After the fight, Clyde made his way back through Porin's dim alleyways. Fog clung low to the stone, swallowing sound and blurring distance until the city felt half-asleep. Old houses leaned inward like tired giants, their windows dark and watchful. When Clyde reached his street, he found Luchian waiting beneath a flickering lantern, arms crossed, foot tapping lightly against the ground.
"How were your teachings?" Luchian asked. His tone was neutral, unaware of the weight Clyde carried back with him, unaware of the faint pulse still lingering behind his eyes.
"It was fine," Clyde replied, adjusting his coat. "I got a raise. Thirty pounds a week."
Luchian stopped tapping. "Thirty pounds. That's more than I expected."
Clyde nodded once. "I'm going to buy a house."
Luchian blinked. "A house?"
"I've calculated everything."
Luchian studied him for a moment, then exhaled slowly. "Then I'll help with the bills."
"You won't need to."
A few days later, Clyde led him across town into a quieter district they had only ever passed through. The streets were cleaner. The fog thinner. He stopped in front of a two-story house with bright windows and a freshly painted door.
"We're here," Clyde said.
Luchian frowned. "Why? Someone you know lives here?"
Clyde placed a key into his hand. "We do."
The door opened to warmth and clean air. Clyde had already brought in what they needed. A proper stove. A sturdy table. New lanterns. A bed that did not creak with every movement. It felt unreal, like stepping into a future neither of them had planned for.
That night, Clyde sat alone in his room beneath the muted glow of a lunar lamp. Its light did not flicker, only pulsed faintly, as if breathing. An archaic book lay open on the desk before him, its pages crowded with diagrams, waveform charts, and dense blocks of tightly disciplined handwriting.
It was a manual of control.
The opening chapters dismissed force outright. Lunar ichor resisted coercion. Pressure only scattered it, breaking its rhythm and inviting instability. Power, the text insisted, emerged through synchronization.
Lunar ichor answered rhythm.
Resonance, the book explained, was the synchronization of both internal frequency and internal wave. Frequency defined identity. The wave defined motion. One without the other produced noise, not power. To resonate an object, the user had to align both, drawing the ichor outward while maintaining harmonic balance.
Each bearer's lunar ichor carried a color, a signature shaped by temperament, instinct, and sustained exposure. When resonance succeeded, the object did not merely channel power. It learned. The material adapted, storing the wave pattern like an echo pressed into metal or stone. With repetition, release became smoother.
The text warned that partial resonance was dangerous. Objects forced into alignment without full synchronization accumulated stress, their internal structure warping over time. Many recorded failures ended with fractured weapons, ruptured organs, or both.
Recalibration followed mastery.
Once a user achieved consistent control, their lunar wave stabilized into a repeatable pattern. That frequency imprinted itself into the body through repetition, not unlike muscle memory. Releasing power again required less effort, less conscious alignment. The wave would fall into place naturally, even under strain.
Those who failed to recalibrate carried unstable waves. Under emotional pressure or physical injury, distortion became inevitable.
Clyde traced the diagrams slowly, following the flow paths marked across the human form. Nodes along the spine. Convergence points at the heart and skull. Feedback loops drawn and redrawn, corrected by hands that had clearly learned through loss.
He tried to feel it within himself.
Every attempt ended the same way.
Silence.
Then the writing changed.
The structure broke down. Margins filled with cramped notes. Ink darkened where the pen had pressed too hard, as if the writer's hand had shaken.
Beneath that section, the ink darkened. Warnings crowded the margins.
Disrupted frequency led to internal fracture.
Excess release invited backlash.
Correction required restraint.
Clyde stared at the warnings, his eyes tracing the uneven lines again and again.
Disrupted frequency led to internal fracture.
He frowned. Frequency was a measurement, a rhythm, something abstract. How could it fracture? The diagrams earlier showed waves folding and overlapping, but the word felt wrong in his head. Fracture implied something breaking apart, something physical. He pressed two fingers lightly against his chest, trying to imagine where such a break would occur. In bone? In flesh? Or somewhere deeper, where the ichor moved in ways the body was never meant to feel?
Excess release invited backlash.
That line made more sense, and that almost bothered him more. He had already felt the recoil of his own power during the fight, the way the strain had surged back into him when he failed to finish the strike. If that had been excess, then how close had he come to something worse? The book offered no numbers, no limits. Only the warning.
Correction required restraint.
Clyde stared at that one the longest.
Correction of what? The wave? The body? Himself? Restraint was a vague word, easy to write and difficult to practice. The text did not explain how restraint was measured, or how one knew when to stop before the damage began. It assumed understanding he did not have.
Several lines were underlined so aggressively the paper thinned beneath them.
Clyde closed the book, more unsettled than enlightened.
For the first time, he realized that power did not come with clear rules or certainty. It came with risks that were only half understood, recorded by people who had survived long enough to leave warnings behind.
Whatever class Hollow Star placed him into, whatever anomaly it represented, brute strength would only accelerate his end.
Outside, Porin lay still beneath the cobalt sky.
The streets were empty, lanterns burning without flicker, their pale light stretching too far across the stone. Fog drifted between buildings, yet nothing stirred within it. No footsteps. No distant voices. Even the usual hum of the city felt muted, as though sound itself had been pressed flat.
Clyde rose from his chair and moved to the window. From the second floor, he could see the narrow street below, every doorway sealed, every window dark. The air felt heavy against the glass, thick with a pressure he could not place.
Then the lunar lamp behind him dimmed.
Clyde turned.
The book on his desk had reopened on its own.
A single page lay exposed, ink seeping slowly through the parchment as new words formed, written in the same dark hand as the warnings before.
Resonance detected.
Clyde's breath caught.
Somewhere beyond the walls of the house, something answered.