While Mith and Jis sat against the mossy roots trying to regulate their ragged breathing, Elvin remained standing.
The Arbiter's hands slipped behind his back. The subtle smirk that usually sat at the corner of his mouth vanished, replaced by an expression of cold, clinical intent. Two novices who could manifest such nascent, world-bending techniques in a single afternoon defied every law of martial cultivation he had documented in the High Court logs.
Elvin closed his eyes.
Beneath his eyelids, the golden Sigil of Pure Judgment flared into life. When he reopened them, his wire-rimmed spectacles reflected no glare from the forest canopy. His pupils had contracted into glowing vertical slits, haloed by concentric amber rings—the Arbiter's Ocular Weight, a judicial ocular technique reserved strictly for high magistrates to peel back deceit, peer into spiritual reservoirs, and measure the raw essence of a soul.
He focused the ocular lens first onto Jis, then onto Mith.
What Elvin expected to see was standard: the familiar conduits of refined aura energy circulating through marrow and blood, perhaps marked by the signature of high-tier bloodlines or ancestral blessings.
What he saw instead made his breath catch in his throat.
Deep within Jis's core, beneath the surface layer of azure light, the energy currents suddenly distorted. They ceased behaving like normal aura channels. Bands of inexplicable, foreign hues began to twist together—shades that had no name in standard magical treatises, colors that seemed to bleed beyond the visible spectrum. They swirled like a fathomless, silent whirlpool, ancient and suffocating.
Elvin shifted his focus to Mith.
The boy's chest didn't just hold the faint, grey kinetic aura energy he had displayed moments ago. Entwined around his spirit, feeding into the sleeping presence of the Slate, was that exact same mysterious chromatic phenomenon. An impossible spectrum of light coiled like a slumbering serpent, vibrating at an incomprehensible frequency.
Then, just as Elvin pushed his ocular energy further to pierce the core of the anomaly—
Swoosh.
The mysterious colors evaporated like morning mist beneath a sudden gale.
The deep, chromatic currents vanished into absolute nothingness, leaving behind only the ordinary, exhausted grey aura energy of a tired youth and the calm azure flow of a resting swordsman.
Elvin recoiled half a step, the amber rings in his eyes shattering as a sharp, burning ache lanced through his optical nerves. He reached up, pressing two gloved fingers against his temple to steady his suddenly spinning equilibrium.
What in the heavens was that?
To the readers who had witnessed the trials of Volume 1, this vanishing act was chillingly familiar.
Months ago, within the sanctum of the inner academy, Master Akhand himself had unleashed his legendary All-Seeing Eye upon Mith and Jis during their initial evaluation. Just like Elvin, the venerable master had caught a fleeting, terrifying glimpse of those very same mysterious, transcendent colors swirling within their depths—only for the phenomena to immediately slip into the shadows, locking their true potential behind an impenetrable veil that not even a grandmaster could unravel.
Akhand had stayed silent then, haunted by the omen of what those latent colors portended. ((Refer to Volume 1 readers))
Now, leagues away in the corrupted heart of the Km border, Elvin had stumbled upon the exact same phantom.
"Arbiter?" Jis called out, noticing the subtle tremor in the man's posture. Jis rested a hand on the pommel of his broadsword, instantly alert. "Did something cross the perimeter?"
Elvin lowered his hand, his expression resetting behind his spectacles into an emotionless, impenetrable mask. Not a trace of the shock that had rattled his core was allowed to surface.
"Nothing," Elvin replied smoothly, though his heart hammered against his ribs like a war drum. He looked at the two young warriors, seeing them no longer as mere capable survivors, but as walking enigmas carrying dormant forces capable of upending the world. "Just the shifting of the forest mist."
He turned toward the path leading deeper into the suffocating Km wilderness.
"Your rest is over," Elvin commanded, his voice carrying a renewed, unspoken urgency. "Get moving. We have much ground to cover before nightfall."