The bruise on my shoulder was a purple-and-yellow badge of dishonor. A reminder that my flawless facade had required a genuine crack. But the lingering question was more painful than the bruise: who had sabotaged the ladder? The Scorpion was no longer just observing; they were actively engineering scenarios, turning the academy itself into a trap.
Their next move was not against me.
It was Elara.
It happened in the Advanced Alchemy lab. A supposedly stable purification ritual for a tainted healing potion went catastrophically wrong. There was no explosion, no flash of light. Just a silent, emerald-green mist that bloomed from the crystal alembic and hung in the air for a single, deadly breath before the containment wards slammed down.
Elara, being the most gifted life-mage present, was at the epicenter, trying to stabilize the reaction. She inhaled the mist.
She didn't scream. She simply folded, like a marionette with its strings cut, her skin taking on a waxy, pale green hue.
Panic erupted. The other students scrambled back. The professor, a normally unflappable man named Higgs, turned as white as his lab coat. "Gods above... Quintessence Decay! There's no antidote! The reaction is impossible!"
I was outside, washing the lab's high windows, when I felt it. Not a temporal shift, but a violent, sickening unraveling in the flow of life energy from within the room. It was like hearing a unique, beautiful song suddenly shatter into dissonant noise.
I didn't bother with the door. In the blink of an eye, I was inside, my janitor's cart left forgotten in the hall. The students were a blur. Professor Higgs's frantic shouts were a distant hum. My entire world narrowed to Elara, lying on the cold stone floor, her life force fraying at the edges like burning silk.
Quintessence Decay. A magical poison that didn't just kill you; it unraveled your very existence, erasing you from reality strand by strand. It was a weapon. A sophisticated, cruel, and undeniable weapon meant for me. They had targeted her to see if I would react. To force the god's hand.
And they were about to get their wish.
Professor Higgs was fumbling with a generic anti-toxin, his hands shaking. "It's no use! The mana signature is... it's corrupted at a fundamental level!"
I dropped to my knees beside Elara. Her eyes were open, wide with pain and confusion, but she was no longer seeing this world. She was looking into the abyss of her own dissolution.
"I need a baseline reading!" Higgs yelled to no one in particular. "A sample of her pure life mana from before the exposure! It's the only way to possibly recalibrate a counter-spell, but it's impossible!"
It wasn't impossible for me.
I placed a hand on her forehead. It was cold. The students and professor saw a desperate janitor offering futile comfort.
But in the space between heartbeats, I dove into the river of her timeline.
It was a dangerous, delicate process. I wasn't just stopping time; I was navigating the very history of her existence. I moved backward, through the panic in the lab, through her morning studies, through her quiet determination to help in the lab. I bypassed years in an instant, a ghost watching the highlights of a life. I saw her kindness to me in Oakhaven, her fierce intelligence, her silent struggles.
I found what I needed just a few hours in the past: a pure, untainted strand of her life mana, a vibrant green echo left on the pages of a book she had been reading in the library. I isolated it, a single, perfect note in the symphony of her being.
Then, I returned to the present, the pristine mana held in my metaphysical grasp. But I couldn't just inject it into her. That would be like trying to un-bake a cake. I had to guide the healers. I had to make them brilliant.
As Professor Higgs prepared a hopeless counter-charm, I subtly rewound his knowledge and intuition by ten minutes, putting him in a mental loop. But each loop, I fed him a fragment of understanding, a clue gleaned from observing the poison's behavior in a frozen micro-second. I was a ghost in his machine, programming him with the solution.
His eyes glazed over for a second, then sharpened. "Wait... the decay vector... it's not attacking the mana, it's attacking the memory of the mana! We don't need an antidote; we need a restoration! We need an anchor!"
He spun around, his earlier despair replaced by a frantic, inspired energy. "Someone! Get me a core memory! Something potent, joyful! A powerful emotional anchor from before the exposure!"
The students stared, bewildered. It was a insane request. How could they possibly—
"I have it," I said, my voice quiet but clear.
All eyes turned to me. The null. The janitor.
"What could you possibly have, boy?" Higgs snapped, impatient.
I didn't look at him. I looked at Elara. I let the pristine strand of her life mana I had collected flow from my hand, visible to no one but felt by all as a sudden, overwhelming wave of pure, vibrant life. To them, it seemed to emanate from me, a residual echo of her power I had somehow absorbed through proximity.
"It's... it's her joy," I said, weaving the lie into the truth. "From this morning. In the library. She was happy, reading about the first bloom of the Sun-Kissed Lilies. I felt it when I passed her." I focused the pure mana, using it as a template, a blueprint for her body and soul to rebuild itself.
Higgs didn't question the impossibility. He seized on the energy. "Yes! That's it! Channel it! Focus it!"
He began a complex incantation, his hands moving in patterns he'd never learned, guided by my invisible hand. The green pallor receded from Elara's skin like a tide. The unraveling stopped. Her breathing, which had been shallow and faint, deepened into a strong, steady rhythm. Her eyes fluttered closed in natural sleep, the pain gone.
The lab was utterly silent, save for Higgs's panting. He stared at Elara, then at me, his expression a mixture of awe, confusion, and exhaustion.
"You... you felt that?" he whispered.
"I just... felt she was happy this morning," I repeated, reinforcing the lie. I stood up, my legs unsteady not from strain, but from the emotional toll. I had come terrifyingly close to the edge.
As I turned to leave, my gaze swept the crowd of stunned students. And I saw him. A quiet, unassuming boy named Ren, who always helped the alchemy professor prepare materials. He was watching me, not with shock or gratitude, but with a cold, clinical satisfaction. His fingers were stained with a faint, almost invisible green powder.
Our eyes met for a fraction of a second. There was no fear in his, only a message: We see you. And we know how to make you dance.
He was the saboteur. Not a mighty Seeker, but a quiet, poisonous weed planted deep within the garden.
I walked out of the lab, the weight of his gaze heavier than any temporal dampening field. They weren't trying to capture me anymore. They were trying to break my will by breaking everything I might care about.
They had forced me to reveal a new facet of my power—not just stopping time, but manipulating the very essence of a life's history.
The game was now a duel of souls. And the next move was mine.