A few days later, Soren stood by his dorm window with one hand braced against the frame, looking out across the academy grounds while the darkness stared blankly back.
At this hour, Stellaris looked almost too calm.
Mana lamps cast their pale light over the paths below, turning the stone walkways into quiet silver lines between dormitories, lecture halls, and trimmed gardens.
The academy buildings rose beyond them in still silhouettes, dark and self-contained, as though nothing in this place had ever gone wrong, as though nobody inside it had ever bled, panicked, or lain awake replaying a loss until their thoughts turned sour around it.
His head still ached.
Not sharply, or in the way it had after pushing too hard during training, but as a constant, low pressure that sat behind his eyes and never fully went away.
Every time he thought it had eased, something dragged his mind back there again.
The arena.
That golden light.
The way the world had seemed to drag around him while Alex moved through it without effort.
Even now, remembering it made something inside his stomach tighten.
Soren exhaled slowly and let his gaze drop from the window to the coat hanging over the back of his chair.
For a moment he did not move.
His room was quiet, the sort of quiet that should have made it easier to think, easier to rest, easier to wait for morning like a normal person.
Instead, it only made the thoughts louder.
He already knew he was not going to sleep.
There was no point pretending otherwise.
His hand closed around the coat and pulled it from the chair.
'It's time.'
He did not say the words aloud, but they landed in his head with enough weight to matter.
He shrugged the coat on, rolling one shoulder once as the familiar weight settled over him, then crossed to the desk and picked up the book resting there.
Its cover was plain, its title modest, and its appearance so unassuming that it still felt faintly absurd, even now, to think about what it was actually worth.
Lilliana had helped him get it.
That thought sat badly in him no matter how many times he circled it.
He slid the book under one arm, took one last look around the room as though checking for something forgotten, then finally stepped out of the room.
The corridor outside was dim and mostly empty.
A few mana lamps set into the walls kept the darkness from swallowing the hall entirely, but their light was muted, gentle enough that it left the corners in shadow.
The dormitory at night was not silent, not completely; somewhere far off, water ran through pipes, floorboards shifted faintly, and a door shut with soft restraint rather than force.
Ordinary sounds.
Lived-in sounds.
Soren walked past them all with his mind elsewhere.
By the time he reached the stairs and descended to the lower floor, his grip on the book had tightened without him noticing; he loosened it slightly and kept going.
The entrance hall was quiet as well, though not abandoned.
One of the maids was adjusting a vase arrangement near the wall, her movements precise even at this hour, and she looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps.
The moment she noticed who it was, her posture straightened.
"Mr Arden?" she asked softly.
Soren paused.
The maid hesitated for half a beat before continuing, her tone careful in the way servants often were when they wanted to say something that was not quite their place.
"Are you alright? It's rather late."
He was already tense enough that the question landed harder than it should have.
For an instant, the answer that rose in him was too sharp, too tired, too close to the surface.
Instead, he forced it down before it reached his mouth.
"I'm fine," he said.
The maid's eyes flicked briefly to the book under his arm, then back to his face.
She was trying not to stare, but whatever expression he was wearing clearly was not helping his case.
"And were you heading somewhere?" she asked, still polite, though now with a trace of uncertainty, as if she was trying to decide whether stopping him was part of her duties or not.
Soren realised, a beat too late, that he must look strange.
Fully dressed at this hour.
Coat on.
Expression drawn.
Walking out alone with a book under his arm and the sort of air people usually had before doing something either reckless or miserable.
"Just going for a walk," he said.
It sounded thin even to him.
The maid did not call him out on it.
She only lowered her gaze slightly and spoke politely.
"I see." Then, after a brief pause, she added, more gently, "Please be careful."
Something in the phrasing caught him off guard, not because it was unusual, but because it was so simple.
No probing.
No lecture.
No insistence that he explain himself properly.
Just quiet concern from someone who had noticed enough to know he looked wrong.
For a second, guilt pricked at him for no good reason.
He gave a small nod.
"I will. Thank you."
The maid stepped aside, and Soren walked past her toward the doors.
Cold night air met him the moment he stepped outside.
It slipped beneath the collar of his coat and across his face, crisp enough to wake him a little, though not enough to clear the heaviness from his head.
The academy grounds stretched ahead, open and still beneath the lamps, and for a few moments he simply walked without hurrying, boots tapping softly against stone as the dormitory receded behind him.
Once he was far enough away, he let out a breath he hadn't realised he had been holding.
That had been close to unpleasant.
Not because the maid had done anything wrong, but because he had.
He was wound too tightly, too little sleep and too many thoughts piled on top of each other until even a polite question felt like fingers pressing against a bruise.
A few days ago he probably would have handled it more cleanly.
Tonight, he had barely managed not to snap.
He rubbed at his temple with his free hand and kept walking.
The paths were mostly empty, save for the occasional distant figure crossing from one building to another, all of them too far away to bother him.
That suited him.
He did not want conversation, did not want to be recognised, and definitely did not want anyone asking him where he was going.
The answer to that would have been difficult to explain.
Because even now, as he crossed the sleeping academy with a coat on his shoulders and a stolen-not-stolen future quest item tucked beneath his arm, part of him still felt the absurdity of it.
He was heading for a hidden area concealed beneath the academy cemetery.
Because a memory from an old playthrough had handed him a clue at exactly the moment he was desperate enough to chase one.
Because he needed strength.
Not in the vague way people always said they needed to get stronger, and not as a comfortable goal for someday, but with the ugly urgency of someone who had seen the shape of the wall in front of him and understood, maybe too clearly, that clawing upward by inches would not be enough forever.
He had made progress.
That was the infuriating part.
Lilliana had said so.
Carlen's lesson had mattered.
He had forced Alex to take him seriously for a while, had adapted on the fly, had done things he should not have been able to do yet.
And it still had not been enough.
The memory of gold bled briefly through his head again, and he shut it down before it could settle.
A little while later, he finally reached his destination.
Stellaris Cemetery.
Iron bars framed the entrance, black against the lamp-lit grounds beyond, and the graves stretched back in rows of stone and shadow, some neat and pristine, some older and weathered by years of wind and rain.
Lanterns stood at intervals along the path, their light kept low out of respect rather than necessity, leaving long strips of darkness between the headstones.
The academy did not neglect its dead.
That much was obvious at a glance.
Grass had been trimmed.
Fallen leaves had been cleared from the main path.
Even the older markers, faded though they were, did not look abandoned.
There was a solemn order to the place, a quiet that felt different from the rest of the campus, heavier without being oppressive.
His memories had brought him here.
This was where the second hidden piece had been.
Soren stood at the gate for a few moments, looking through the bars into the cemetery proper while the cold sank a little deeper into his hands.
His fingers were trembling, but not from fear.
Fatigue sat in him too deeply for that, woven through his muscles, his thoughts, and the space behind his eyes.
Even so, when he finally stepped forward and passed inside, his pace did not falter.
He kept to the edges where he could and moved between the graves with deliberate care, his attention flicking constantly between the path ahead and the spaces between the headstones.
There were patrols here.
The academy took the dignity of the dead seriously, and being found digging in one of its graveyards at night was not an experience he had any desire to collect.
So he watched.
He listened.
Whenever the faint glow of a lantern shifted too close in the distance, he paused and waited, half-hidden by stone and shadow until the light moved on again.
Once, he caught the soft crunch of footsteps on gravel and stayed perfectly still until the sound receded.
Only then did he move again.
Eventually he stopped in front of a particular grave.
Its headstone was older than the ones around it, the lettering softened by time and weather until it was difficult to read at a glance.
Nothing about it would have stood out to anyone who had not known what they were looking for.
It was simply one grave among many, one old marker among rows of dead students and forgotten names.
To Soren, it was a fixed point.
A memory trigger.
This was the one.
He let out a slow breath and summoned his inventory.
The translucent window shimmered into being before him, pale and familiar in the dark.
He reached in and pulled out a shovel, the metal cold against his palm, then dismissed the window and looked down at the grave in silence for one last second.
Then he began to dig.
The earth was dense.
He felt that almost immediately.
The shovel bit in, but not easily, and each load of soil seemed heavier than the last as he lifted and threw it aside.
The rhythm settled quickly into something ugly and repetitive, drive down, brace, lever up, lift, throw, repeat, until his shoulders began to burn and the ache in his arms deepened into something meaner.
He kept going.
Dirt piled beside the headstone in dark, uneven mounds.
The hole deepened by inches rather than anything satisfying.
Sweat gathered under his collar despite the cold, then slid down the back of his neck, and before long, his hands were stinging where the handle rubbed against skin already too worn down from the past week.
It was slow, miserable work.
Strenuous in a way fighting was not.
In a fight, pain came with urgency, with sharp decisions and immediate consequences.
This was just labour, heavy and thankless, the sort that dragged on until fatigue stopped feeling dramatic and became simple fact.
His muscles protested every movement.
His breathing roughened.
Once or twice he had to stop for a moment just to flex his fingers and tighten them again around the handle.
Still, he did not stop for long.
He needed what was down there.
By the time the shovel struck something solid, he was breathing hard enough that the sound of it seemed too loud in the silent cemetery.
Soren stilled.
Then he exhaled, low and tired, and leaned slightly on the shovel while he wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist.
"Finally," he muttered.
The word came out rough.
He crouched and brushed away some of the loosened earth, exposing not the lid of a coffin, but a wooden structure set cleanly beneath the soil, more like a hatch than any burial box.
That matched what he remembered.
Even so, seeing it there beneath his own hands made something in his chest tighten.
He stored the shovel back in his inventory and reached down instead.
The hatch lifted with a faint resistance, old wood shifting after years in place, and beneath it there was no body.
Only a staircase.
It vanished into darkness below, narrow stone steps descending into the earth as if the grave had been built to hide an entrance rather than a corpse.
Soren's expression hardened slightly.
He summoned his handaxe into one hand, feeling its familiar weight settle against his palm and wrist, then cast [Ignition] with the other.
A small flame bloomed above his hand, steady rather than dramatic, just enough to push back the dark a little and paint the stairwell in moving orange light.
Then, without rushing, he began to descend.
The air changed almost at once.
It grew cooler the deeper he went, not with the clean cold of the night above, but with the damp stillness of earth and enclosed stone.
The narrow staircase seemed to pull the warmth from his skin one step at a time, and the smell shifted as well, soil, old wood, and something dry beneath both, like a place sealed too long and only rarely disturbed.
His footsteps echoed more than they should have.
Each one came back to him from the walls, turning a simple descent into a reminder that he was going somewhere enclosed, somewhere hidden, somewhere that would become a very bad place to panic if things went wrong.
Tension clamped around him gradually rather than all at once.
Even with the firelight, the darkness below felt dense.
It pressed close to the edges of the light, waiting just beyond it.
The walls were rough in places, damp in others, and their shadows shifted whenever the flame moved in his hand.
The whole stairwell felt like a throat swallowing him deeper.
Soren kept his pace measured.
He was desperate, not stupid.
The urge to hurry was there, threaded through his exhaustion and his frustration, because every extra second spent creeping downward felt like another second spent still being too weak, still being behind, still chasing strength through old clues and hidden places instead of simply being able to stand on his own.
But running blindly into an area with enemies because he was upset with himself would be idiotic, and he knew it.
So he moved carefully, eyes trained ahead, axe ready, and flame steady.
At the bottom of the staircase stood a stone door.
Tall.
Heavy.
Old.
Its surface was etched with lines that had probably once been decorative, though time had worn them down until they were little more than faint grooves in the rock.
Even like that, the sight of it pulled a quiet breath from him.
It was still here.
Still the same.
For the first time since entering the graveyard, a small measure of relief slipped through the pressure in his chest.
With how much had already changed from what he remembered, he had not been fully certain this place would still obey the same logic.
The hidden route existed, yes, but that did not guarantee the triggers had remained intact.
Plenty already had gone wrong in ways the game never accounted for.
This, at least, seemed unchanged.
He hooked the handaxe at his belt long enough to free both hands, then brought the book out from under his arm and held it properly.
Its plain cover looked almost dull in the weak firelight.
That dullness only made the absurdity of its value feel sharper.
This was the help he had asked Lilliana for.
Not training, or comfort, or even reassurance.
A book he should not have had access to yet, a book that under normal circumstances would only come into the protagonist's hands in the second semester, after a quest line tied to the principal's office and a reward structure nobody in their right mind was supposed to bypass.
Yet he had bypassed it anyway with Lilliana's help.
The memory came back to him with uncomfortable clarity, her hesitant expression, the way concern had sat plainly in her eyes even while she handed it over.
— Here… I'm not sure why you need this, but please promise me that you'll give it back in a couple of days, and please… talk to me if something is going on…
'I'm sorry.'
The apology formed in his head with a weariness that did not soften it.
He had used her trust.
There was no cleaner way to phrase it.
He had asked for help while withholding the real reason, had smiled, accepted the book, and given her just enough to work with that she had helped him anyway.
The guilt of that had not faded over the last few days.
If anything, carrying the book here only made it worse.
But guilt did not change what this place contained.
And it certainly did not hand him better options.
Soren stepped closer to the door.
Near its centre, beneath the handles, was a rectangular slot set neatly into the stone.
He stared at it for a moment, the shape confirming what memory had already insisted on, and a thin thread of relief went through him again.
It matched.
The book would fit.
'Thankfully that didn't change.'
He lowered the flame slightly and slid the book into place.
It went in with an exactness that felt almost unnatural, as though both door and text had been made for each other down to the smallest measurement.
His eyes dropped briefly to the title as it settled.
[Crystalised Mana] [By Lunaris Sona]
At a glance, it was only a research text.
Dense page and narrow margins.
A straightforward title that sounded academic enough to bore most people before they even opened it.
But Soren knew what it really was.
Research into a physical form of mana, compiled by one of the greatest geniuses in history.
A woman whose work had outlived her so thoroughly that even fragments of it could reshape fields of magic centuries later.
Lunaris Sona, assistant to the founder of Stellaris Academy, and one of the very few names in the setting whose brilliance had not been exaggerated by legend.
People would have killed for this book.
Not metaphorically, but literally.
If someone sold it in the capital of Fialova, they could buy a mansion near the royal palace with the proceeds and still have enough left over to furnish it lavishly.
Not a respectable house, not a nice estate on the edge of the city, but a mansion right in the heart of the country.
And he had just slotted it into a hidden mechanism beneath a grave.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then the mechanism caught.
A muted internal shift travelled through the door, followed by the deep grind of ancient stone dragging against stone.
The sound rolled through the enclosed space, low and rough, while the door began to move aside at a pace that was almost stately.
Soren's hand was on the axe again before the opening was wide enough to step through.
He took two small steps back instead of one, body tensing automatically as stale air spilt from the crypt beyond.
It smelled of dust, age, and sealed things, not rot exactly, but something adjacent to it, the scent of a place cut off from light and ordinary life for too long.
The flame above his hand flickered once in the shifting air, then steadied again.
When the gap was large enough, he crossed the threshold.
Cold reached him first.
It rose through the soles of his boots from the stone floor, a damp subterranean chill that felt different from the air outside, less alive, less clean.
It climbed into his legs and sat there while the crypt opened around him in fragments of firelight, rough walls, old supports, and shadow pooled in corners where the flame did not quite reach.
Soren took another step in, then another.
His body felt heavy.
That had not changed either.
Too little sleep, too much strain, and too many thoughts grinding against each other without resolution, all of it had settled into him until tiredness no longer felt like a temporary state and more like something built into his bones.
Even now, even standing inside a hidden dungeon because he had chosen action over lying awake and spiralling, the exhaustion came with him.
And with it came memory.
Not the old game memory that had led him here, but the newer ones, sharper and far more unwelcome.
The goblins in Rena Forest.
The frantic, ugly desperation of those early fights.
Training matches where his body had lagged behind what he wanted it to do.
The mock duels.
The back alleys of the city.
Carlen's lesson.
Alex bathed in gold.
Every mistake seemed to surface as he walked, not in neat order, but in the irritating fragments his mind preferred when it wanted to hurt him efficiently.
A hesitation.
A wrong read.
A moment of panic.
A strike landed too slowly.
A spell formed too late.
A chance missed because his body or courage or judgement had failed him by an inch.
He clenched his jaw.
'Don't start.'
The rebuke was quiet, tired, and entirely ineffective.
Because the truth was that he was here precisely because he had started.
Because he could not forget the shape of that duel, could not stop measuring himself against it and finding the gap intolerable.
Lilliana had been right, he knew she had.
He had improved.
He had done well.
He had forced someone monstrously talented to respond in earnest.
None of that changed the wall.
A sound cut across the thought.
Low at first.
A shifting pressure somewhere deeper within the crypt, as though weight was moving where weight had been still for a very long time.
Soren stopped.
The axe came up slightly in his hand.
The flame lifted with his other hand at the same time, his gaze scanning the dark ahead, the corners, the ground, the old structures at the edge of the light.
Then the silence broke properly.
Wood gave way somewhere in the dark with a sharp, violent crack, followed almost immediately by another from a different direction, then another, then several more in quick succession, splintering sounds echoing through the crypt until it was impossible to mistake them for coincidence.
Something inside had just started waking up.
————「❤︎」————