The Core Education Chamber was a space of clinical perfection. There were no desks, no paper, and no distractions—only a circular projection platform at the center of a room designed to facilitate deep focus. In the Veyron household, education was not a passive reception of facts; it was a structural synchronization.
Astra's cerulean light pulsed. "Today's topic: The Origin of Ribbon Civilization."
The boy sat perfectly upright on the floor. His silver-gray eyes were fixed on the dormant platform. "Was there a time without Ribbon?"
Astra's core flickered for a fraction of a second—a delay that indicated a search through deep-archived historical records. "Yes."
The platform activated. The room's ambient light vanished, replaced by a sprawling projection of the void.
"Before the Ribbon discovery, humanity relied solely on mechanical propulsion and chemical energy," Astra explained.
Images of primitive starships appeared. They were massive, clunky, and agonizingly slow. The boy watched as tiny sparks of civilization struggled to jump between stars, only to flicker out. "Expansion was inefficient," Astra continued. "Fragile. Economically unsustainable. Colonies were isolated by decades of travel. Most collapsed into Resource Wars before they could be reinforced."
The boy nodded slightly. "Then Ribbon was discovered."
The Fabric of Reality
The projection shifted. The darkness of space didn't just contain light; it began to shimmer. It looked like a fracture in a mirror, where a hidden dimension was spilling through.
"Ribbon is not energy," Astra stated firmly.
The boy tilted his head, his brow furrowing. "Then what is it?"
"Ribbon is structural substrate," Astra replied. The projection zoomed inward, past the stars, past the atoms, until the vacuum of space itself seemed to be held together by thin, almost invisible threads woven between dimensions. "It is the fabric that stabilizes spatial continuity. It is the 'grid' upon which the universe is stretched."
The boy's eyes sharpened. He leaned forward, his fingers twitching as if he wanted to reach out and pluck a thread. "We didn't create it."
"Correct. We learned to interact with it."
The projection showed an early experiment: a scientist reaching toward a distortion field. As the researcher's mind focused, the field didn't push back—it compressed. Reality bent, shortening the distance between two points.
"Ribbon responds to structured cognition," Astra said.
"Structured how?"
"Mathematical compression," Astra answered.
A heavy silence filled the room. The boy felt a familiar stir in his chest. In his past life, math was a language used to describe the world. Here, math was the tool used to edit it.
"The first cultivators were not warriors," the projection changed to show researchers, mathematicians, and engineers. "They discovered that through mental modeling of spatial compression, Ribbon could be condensed, stored, and released. It was the ultimate bridge between biology and physics."
"Stored where?"
"Within the body's neural lattice." A human silhouette appeared, glowing with intricate pathways that mirrored the star lanes. "Thus began Ribbon cultivation. The body became the battery; the mind became the processor."
The Loom Hierarchy
The projection shifted into a series of layered, concentric rings, each representing a stage of human evolution.
"Loom Phase measures one's ability to compress and stabilize Ribbon within biological limits," Astra explained.
Phase Designation Capability
1–50 Thread Awareness. Basic sensory perception of Ribbon.
50–150 Strand Stability. Stable interaction; power for personal equipment.
150–300 Loom Integration. External manipulation; piloting of small-craft.
300–450 Weave Command Structural dominance; fleet-scale coordination.
450+ Dimensional Authority Combat capability against trans-dimensional threats.
The boy absorbed the tiers, his mind already calculating the energy requirements for each. "And above 500?"
Astra's light dimmed. The projection flickered, revealing a shadow—a massive, unstructured shape that seemed to bleed out of the edges of the frame.
"Unstable," Astra whispered. "Excessive Ribbon compression without stabilization results in entity fragmentation. The mind loses its 'form,' and the Ribbon consumes the host."
"Or they transform," the boy added quietly.
"Correct."
The Universal Node
The projection changed one final time to show a massive, luminous nexus at the center of the Stellar Grid. It was the heart of the Core, a beating sun of pure, ordered information.
"The Universal Node stabilizes Ribbon flow across all star systems," Astra said. "If it collapses, interstellar civilization fractures. Communication ceases. The grid fails."
The image darkened. Warning sirens wailed in the audio feed. A distortion breach appeared near the Node, and a shape emerged an entity that defied geometry, radiating a pressure that felt heavy even in a recording.
"Three hundred years ago, an overcompressed entity breached the Node barrier. It was a failure of balance," Astra said.
The boy watched the battle. He saw small ships converging, dancing around the monster. He saw two ships merge briefly, their Ribbon signatures overlapping to create a temporary warform that struck with the force of a supernova.
"That merge..." the boy whispered, his eyes narrowing. "It was inefficient."
Astra paused. "Clarify."
"The stabilization delay window is too long. They lose 0.4 seconds during the phase-lock. If the entity had shifted its compression toward the left axis, the ships would have been crushed."
"Correction acknowledged," Astra said, though her tone held a hint of mechanical surprise.
"You noticed."
The boy turned. Arin was standing in the doorway, his silhouette imposing against the hall light. He entered slowly, his eyes fixed on the projection of the ancient war. "That delay nearly cost us the Core, son. It's the flaw in every Dual Resonance protocol."
"Why didn't you redesign it, Father?"
A faint, heavy silence filled the chamber. Lyra stepped in beside Arin, her expression unreadable. "Because war does not allow infinite iteration, little one," she said softly. "Sometimes, you have to fight with a broken tool because there is no time to fix it."
The boy looked back at the flickering battle. "It should allow it. If the model is perfect, the tool won't break."
The Philosophy of Balance
Astra dimmed the projection, and the room returned to its calm, clinical glow.
"Ribbon cultivation is not about power," Astra concluded, almost like a prayer.
"It is about stabilization," the boy finished.
Arin studied his son. He saw the way the boy looked at his own hands—not with the wonder of a child, but with the cold intent of an engineer looking at a raw material.
"Many forget that," Arin said. "They chase the high of the compression, the feeling of being a god. They forget that a god without a floor to stand on is just a ghost in the void."
"And when they forget," Lyra added, placing a hand on her son's shoulder, "they compress beyond stability. Like the entity."
The boy looked up at them. "If Ribbon responds to mathematical compression... then better models mean safer compression. You don't need more power. You need better math."
Arin's gaze sharpened. "In theory."
"Not theory," the boy replied. "Application."
A subtle shift passed through the air. It was barely perceptible—a microscopic tightening of the room's atmosphere. Astra's sensors spiked instantly. "Ambient field alignment increasing. Localized stability rising by 0.003%."
He wasn't even trying. He was just thinking about the correct architecture, and the universe around him was trying to comply.
"Enough for today," Lyra said, her voice gentle but firm.
That night, the boy stood beneath the transparent dome of his room. The Stellar Grid shimmered overhead, a web of silver light holding the darkness together.
In his past life, he had studied abstraction to escape reality. In this one, abstraction was reality. Cultivation wasn't about lifting weights or meditation; it was about refining the mental model of the universe until the universe had no choice but to follow his lead.
He felt no regret for the world he left behind. Only direction.
Far beyond the Core, there were beings who played with the Ribbon like children with fire. There were pirates who saw the grid as a target, and factions who saw the Node as a throne.
But the boy didn't care about thrones. He looked at the stars and saw a messy equation. And he was going to solve it.