Shadows and Boundaries
The days following the botanical gardens breach passed under the heavy cover of a mundane routine.
For the rest of City CC, the incident was just another grim statistic—a Class-2 gate managed by Guild responders, another handful of names added to the memorial wall, and a brief spike in danger pay for emergency crews. But inside the modest apartment Ruyi shared with her family, the silence felt different. It was heavy with secrets.
Ruyi sat at her small desk late into the night, the soft blue light of her laptop illuminating her face.
She spent hours scouring public Guild databases, community forums, and archived research papers on spatial anomalies. Being officially registered as a non-awakened civilian severely restricted her access. High-tier forums required verified hunter license credentials just to view tactical breakdown threads, and detailed manuals on spatial magic mechanics were locked behind Class-A security clearances.
Unfortunate, but manageable, Ruyi thought, scrolling past another locked red banner that read: ACCESS DENIED: VERIFIED GUILD MEMBERS ONLY.
She didn't need their official manuals. What she needed was an understanding of how the Guild tracked spatial signatures.
Through obscure civilian blogs and archived technical leaks from equipment manufacturers, she pieced together the basics. Standard Guild scanners relied on detecting Ether Residual Waves—the faint, lingering heat and mana friction left behind when space was torn open.
"Standard spatial magic pushes energy out to tear reality," Ruyi whispered to herself, tapping a finger against her chin. "My power pulls energy in."
That was why the Evaluator Core had flatlined. It was calibrated to detect an explosion of pressure, but Ruyi’s Void was an implosion. A vacuum.
To test her limits further, she began conducting quiet experiments late at night when her family was fast asleep. She found a ruined, abandoned industrial block four miles outside her district—a quiet place where the streetlights had been dead for years.
There, she pushed her spatial jump.
She learned that her range was bounded by mental clarity. If she had a sharp, vivid memory of a physical location, the jump was instantaneous and silent. If her visual memory was vague, the spatial jump cost significantly more stamina, leaving her lightheaded and drained.
She also practiced her Void Pocket.
She discovered that while living organic matter was suffocated and frozen the moment it entered the absolute vacuum, non-living materials remained perfectly preserved. To test this, she bought a container of piping-hot noodle soup, slipped it into her void for three hours, and pulled it back out.
It was still steaming. The temperature hadn't dropped by a single degree.
"Zero thermal transfer," Ruyi noted in a small, physical notebook she kept hidden. "No air, no time, no heat loss. Cold storage."
Yet, as she experimented, a strange realization took root.
When she transported herself using her spatial jumps, she felt a distinct, split-second sensation of passing through the void space itself—not just around it. If she could survive stepping into that vast expanse of nothingness, then it wasn't inherently lethal to living beings. The vacuum wasn't a absolute barrier; it was simply an unoxygenated, hostile environment.
If I can enter it safely, she mused, staring down at her palm, there must be a way to create an isolated pocket of atmospheric pressure inside—a way to let a living person stay in the void without suffocating.
She would need time and more field tests to figure out the exact mechanics, but the implications were massive.
While Ruyi refined her secret, she didn't leave Rion to navigate his sudden awakening alone.
She knew what happened to young, freshly awakened kids who lacked control. An accidental power leak at a public school could bring the Guild running with diagnostic wands before sunset.
On Saturday afternoon, under the pretext of helping Rion study for his upcoming college entrance exams, Ruyi brought him out to the abandoned industrial lot.
"Your barrier isn't just a wall," Ruyi said, leaning back against a rusted steel pillar as Rion stood in the center of an empty warehouse floor, panting heavily. "You're treating it like a heavy iron shield you have to pick up and hold with both hands."
Rion wiped the sweat from his forehead, his breath ragged. "That’s what it feels like! When that hound attacked me, it felt like holding a concrete slab over my head."
"That’s because you panicked and threw your entire energy pool into a single point," Ruyi analyzed calmly. She stooped down, picking up a jagged piece of loose concrete from the cracked floor. "Don't build a fortress when you only need an umbrella."
Without warning, she flicked her wrist, tossing the concrete piece straight at his face.
Rion flinched instinctively, raising an arm.
CLANG.
A tiny, paper-thin sheet of shimmering, invisible force materialized two inches from his nose. The concrete chunk bounced off with a sharp ping and clattered to the dirt.
Rion blinked, staring wide-eyed at the empty air. "Wait... that didn't drain me at all."
"Because you didn't manifest a wall," Ruyi explained, stepping toward him. "You manifested a patch. Scale it down. Control the surface area. If an attack is small, your shield should be small. The denser and more localized you make it, the less stamina it drains."
Rion stared down at his hands, his eyes glowing with sudden understanding. "How do you know all this? Is your ability like mine?"
Ruyi offered him a cool, unbothered look. "I watch the news. And I have common sense."
Rion let out a dry, breathy laugh, though deep down, he knew better. He had seen the way she handled the responders at the botanical gardens, the impossibly calm way she moved through the mist, and the cautious respect in Officer Mark’s eyes when he looked at her. His sister wasn't just smart—she was dangerous.
But if she wanted to pretend to be a simple, non-awakened civilian, he was more than happy to play along with the lie.
"Try it again," Ruyi instructed, picking up three small pebbles from the ground. "And this time... don't flinch."
For two straight hours, they practiced. By the time the sun began to sink below the horizon, painting the warehouse in long orange shadows, Rion could manifest a localized, palm-sized barrier in a fraction of a second, deflecting incoming debris without breaking a sweat. He was even learning to hide his energy signal, dampening the shimmering ripple of his shield until it was completely invisible to the naked eye.
They were building their own safety net—quietly, stubbornly, far away from the Guild's watchful eyes.