Clara worked as a child caretaker, and her meager wages barely kept food on the table.
Taking in another mouth had tightened their budget to the breaking point.
An infant was an endless drain of labor.
Feeding, washing, changing cloths, keeping watch through the night, there was always another task waiting.
Clara had no time left for herself, and the strain showed in the dark circles beneath her eyes.
Yet she never uttered a single complaint.
She still remembered what her friend, a maternity nurse, had told her about the orphaned boy every nearby institution had rejected.
The excuse was ridiculous.
His silence.
Babies who can live without crying were rare, and old superstitions ran deep in the provinces.
Some folks still whispered that a child who did not cry and remain silent carried a curse, bringing ruin to whichever roof sheltered him.
Clara had no patience for such nonsense.
Plenty of educated townspeople claimed they didn’t believe it either, but folklore had a stubborn way of clinging to the shadows.
Enough quiet dread lingered that an unusual newborn was left to languish in a cot.
To Clara, it was just heartless superstition hurting an innocent life.
Hearing that the child had nobody in the world had broken her heart; she could not look away.
Of course, it did not take long for her to see that Silas was far from typical.
If anything, his intellect bordered on the terrifying.
He had spoken his first clear word at two months, shocking every neighbor who dropped by.
And that was merely the start.
His vocabulary expanded by the week.
Month by month, his speech grew sharper, until he was holding full conversations before he could even walk properly.
His temperament was stranger still.
Silas never threw tantrums.
Even when he tripped and scraped his knee, he pushed himself up without shedding a tear.
He was calm, deliberate, and eerily composed for a child.
Clara often caught herself watching him across the room, wondering how a baby could carry such quiet gravity.
It might have frightened her if Silas had been cold, but he was always gentle and attentive.
He had a sweet disposition and a bright face, enough that Clara often joked he would break plenty of hearts when he grew older.
Alice, meanwhile, spent most of her mornings studying at the kitchen table.
Clara taught her reading, geography, history, and basic arithmetic, along with practical lessons on household finances and civil law.
She wanted Alice to possess not just standard schooling, but the practical sense required to survive in the world.
Clara was no scholar, but over two decades of caretaking had given her a clear, patient way of explaining difficult things.
She was remarkably good at it.
Before long, Silas started sitting on the wooden stool beside Alice’s desk.
Clara assumed the toddler was just copying his older sister.
But as the lessons went on, she realized he was hanging on every single word.
He would sit without fidgeting, his dark eyes tracking Clara’s chalk as she wrote across the slate.
He absorbed everything on the first pass.
An explanation delivered once was locked in his head for good.
* * *
Two years slipped by.
Silas stood on the front stoop, looking out at the quiet residential road.
Over those two years, his limbs had lengthened and his balance had settled.
To any passing neighbor, he looked like a standard three-year-old with dark hair and bright, curious eyes.
But the stillness in his shoulders and the cold weight in his gaze belonged to an entity who had watched eons turn to dust.
Three years in this vessel, Silas mused.
Thanks to Clara’s lessons, I finally have a clean map of this world’s structure.
A low, dry breath left his chest.
They call this place Earth.
And frankly, it is populated by blind men.
A faint scoff curled his lip.
Not even a single Path Awakened across the entire sphere.
A barren rock, just as I feared.
Under different circumstances, waking up on an uncultivated world was the greatest gift a pioneer could ask for.
A world without an established Path was a blank slate, offering the rare freedom to found a Path of one’s own and claim the title of Path Ancestor.
Had he landed in a realm already claimed by other Paths, he would have needed to flee into deep space just to find an unclaimed rock where his vision could take root.
Yet Earth was in wretched condition.
Instead of gathering spiritual energy or exploring the depths of their own bodies, humanity had poured its genius into combustion engines, wire grids, and synthetic chemicals.
They had erected an intricate mortal society, but the cost had been catastrophic.
They had choked the sky, stripped the soil of its vital marrow, and drained the planet’s dormant life-force.
Earth was a cracked vessel.
Because its core vitality had been gutted, the planet would have virtually zero natural resistance when the time came for it to evolve into a Path World.
And as a three-year-old toddler, Silas had no means to fix it yet.
His physical form was far too fragile.
Cultivating a Path required a physical foundation that only matured around the age of ten.
Only then could his meridians and brain tissue endure the strain, kickstart Earth’s evolution, and punch through this localized dimensional pocket into the True Universe.
Yet every time Silas ran the calculations on that emergence, his head throbbed.
If a newly evolved world tumbled into the True Universe without preparation, it will be immediately stripped and reduced to a Slave World.
The cosmos was littered with the bones of such realms.
Blind worlds that broke their dimensional shells without the backing of a major power from the Lesser Zones were helpless against the apex predators of the higher realms.
Earth’s mortals were busy squabbling over imaginary borders while perched atop a crumbling cradle.
If Silas wanted to survive the transition, waiting until ten to start meditating was not enough.
He needed an ironclad plan.
The immediate objective was obvious.
He had to break the will of these petty world leaders, force the fragmented continents under one banner, and point all of human civilization toward the coming cosmic trial.
Only a fortified, unified planet could endure the shock of the True Universe.
Silas had spent a million years in chains within the Heavenly Wizard World.
He knew what happened to conquered realms, and he would burn this planet to ash before he allowed himself to wear a collar again.
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