I woke to a sharp, ringing hum between my ears, as if someone had struck a copper bell inside my skull.
My eyes snapped open. I bolted upright on the cot, blanket twisted around my legs, heart slamming against my ribs, certain I'd find a municipal guard kicking in my door or the whole tenement coming down around me.
Instead, the room was pitch black except for one point of light, hanging dead center in the air three feet in front of my face.
It wasn't the weak, watery green of Azure Star's public displays. It was a tight weave of gold and black threads, spinning together like a tiny galaxy in the stale air of my room. The black parts burned without a sound and threw long, impossible shadows across the peeling paint.
I went still. My breath stopped somewhere halfway up my throat. "What the…" I whispered, and dragged my knees up to my chest, which was useless as a defense and I knew it.
The light expanded with a soft, hollow whoosh and flattened into a pane of dark, translucent glass, framed by silver runes older than anything I'd ever seen. White text scrolled down it, and I only had to read the last line before something in my chest pulled tight with recognition.
[WELCOME BACK, YOUR HIGHNESS.]
I knew that voice. Not heard, exactly. Felt. Something deep and slow, a grinding like stars against each other, in the middle of a dream I could barely hold on to.
"Your Highness?" It came out a croak, too loud in the empty room. "Is this a joke? Did Jax pay someone to rig up an illusion rune and mess with me?"
I raised my bandaged right arm and swept it straight through the screen. My fingers met nothing: no heat, no cold, no resistance. The screen didn't so much as flicker. When I tilted my head, it followed my eyes like a patient dog.
The text faded, and a cleaner panel took its place.
[STATUS PANEL]
Name: Adrian (Andaras Celestia)
Race: Celestial
Age: 15
Spirit Cultivation Rank: None
Body Cultivation Rank: None
Mind Cultivation Rank: None
Soul Cultivation Rank: None
Talent: Primordial Echo (Unique - Exalted)
Physique: Primordial Physique (Primordial Grade)
Bloodline: Origin: Creation + Origin: Destruction → Primordial (Primordial Grade)
Affinity: All (Universal Harmonization)
Techniques: None
I blinked. Rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist, hard enough to see sparks. Some part of me was waiting for the letters to rearrange themselves into the version I knew. Adrian. Orphan. Unclassified Zero.
They didn't.
My eyes caught on the top line and stuck there. Andaras.
I'd been Adrian my whole life, a name the Sector 4 shelter director had scrawled on a scrap of paper because it was the nearest thing to a proper municipal name he could think of on a busy afternoon. And here, in brackets, in clean white light, sat another one. It fit wrong in my mouth and worse in my chest.
Below it: Race: Celestial.
"Not human," I said. It came out strange, almost polite, like I was correcting a clerk's paperwork. "I'm not… human."
Fifteen years of what's wrong with that kid had an answer after all, and the answer was nothing. There had never been anything wrong with me. That should have felt like being let out of a cell. Instead it felt like someone had knocked the foundations out from under a house I'd been trying to live in.
A second notification bloomed beneath the panel in deep gold.
[TITLES DETECTED]
[The Missing Prince]
Effect: Denotes direct royal bloodline status within the Celestia Empire, which spans thousands of realms. Grants maximum royal administrative clearance within the Celestial System, unlocking imperial-tier shop listings, ancient knowledge repositories, and direct line privileges.
[Void Traveler]
Effect: Indicates survival of a high-tier spatial void banishment, a feat fatal to high-ranking cultivators. Grants inherent resistance to spatial tearing, void corruption, and environmental rift pressure.
I read both descriptions twice. The words stayed exactly where they were.
The Missing Prince. Void banishment.
Then the parts of my life that had never made sense started slamming into place, one after another, almost loud enough to hear. A rift opening in Sector 4. A crater where three blocks used to be. A baby in the middle of it, without a scratch. The elders who'd called me a miracle and then spent years watching me fail test after test, and slowly stopped kneeling.
It wasn't a miracle. Someone had wanted me dead.
My stomach turned over, sour and empty. Someone had looked at a baby, a tiny thing that couldn't hold up its own head, and said throw him into the void. I hadn't survived on luck. I'd survived because my blood had been built to survive exactly that. Then I'd landed on a backwater planet whose cheap public terminals couldn't read what I was, so they'd flagged me as a system fault and tripped their own breakers rather than look any closer.
The terminal hadn't failed me. I'd broken it.
"Unclassified Null," I breathed. A dry little laugh got out, and I clamped a hand over my mouth because it sounded too close to something else. I thought of Dugan drawing that red line through my number, slow, his hand unsteady. He'd thought he was writing off a kid with nothing. The stone had been too small for me, and nobody had known.
Then another memory came up, and the laugh died in my throat.
The envoy. That sudden stillness at the railing, the boredom wiped off his face. The way he'd looked at me, just for a second, like a locked door he'd heard click.
He hadn't been bored. He'd been checking. And then he'd smoothed it all over and told thousands of people it was the relays.
I pulled the blanket up around my shoulders. The room wasn't cold. I did it anyway.
Somebody tried to kill me once, I thought. And yesterday I set off the planet's own terminal in front of an Elven envoy. Two facts, and neither of them was on my side of the ledger.
For a long minute, I didn't move. I didn't read anything. I just sat there with my pulse thudding in my ears while the panel hung in the dark, patient, as if it had all the time in the world.
Then my eyes drifted to my left wrist, to the stiff, rust-stained thread catching the gold light, and something in me steadied.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Andaras Celestia. That was the name of someone who'd been thrown away. Someone I'd never met.
But Adrian was the name people had actually said out loud. Chen, every day, across a counter. Dugan, quietly, like it mattered. Lin, dead serious, on a cold landing. A stranger who didn't care had scribbled it on a scrap of paper, and the people who did care had filled it in anyway.
Adrian was mine. I'd decided. Whatever else was on that screen, I was keeping that.
"Alright," I said softly. "Let's see the rest."
I focused on the talent line, and a window unfolded.
[TALENT: PRIMORDIAL ECHO (UNIQUE - EXALTED)]
Effect: Automatically harmonizes conflicting energies (Aether and Void) within the soul while multiplying all absorbed Qi, experience points, and system rewards by 10x. Furthermore, it allows the user to bypass all comprehension bottlenecks across all four cultivation paths simultaneously, granting instant insight into any martial or technical manual read.
"Ten times," I whispered.
Ninety percent of the Qi a human takes in from a slain beast simply bleeds away into the air. In District 9, a cultivator counted himself lucky to keep ten or fifteen percent. I'd spent years watching grown men break their backs for scraps.
My talent didn't just stop the bleeding. It multiplied everything by ten.
And then there was the second half. Bypass all comprehension bottlenecks.
I thought of the old porters down at the docks. Men with calloused hands and tired eyes who'd stalled at the peak of the Ironhide Realm for twenty years, scraping together coins for breakthrough pills that never quite worked, risking their lives in rifts for a single spark of insight. I'd read every public manual in the library until the spines broke, and half of it had run straight through my head like water through a net.
If I read a manual now, I'd understand it. Just like that.
I sat up straighter, my pulse going hard enough to feel in my fingertips. It wasn't just power. It was the first time in my life that effort might actually go somewhere, that an hour put in would come back as something I could count.
Then my eyes caught on the four ranks near the top of the panel, all blank, all labeled differently, and I frowned. "Wait. Four paths?"
Azure Star taught one: Spirit Cultivation, with a minor branch of Body Tempering for kids who couldn't manage the first. I focused on the list, and a guide opened.
[THE FOUR UNIVERSAL CULTIVATION PATHS]
The Spiritual Path (Qi Dao): Gathering, compressing, and manipulating external world energy to command elements and cast grand arts. (Realm 1: Qi Condensation)
The Body Path (Indestructible Vajra): Mass, physical force, cellular density, and genetic evolution. (Realm 1: Ironhide Realm)
The Mind Path (Sovereign Will): Brain capacity, computational speed, telekinesis, and rewriting reality through mental pressure. (Realm 1: Hyper-Cognition)
The Soul Path (Phantom Monarch): The incorporeal self, karma, life-force manipulation, and the laws of mortality. (Realm 1: Astral Awoken)
[SYSTEM NOTE: Standard mortal species are limited to 10 Minor Levels per Major Realm before facing an absolute path bottleneck. Exceptional human bloodlines cap at Level 12. Standard Celestials reach Level 20. Royal Celestial Lineages reach Level 22–23.]
[YOUR PRIMORDIAL PHYSIQUE PERMITS A MAXIMUM CAP OF LEVEL 25 PER MAJOR REALM ACROSS ALL FOUR PATHS SIMULTANEOUSLY.]
Level 25.
An ordinary human maxed out at ten. I'd be sitting on more than twice that, in four paths at once, before I even touched the next realm. Across all of Azure Star, people believed Soul cultivation was a myth. Nobody taught Mind at all. And I could have every bit of it.
"They don't even know it exists," I murmured. "All of them. Everyone I know. They don't even know what they're missing."
I swiped the panel sideways, and a tab I hadn't noticed caught my eye.
[CELESTIAL SHOP & POINT BANK]
I tapped it. The screen filled with a vast, searchable marketplace, like an auction house built for gods. Thousands of glowing icons hung in tidy rows: ancient weapons, pill bottles, jade slips of martial technique, spatial rings, rare ores, raw monster cores. A ledger sat at the top.
[CURRENT CELESTIAL POINTS: 0]
[QI CONVERSION RATE: 100% OF ABSORBED EXCESS QI CONVERTS TO SYSTEM POINTS (MULTIPLIED BY 10 VIA PRIMORDIAL ECHO)]
[ROYAL CLEARANCE ACTIVE: YOU ARE VIEWING DIRECT LISTINGS POSTED BY CITIZENS AND NOBLES OF THE CELESTIA EMPIRE ACROSS THE COSMIC NETWORK. ALL MORTAL TIER RESTRICTIONS REMOVED.]
I scrolled through the first page.
[Heaven-Cleaving Aether Sword — Sovereign Grade] — Price: 50,000,000 Points
[Nine-Revolutions Void-Cleansing Pill] — Price: 1,200,000 Points
[Manual: Primordial Star-Crushing Art (Body Path)] — Price: 8,000,000 Points
I let out a low whistle. Millions, against a balance of zero. But as I stared at the icons, a stranger thought crept in. Every one of these had been posted by someone. Somewhere out there, in cities I couldn't picture, there were people with names and kitchens and bad days who had looked at a sword like that and thought, I'll sell it.
They were my people. Or they were supposed to be.
I pushed the thought away before it could settle and set the filter to [ENTRY TIER - BASIC]. The imperial relics vanished.
[Manual: Basic Qi Condensation Method (Spirit Path)] — Price: 10 Points
[Manual: Basic Ironhide Forging Technique (Body Path)] — Price: 10 Points
[Manual: Basic Mind Awakening Method (Mind Path)] — Price: 15 Points
[Manual: Basic Soul Perception Art (Soul Path)] — Price: 20 Points
Ten points. Low-tier F-rank vermin carried only a few units of raw Qi apiece, but run that through a tenfold multiplier and every unit became ten points. All four manuals together came to fifty-five. Two or three kills could pay for the foundations of all four paths.
I leaned back against the cold wall and looked around.
The tin pot sat dented in the corner where I'd thrown it at the door. Splinters of the wooden box lay scattered across the floor with the dried Blood-Root leaves. The bandages on my forearms were grey with dirt. In the panel's gold glow and the thin yellow smear from the window, the room looked smaller than it ever had. It was a room a kid had lived in, a kid who'd been told his entire life that he was nothing.
I thought about telling someone.
The urge hit hard enough to hurt. I wanted to run down two flights of stairs and wake Lin. Every word, I'd promised, and now I had more words than I knew what to do with. I wanted to bang on Chen's shutters until he opened them, just to watch his face. I wanted to find Dugan and show him that the stone hadn't been broken, that all those zeroes had never been my fault.
But someone had thrown a baby into the void to kill him. If they found out he'd lived, they wouldn't care who he was standing next to.
Anyone I told would become a target. Lin was nine. Chen was an old man with a soup stall and his dead wife's name on his sign.
Not yet, I thought. Not until I'm strong enough that knowing me isn't dangerous.
I would tell her someday. Every word, like I'd sworn. I just couldn't say it yet.
And somewhere under that, small and quiet and foolish, was another thought I didn't dare look at head-on. Missing. The title said The Missing Prince. Missing meant someone had been looking, didn't it?
Or it meant I'd been sent away on purpose, and missing was just the System's polite word for it.
I had no way of knowing. I closed that door, gently, and left it closed.
What I did know was this. Jax was probably sound asleep in his father's multi-story house, finally breathing easy after a day of being terrified. The Director was probably preparing the labor lists. The envoy was probably sipping tea in some sky-mansion, wondering whether he'd been wrong about the relays.
Let them think whatever they wanted.
Something quiet and sharp had settled into the middle of my chest. It wasn't the cold weight I'd fallen asleep under. It was more like a flame, small and steady, with nothing to burn but me.
I tapped the panel closed. The gold-and-black glass came apart into specks of light that drifted down into the shadows and went out. I unwound the dirty bandages from my forearms, the last layer peeling off the blisters with a wet sting, dropped them on the crate, and stood up.
My skin still stung, but I found I didn't mind.
I crossed the room, dug into the canvas bag by the door, and pulled out the only weapon I owned: a heavy, six-inch iron hunting knife I'd bought from a scrap dealer two years ago for four copper credits. Its weight settled into my palm, blunt and familiar. I slid it into the sheath on my belt, pulled on my old cloth jacket, and glanced at the clock on the wall.
Four in the morning.
The labor draft wouldn't post its assignment boards for three more hours. The guards at the outer gates would be on their sleepy night shift, drinking warm spirit-tea and ignoring the drainage exits along the District 9 perimeter. Just past the fence lay the Outer Garbage Rifts, low-grade fissures where F-rank Void Rats and slime-creepers crawled out of the mist. Ordinary people stayed well clear of them without a guild escort.
Three hours. One knife. Fifty-five points standing between me and four paths.
Ordinary people hadn't just found out they'd survived the void.
"Mines?" I murmured, and felt a small, sharp smile pull at my mouth as I started down the creaking stairs. "Not today."