The shock of the test didn't fade; it simply metabolized into a new, denser element in my being: a core of cold, hardened resolve. The initial despair was a luxury I could not afford. It burned away, leaving behind a stark, unadorned reality.
I went back to the tower and slept without thinking anything. Not true sleep, but a system shutdown, a deliberate void to prevent the cognitive spiral. When I opened my eyes to the twin-moonlit room, the problem was no longer an emotional crisis. It was a tactical parameter.
Without Aether, I would be powerless against this world. This was the foundational axiom. Magic was the currency of power here, the language of the elite. My body, no matter how strong, was a spear against artillery. A low-level Aether user could reinforce their skin to negate my punches, could conjure a barrier, could hit me with a force I couldn't see or block.
The immediate threat was closer. And also all those in my family are superbly strong. If they find out, I will be out of this family! The House of Theodore, guardians against the Ashenveil, would not tolerate a defective weapon. I would be a crack in the family's proud, unblemished façade. My fate wouldn't be exile to a quiet country estate. In a house that valued strength above all, a son without the family's defining power would be an embarrassment to be erased. Quietly. Permanently.
What should I do?
The question hung in the silent dark. And the answer came, not as a shout, but as a cold, clear whisper from the deepest part of my will, forged in the regret of a mountain road and tempered by three years of silent struggle.
There is no way in hell I would back down! The universe gave me a second chance in life just to do this! I will never accept this! I will change my fate. I will definitely become strong!
Fate had unwoven itself for me once. I would re-weave it with my own hands, thread by bloody thread. Aether or no Aether.
First, a reprieve. There would be no Aether checking by my family. Because it will be done by the church. So I can rest assured that the family won't remove me until I am 9. Four more years of grace. Four years to build a foundation so formidable that my lack of magic would become a secondary, puzzling footnote rather than a death sentence.
But the Church itself was now a looming executioner. The question is what will the church do when they know I'm Aetherless? Will they banish me? Or even kill me? Or separate me from others saying I'm a curse or irregular. The medical text said it was a rare genetic mutation, not a curse. But institutions fear anomalies. A noble child with zero Aether was an unexplainable flaw in their worldview, a crack in the system they controlled. They would not let me walk free. I would be a specimen, a prisoner, or a corpse.
How would father react? I pictured his citrine eyes. There would be no paternal disappointment, only calculation. I would be assessed not as a son, but as a variable. A useless variable. His reaction would be swift, clean, and utterly devoid of sentiment. I don't know that. And not knowing was the greatest danger.
Hmmm, rather than that I should focus on my physical development and knowledge. Panic was pointless. Action was everything. If I couldn't manipulate Aether, I would become a master of everything else. The body, the mind, strategy, information. I would be so useful, so formidable in a non-magical way, that disposing of me would seem like a waste of a unique asset.
The next months I studied and focused on Physical development. My training regimen mutated. No longer just building strength, but honing a killer's efficiency. I practiced silence until I could move through the nursery like a draft. I studied the anatomy diagrams in the library, learning pressure points, weak spots in joints, the exact angle to drive a makeshift shiv (a sharpened piece of crib wood) to bypass reinforced muscle. I became a student of war in a world that had forgotten to fight without magic.
It was soon my 6th birthday. Here in this world birthdays are not well celebrated. In this family it is not even mentioned. No cake, no recognition. Just another day in the gilded cage. Well, more time for me!... I celebrated by adding another fifty repetitions to my routine.
Soon time passed and passed. My strength grew very fast. I was now stronger than professional athletes. By the metrics of my old world, I was a pre-teen super-soldier. Here, I was a six-year-old with a very firm handshake. But it was something. It was my foundation.
My weekly raids on the hidden library continued, but the focus shifted. I was no longer just ingesting magic theory I couldn't use. I was mining for secrets, for leverage, for any piece of information that could be a weapon.
One day I noticed a small algorithm in a book.
It was in a dense historical text about crop rotation in the early Sunstone era. A single sentence about soil nutrient depletion. But one word in the middle of a paragraph—'reciprocity'—was spelled using an archaic character form not used elsewhere in the book, or indeed, in the last five centuries of written Aethelandrian.
What the? What's this? It was a normal line but if you look carefully there is a single word in the middle that's looking too algorithmic.
My programmer's brain, long dormant, flickered to life. It was a bug in the text. An inconsistency. A pattern break.
A thrill, colder and sharper than any I'd felt since arriving here, shot through me. This wasn't a printing error. This was a message. A watermark. A cipher.
After a few days I noticed this rarely in books. Never in the obvious books—not in the grimoires or the political ledgers. Always in the mundane, the boring, the overlooked: a treatise on mineralogy, a genealogy of a minor extinct house, a cookbook from three hundred years ago.
I tried to gather all the books from the library that had these algorithms. My photographic memory became a search engine, cross-referencing every anomalous character, every odd spelling, every subtly misplaced glyph across hundreds of texts. It was a massive, subconscious data-correlation project.
I spent many days trying to find the meaning of it. The isolated words were gibberish. 'Reciprocity.' 'Azure.' 'Foundation.' 'Silent.'
Some were useless like information about Aether magic, some were mediocre providing me some information like- Notes about the king, Mareux Nobles etc. These seemed like test runs, placeholders. and some were utterly obvious such as 'House name is Theodore.' A confirmation of the cipher's basic functionality.
Then, the breakthrough. In a dusty botanical guide to fungi of the Ashenveil's edge, I found a cluster of them. Three words in a single paragraph about a glowing moss.
I found something interesting. It was something about the church. The words that I decoded were 'The Church'.
My heart hammered against my ribs. This was no accident. This was a trail. Someone had painstakingly seeded this hidden archive with a second, deeper layer of information. For whom? For a curious child like me? Or for someone else entirely?
I needed more information about the church. The hunt became an obsession. I ignored my physical training for days, my mind wholly consumed by the puzzle. I scoured books on theology, architecture, and law, looking for the telltale glitches.
After hours I found the third and fourth words. 'Is Controlled'.
The air left my lungs. This means that the church is definitely being controlled by someone. The great independent power, the gatekeeper of Awakening, the moral authority… was a puppet. The four-way balance of power was a lie. One of the pillars was hollow.
Is it the king? Or Mareux? Or even our family? My mind raced. The king seemed the weakest. Mareux were rivals, but did they have the subtlety for centuries-long infiltration? My own family… it was possible. Lord Theodore's ambition was a palpable thing. But controlling the Church felt like a move he would make only as a final step toward total dominance, not as a hidden gambit.
That means the church as the books said isn't an 'AUTONOMOUS' power. It's a controlled one. Let's find out who controls it…
The search became frantic, desperate. I was close to a truth that could redefine everything.
After days I finally found the next words. 'By A Superior'
Superior what? A human? The patriarch of Theodore or Mareux? But 'Superior' was a title, a classification. In all my reading, it had one primary, capitalized meaning.
Superior is used for dragons right? The chill returned, deeper than before. How would a dragon control a human power? It's impossible. The treaty forbids any attacks between humans and The Other species. There is no way this can happen…right?.
But the treaty only forbade open warfare and land grabs. It said nothing about infiltration, manipulation, subversion. A dragon in human form, with millennia of patience and cunning… What better way to control your ancient enemy than by controlling the institution that shapes its young, that defines its relationship with the very power you wield?
After hours the last word was indeed Dragon.
I sat back on the cold stone floor of the hidden library, the glowing moss book open in my lap. The complete sentence assembled itself in my mind, each word a block of ice.
THE CHURCH IS CONTROLLED BY A SUPERIOR DRAGON.
Ah, is this the reason why House Theodore is not expanding… The pieces slammed together. We couldn't move against the Church because the Church wasn't the real enemy. It was a proxy, a facade. Attacking it would mean directly challenging a Superior Dragon, breaking the treaty, and inviting a war we might not win, all while the Ashenveil pressed at our backs. We were checkmated by a piece we didn't even know was on the board.
Wait, does that also mean that the Superior Dragon controlled the church for centuries? I scrambled for historical texts. I looked for the history of the church. The church was made exactly 1092 years ago. Under the empire's king. Then Theodore formed and then Centuries later House Mareux formed.
Does this mean that Father already knew everything about this?.. This may be the reason why my father did not capture the land of three powers. He knew. He had to know. The cold calculations, the hidden strength, the watchful patience—they weren't just for human rivals. They were for a far older, more dangerous game.
This is getting complicated… It was a vast, hidden layer of geopolitical horror.
And what with these algorithms? Does this mean it's a test for me? The thought was terrifying. Had my father, or some other entity, planted this puzzle to see if I was clever enough to find it? Was solving it the key to joining the real game, or was it a trigger for my elimination?
The immediate, personal danger crystallized with awful clarity. Shit! Now since the church is controlled by humanity's greatest enemies … they will try to kill me or banish me since I'm Aetherless… A dragon pulling the strings of the Church wouldn't want an anomaly. A noble child with zero Aether was a statistical impossibility, a variable their millennia of planning hadn't accounted for. I was a loose thread. They would cut me.
This situation is worse than I thought!
What should I do? The question echoed again, but now the stakes were cosmic. I was a six-year-old, Aetherless boy who had stumbled upon a secret that could shatter the human world. I had three years until my "Awakening," where my defect would be revealed not just to my family, but to the dragon-controlled institution that would see me as a threat.
I don't know anything. The admission was humble, terrifying, and true. But it was followed by the only certainty I had left.
But I do know one thing: that the future will be one of a kind….