When dawn finally reached Blackspire, it came like a thief—pale and silent, slipping between the cracks of rusted roofs and hollow towers. The city didn't awaken so much as shift in its sleep. The murmurs from below his rented room grew from scattered snores to the slow hum of life: the clatter of carts, the rasp of a blade being whetted, the hiss of early rain hitting forge fires.
Ezra opened his eyes before the first bell. Sleep had been shallow, tangled with visions—voices speaking in languages he couldn't quite grasp, serpentine symbols coiling across endless skies, and beneath it all, that same soft whisper that had haunted him since the mark's awakening:
Feed. Adapt. Climb.
He sat up slowly. The dim light leaking through the warped shutters painted his skin in the color of tarnished gold. His arm, once smooth, was now veined with faint ink—thin black lines stretching from wrist to shoulder, pulsing faintly in rhythm with his heartbeat. When he concentrated, he could feel the faint tingle of energy threading through them, sluggish but alive.
He flexed his hand. The mark responded with a low hum that vibrated through his bones.
"Still here," he muttered under his breath. "Guess I didn't dream any of that."
The memory of last night replayed—the brawl, the siphon of Qi, the way his vision had sharpened for a heartbeat afterward. He had stolen power, and it hadn't rejected him. That terrified him almost as much as it thrilled him.
He stood, grabbed the tattered cloak Rook had tossed him after the fight, and pushed open the window. The view was a graveyard of spires—black towers jutting upward like the ribs of a buried god. The streets below were half-mud, half-shadow, filled with traders and mercenaries already shouting prices for relics that glowed faintly with stolen life.
Below his window, someone had scrawled a phrase in old Aetherion script across a wall:
"Heaven's laws are shackles for the weak."
Ezra smiled faintly. My kind of city.
He made his way down the crooked stairway into the tavern below. The Hollow Fang looked different by daylight—less myth, more ruin. The crowd was smaller, mostly people too broke or too brave to rest.
Rook was where Ezra expected him: hunched over a map pinned to the bar, a glass of dark amber liquid sweating beside him. The man looked older in the light, the ink stains on his fingers like permanent bruises.
"You lasted the night," Rook said without looking up. "That's a good start."
"Is that supposed to be a compliment?" Ezra asked.
"In Blackspire? It's the highest praise you'll get before noon."
He motioned Ezra closer. The map spread across the counter was hand-drawn—mountains rendered in quick charcoal lines, valleys inked in smudged grey. Symbols marked certain areas: a ring of fire for a sect, a bleeding star for a cult, an open palm for a religious order.
"This," Rook said, tapping the parchment, "is the Lower Reaches of Aetherion. Blackspire's on the fringe—neutral ground, for the most part. Beyond it, the world splits into three spheres of influence."
Ezra leaned in. "Spheres?"
Rook nodded. "The Heaven-Clad Sects—they own the peaks. Clans like Azure Sky and Vermilion Flame rule through technique and bloodline. Then you've got the Obsidian Cults—they thrive in chaos, feeding on power the heavens forbid. And lastly, the Faiths of the True Sun—religions that claim divinity still watches, still judges. Each has their own method of cultivation, their own path to so-called immortality."
He took a sip, then smirked. "And each would kill to keep the others from gaining an inch."
Ezra studied the map, his gaze drifting to a dark blotch at its center—an unnamed mountain surrounded by swirling ink strokes.
"What's that?" he asked.
Rook's tone sharpened. "That's the Heartspire. The oldest mountain in Aetherion, and the closest thing this world has to heaven's doorstep. Every great power sends their disciples there to compete for relics—sacred remains said to contain fragments of creation itself. They call it the Path of Transcendence."
Ezra felt something stir deep within him—the mark's pulse matching the rhythm of those words. Transcendence.
"Let me guess," he said quietly. "That's where the real monsters go."
Rook grinned. "Exactly. Which means you should stay the hell away from it—for now. The Heartspire eats anyone who isn't backed by a Sect or a Saint."
Ezra leaned back, thoughtful. "And what if someone doesn't belong to any of them?"
Rook finally looked up. His eyes were pale grey, like ash left too long in the wind. "Then he either dies alone… or he builds something the world's never seen before."
That evening, as the sun drowned itself behind the jagged skyline, Ezra climbed to the upper platforms of Blackspire. The wind carried the scent of metal and rain. Below him, the city glowed faintly with Qi lamps and restless fires.
He sat cross-legged on the ledge, letting his breath steady. The mark beneath his skin pulsed, faint but insistent. Slowly, deliberately, he began to focus—guiding his awareness inward the way he'd read about a thousand times in the novels back home.
For a long while, nothing happened. Just the sound of wind and distant bells. Then—click.
It was subtle, almost inaudible, but he felt it: a channel opening within his body, like a lock finally giving way. Energy trickled through it—thin, wild, untamed. He guided it with care, letting the mark absorb a fraction and release it back into him, purer, denser.
The process burned. His vision blurred. Every instinct screamed to stop. But he pushed through.
And when it ended, the world around him felt… different. Colors sharper. Sounds deeper. The air itself hummed like an instrument tuning to him.
He exhaled, trembling, a grin cutting across his face.
"So this is what cultivation feels like."
Far below, unseen in the dark, a figure cloaked in silver silk watched him from a rooftop across the way. The woman's eyes glowed faintly crimson as she traced a sigil into the air, her voice a whisper swallowed by wind.
"Another marked soul. The cycle begins again."
She vanished with the rain.
And above the sleeping city of Blackspire, Ezra Thorn took his first step into the long night of immortality—unaware that his awakening had already been noticed by powers that had been waiting centuries for someone like him to appear.