The rain came with a quiet persistence that night, tapping against the makeshift tents and the metal plates of scavenged armor. The Black Spire breathed around them — the wind howling through its hollow ridges, carrying the scent of blood and wet stone.
Ezra sat apart from the others, beneath the jut of a shattered obelisk. His cloak was still damp with lake mist, but the cold no longer bit at him. Lightning slumbered beneath his skin, faint pulses of blue tracing his veins in slow rhythm, like a heartbeat that didn't belong to him.
Across the campfire, Serah spoke in low tones with the other survivors. Even now, their eyes flicked toward Ezra when they thought he wasn't looking. Not with hatred — not anymore. With something closer to fear.
He didn't blame them.
He was afraid too.
That core's essence — the raw, ancient storm that had flooded his body — hadn't settled. It lingered at the edges of his thoughts, whispering in flashes of alien instinct. The temptation to draw on it again was constant, intoxicating. He understood now why cultivators called power a living hunger.
A soft crunch of boots over gravel broke his reverie. Serah approached, the firelight catching in her copper eyes.
"Half the camp wants to leave," she said. "They think the Spire's cursed."
"It probably is," Ezra replied evenly.
She tilted her head, studying him. "And you? You don't seem the type to stay out of superstition."
"I stay because the storm down there wasn't random," he said. "That core — it reacted to me. Like it was waiting."
Serah crossed her arms. "Or it was testing you."
Ezra met her gaze. "Then I passed."
Lightning flickered faintly above the clouds, distant yet deliberate — a quiet echo of his words.
Serah's expression softened, but only slightly. "You draw too much attention," she murmured. "Even out here, the clans will notice. A cultivator who consumes essence directly? The last man who tried that burned from the inside out."
Ezra gave a faint, humorless smile. "Then I'll try not to make the same mistake."
"You think that storm obeys you?" she asked quietly. "It's older than language. It's not power, Ezra — it's will. Something that chose to live through you."
Her words lingered, but Ezra didn't answer. He didn't have one.
Because somewhere deep inside, she was right.
Every time he drew on the lightning, it didn't feel summoned. It felt released.
Later, when the camp had gone quiet and the fires burned low, Ezra knelt alone at the edge of the cliff. Below him stretched the endless dark — the Spire's ruins vanishing into mist and shadow.
He exhaled, steady and deliberate, closing his eyes. The qi inside him moved like a storm-tide, chaotic and untamed. But with focus, with patience, it began to obey.
His thoughts moved like a cultivator's mantra:
Observe. Absorb. Refine. Control.
He drew the storm inward, compressing it until the faint arcs of light around him dimmed. The process hurt — a pressure behind his ribs like his bones were turning to glass — but he endured it. He always endured.
Slowly, his breathing evened. The mark on his chest cooled from searing blue to a dull silver. The whispers faded.
For the first time since the catacombs, he felt like himself again.
Then the ground trembled.
A pulse — faint but unmistakable — rippled through the stone beneath his feet. Ezra's eyes snapped open, glowing faintly as he looked toward the horizon.
The mist was rising higher than before, curling like smoke from the bones of the mountain.
Something massive stirred deep within the Spire — not a storm this time, but awareness.
A voice brushed the edge of his mind, neither male nor female, a sound like thunder given thought:
You took what was mine.
Ezra rose to his feet, calm but alert, every nerve alive with tension. "Then come and take it back," he murmured.
The air answered with a distant rumble, as if amused.
And far below, deep within the ruins they thought buried forever, something began to move.