There are teachers in Nyth who hand you skill like a blunt tool: how to hold a blade, how to make your footfall mean nothing, how to read the small tells on a man's neck. Then there are teachers who hand you positions—schedules, patrons, the right timing to be unseen. Kael had known both kinds. He owed tribute to neither.
Master Thane taught him the first kind. Thane was a compact man with a face like a coin bitten on the edges: useful, worn, and honest about costs. He ran a courtyard of fighters and pickers—boys whose hands had learned to take and men whose hands had learned to survive. He taught economy of motion like a priest teaches prayer: repetitively, until the body recited the lesson on its own.
Kael apprenticed under Thane not because Thane was kind—he was not—but because Thane was useful. The old man gave structure; he gave practice and the opportunity to sharpen reflexes against men who had no patience for sentiment. To Thane, Kael was another promising blade, and Thane's pride liked to invest in things that returned profit.
For a while, that arrangement was tidy. Kael learned feints that made men miss imaginings, how to pocket a coin so cleanly it felt like magic to the hand, how to make a knocked tooth look like an accident. He saved what he needed. He learned discipline. He tasted the narrow satisfaction of doing a thing cleanly and turning it into something else.
Kael also watched Thane's soft places. Everyone has them; it is a fact of anatomy you can rely on in a city of brittle men. Thane's feet still remembered a home he would not speak of, and at night he fed a thin stray cat in a corner nobody noticed. Such habits made a man human and therefore manipulable.
This is the first rule of the Pathway: the Sin Energy feeds on the deliberate, not the accidental. A kindness mislaid by forgetfulness leaves a thin, erratic residue. A mercy withheld with calculation leaves a chord. To harvest a chord you must either wait for history to produce it or manufacture one—arrange the conditions so the universe writes the echo the way you want.
Kael chose manufacture.
He had the ledger from Lerras: names, routes, debts, and a brittle constellation of favors. From it he traced small networks—pawns and mid-level swindlers who competed for scraps. He placed a slender suggestion in the right ears: Thane's fighters had been seen carrying extra goods on their belts, multiple small thefts. He made sure the evidence could be found by an opportunistic collector: a watch with a maker's mark, a scrap of cloth matching a man's cloak. He did not make the accusation himself. That would have been crude. Instead he let the market of suspicion work, letting gossip fatten into claim.
When the collectors came, they came polite and efficient. They read contracts by candlelight and gave the perfunctory nods of men interested in profit. Thane's face when they accused his boys was not surprised; only annoyance remained, the same tight annoyance he wore over the years like armor. He argued, of course—old men practice arguments as children practice prayers—but the collectors had their ledgers, and ledgers have weight.
Kael watched from a roof across the alley while the scene unfolded. The pathway in him thrummed at the raised tension: accusation, betrayal, the rustle of authority being challenged. He had practiced the filament of perception—those half-flashes of seams—but he had not yet seen through a man's life the way he now intended.
The plan required a final move that would escalate the sin into something harvestable at scale. Kael waited until the collectors were ready to take one of Thane's fighters for public shaming—a ritual that would end with the man beaten and Thane begging to keep peace. The lot would be small, but the chord formed by the elder's decision to protect or sacrifice one of his own would be deep. In that choice lay the kernel of betrayal.
Kael descended.
He stepped into the courtyard with the careful quiet of a thing that had practiced its entrance enough to be invisible. He did not prejudice the outcome with violence at first. Instead he interposed himself like a small variable in an accounting ledger: a whisper, a gesture, a word placed in the right cadence. He reminded Thane of a debt the elder had forgotten to note; he suggested, softly, that a pair of collectors respected the old man less than his reputation deserved. He made the simplest of offers—one that would save Thane face if he accepted it.
Thane considered. Old men read risk in bone and muscle. He knew a bargain when it was a bowl of warm soup on a night with thin bread. He wanted the peace. He wanted to keep his fighters whole so the yard could continue to earn, and so he made a choice he had made before and would make again: he bargained away what was not immediately precious.
The public shaming took place by dawn, in front of two rows of small, hard-eyed men who took pleasure in the calibration of human dignity. Thane stood aside and watched as one of his boys was fined, bound, given lashes that were stiff and short, precisely designed to humiliate more than kill. The boy's eyes cut to Thane, and there, briefly, the line between teacher and betrayer flashed like a fault in crystal.
The chord the universe wrote then was immediate and pure: old loyalty exchange for continued convenience. Kael felt it not as a metaphor but physically—a soundless ringing behind his eyes that surged into him like silver water. He inhaled, and the pathway took.
Power is never free. The Sin Energy translated the chord into something tangible: a sudden widening of perception, a coolness behind the eyes that rewired his scanning. The filament he had been nurturing snapped into a full thread. It unrolled like a map.
He saw then. Not metaphorically—he saw seams.
People's resolve was threaded with tiny cords: certain names, gestures, private memories, the tone of an apology uttered at a specific pitch. Those cords made patterns overlaid on faces and chests: a lattice of pressure points. Where a man loved something, a dull red node pulsed; where he feared, a shrill blue thread twined like frost. The world reorganized into a lattice of vulnerabilities and obligations. He could trace, for instance, how the boy's glance at Thane connected through a thin silver filament to the old man's chest where a faded tattoo of a wife's name lay sleeping. He could follow the filament across neighborhoods to the woman who kept Thane's secret bread, who had once forgiven him a theft.
An eye opened where there had been only hunger. It was not physical. No flesh slit and no third pupil bled light. It was a perception that arranged the world in a new grammar. Kael labelled it immediately—some habits remain: Eye of Discernment. It had the pragmatic name of a thing to be used, not worshipped.
With the Eye, the world became predictable in a way that thrilled and frightened him. He watched Thane from the courtyard roof and read the old man's seams: how the man's voice hardened when someone mentioned "home," how he flinched at a phrase someone used in a story, how he kept an extra coin for a stray cat. These were not weaknesses in the heroic sense. They were vectors of leverage.
The Eye did not grant morality. It granted options. Kael tested it in small acts: a look at a man's elbow revealed the fine tremor of arthritis, and he knew which blows to avoid in a real fight; a glance at a collector showed a pattern of panic tied to a particular coin mark, and Kael knew which coin to produce to unravel their composure. It rearranged tactics into inevitabilities.
He chose his final act not out of necessity but for economy. Thane was useful; he had given Kael skill. But Thane's choice that morning—trading a boy for the continuation of business—was a proof. The map told Kael that such choices, made routinely by elders who kept markets alive, created broad and deep echoes that could be harvested more than once if the system was managed. To unlock that potential into a permanent instrument, Kael needed a clear, irrevocable chord: a betrayal that cut the teacher from his claim to paternal authority. Killing the teacher would anchor the Eye and expand its clarity.
He did it later that night, when the yard was silent and the cat Thane fed stretched out and ignored the danger on instinct. The death was simple, precise. He did not fashion it into tragedy. He left the knife cleanly in the dirt and took Thane's ring as an accounting token—proof that the exchange had occurred and a small item he could later use if he needed to call the old man's name.
When the pathway took the echo from that killing, the Eye expanded. Where before it had shown seams and nodes, now it cut lines that revealed structure—how loyalty braided into markets, how protector roles could be plucked like ripe fruit. It taught him an additional lesson: instruments have contexts. The Eye could not merely show weak spots; it could show how to exploit networks with minimal blowback, how to pluck one cord so the whole web shifted to your advantage.
He felt the cost in a concrete way. A small, private cadence of warmth that had been lodged somewhere like a fossil—a stolen laugh of his mother recalled in the cheap light of memory—dampened. Memory became a tool he could shelve and draw upon as needed, rather than a persistent ache. Empathy slid into a drawer labelled resource.
He noted that without ceremony. Notice is not admiration.
Kael sat afterward in the empty courtyard, the cat weaving around his ankle as if nothing sacred had happened. The city breathed around him—vendors preparing for market, a bell somewhere striking a mundane hour. He felt new power cooling in his chest like a weapon left polished.
The Eye of Discernment was not a miracle. It was an instrument. It would allow him to bend social architecture with scalpel precision: find the pivot in a man's loyalty, find the secret that split a household, find the one shame that rerouted a life. With it he could turn petty markets into pipelines, and pipelines into conveyors for larger echoes.
He closed his eyes briefly and catalogued the changes.
Level: still unnamed in the Pathway's ledger—titles matter less than function.
Ability: Eye of Discernment—perceptual mapping of vulnerabilities and social threads.
Cost: emotional narrowing; a steady trade-off of small comforts for expanded capacity.
The next morning, the yard was different. The fighters moved with a brittle new care. They spoke Thane's name like a wound. The collectors were satisfied; the market continued. On the surface, life had remained disturbingly consistent. Underneath, Kael could see the newly taut strands where blame and gratitude had once braided.
He had not only learned the first lesson of betrayal—how to manufacture it so it served the Pathway—but he had also acquired a tool that would let him commit betrayals with the precision of an artisan rather than the chaos of a brute. Tools amplify intention. Intention defines destiny.
Kael left the yard with Thane's ring in his palm and the Eye narrowing and widening with every step, tuning itself to the city's pulse. There were names in the ledger he had not yet spent, favors he intended to untangle, and a world that now showed him how to exert force without needless waste.
He was still a boy learning a very old arithmetic. But he had found a new operator. The ledger in his mind added a new column: perception as instrument, used to turn human systems into harvestable pattern.
Next on the list: expand sources, build subtlety, keep the path quiet until it was large enough to be undisputed.