The Elvensia Empire did not hold Awakening Ceremonies in shrine grounds tucked behind a village well.
It held them in the Hall of Blades, a cathedral of white stone and stained glass built specifically for the purpose, where every noble house in the capital gathered to watch their children step up to a monument taller than three grown men, carved from the same silver wood as the royal throne itself.
Saria had waited sixteen years for this exact morning, the way every elven child waited for it, half raised on stories of her own parents’ Awakenings and half terrified of falling short of a legacy that had already decided, long before she ever asked for it, exactly what kind of number the court expected to see above her head.
She stepped up to the monument in a hall gone completely silent, her mother watching from the front row with an expression carved from centuries of discipline, her father beside her, his hand resting lightly on the hilt of a blade that had drawn a swordmaster into a legendary draw.
She pressed her palm flat against the silver wood.
The script bloomed above her a moment later, and a low murmur rolled through the assembled nobility before the herald even finished reading it aloud.
**Level: 34**
**Max Level Cap: 800**
The murmur broke into applause almost immediately, warm and genuine, the kind reserved for a number that confirmed exactly what everyone had already assumed a child of two Sword Saints would produce.
Level thirty four at Awakening put her comfortably above nearly every other elf her age in the capital.
A cap of eight hundred put her on a trajectory that, with patience and proper training, could plausibly see her surpass both of her parents inside a single generation.
Her mother’s carefully composed expression finally cracked into something closer to open pride.
Her father simply nodded once, the way he did after watching a well executed technique, which from him was as close to unrestrained joy as the court had ever seen.
Saria smiled, relieved and lightheaded all at once, and let herself, for one brief unguarded moment, believe that her entire life from this point forward had just been decided in her favor.
She had no way of knowing, standing in that gleaming hall surrounded by silk and silver and generations of expectation, that a boy her exact same age had been shoved into a dungeon that same season, half a continent away, carrying a cap of two that would somehow, impossibly, prove far more dangerous than her eight hundred ever would.
Dako’s Awakening happened with considerably less ceremony.
His village held its monument in an open field rather than a shrine, a squat gray stone worn smooth by generations of weather, and the entire event drew a modest crowd of maybe thirty people, most of them there for the small festival that followed rather than any particular investment in the results.
Elin stood near the front, hands twisted together in her apron, watching the son she had raised without ever once telling him the truth of where she’d found him step up to the stone.
Dako pressed his palm against it, and the script answered fast, brighter than most villagers in that crowd had ever personally witnessed.
**Level: 50**
**Max Level Cap: 1400** This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The field went dead silent for a beat, then erupted into noise, disbelief and excitement tangled together so tightly no one could quite separate the two.
Level fifty at Awakening was not merely rare, it was the kind of number that occasionally drew scouts from actual noble houses out to villages exactly like this one, chasing rumors of hidden talent.
A cap of fourteen hundred was the kind of number that, in a city large enough to properly appreciate it, would have started a bidding war among houses eager to sponsor his training before anyone else could claim him first.
Elin’s hands flew to her mouth, tears already gathering, pride and something else, something quieter and more worried, tangled together underneath it.
She had always known there was something different about the boy she’d found in that grain shed, something in the way he moved, the way trouble seemed to bend around him without ever quite catching hold.
She had simply never let herself guess how different until this exact moment, standing in a field watching a number appear above his head that no ordinary human child had any business producing.
Dako, for his part, simply grinned, wide and unguarded, the grin of a boy who had grown up entirely certain of his mother’s love and entirely unaware of anything else about his own bloodline.
Neither Elin nor Dako noticed the stranger standing at the edge of that crowd, cloaked despite the warm afternoon, who watched the number appear above the boy’s head with an expression of quiet, calculating interest, then turned and walked away from the village before the festival had even properly begun.
Abarat’s records on the demon lord’s missing child had never been closed.
Someone, somewhere, had simply been waiting, patiently, for a number worth reporting.
Back in Teria, the eastern ridge clearing sat quiet under the early afternoon sun, the golden dungeon portal still hovering exactly where it had been since morning, undisturbed and impassable.
Fragg had tried the entrance himself twice more after Hoju disappeared through it, both attempts ending the same way, an invisible wall stopping him cold the moment he got close enough to touch the light.
Duncan had tried once too, with the same result, and after the third failed attempt Fragg’s easy laughter from that morning had curdled into something meaner, pacing back and forth at the clearing’s edge while the minutes dragged on with no sign of Hoju coming back through.
“He’s locked us out somehow,” Fragg finally said, more to convince himself than to inform anyone listening.
“Little rat found something in there and doesn’t want to share.”
“Boss, he’s level one,” Duncan said carefully.
“He couldn’t lock a door if his life depended on it.”
Fragg’s expression darkened further at that, less because Duncan was wrong and more because the reminder didn’t fit the story he was already deciding to tell.
He glanced at the portal one final time, then made up his mind with the particular speed of someone who preferred a convenient version of events to an inconvenient one.
“Watch it,” he told Duncan, nodding toward the clearing.
Someone needs to let the village know what’s happening out here.”
He walked back to Teria alone, and by the time he reached the shrine grounds, he had already rehearsed the shape of the story he intended to tell, polishing it the way he polished everything, until it fit exactly the version of himself he preferred people to believe in.
He found a decent crowd still lingering near the shrine, villagers who had stayed on after the morning’s Awakenings to trade gossip about the season’s results, and Fragg made sure his voice carried when he spoke, loud enough to draw every ear in range toward him before he’d even finished crossing the square.
“You’re not going to believe what that boy did,” he said, shaking his head with an expression carefully arranged into wounded disappointment.
“I found a dungeon out past the eastern ridge this morning.
No rank on it, which usually means it’s safe, no monsters, just treasure sitting there for whoever gets to it first.
I thought, after the morning he’d had, the least I could do was let him go in first, let him find something worth taking, maybe pick up a level or two along the way.”
A few villagers nearby made sympathetic noises, exactly the reaction Fragg had been counting on.
“And what does he do,” Fragg continued, voice climbing with practiced outrage.
“Locks the both of us out.
Won’t let me or my men anywhere near the entrance.
We’ve been standing out there for an hour trying to get in, and he’s in there right now, hoarding whatever’s in that dungeon for himself, after I was the one who found it, after I was the one trying to help him.”
The crowd’s mood shifted fast, sympathy curdling into something closer to disgust, exactly the reaction Fragg had built the entire story to produce.
It fit too neatly into everything the village already believed about Hoju to invite any real scrutiny, a boy who had spent ten years being blamed for things he never did finally living down to the reputation they’d built for him all along.
Word reached the chief’s household within the hour.
It reached Fresha not long after that, delivered secondhand through a household that had spent years carefully shaping exactly how she was meant to feel about the brother she barely remembered, and this newest piece of the story slid into place beside all the others with an ease that troubled no one enough to question it.
By the time evening fell over Teria, the story had already hardened into fact the way every story about Hoju eventually did in that village, repeated often enough by enough mouths that no one thought to ask the one question that might have unraveled it entirely.
If Hoju truly had locked Fragg out of a treasure filled dungeon, why hadn’t Fragg simply waited outside for him to come out and taken it from him then.
No one asked.
Fragg made certain of that, steering every retelling firmly away from the details that didn’t hold together, and by nightfall the eastern ridge clearing sat abandoned except for one bored goon, still watching a portal that showed no sign of opening, with absolutely no idea that the boy he’d been left to guard against had, by that point, been trapped in a place where ten minutes had already stretched into ten full days.