They woke with the residue of moonlight between them. The hill outside the academy had held their whispers and laughter until the sky paled; for a few rare hours Staryo and Aru had been nothing but two people, not mysteries or legends, and when morning came the memory of that ordinary intimacy hung like perfume. Hand in hand they walked through the Academy gates, and the world caught fire.
Students saw them and the courtyard erupted into gossip. It was never unkind at first: teasing words, nicknames. "Lovers of the Cosmos." "Twin Stars." Kael pushed through the crowd with his usual brash grin, Lyra slipping quietly at his side with a teasing raise of her eyebrow. Even those who envied them could not deny the way the academy seemed to watch the pair with a kind of greedy attention. Staryo felt it as a light pressure on his chest — expectation, interest, and, beneath it all, a thin thrum of watchful fear he could not yet name.
The headmaster stood in the amphitheatre, the old runes on his robes glinting as he raised his hand. "Students," his voice boomed, and the world stilled. "Today we begin the Grand Examination. Five trials — the Written Examination, Power Resonance, Physical Endurance, Team Battle, and the Duel Tournament. Prove yourselves. Be remembered." No sooner had he spoken than the air filled with the electric taste of challenge. Staryo's jaw tightened. He swallowed the small tremors of hunger in his chest; the Cosmos Eye, still a living thing within him, pulsed like a second heartbeat.
The Written Examination was first. Rows of low desks were laid out beneath banners that swayed like distant nebulas, each sheet of parchment inked with symbols that seemed to shimmer when answered correctly. The questions were designed to separate rote learning from true understanding — epochs of the Ten Great Realms, the subtle signs of a Void-born beast, the logic that undergirded star-formation myths and sealing arrays. For many students the test became a swamp of doubt; pencils clicked like nervous wings.
For Staryo it was different. When he looked at the page the Cosmos Eye colored the letters into maps. Where others saw discrete questions, he saw nodes and paths: cause and effect as constellations. He wrote not only answers but connections, lines of reasoning that surprised even some of the warmest professors. Aru's hand moved across her paper with the quiet certainty of someone who had loved learning for its own sake; when their eyes met across the room it was less triumph than communion. At the bell the examiners gathered the scrolls and, in a twitch of rumor, the results were posted: Staryo first, Aru tied near the top. The crowd swelled with shocked murmurs and delighted whispers. For the first time that morning the words "Twin Stars" had weight behind them.
The Power Resonance test was intended to be more sterile. A crystal pillar stood in the centre of the amphitheatre — a tall column that would measure and catalogue the waveform of a cultivator's spirit. One by one, students pressed palm to stone and watched coloured light blossom outward. Aru's pillar pulsed with the silver-blue hush of moonlight and glowed steady and true. When Staryo stepped forward the atmosphere tightened; even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
He touched the crystal with palms that still smelled faintly of the river they'd walked beside the night before. At first the pillar sang a low, ordinary note. Then, behind his ribs, something split like an old seam letting out a new sound. The Cosmos Eye did not simply flare — it re-wrote itself. A warmth, sharp and vast, unfurled like dawn across his vision. Color poured into his pupils; what had been a calm star-silver now seethed with inner gold and pricked edges of violet. For a sliver of a breath he felt new reflexes fold into his body — not learned but returned, as if an instrument finally remembered the tune it had always been made to play.
Names came, later, in the quiet of the training halls: Astral Step, a blink between fragments of star-space that let his body move impossibly fast; Star Bind, chains of concentrated starlight that could arrest an enemy's energy flow mid-motion; Star Strike and the darker, more brutal culmination, Shattering Nova, ways to condense and then explode a focused core of starlight with earth-shattering force. In the moment Staryo did not call them names. He only felt the hollow in his chest fill, and then the pillar cracked. Crystal rain ticked like falling stars and the auditorium roared, teachers trading glances that mixed awe with silent, sharpened worry. Aru's light stood close to him on the scale, almost white with serene power, but the pillar's inability to hold his resonance told the room something unshakeable: this boy was not ordinary.
The Physical Endurance course sat beyond the Hall of Records like some cruel garden: collapsing ledges, rotating blades of wind, gravity wells that tugged at bone and thought. Staryo had a tactic. He would not waste the newborn fury in reckless display; he had learned the price of such waste. Using Astral Step as a movement economy, he flicked across gaps and over snapping stones, each skip eating a little of the Cosmos Eye's glow — five percent here, another three there — always keeping a margin. His body bled a little where old wounds reopened in sudden angles, but he moved like someone who had learned to turn scar into skill. Aru followed, a silver river weaving through the course, finishing a hair behind him. When they stood at the end, panting and smiling, the stands applauded and the gossip swelled anew — admiration braided with jealousy.
Team Battle was the crucible where bonds were tested. Fate — or the academy's scheduling runes — placed Staryo, Aru, Kael and Lyra together against six upperclassmen who had spent seasons perfecting coordinated assaults. The initial volley came as a single wave: earth pillars thrust up like spears, lightning braided the air, and a whirlwind of poisoned blades hissed through the opening. Hisses of panic might have broken lesser squads. Their opener staggered the team and splintered coordination, but Kael, roaring with that reckless grin, waded into the gap and grounded the front with twin axes that looked clumsy until they hit a flank and then became terror. Lyra's barriers arced like glass domes where they were needed; she moved with the practiced calm of a protector.
Staryo found the rhythm. Where individual attacks pressed, he placed Star Bind in the center of the maelstrom — chains of light that did not burn but arrested the flow of qi through the enemy's bodies, a felt hesitation in their movement. Kael exploited it with devastating swings; Lyra chilled and shattered an offensive with a well-placed barrier and volley. The formation broke, and Staryo did not waste the advantage. He let a controlled bloom of starlight gather — a concentrated heart of radiance — and used Shattering Nova in a scaled, surgical release (he measured the blast to expend roughly thirty-five percent of the reservoir he guarded). The detonation split the enemy's formation like a seam, and by the time the dust settled the six upperclassmen lay scattered and stunned. Teamwork had won the day; the crowd's delirium sounded like thunder.
Then came the Duel Tournament, and with it the chain of confrontations that would shape the afternoon and, perhaps, the first lines of legend. Staryo's name moved up the board with the calm inevitability of tides. Teachers stayed until the stands emptied, and students would later say they had never felt the academy buzz quite the same way.
First: Kalden, a burly youth from a sect of flame-honed warriors, stepped forward with a tower of flame spiralling over his head. He hurled heat like a blunt instrument and expected to rattle the newcomer. Staryo did not want to squander the newborn currents that had risen in him; this round was for control, not display. He kept his expenditure low — five to eight percent of the power now thrumming behind his eyes — and relied on Astral Step to make himself an unpredictable blur. Kalden's cometlike spears came at him in a menacing storm, but Staryo's Starfall Slash cut through their tracks as a moon cuts mist. He finished with Meteor Fist, a concentrated falling-blow that ended the fight in under a minute. Kalden skidded across the sand and tasted dust and humility; the crowd cheered not for the speed but for the economy and an almost frightening calm.
Second: Lirei (sometimes called Lira, depending on which cluster of students told the story) was a wheeling dancer of wind and illusion, her blades made of shifting air and reflective shards. She made the arena feel like a room full of mirrors. For the first time the Cosmos Eye encountered not just violence but misdirection; images multiplied, intentions cloaked. Staryo let a larger slice of his reservoir light up — twenty to twenty-five percent — because fighting shadows required more than prediction: it required cutting the phantom at its root. Star Bind unfurled from his wrists like the slow closing of prison doors; the chains snared the real forms and anchored them to a stubborn spot in the earth. With illusions anchored, Lirei's panicked openings became clear and Staryo's Star Strike — a compact, comet-shaped arc of concentrated light — landed with artistic precision. Lirei's chest sank to sand. After she rose, grace did not leave her; she bowed, and in her eyes was the respect that only a true duel can grant.
Third: Dreven. The name carried malice. He was a man made of edges: Shadow Warp made him scatter into nothing and reappear a breath later, and his Void Blades cut with a cold that made light behave as if it were being insulted. From the first bell this battle was not a contest of sparring but a trial of wills. Dreven's technique was built to devour predictability — to burrow into the seams of a fighter's pattern and pry it apart. Staryo answered with patterns of his own, but this fight demanded escalation. He moved through Astral Step like a blade through cloth, but Dreven's abyssal tricks opened pockets of nothing that resisted even the Cosmos Eye's vision. The student body watched as two philosophies of combat collided — one made of hunger and void, the other of brightness that sewed itself like armor.
Staryo forced himself to go deeper. At first he met the waves with thirty to forty percent of his reservoir; the movements required raw light sharpened into reflexes. But when Dreven opened his final gambit — an eddy of darkness that swallowed the center of the ring, a thing called by some teachers later as Eternal Abyss — there was no telling how long he could hold the balance. For the first time the Cart Method hissed at the edge of his mind: "Destroy and be reborn," it murmured, a seductive mathematics of annihilation and reconstruction. Staryo felt the black mouth of the abyss and felt his own edges soften with fear. He refused the easy answer. He gathered instead: compression, focus, the brittle willing of every scrap of starlight he had kept contained. He poured himself into one strike — the brutal beauty he now named Star Strike: Shattering Nova — and let it go. It was not a performance but an offering, a great compressive bloom of energy that took sixty to seventy percent of his stored power. The Nova did not merely break Dreven's defense; it unmade his hole and filled it with light. When the smoke cleared Dreven lay panting, pride shredded. He had learned a lesson that would not heal fast: there are knives that cannot be used without cutting the hand that holds them.
The final board read like a page from a myth: Staryo would face Aru.
Silence flattened the stands. Even the vendors froze mid-step. There were no jokes now, no shouts of "Twin Stars!" — only the dense hush of people watching two people test the truth of one another. Aru moved into the ring with a quiet that felt like a river taking its course. Her aura was not a mirror of his brightness but a contrast: moonlit, patient, and terrible in its clarity. There had been rumors whispered of her lineage, other power veins unseen in most devotees, but nothing easy could capture her. She bowed to him as if in gratitude for their shared path. "We must be honest," she said, soft as breath but sure as steel. "No holding back."
They began as two blades testing tips. Her hands folded petal-like patterns, releasing Lunar Bloom — petals of silver light that cut without malevolence — and he returned with Starfall Slash. Their technique was not meant for spectacle though it became spectacle by accident: it was a conversation in blows. At times both moved like children testing balance — light, cautious — at others they lashed with the full weight of what they could do. Staryo kept a careful ledger of expenditure. He had burned enough of the reservoir to climb and prove; he wanted this final meeting to be measurement rather than ruin. He spent between thirty and fifty percent of his store across the entire duel, leaning toward restraint when she smiled and allowing fierceness where she asked him by the tilt of her head. There was a moment when his Astral Step and her Heaven's Flow braided, and something tender and fierce passed between them. Their hands met in the middle of the storm, briefly, and the world sold itself cheap for a heartbeat; they leaned their foreheads together and then their lips met.
The kiss was not theatre. It was a small, hot anchoring of two people who had fought beside one another and now admitted to an intimacy born of shared danger. The amphitheatre dissolved into a frenzy. Some students cheered, some booed delightedly, but all felt the point of it: a promise had been made and displayed. The referees muttered about protocol and fairness, and when the call finally came it was a tie. The score mattered little that night. The story — the shared look, the touch, the kiss — would be what the students passed along with breathless stabs of gossip.
When the day finally closed and the crowds poured away, the headmaster called those who had distinguished themselves forward. He praised discipline and courage, but his lips pressed into a thin line when he looked at Staryo. Something about the boy's awakening cut across the habits of the school like a new weather front. A shout went up from the crowd and then a low rumble that no one could really parse.
Unseen by the cheering students, at the ridge of the cosmos where charts grow thin and light is a rumor, something took note. A watcher nested in shadow — a scriptorium of eyes between stars — blinked and sent a faint ripple out along empty highways. In the far rim, a sigil glowed and a voice spoke without sound: He awakens. It was not complaint, nor delight. It was selection. The great turnings of the cosmos tend to be quiet at first: a single catch of breath in the infinite. Staryo had taken a step that sent that breath outward.
Staryo stood beneath the banners with Aru's hand in his, the taste of dust and victory in his mouth. His eye had leapt from Level Ten to Eleven; he had woken Astral Step and Star Bind, sharpened Star Strike into Shattering Nova, and learned how thin and expensive each ascent could be. He had used power sparingly and when he had let it loose he had felt the cost ring inside him like a bell. The Cart Method was a voice he had not used fully, but he could feel it waiting, patient, a dangerous teacher that whispered how easy total rebirth could be if one was willing to give everything away.
Around them the academy sang and gossiped: "He used five percent then? No—he used twenty-five in the second duel! Did you see his eyes when he opened them?" The rumor nets bloomed; threads of envy and adoration braided together. Kael clapped Staryo on the shoulder until stars danced in his vision. Lyra handed Aru a bandage and gave her a conspiratorial smile. They belonged to one another now in a way that was public and dangerous: two lights tied by choice and courage.
And out beyond the rim, the watcher that had whispered He awakens turned that faintness into a line. In places no Academy manual had maps for, preparations began — not for congratulations but for caution. The day's triumph closed on that small, brittle note: victory tasted sweet, but the cosmos had noticed. Power draws attention like iron draws storms, and storms answer with teeth. Tomorrow, whatever else might happen, someone with patience and depth would come to test the reach of the Twin Stars' light.
They walked away under the lowering sky — laughter and cheers at their backs, a strange hush beyond the horizon. Staryo's hand tightened around Aru's; the Cosmos Eye hummed like a sleeping engine. The world itself felt older. Somewhere, quietly, a war-flag was unfurling