“Oh, please, Dylan. Stop acting like hitting Tier 2 turns you into a celestial superstar overnight,” snorted Marcus, one of the classmates who had already celebrated his eighteenth birthday a couple of months prior.
To prove his point, Marcus cleared a small space on the table, moving his empty lunch tray aside.
He took a deep breath, aligning his throat to the clean phonetic structure of the Base Chord, and hummed a single, low-frequency note.
Simultaneously, he pressed his index finger flat against the smooth surface of the table.
Victor’s producer brain instantly recognized the precise kinetic mechanics of Shear and Convergence at play.
Marcus was executing the first foundation scale—the Scale of the Perimeter.
Right before their eyes, a flawless, glowing crimson hexagon materialized in midair, floating exactly three inches above the wooden table.
It was perfectly crisp, completely sharp, and completely static.
Unlike the blurry, fluctuating geometric messes a Tier 1.5 teenager would project, Marcus held the sharp holographic outline completely motionless for a solid ten seconds before cutting his frequency and letting the light anomaly vanish into thin air.
“See? Stable as a rock,” Marcus said, leaning back with a smug, satisfied grin.
Dylan stared at the empty space where the hexagon had just been, his jaw practically dropping to his chest as pure, unadulterated envy flashed across his hazel eyes.
“Man… that is so clean! My shapes still look like a melting candle if I try to hold them for more than three seconds! Come on, two weeks cannot pass fast enough!”
The entire table burst into a collective wave of laughter at Dylan’s dramatic, heartbroken expression.
Even Victor couldn’t help but let out a quiet, sarcastic snort, watching the towering athlete look completely defeated by a simple geometric outline.
Eventually, the lunch rush began to clear out.
When they finally finished eating, there was still a solid half-hour remaining before their afternoon History block officially commenced.
“Hey, we still have thirty minutes,” Dylan suggested, his baseline excitement instantly bouncing right back to full capacity as he slung his arm over Victor’s shoulder.
“Let’s head over to the campus auditorium! A bunch of underclassmen from the second year and below are supposed to be running full-scale rehearsals for the City’s Inter-School Music Competition today. The visual manifestations are rumored to be absolutely insane.”
The rest of the classmates immediately voiced their enthusiastic agreement, eager to see the younger talent show off their skills.
In the Federation’s high schools, all competitive tournaments were strictly reserved for underclassmen.
Once students entered their third and final year, they began turning eighteen and hitting their maturity milestones, causing their baseline skill and resonant capabilities to skyrocket.
To maintain absolute fairness, third-years were universally barred from entering any inter-school competitions; their sole mandate was to aggressively focus on surviving the grueling graduation exams and passing the college entrance placement tests.
Victor, however, felt a sudden, sharp panic seize his chest.
Even if it was just the underclassmen performing, the word music competition still triggered a dull, psychological ache deep within his newly unlocked Earth memories, dragging up ghosts of stolen audio credits, predatory corporate elites, and rabid, toxic idol fanbases.
His social battery was already running on absolute fumes, and the last thing he wanted was to subject his ears to a high-volume musical stadium.
“My head is still rattling from that concussion yesterday. I’m going to go find a quiet bench outside and stare at a wall.”
“Oh, no you don’t, Vic!” Dylan laughed as he grabbed Victor’s shoulder like a steel vice and steered Victor toward the auditorium doors before he could even take a single backward step.
“Nurse Brenda said no strenuous exercise, but she never said your ears would fall off if you listened to a good tune. You’re coming with us. Besides, a little acoustic vibration is supposed to be good for internal cellular healing, remember?”
“Damn it, I thought you weren’t paying attention to class.” Victor cursed as he freed himself from his claws and just followed the group.
The group laughed out loud at their interaction; they were already used to it, as Dylan would always shamelessly drag Victor to all kinds of things, and Victor would always grumble and complain.
Victor rolled his ink-black eyes, heavily resigning himself to his fate as he followed the group through the corridor.
He was trapped in an interplanetary civilization completely obsessed with sound, shackled to a best friend with the energy of a golden retriever, and currently marching straight into the one place he wanted to avoid above all else.
There was truly no escaping the musical claws of this world.
The heavy, sound-isolated doors of the campus auditorium swung open, and the sheer scale of the space instantly made itself known.
To Victor’s surprise, they weren’t the only ones who had thought to spend their remaining lunch break here.
A massive chunk of the student body had already packed into the tiered crowd seats, all having the exact same idea to watch their school’s younger representatives practice for the upcoming city tournament.
Dylan nudged Victor down a carpeted aisle, and the group managed to slip into a row of empty seats near the middle section, giving them a clear, unobstructed view of the grand stage.
Up on the stage, a lone second-year girl stood before a microphone stand, singing a popular, sweeping contemporary ballad.
The auditorium was outfitted with state-of-the-art Sound-Imagery Instruments that functioned exactly like a high-end sound amplifier and projector system from Earth.
The machinery took her raw acoustic energy, amplified her singing voice seamlessly across the hall, and magnified the visual manifestations generated by her ability so the entire crowd could see them in crisp detail.
Because she was a second-year underclassman locked into the Tier 1.5 adolescent limbo, the holographic imagery she manifested wasn’t sharp or high-definition.
It entirely lacked the defined lines of a Tier 3 Scholar.
Instead, her music wove a shifting, atmospheric landscape around her—a fluid swirl of deep violet shadows, shimmering silver particles, and the indistinct, soft silhouettes of a weeping willow tree that ebbed and flowed in perfect rhythm with the cadence of her voice.
Yet, as Victor observed the display with his critical producer brain, he noticed something profound about the audience’s reaction.
No one was mocking her.
In the Resonance Federation, society never looked down on an artist simply because of their young age or their low-tier placement.
Art wasn’t strictly dictated by hyper-realistic, defined geometry; true emotional resonance thrived in the abstract.
If a performer possessed a genuine emotional depth, clean vocal technique, and the ability to compose a visually beautiful mood, they could touch anyone’s heart regardless of their biological maturity.
All around the auditorium, rows of students were nodding their heads in genuine approval, quietly analyzing her impressive breath control and pitch stability.
“Her technique is actually pretty solid for a second-year,” Dylan whispered loudly from the seat next to him, his eyes glued to the shifting silver lights floating over the stage.
The final, sweeping cadence of the ballad drifted through the amplified acoustic dampeners, and the shifting violet fog on the stage dissolved back into standard, ambient light.
A warm, appreciative round of applause rippled through the tiered auditorium seats.
Up on the platform, the second-year girl stepped back from the microphone stand, wiping a thin layer of sweat from her forehead.
She didn’t bow.
Instead, she stood perfectly rigid, her eyes locked anxiously onto the front row of the faculty seats, waiting for the feedback of the professor guiding the school’s competition roster.
The auditorium grew completely silent as a middle-aged man with sharp spectacles and a deeply weathered face stood up, holding a digital clipboard.
“Your breath control during the second kinetic shift was exceptional, Miss Lin,” the professor began, his voice carrying the calm, heavy authority of a Tier 4 Specialist.
“Your Shear lines were clean, and your synchronization with the venue’s amplifiers showed high technical proficiency. But your performance was structurally hollow.”
The girl swallowed hard, her shoulders dropping slightly.
“You are executing the notes flawlessly, but you are not putting your actual emotions into the resonance,” the professor explained, his voice echoing clearly through the isolated hall.
“You are singing for the judges’ scoreboards. You are calculating how the audience will react to the silver particles. But the true meaning of music has never been about how massive your stage is, or how much corporate applause you receive. It is about whether the melody can illuminate your own inner heart first.”
Deep in the middle rows of the crowd, Victor’s posture went completely rigid.
His hand, which had been lazily supporting his chin, dropped flat onto his lap.
“Let the written words tell the story, and let the music transport your genuine emotions to touch another’s soul,” the professor continued, stepping closer to the stage apron.
“If your own chest remains cold while you perform, the images you project will never be anything more than empty, artificial light. The outside world—with all of its loud expectations, its superficial glitter, and its rigid rankings—cannot be allowed to interfere and drown out the initial voice in your heart. You must remember why you picked up the instrument in the first place.”
The initial voice.
The phrase slammed into Victor’s consciousness like a physical impact, instantly shattering his calm, sarcastic facade.
Behind his unblinking, ink-black eyes, his freshly unlocked Earth memories began to violently churn.
He saw himself as a young orphan, completely alone in a cold world, clutching a cheap acoustic guitar because the strings were the only things that kept him warm.
He remembered the pure, unadulterated euphoria of his first year in music school, before the corporate elites, before the uncredited ghost-producing shifts, and before a predatory pop idol’s toxic fanbase systematically bled his passion dry until he completely gave up on life.
“Hey, Vic? You okay? Your face looks kind of intense,” Dylan whispered, nudging his elbow with a look of sudden concern.
Victor didn’t answer immediately as a violent tidal wave of past-life memories crashed against his mind, forcing him to clench his fists until his knuckles turned white as he fought to suppress the inner demons of his buried musical passion.
It took every ounce of his cognitive budget to hold the line, but he barely managed to wrestle his features back into a flat mask before turning to Dylan with an unbothered, deadpan expression.
“I’m fine,” he replied, his low-energy drawl completely hiding the psychological warfare raging inside his skull.
“Just realizing how right I was—listening to deep lectures during lunch is definitely making my headache worse.”