The classroom looked like someone had summoned a boardroom out of an ancient cult’s IPO.
It reeked of old money and older magic: vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows bleeding light in all the wrong colours, blackwood desks polished to a shine that suggested at least three generations of overachievers had cried on them. Students scribbled furiously while the instructor droned in a voice pitched somewhere between a threat and a bedtime story. Every so often a flare of magic sparked from one of the desks, only to be smothered beneath frantic coughs or a hissed, “Shut up, you’ll get us hexed.”
And then, without warning, reality gave up.
A jagged tear ripped through the middle of the room like space itself had been outvoted. Light and colour spilled through in ways physics had very much not signed off on, and through that existential paper shredder stumbled Aster Elchen, looking like he’d just lost a bar fight with God.
He landed in the middle of the classroom like an unpaid invoice.
Behind him came something worse.
Aerathena.
Her presence hit the room like divine debt collection. The air buckled. The floor cracked and time itself seemed to flinch. Students froze mid-breath. A few collapsed entirely, clawing at their collars like the room had been vacuum-sealed. One poor soul vomited into what looked like an enchanted lunch tin.
The teacher, thin and severe and built like a moral opinion given human form, somehow remained standing. Barely. His jaw locked in academic defiance while his knees trembled like a tuning fork in an earthquake.
“Lady Thena,” he rasped, somehow managing to sound both reverent and one dropped heartbeat away from organ failure. “How may we serve the Sun Sovereign?”
Headmaster Ndlovu stepped casually out from behind her while drinking a cup of tea.
With a flick of his wrist, the pressure vanished as though it had never existed. The room didn’t breathe a sigh of relief so much as collapse in unison. Students wheezed, cried, or lay where they’d fallen reevaluating every decision that had led them here.
Ndlovu glanced around lazily.
“Hm,” he murmured.
His gaze drifted across the room once. Twice. Then settled on a blond girl with glasses sitting in the exact position that indicated class valedictorian, or future tyrant.
He pointed at her with his teacup.
“You,” he said.
The girl shot to her feet so fast her chair nearly went over.
“Yes, Headmaster?”
Ndlovu tilted his head toward Aster, who was still trying to remember what dignity looked like.
“This boy is about to make several extremely poor decisions in rapid succession.”
Aster frowned. “In my defense—”
“Denied.”
Ndlovu sipped his tea and continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
“You are now responsible for reducing his casualty rate.”
The girl blinked.
“…Excuse me?”
“Orientation,” Ndlovu clarified. “Registration. Basic survival. Explain to him why licking unidentified artefacts is frowned upon.”
“I wasn’t planning to—”
“You will.”
Aerathena closed her eyes briefly, like someone enduring a headache old enough to vote.
The Professor finally found enough of his spine to bow stiffly. “Headmaster,” he said carefully, “may I ask why Ms. Bramble specifically?”
Ndlovu took another sip.
“No.”
Silence.
Then the old man’s eyes narrowed slightly at something only he could see.
“Hm,” he murmured.
The Loom-thread bracelet around his wrist clicked softly.
“Yes,” he muttered to himself. “That should delay the rooftop incident.”
Xiou went rigid. “...the what incident?”
Ndlovu blinked at him.
Then stepped backward through the still-open portal.
Aerathena gave Aster one final look—sharp, assessing, and irritatingly close to sympathetic.
“You’ll adapt,” she promises.
Then she vanished after him.
The portal snapped shut.
Silence crashed into the room.
Aster stood there for a long beat, trying to process the fact that he’d just been deposited into the middle of a classroom full of strangers like forgotten laundry. Thirty pairs of eyes stared at him with the morbid fascination usually reserved for car crashes and public breakups.
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“Your name?” TheProfessor asked.
Aster swallowed. “Aster,” he managed. His voice cracked halfway through, because apparently the universe wasn’t done humiliating him yet. “Aster Elchen.”
The professor’s eyes narrowed, filing that away in whatever internal cabinet he kept labelled Hazardous Materials.
“Mr. Elchen. I am Professor Xiou. You are late, underprepared, and were escorted into my classroom by a divine-class anomaly.”
That was one way of putting it.
Xiou turned to the blond girl Ndlovu had singled out.
“Ms. Bramble. You’re cleared of classes for the remainder of the day. Escort Mr. Elchen to Initiate Registration. See that he is processed and oriented without mishap.”
The girl smiled like she’d just been handed a challenge.
“Hi! I’m Ellena Bramble,” she said, appearing in front of Aster with alarming speed and seizing his arm before he could protest. “But my friends call me Lena. You should too.”
Before he could reply, object, or even properly register the smell of lavender and overconfidence, she yanked him out into the hallway like a misbehaving toddler being removed from a grocery store.
The corridor beyond was enormous.
Not grand in the tasteful rich-person sense. Grand in the way certain institutions were built specifically to remind everyone inside them of their own irrelevance. Dark marble walls gleamed beneath veins of gold that pulsed faintly, as if the building had a circulatory system.
He barely had enough time to gape at it, as Lena set a pace somewhere between urgent meeting and Amazon fulfilment centre, dragging him by the wrist while talking at a speed normally associated with auctioneers and mild disasters. Aster stumbled after her with his head on a swivel, each new architectural monstrosity threatening to finish off what remained of his sanity.
Above them, one of the floating signs shifted through languages—Zulu, Xhosa, Swahili, Afrikaans, then finally English.
Dual Cultivation between faculty and students is strictly prohibited. Approved Dual Partners may be assigned at Admin Office B-4.
Aster’s mouth opened. Closed.
He squinted at it.
Dual cultivation? Isn’t that… Before he can finish the thought, Lena is already yankimg him past it.
They pass another sign.
All initiates are reminded: Do not attempt to milk the Dawn Serpents. Yes, even during mating season.
Aster stares at it. “Okay. I have questions.”
“How do you know Lady Thena?” Lena asks, ignoring his comment. Her voice is loud and pointed, like she’s already asked this more than once and is beginning to mentally file him under ‘dropped on his head as an infant.’
Aster, currently distracted by a group of students gathered around what looked suspiciously like a glowing egg, barely registers her question.
He barely manages the words: “She helped me…”
The students were doing synchronized breathing exercises with the kind of intensity normally reserved for bomb disposal or tax audits. Whatever was inside apparently required yoga.
“Helped you?” Lena asked, still walking. “Helped you with what, exactly?”
When the egg finally cracked, the entire group erupted into cheers like someone had just scored the winning goal in a cup final.
Aster tore his attention away long enough to answer. “From being executed.”
Lena stopped so abruptly he nearly walked into her.
“Executed?” she repeated. “Executed for what?”
Before he could answer, a floating fish—a bright purple thing with gold fins—shot across the hallway and smacked him in the temple hard enough to make him flinch.
“NOPE.”
He swatted it away on instinct.
“Don’t strike the courier fish,” Lena sighed, pressing fingers to the bridge of her nose. “They hold grudges.”
“Why is that a sentence people have to say here?” Aster muttered, rubbing his head.
The fish hovered a short distance away, visibly offended. Then, with a smug little pop, it spat a scroll into Aster’s chest.
The label read:
You may already be eligible for a Rank Increase! Click to find out!
Then it zips away to terrorize its next victim.
Lena’s eye twitches as Aster turns the scroll over, trying to work out where exactly one is meant to click.
“Executed,” she repeated. “For. What?”
Aster shrugged. “For having a bug in me.”
Lena’s mouth actually fell open.
She closed it. Opened it again. Closed it a second time. Then something in her expression shifted. The brightness dimmed. Her smile tightened. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on the careful, exaggerated patience normally reserved for toddlers, concussion victims, and men who had just admitted to investing in meme-coins after being asked about retirement.
“…Why would they want to execute you for being host to a bug?”
Aster blinked.
A horrible possibility dawned on him.
“…Do lots of people have bugs in them here?”
Lena stared at him.
“Here?”
He makes a vague, helpless gesture at everything—the walls, the columns, the floating fish now chasing a fleeing student down the hallway. “You know. The Astral Plane.”
Lena inhaled slowly through her nose, clearly trying to decide whether murder would complicate her schedule.
“It depends,” she said at last. “Some cultivators use insects. The Rhenus family cultivates with an Ember Hornet Queen. The Soqwe family uses an Emerald Thunder Beetle. But—”
She kept talking.
Aster, unfortunately, had stopped listening.
Three stories above them, a stained-glass window had captured his full attention. Its panels shifted like living dioramas. One panel depicts a battle. Another—definitely not a battle. An orgy, maybe? The third—
Aster blinked.
Is that… a snake… giving birth to a fully armoured man? While winking?
Why is it smiling like that?
Why does he feel personally implicated?
Lena snaps her fingers in front of his face, trying to get his attention, oblivious to the existential crisis Aster is having about the snake thing.
“Focus. I said nobody gets executed just for having a little bug friend. So what bug would make them want to kill you?”
Still half trapped in a moral dispute with the smug birthing snake, Aster answered automatically.
“Oh. A Void Wyrm.”
Lena went white.
“A Void Wyrm?” she whispered.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “But it’s sealed. Mostly. So, you know. Fine now. Ish.”
She took an actual step away from him.
“You have no idea what that means, do you?”
“Not really,” Aster admitted. “I’ve only been doing this”—he gestured vaguely to the floating school, murder fish, and suspiciously fertile stained glass—“for like two weeks.”
Lena’s jaw drops. “Two weeks?! And you, Void Wyrm, you got saved by Lady Thena—” She cut herself off and stared at him like her brain was rebooting around a fatal error.
“Oh my stars,” she mutters. “I thought you were… like… not all there or something. That they were making me babysit Aerothena’s slow cousin.”
Aster’s lips twitch. “Glad we’re clarifying that. Nope. Not stupid. Just catastrophically uninformed while making life-threatening mistakes at high velocity.”
A startled laugh escaped her—more disbelief than amusement—but it faded almost immediately.
“A friend of mine…” she said softly. “She had a Void Wyrm. Class D infection.”
Aster already knew where this was going. His stomach tightened anyway.
“Her family was poor. Barely enough Faith stored to last two years. Barely enough of a threat—so they were given a choice. Die together or execute her early and spare the rest. They chose to go together. One by one they passed, until she finally fell into a coma. Then the officials came...”
She swallowed.
“Standard protocol. It’s not even rare. Void Wyrms don’t get cured….”
Guilt slid down Aster’s spine.
All at once the weight of what Matter had done hit him—not just saving him, but cheating a system monstrous enough to have devoured countless others before him.
And somewhere out there, other people were still being fed into the same machine.
The hallway seemed quieter after that, even with another courier fish shrieking past overhead.
Lena exhaled shakily, then straightened.
“Right,” she said, forcibly dragging some brightness back into her voice. “I’m showing you the portal system next, newbie. Try not to freak out. It doesn’t bite.”
Aster gave her a flat look. “That’s probably what they said about the Dawn Serpents too.”
To his surprise, Lena snorted.
“Okay,” she says. “Maybe you’re not completely hopeless.”