The next morning, the sunlight cut clean and bright through the window like a verdict.
He made his decision before he was fully awake.
No academy today.
The ritual required undisturbed hours and an undivided mind — and he had spent enough time moving cautiously around its edges.
The Black Lexicon’s instructions were clear.
The risks were clear.
Every additional day he waited was another day without power in a world that had already tried to kill him twice.
When Zyla called from the foot of the stairs — “Zayden! It’s seven already, you’ll be late!” — he stayed silent.
She came upstairs.
Her voice rose with the particular dramatic warmth she brought to every expression of concern, the kind that was obviously love wearing the costume of exasperation.
“Zayden Everhart, get up this instant! Don’t make me drag you out of that bed!”
“I’m not well today, Zyla,” he said, keeping his voice steady and tired.
“Very tired. I need to rest. Please leave me be.”
She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, performing outrage with great commitment.
“Now you’re being dramatic. Fine — rest today, but tomorrow you better be completely normal again. I’ll tell Hash.”
Downstairs, Hash asked shortly: “Everything alright?”
Zyla sighed.
“That overly dramatic boy says he’s unwell. Let him sleep.”
A short pause.
“He never takes leave. Let him be.”
The door clicked shut.
Alone at last.
He opened the window.
Morning light spilled across the floor — pale and steady, the sun still climbing toward its peak.
He sat at the edge of the frame, faced it directly, and began.
The ritual was simple in its instruction and brutal in its execution.
Three hours.
Don’t blink.
Don’t look away.
Fifteen minutes in, his eyes burned as though someone had pressed hot coins against them.
The light drove straight through to the back of his skull.
Pain flared in steady, building waves, and beneath it something uglier — doubt.
This is impossible.
This will blind me.
He almost looked away.
Then the words surfaced from memory, written in small script on the back cover of the Black Lexicon:
Believe in your soul and mind.
Accept the Nature.
He stopped pushing.
That was the insight — the one he’d almost missed.
Not endurance.
Not willpower grinding through pain.
Acceptance.
The sun was not an enemy.
It had never been an enemy.
It was warmth, life, guidance, the thing that made growth possible.
Fighting it was the wrong posture entirely.
He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and restarted.
This time he opened himself to the light rather than bracing against it.
Let it be warmth instead of weapon.
Let it move through him.
Like breathing — not forced, just received.
The burning faded to heat.
The heat became presence.
The presence became something he couldn’t name but recognised the way you recognise a familiar voice in the dark.
One hour passed.
Another half.
His body trembled with the accumulated effort.
The heat built to something unbearable — pressing from outside and inside simultaneously, threatening to unravel the careful focus he had built.
The murmurs returned then, rising from some place he couldn’t locate, clawing at the edges of his mind with desperate, wordless urgency.
Something slipped.
A terrifying flash erupted from within him — brighter than the sun itself, fiercer than anything he had produced or intended.
It detonated outward like a dam bursting rather than opening.
Zayden collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
In the suffocating embrace of absolute darkness, a blinding flash tore through the void.
A majestic figure emerged from that radiant storm.
His presence pressed down like the weight of something ancient and immense — threatening to crush Zayden’s spirit beneath it, yet some invisible mercy held him upright, knees locked, heart hammering with violent force.
Cold terror clawed at his insides.
He forced his face neutral, held himself still.
Strange murmurs swirled through his mind — desperate voices demanding something precious from him, something he strained to understand but couldn’t.
The brilliant light dimmed slowly.
The towering figure dissolved into drifting particles.
The whispers faded into silence.
His eyes flew open with a sharp gasp.
He collapsed onto the cold wooden floor near the window, body twitching uncontrollably, sweat soaking through his shirt.
His head turned weakly to one side, vision swimming in the aftermath.
“Zayden! Zayden !!”
Zyla’s voice cracked with pure panic.
Her face hovered above him, drained of colour, eyes wide with terror as tears fell in steady streams she didn’t bother stopping.
She gripped his shoulders and shook him with trembling hands.
“Are you okay?! What happened?! Say something , please!”
He pulled a faint whisper from somewhere.
“I’m… okay. Tried to wake up… fell unconscious. I’m fine now.”
Zyla’s terrified expression slowly fractured.
Relief and leftover fear fought across her face as more tears slipped free.
“I heard a loud crash and ran up here — you were just lying there, so still! I called your name for fifteen minutes, shook you, cried — and you wouldn’t wake up.” Her voice trembled with the full force of it.
“I was so scared, brother. My heart almost stopped. I thought something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.”
A weak but genuine smile touched his lips.
He squeezed her hand gently.
“See? Still breathing. Don’t worry so much.”
Her teary face softened into something warm and unguarded, pure affection shining through the storm.
With her help, he managed to sit on the edge of the bed.
As strength gradually returned, his mind moved with its usual cold precision.
I didn’t die.
I didn’t go blind.
Did the ritual actually succeed?
His gaze drifted instinctively toward the corner of the room near the window.
There, a dark yellow stone rested on the floor, pulsing with a soft, sun-warm glow that seemed to reach into him and settle there, like a ember placed inside the chest.
There it is.
Zyla noticed where he was looking.
“What is it, brother? Why are you staring like that?”
He blinked, registering immediately that she couldn’t see the stone at all.
Relief moved through him, quiet and controlled.
“Nothing important. Just lost in thought.”
She wiped her cheeks, stood, and levelled her best no-argument tone at him.
“Rest properly. I’m bringing food. You scared me enough for one lifetime today.”
Alone, he reached out and lifted the stone.
It was warm in his palm.
Alive.
It pulsed against his skin with a slow, steady rhythm that felt uncomfortably like a heartbeat that wasn’t his own.
He retrieved the Black Lexicon.
The black pen materialised the moment he opened the cover.
He wrote with focused precision:
I completed the ritual and gained the Ligtirs badge in the form of a stone.
How do I use it?
What powers have I gained?
The page shimmered.
Words rearranged themselves.
Oh?
You actually finished it.
Impressive talent.
This badge belongs to the Ligtirs element — Order 9: Glow.
It grants the ability to manipulate light density: illuminate the deepest darkness; fire rapid light beams that burn flesh (stronger with training — eventually acting as lethal projectiles, limited by your stamina); and unleash disorienting flashbangs.
You are now immune to sunlight’s glare and can stare directly at the sun without harm.
Your thinking speed and reaction time have slightly increased.
In time… you may become light itself.
Laser-like beams.
Faster mind.
Sharper reflexes.
He wrote again: *How do I carry or store the stone?*
In early Orders, it remains a physical badge.
In higher Orders, it binds to your body and soul.
He pondered that quietly, then asked for details on the next Orders.
The book demanded a drop of blood.
He pressed his fingertip to the page and let it fall.
The book trembled, absorbed it, then replied in its usual uncharitable tone:
It’s only on you, bastard.
I won’t spoon-feed everything — discover the rest yourself.
A pause.
Then, teasingly: Any secrets to share?
He froze.
Does it know what I am?
He ran every dangerous scenario through his mind in rapid succession before answering carefully: “I… I’m frightened of the dark.”
Oh, you child, the book replied, clearly amused.
I was just teasing.
How pathetically childish.
Too close.
He exhaled once, slowly.
He then asked the real question he’d been building toward: should he present himself to the Church of Ligitaris and disclose the awakening?
The book’s tone shifted to something grave.
Good place to gather knowledge — but extremely dangerous.
Awakening is one of the Aethernal System’s most closely guarded secrets.
If they suspect any connection to hidden organisations or forbidden research, they will eliminate you without hesitation or ceremony.
He spent the rest of the day planning in careful silence.
Weighing every question he might be asked, every scenario that could emerge, every word he might need to say.
Risks measured against rewards.
His life measured against answers.
The math, in the end, was not particularly difficult.
I need to know this world.
I need power to survive long enough to know this world.
And the church is the fastest path to both.
So tomorrow, I walk through their door.
And I do it on my terms.
He closed the Lexicon and sat for a long time in the quiet, turning the warm stone over in his hand, watching the soft golden light it threw across the ceiling.
Outside, the city moved through its evening routines, entirely unaware that something had just quietly, irrevocably shifted in one small room above a modest street.
Knowledge is power, but knowledge without understanding can be dangerous.
Theon has begun learning the rules of this world.
The question is whether the rules will remain the same.