple.
Cael's legs moved on their own. Every step forward felt like dragging chains, and his breath came harder with each inch closer. Something inside him knew that this place had been sealed off for a reason. He shouldn't be here. No one should. Even the priests who once tended this sacred hall never dared descend to this place. The stories called it cursed. They whispered of a sealed power that turned saints into tyrants.
And yet here he was.
And the sigil was waiting.
The whispers returned, louder this time. Dozens of voices. Hundreds. Thousands. All layered atop one another like waves crashing into the mind.
Take it. Annex it. It is yours. It always was.
His knees buckled. Pain lanced through his head. He collapsed again, clutching his skull, but the pressure didn't stop. Instead, it broke through him entirely.
And then the visions started.
He was no longer in the chamber. No longer in his body. He was everywhere.
He saw himself kneeling in a throne room made of bone, his hands red, a crown of shadow pressed to his brow by priests who wept as they praised him.
He saw himself screaming as he burned alive in a pit of righteous flame, chains of golden magic holding him still as a crowd jeered.
He saw himself standing on a battlefield, alone against a tide of angels, his body fractured but his will unyielding. The sky screamed as his name was cursed by every tongue.
He saw himself as a child again, running through alleys barefoot, clutching a piece of bread for his dying sister who was already cold by the time he returned.
He saw himself older, wearing tattered robes, healing others with hands that trembled from hunger.
He saw himself on a cross, bleeding light.
He saw himself with wings made of pure night.
Each vision stabbed into him with clarity that tore at his soul. Different worlds. Different versions. Same pain. Same struggle. Same loneliness. But different ends. Some noble. Some monstrous. None free.
Then came the garden.
Ash fell from the sky like snow, and he stood barefoot in the center of it. The trees were burned to bone. The sky was a wound. And in the middle stood a figure.
It was him.
But older. Taller. Wreathed in something that felt like divinity soaked in sorrow. His eyes were hollowed by pain, tears of blood streaking down his face.
Cael stepped forward.
"Who are you?" he asked, though he already knew.
The man looked at him, voice like cracking glass. "I am what you could become. I am every version of you that ever broke under the weight of it all. And I am the one that kept going."
"I don't want this," Cael whispered. "I just wanted to live. That's all. I didn't ask for this."
"But it asked for you," the older Cael said. "It has always waited. Hidden. Buried beneath fear and reverence. They called it a curse. They were wrong."
"What is it?"
"The Umbra Genesis," the figure said. "The power they feared even the gods would kneel before. The gift they locked away and told no one to seek. Because it is not bound by their rules. It is beyond measurement. Beyond law. It does not serve the heavens. It consumes them."
The sigil flared in the distance.
The ground shook.
"Take it," the older Cael said. "Before they bury it again. Annex its power. Don't become another broken echo. Become the scream that wakes the stars."
The world twisted.
The chamber returned.
Cael gasped, sweat pouring down his face, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes as he staggered to his feet.
The sigil hovered, pulsing faster now, its glow frantic. Alive.
He reached out.
The moment his hand touched the space around it, it surged forward like it had been waiting for him all this time. It didn't enter his body—it became his body. It poured into his skin, his bones, his blood. Symbols lit across his chest, ancient and unreadable, burrowing beneath his flesh like they belonged there.
He screamed. Not in pain—but in the weight of it all. The knowing. The binding. The becoming.
Light exploded.
The top of the temple cracked, beams of magic lancing upward like a beacon. The runes of the chamber burst one by one, releasing centuries of locked magic in an instant.
Cael collapsed again, this time breathing hard, the glow on his skin fading into faint lines that moved like veins.
He lay still.
He didn't feel weak anymore.
He felt complete.
Above, the city stirred. The poor and the powerful alike felt the pulse beneath their feet. They spoke of omens, of godly wrath. And after a moment, deep in the darkness, Cael stirred awake to the scent of ash and ancient stone, the crumbled walls of the abandoned temple looming overhead like forgotten gods mourning. He lay amidst shattered marble and dust, the sigil still burning faintly against his chest beneath the torn fabric of his shirt. It pulsed—not painfully, but with a presence that made his breath catch. For the first time in his miserable life, he felt it. Power.
He sat up slowly, afraid to move too quickly, as if that might shatter the moment and send him back to the same empty weakness he had always known. But it didn't vanish. The tingling warmth that coursed through his veins was still there. Curious, trembling, he looked at the stone column beside him, thick and ancient, something that even an Earth-class mage would find hard to shift.
He stretched out his fingers toward it. There was no incantation, no scroll, no ritual. Just a thought—move—and the pillar groaned, trembled, and slowly levitated.
Cael gasped, heart slamming against his ribs. He let it down, stumbling backward in awe. This was impossible. This was beyond anything he had seen even from the Masters who trained the Arcanum elites. No one could just think and make stone obey like that.
He reached for the rune burned into his arm the day before, the humiliation brand the merchant had stamped on him with cruel laughter. It had always ached. But now, it was flaking away, dissolving into gold dust. Beneath it, something new shimmered—an intricate glyph shaped like a sun being swallowed by a spiral of night.
His breath hitched. He looked down at his hands. A soft golden glow pulsed in his palm, a strange rhythm that felt... alive. He tried to will it away, and to his astonishment, the glow faded until it vanished completely. He had control. Somehow.
Then he heard footsteps.
He crouched behind a broken altar. The sound of boots scrambling echoed down the corridor. Joren.
The academy boy stumbled past, face white with fear, mumbling to himself. Cael caught the words as he ran.
"He wasn't human. He wasn't even... possible."
Joren vanished down the stairwell.
Cael's heart began to race. This wasn't over. Not by far.
By the time he emerged from the ruins into the bleak morning light, rumors had already begun to take root in the city's underbelly. First whispered among beggars, then shouted in taverns, and finally carried to the higher towers where the Arcanum's spires pierced the clouds: the forbidden temple had collapsed. A forbidden sigil had awakened. A catastrophe had been born.
Guards in gold-threaded cloaks stormed the area by noon, sealing the ruins with reinforced ward-stakes and demanding statements. Their magical detectors hummed with unease, unable to pinpoint the energy but sensing something had cracked reality.
Witnesses spoke of a boy. A figure walking through dust and ruin, light flickering behind him. Someone said they saw Joren sprinting from the site, screaming about shadows.
By sunset, Joren had been dragged before the Arcanum investigators. His face was drained of color, and he shook with every breath. They pushed him to his knees in the temple square, where an audience had gathered, curious and afraid.
"What did you see?" one of the elites asked. A woman with eyes glowing white and lips sealed by vow runes. Her voice carried like thunder.
Joren trembled. "I saw... I saw Cael. Cael Meridius. In the dark. He was floating. The air—it felt wrong. Wrong and burning. The ruins fell when he opened his hand."
Gasps and murmurs rippled through the crowd.
"Bring the boy!" the woman commanded.
They dragged Cael forward, dirt on his face, cuffs searing his wrists. He didn't resist. He couldn't. Not with Mira watching.
She stood by the crowd, arms wrapped around her bundle of alchemy herbs. Her eyes were wide and shimmering with unspoken pain. She didn't speak. She never did. But something in her gaze—silent and sorrowful—told him she knew more than she had ever let on. There was fear in her look. But not of him. For him.
The crowd shouted insults. Old women spat. Apprentices from the academy jeered, calling him a devil's host. A priest muttered verses of purification and waved a charm.
The elite woman turned. "Do you deny entering the forbidden sanctum?"
"I... I didn't mean to," Cael said, struggling for words. "Something.. whispered to me. The doors opened, and I was drawn—"
"Blasphemy," snapped one of the mages. "He speaks as if the cursed power itself favors him."
"He let the seal break," another barked. "Do you know what slumbers there? The Umbra Genesis—an essence once buried by the gods and the three highest magic masters in the universe themselves."
Cael tried again. "I didn't know! I didn't know it was real! I was dying in the ruins, and it... it just.. I didn't take anything!"
"Lies."
"If we do not act," the white-eyed woman said solemnly, "the entity will consume this world. The only way to bind the Umbra Genesis again is to offer blood— the strongest divine blood. A master's sacrifice."
"We'll find a volunteer," one said grimly. "But this boy, this Cael... he will pay for awakening what should never rise. Beat him till the High Sorcerer arrives to give a verdict."
"Wh.what? The High Sorcerer?" People gasped. Mira also was shocked, eyes filled with terror.
"This boy will finally lose his life today"
"What a pity!"
"He would die a poor virgin"
"At least, one of the market thieves would leave the world today, haha", people continued murmuring.
The High Sorcerer wasn't just a title. He was the founding father of the Arcanum, an immortal feared not only for his magic, but for the brutal precision of his justice. People said he had lived longer than a million years by keeping himself strong and alive with his unparalleled magic and cultivation. After him, were the FIfty Masters of the Arcane who trained the Arcanum elites.
The guards started lashing him.
Not with ropes or whips, but with magic. Cursed strands of light that burned through cloth and flesh. The pain should have ripped him apart.
He didn't scream.
He bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. But he didn't cry out. Because the pain—it surprisingly moved into his palm. It vanished there, absorbed into the glowing mark that had replaced his humiliation rune. The sigil drank the suffering like water to fire.
He looked up, locking eyes with Mira.
Her lips trembled, and for the first time, her hand moved slightly—fingers tracing a symbol in the air behind her cloak. It wasn't alchemy.
It was worship.
"What.. is that?" Cael wondered silently.
Then the lash descended again, and again. Cael remained silent. Not because he had something to prove. But because something within him was changing, rising like embers beneath a dying flame.
"High lordship High Sorcerer has arrived", an old apprentice echoed loudly.