Chapter 3: Seris Nighthollow
Rhain opened the door and stepped into the grey dawn light of Azure Cloud Sect
A few early-rising outer disciples passed him in the corridor, carrying buckets of water or bundles of firewood. They glanced at him, then immediately did a double-take.
The original Rhain Voss had been gaunt, hunched, and sickly—a boy who kept his eyes glued to the dirt to avoid drawing the ire of his betters. He had shuffled when he walked, his spine curved in perpetual submission.
The man who walked through the courtyard now did not shuffle.
The Sovereign-Grade integration had decompressed his spine, adding an inch or two to his height. His frame had filled out, not with bulky mass, but with lean, incredibly dense muscle forged by abyssal energy.
Something was wrong.
They gave him a wide berth, their instincts screaming at them to step aside, though they couldn't articulate why.
Azure Cloud Sect occupied a shelf of land carved into the western face of the Greymist Hills — three tiers of wooden buildings connected by stone paths, surrounded by a low wall that hadn't been properly maintained in decades.
The compound held a main hall, two training fields, an herb garden, a small forge, an inner disciple wing, and the outer disciple quarters where Rhain lives.
It was, by any objective measure, a pitiful operation.
The borrowed memories supplied context without sentiment. Azure Cloud Sect had been founded roughly two hundred years ago by a Spirit Manifestation cultivator Realm 3 — who had carved out a modest territory in the Greymist Region of the Outer Frontier. That founder was long dead.
His successor, Elder Harmon Vael, had kept the sect alive through caution and compromise, slowly losing ground to rivals, bandits, and the simple erosion of time.
Two hundred disciples remained.
Most were Essence Awakening Realm cultivators.
A handful of inner disciples had reached Essence Condensation Realm.
"Rhain?"
A soft, breathless voice called out from his right, cutting through his sensory analysis.
Rhain stopped and turned his head.
Hurrying toward him through the mist was a slender girl. She had striking, silver-white hair that tumbled down past her shoulders, and pale violet eyes wide with frantic worry.
Seris Nighthollow.
She wore the same coarse, blue outer disciple robes as he did, though hers were kept meticulously clean. She was beautiful, but in the brutal culture of the Outer Frontier Territories, her unusual silver hair was considered a bad omen—a sign of a weak or cursed constitution.
Because of it, she was an outcast. An orphan with no family, no backing, and no future, surviving on the fringes of a sect that didn't care if she lived or died.
She was also the only person in the world who had ever shown the original Rhain Voss an ounce of kindness.
Seris closed the distance, stopping a few feet away, her chest heaving as she caught her breath.
"Rhain... I went to yuur room. You weren't there. I heard Fennick attacked you last night, I..."
Her words died in her throat.
She looked up at him, her pale violet eyes widening as they swept over his face, his posture, his eyes, his face.
It was still same, but Seris felt as if something fundamentally had changed.
"You... are you alright?" she whispered, her voice trembling with confusion. "You look..."
Handsome?
Eh? That's not what you meant.
She quickly stopped herself mid-sentence.
Rhain looked down at her, feeling a complex, sudden rush of emotion well up in his chest.
It was the original body's lingering affection, layered heavily with his own Earth-born cynicism.
In his past life, he had been a ghost in a crowded city. No one had cared if he lived or died.
In this life, the original Rhain had been beaten to a pulp, and this girl was the only one who bothered to look for him.
He felt the warmth for the first time after coming in this world.
"I'm fine," Rhain said. His voice was deeper now, steady and completely devoid of the usual tremor it held when addressing others. "Better than fine."
Seris didn't look convinced. She stepped closer, her brow furrowing. She reached up hesitantly, and touched his jaw. Her fingers were cool and gentle.
Rhain let her. He didn't flinch away.
Seris was at Essence Awakening Level 2. She was tougher than she looked, surviving three years in the sect by being stubbornly resilient and quiet. Because of her cultivation, her senses were slightly sharper than a mortal's.
As she stood this close to him, she felt it.
A faint, suffocating pressure radiating from his skin.
It wasn't intentional. Rhain hadn't fully mastered the passive emission of the Abyssal Sovereign Physique's suppression aura yet. To Seris, standing next to him felt like standing near a banked fire—there was no visible flame, but the terrifying, consuming heat was undeniable.
His Essence aura had completely transformed. Yesterday, he had barely registered as a cultivator. Today, the depth of his aura felt vast, dark, and impossibly heavy.
She pulled her hand back slightly, a shiver running down her spine.
"What happened to you?" she asked quietly, her eyes searching his dark grey ones.
Rhain considered his response before speaking.
"I had a breakthrough," Rhain replied smoothly, holding her gaze.
It was a partial truth, but it was enough.
Seris's lips parted in surprise.
The original Rhain had been perpetually trapped at the threshold of EA Level 1 — able to sense Essence but unable to draw it into his pathways in any meaningful quantity. Reaching true Level 1 was a matter of celebration.
"I'm so glad," she breathed out, her shoulders dropping.
They fell into step beside each other, walking slowly toward the dirt fields of the training grounds.
The silence between them was comfortable for a moment, before the harsh reality of their environment crept back in.
"Fennick was bragging," Seris said softly, her tone darkening. Her eyes dropped to the dirt path.
Rhain's footsteps didn't falter, but his attention sharpened. "Oh?"
"This morning, in the cafeteria," she continued, her hands balling into small fists at her sides. "He was laughing with Tobias and Garett. He told everyone he finally taught the trash a permanent lesson. He said they left you in the alley to bleed out."
Rhain said nothing. He simply listened with an unreadable expression.
"I confronted him," Seris spoke with a mixture of shame and lingering anger. "I told him I was going to report it to Elder Harmon."
Rhain stopped walking.
He turned to look at her, his dark eyes narrowing slightly. "And what did Fennick do?"
Seris looked away, rubbing her left elbow self-consciously. "He laughed. He asked who the elders would believe—an Essence Awakening Level 3 disciple with inner sect connections, or the cursed silver-haired orphan."
She took a shaky breath. "Then he shoved me into the dirt. Told me if I kept talking, I'd end up in a cell next to you."
Silence fell over the pathway.
Rhain's expression had not changed in any way that a casual observer would notice.
But something behind his eyes had shifted, like a lens rotating into focus, and the temperature in the air around him dropped by a perceptible degree.
The Sovereign Suppression Aura.
It was released subconsciously when his emotional state was unstable.
Seris shivered. Involuntarily. Her arms crossed over her chest and she looked at him with an expression that felt something but couldn't name.
"Rhain?"
He calmed himself, reining his power.
He reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder gently.
"Don't worry about Fennick," he said.
The tone were quiet.
"It won't happen again."
Seris opened her mouth. Closed it.
She had known the old Rhain well enough to recognize when he was making empty promises — he'd made them often, quiet vows to himself that tomorrow would be different, that he'd find a way.
This was not that.
This was a statement of fact. Delivered with the absolute certainty of someone who had already decided the outcome and was merely waiting for the world to catch up.
Seris didn't know what to say.
So she said what she had always spoken to Rhain.
"Be careful."