POV: Sung Ji-Hoo
Sung Ji-Hoo's day began, as it always did, with pain.
Not his own. Everyone else's.
He woke in his narrow cot in the Healer's Auxiliary dormitory—a clean, white, soulless room he shared with two other scholarship students. The first thing he felt was the phantom ache in his right hand, a leftover echo from mending a stable boy's crushed fingers yesterday. The second was the dull throb behind his eyes, residue from calming a hysterical noble girl's runaway fire resonance three nights ago. The third was a deep, hollow soreness in his chest. That one was older. That one was his.
He sat up slowly. Morning light filtered through the high, barred window. It was an hour before the official wake-up bell. This was his only quiet time.
"Another day of playing saint," a voice murmured in the back of his skull. It wasn't a sound. It was a presence, oily and familiar. His demon. It had no name he knew. It just was. "How many lives will you pour your own into today, little healer? Ten? Twenty? Will you make it to noon before you taste blood?"
"Quiet," Ji-Hoo whispered, his voice raspy with sleep. He pulled on his simple gray uniform—coarse fabric marked with the caduceus symbol of the Healer's Guild. He was the only first-year assigned to the emergency ward. A "prodigy," they called him. He felt like a sponge slowly being wrung dry.
The demon chuckled, a sensation like cold water trickling down his spine.
The academy's healing halls were in the East Wing, far from the gleaming white towers of the main campus. Here, the stone was older, darker, stained with things light couldn't wash away. The air smelled of antiseptic herbs, slow-burning hearth-coals, and beneath it all, the copper-tang of blood.
Senior Healer Aris, a woman with hands like knotted roots and eyes that had seen too much, was already grinding morning herbs. "Ji-Hoo. The night watch left you two. Barracks fever in Dorm 4. And a resonance backlash in the training pits. Simple work. Don't dally."
"Yes, ma'am."
The first patient was a lumbering third-year from the northern mines, shivering with fever on a cot. His focus crystal, dark and inert, lay on his chest. "It just… stopped," he croaked. "Felt cold. Then hot. Then nothing."
Barracks fever. It wasn't a true sickness. It was what happened when a young resonant's body rejected the academy's intensive training. The man's own power was turning inward, attacking him.
Ji-Hoo placed his hands on the student's broad, sweaty chest. He closed his eyes.
This is where others saw light and felt warmth, the demon cooed. This is where you feel the break.
Ji-Hoo tuned it out. He reached for his power—not with force, but with listening. A gentle hum started in his core. His own focus crystal, pale blue and milky, began to glow softly against his skin. He didn't push his energy into the patient. He matched it. He found the discordant, panicked rhythm of the man's feverish resonance and began to amplify its natural, healthy frequency.
Amplification was a misnomer. It wasn't just making something louder. It was finding the truest version of a thing and helping it remember itself.
The student's breathing deepened. The violent shivering eased. Color returned to his lips. Ji-Hoo's head throbbed in time with the calming rhythm. He took the student's pain, his confusion, his fear, and let it resonate within himself until it dissipated. It left him feeling stretched thin, but the student slept peacefully.
"One life stabilized," the demon narrated. "Cost: one-twentieth of your morning energy. Net gain for the world: negligible. Net loss for you: cumulative."
"His name is Goran," Ji-Hoo muttered, wiping his brow. "He has a sister back in the mines who sends him letters about her new puppy."
"And the puppy will die in a mine collapse in six months, and her letters will stop, and he will drink himself into a stupor and fail his final trials. You saved him for that. How kind."
Ji-Hoo ignored it. He'd learned that was the only way.
The second case was worse. A second-year girl, a lightning-aspected duelist, lay rigid on a cot, her body occasionally seizing with violent arcs of blue-white energy that snapped against the leather restraints. Her eyes were wide with terror. A training accident. She'd tried to channel more than her body could hold.
Healer Aris watched from the doorway, her arms crossed. "Her pathways are fried. Standard treatment: sedate, let the body purge itself over weeks. She'll lose a tier. Maybe two. Can you do anything?"
It was a test.
Ji-Hoo approached. The girl's name was Lira. He'd seen her in the mess hall, laughing with friends. Now she was a live wire of pain.
"This one is fun," the demon whispered, intrigued. "Her energy is wild. Chaotic. You could calm it… or you could take it. Just a little. She'd never know. It would make you stronger. Strong enough that your next healing wouldn't leave you dizzy."
"No," Ji-Hoo said aloud.
Healer Aris raised an eyebrow. "No, you can't help?"
"I… I can try."
He placed his hands on Lira's temples, avoiding the snapping energy. This wasn't about amplification. This was about harmonization. Her resonance was a scream. He had to weave a silence around it.
He let his own energy—a soft, gold-tinged hum—flow into her, not to fight the lightning, but to give it a path to ground. To turn the scream into a song, however ragged. It was delicate, exhausting work. His own nerves began to buzz, feeling like static. His teeth ached. The demon watched, a hungry spectator.
Slowly, the violent arcs subsided. The seizures stopped. Lira's body went limp, then relaxed into true sleep. The wild energy in the room dissipated.
Ji-Hoo stumbled back, catching himself on a bedpost. Blood trickled from his nose. He wiped it away with his sleeve.
Healer Aris nodded once, a rare gesture of approval. "You saved her tier. Maybe her future. Go. Take the morning off. You look like death."
"She's not wrong," the demon quipped.
Ji-Hoo didn't go back to the dorms. He couldn't stand the quiet there. The quiet was where the demon's voice was loudest.
He wandered instead toward the lower archives, where the air was cool and dust motes danced in sunbeams from high windows. It was peaceful. It was a place where things were quiet because they were finished, not because they were being silenced.
He found a secluded table between towering shelves of botanical records and began sketching in his notebook—not of plants, but of resonance patterns. Trying to map the echoes of pain he'd absorbed, to understand their shapes, to maybe one day prevent them.
A small sound made him look up. A girl, younger than him, was struggling to push a heavy cart of leather-bound volumes. She had brown hair tied in a messy braid and eyes that seemed to see too much. It was the girl from the greenhouse he sometimes passed—Jin Mori's sister. Ara.
The cart's wheel caught on a warped stone. She pushed, grunting with effort.
Ji-Hoo got up and walked over. "Here. The floor dips there." He put a hand on the cart and pulled, his strength augmented for just a second by a whisper of power. The cart rolled free.
Ara looked up, startled, then wary. "Thank you."
"It's nothing." He made to go back to his table.
"You're the healer." It wasn't a question.
He paused. "Sung Ji-Hoo."
"Ara." She studied him with an intensity that was unsettling. "You… glow wrong."
Ji-Hoo froze. "What?"
"Not bad wrong," she said quickly, looking down. "Just… sad wrong. Your light is frayed at the edges. Like you're mending holes in a blanket but you're running out of thread."
He had no response. No one had ever described his power like that. Most just saw the results.
"You feel it too, don't you?" she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper. She gestured downward with her chin. "The… heartbeat."
The deep, sub-audible pulse. The one that came after moonrise. The one that made the ferns tremble. "Yes," he admitted.
"It's getting stronger," she said. "And the people who work down in the deep stacks… they come up quieter. Every week. They talk less. Smile less. It's like they're leaving parts of themselves down there."
A chill that had nothing to do with the archive's cool air went through Ji-Hoo. "She's perceptive," the demon murmured, suddenly attentive. "She's describing early-stage Stillness contamination. Interesting. The academy's precious foundation is infected. How deliciously ironic."
"Why are you telling me this?" Ji-Hoo asked Ara.
She shrugged, a helpless gesture. "My brother says I imagine things. But you… you see the broken parts. You might believe me."
Before he could answer, the main archive door creaked open. Two senior archivists in gray robes entered, pushing a different cart. On it lay a shape covered by a dark cloth. But from beneath the cloth, a hand dangled—pale, limp, fingers curled.
And the fingers were stained with faint, shimmering black lines, like cracks in porcelain.
Ara sucked in a breath and quickly turned back to her own cart, pretending to be engrossed in sorting.
The archivists didn't look at them. Their faces were placid, blank. They wheeled the cart toward a wrought-iron gate at the archive's far end—a gate Ji-Hoo had never seen open. A gate that led deeper down.
As they passed, the cloth shifted. Ji-Hoo saw a glimpse of a face. A young man, maybe a student. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. They weren't glassy in death. They were… empty. Cleared. As if someone had taken a sponge and wiped away everything inside.
The gate opened with a groan of ancient hinges. The archivists wheeled the cart through into darkness. The gate clanged shut.
The archive was silent again, except for the distant, rhythmic thump from below.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
"A delivery," the demon whispered, its voice full of dark delight. "The hungry foundation must be fed. Not with food. With stories. With selves. They call it 'attrition.' You call it healing. I call it the same thing: the management of suffering."
Ji-Hoo felt sick. He looked at Ara. She met his gaze, her eyes wide with fear and confirmation.
"Don't tell my brother," she pleaded softly. "He'll try to fix it. And they'll take him."
She pushed her cart away and disappeared between the shelves.
Ji-Hoo stood alone in the quiet. The phantom pains of the day—Goran's fever, Lira's lightning, the crushing weight of his own constant empathy—were nothing compared to this new, cold dread.
His focus crystal felt icy against his skin.
He had come to the academy to learn to heal. To mend broken bodies and calm chaotic powers.
What did it mean to heal a world where the foundations were hungry?
Later that afternoon, mandatory first-year assembly was held in the Grand Athenaeum. The hall was all soaring arches and stained glass depicting glorious battles against monstrous hordes. Hundreds of students in their colored uniforms—gray for healers, blue for defenders, red for strikers, black for controllers—filled the benches.
Jin Mori sat with the other blue-uniformed defenders. Ji-Hoo spotted him a few rows ahead. The boy from the frontier looked tense, his shoulders tight, scanning the room as if expecting an attack even here.
Damien Veridian held court in the controllers' section, surrounded by a cluster of noble-born students. He listened to them with a detached amusement, his gray eyes occasionally flicking to the lectern, then to Jin, then to the great sealed doors at the back of the hall.
Headmaster Orin, a tall man with a voice like grinding stones, spoke of academy history, of honor, of the sacred duty to become the shield of humanity against the creeping wilds and the silent wastes. It was stirring. It was empty.
Ji-Hoo felt the demon's boredom like a physical pressure.
Then the Headmaster's tone changed. "Next week marks your first practical assessment outside the walls. You will be deployed in mixed squads to the village of Haven's Fall, a day's journey south. It has reported minor monster incursions from the Whisperwood. You will identify the threat, contain it, and protect the villagers. This is not a drill. This is your first taste of the duty you have sworn."
A ripple of excitement and anxiety went through the hall.
"Squad assignments will be posted tomorrow at dawn. Dismissed."
As the students filed out, buzzing with talk, Ji-Hoo felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to find Jin Mori looking at him, those light green eyes serious.
"You're Ji-Hoo. The healer."
"Yes."
"I saw what you did for Lira in the pits. Thank you." Jin's gratitude seemed genuine, but his gaze was sharp, assessing. "We might be in squads together. If we are… I'll hold the line. You keep people standing behind it."
It was a simple statement of tactical necessity. But it felt like the first real offer of solidarity Ji-Hoo had received since arriving.
Before he could answer, Damien Veridian slid past them, not stopping, but his words drifted back, cool and clear. "An excellent division of labor, Mori. The wall and the bandage. Just remember, walls can be scaled, and bandages run out."
Jin's jaw tightened. He gave Ji-Hoo a final nod and walked away, following his sister who waited at the door.
Ji-Hoo was left standing in the emptying hall. The demon yawned in his mind.
"The righteous protector. The cold calculator. And you, the bleeding heart. What a delightful little triangle of doomed intentions. I can't wait to watch it collapse."
That night, the moon rose full and heavy. The pulsing from deep below the academy was stronger than ever.
Thump. THUMP. Thump.
In his cot, Ji-Hoo lay awake. He replayed the sight of that empty-eyed student being wheeled into the dark. He felt the echo of Lira's lightning in his nerves. He heard Ara's whisper: "They come up quieter."
He placed his hand flat on the cold stone floor. The vibration traveled up his arm, into his teeth.
"You could find out what it is," the demon suggested, its voice sly. "Use me. Just a little. I can amplify your senses downward. You could listen to the foundation's heart."
"What would it cost?" Ji-Hoo asked, already knowing.
"A memory. A happy one. The taste of your mother's honey cakes. The feeling of the sun on your face the day your resonance first awoke. Something small. Something you won't miss."
The price was always a piece of himself. The demon traded in echoes of feeling.
"No," Ji-Hoo said, turning on his side, facing the wall.
"As you wish. Sleep tight, healer. Dream of empty eyes."
And as he finally drifted into a fitful sleep, the last thing he felt was not the demon's taunt, but a strange, distant echo—a reflection of Jin Mori's steadfast vow, and the cold, precise geometry of Damien Veridian's calculations. Their nascent powers, one a shield, one a cage, resonated faintly in the dark.
And his own power, the power to amplify, trembled between them.