"Once he finishes his task," Inteja said, her eyes never leaving Zelaine's, "he will be your sparring partner."
She snapped her fingers. Thin small vicious lasers lanced out.
Zelaine threw up her barrier in the same breath. The translucent barrier absorbed the beams, its sheen glowing briefly at each point of contact.
"He'll die if he fights me," Zelaine said. "You know that."
"Only if you use your trump cards." Inteja's voice was even, almost detached. "I want you to train him in my stead. I will be too busy at work to do it myself."
The training continued in bursts after that.
Lasers met barriers, barriers cracked and reformed, Inteja never eased the pressure.
Zelaine spoke again mid-deflection. "He's been in there for ten months already. You twisted the task, didn't you."
The lasers stopped.
Inteja's hand dropped to her side.
"Are you accusing me of trying to kill my own son." The words came out rough, scraped raw at the edges.
"No." Zelaine let her barrier flicker out. "If anything you are obsessed with him. You were about to tear me apart in pieces, someone who was supposed to inherit your legacy and your Yaicraft."
"That is because you went overboard," Inteja said. "I understand the sin of lust drove you to it, but you hurt him nonetheless."
"Yet I forgave you, gave you more chances to make up for it, and you did that brilliantly. I will give you that."
"You told me to code that skill," Zelaine said, her voice dropping. "You knew the process. You knew what it would do to him, and you still made me go through with it, Master."
Inteja looked at her and said nothing.
The silence stretched out for some moment between them.
Then, Inteja's voice continued:
"If you are that worried about him, go check."
****
'Where am I. What am I doing.'
The thoughts formed and drifted away like smoke, leaving nothing behind them.
There was no pain. No pleasure either.
Just an endless stretch of emptiness in every direction, up and down and sideways and inward and outward, with no gravity to anchor him and novisible destination to aim for.
Was he lost. Was he safe.
He genuinely did not know.
He had entered the Yai cave to complete the Immovable Door. To wait, to align, to let the pressures equalize until the portal opened on its own terms.
That had been the task. That had been the whole of it.
Instead the world had come apart around him and deposited him here.
He knew he was not in void as the place was not entirely empty.
Bright colors bled through the darkness the way ink bleeds through wet paper.
Violent crimsons bleeding into electric blues, venomous greens twisting through molten golds, all of it pulsing and shifting without any pattern he could identify, painting the emptiness in colors that hurt to look at directly but were impossible to look away from.
He screamed.
The sound left his throat raw and desperate and died the instant it left his mouth.
The colors rolled on around him.
'Anything I can do.'
He flailed, kicked. Tried to swim through the streams.
His limbs moved exactly as he told them to and he swam through it but led to nowhere beneficial at all.
The colors parted around him and closed behind him and kept moving, endless and utterly unbothered by his presence.
His mind felt deafened. The only voice left in it was his own, turning the same thoughts over and over in frantic circles.
'Is this actually part of the task.'
It felt less like cultivation and more like the opening of a cosmic horror story.
How much time had passed.
Hours. Days. Maybe months.
He had no way to know.
And yet through all of it one thing remained perfectly, uncomfortably clear.
This was the most frightening place he had ever been.
Which made no rational sense.
What was frightening about colors.
About floating in a place with no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no death.
He could live here indefinitely if it came to that.
Immortal in the most literal sense. No material needs and no ending waiting for him anywhere on the horizon.
So why did every part of him want to claw his way out with his bare hands.
The questions kept arriving and stacking up inside his skull, each one heavier than the one before it.
Why does endlessness feel like drowning.
Why do the colors look like they are watching me.
And the quietest one, the one that arrived last and settled deepest:
'What if the portal never opens. What if the blockage was never meant to be removed at all.'
He floated for what felt like forever.
Then, unbidden, his mother's voice surfaced somewhere in the back of his mind. Calm and precise the way it always was when she was explaining something.
"This Yai circle will act as a gate. It will send your consciousness to the place where your task can be carried out."
She had paused there, the way she sometimes did when deciding how much truth was actually useful.
"However, you might get lost in the world of imaginary space. If that happens, your only choice is to wait. It will not be that long."
She had kept her eyes on his the whole time.
"Use your Yai to feel the discontinuity of space around you. If you find yourself in such a place, that is exactly where you are supposed to be. After that, stay. Wait. Try to align the pressures. If you succeed, a portal will open on its own."
That had been the full condition, laid out plainly, simple on the surface and unreasonably vague.
So he floated. And floated. Drifting through the color with his Yai spread thin in every direction, searching for something, anything, that felt wrong in a way that was different from everything else already being wrong.
'How am I supposed to feel a discontinuity in a place like thid, am I some kind of geometer.'
'How do I align pressures when there is nothing solid to push against.'
The questions turned over in his mind slowly, calm but relentless.
He understood the nature of skill acquisition well enough by now. It was never easy and it was never quick.
Years of obsessive coding, brutal tasks designed to be unreasonable on purpose because the system didn't reward people who was not willing to sacrifice and presevere.
This was just another gatekeeper standing between him and something he needed. Survive it and move forward. Fail and stay exactly where he was.
Then something changed.
A thin trail of magenta smoke drifted into view ahead of him, lazy and luminous against the churning backdrop of color, moving through the dimension of colour.
He watched it.
It moved steadily forward, and then, without any obvious reason, it stopped.
Halfway along its path the smoke simply stopped. The two ends hung in the void with a perfect invisible gap between them, as though someone had taken scissors and cutted a rope, seperating them.
'How am I feeling the warping of space between the end.'
Wormhole-like distortions shimmered at the edges.
Atiya's breath caught.
He extended his hand and summoned his Yai.
And pulled.
Not toward the magenta trail. Toward the cut. Toward the gap between the two severed ends.
His yai reacted to him as he drifted closer, drawn the way iron gets drawn to a magnet.
'This has to be it.'
He exhaled slowly and let himself hang in the weightless nothing.
'I will assume this is the discontinuity.'
Now came the part his mother had not explained. Staying here. Feeling it.
Aligning whatever invisible pressures existed in this fractured pocket of imaginary space, and then waiting for the portal to decide it was ready to exist.
'How do I align pressures I cannot see or touch.'
The question turned over in his mind without going anywhere useful.
His mother had held the full explanation back deliberately, not out of cruelty but because she wanted him to arrive at the understanding himself.
He didn't resent her for it. He understood the logic well enough.
So he was left with nothing to work with.
So he did the only thing left to do.
He waited.
And waited.
Doubt arrived quietly and made itself comfortable.
'What if this wasn't the discontinuity at all.'
What if he had mistaken a random cut for the real fracture.
What if the moment to act had already passed while he was floating around being confused and second-guessing everything.
What if he was simply going to drift here until his mind came apart at the seams, surrounded by beautiful meaningless color forever.
So many questions with nowhere to land.
"Fuck it," he muttered.
The strange thing was that the words carried no real impatience behind them.
Beneath the surface frustration something else had settled in, deep and unnatural and almost serene. He turned that over too, puzzled by it.
Why was he calm.
Why.
Then, without any warning at all, a violent current of color came rushing toward him.
A roaring torrent of swirling hues, thick and unstoppable, hurtling directly through the path of the severed magenta smoke.
Atiya saw it coming and kicked upward, pulling himself out of its path just in time.
The stream blasted through beneath him, slicing exactly through the gap between the smoke's cut ends. Whatever passed for air in this place vibrated with the pressure of it.
"Pressure," he whispered. "The pressure of the stream."
He didn't think about it any further than that.
He dove.
He plunged straight down into the heart of the torrent and the cold took him immediately, wrapping around him like a shroud, liquid light that was suffocating and alive at the same time. He couldn't see anything.
The colors overwhelmed every sense he had and left him with nothing tired mind instinct of him to rely on.
The old bite marks on his hands found him first. Then the faint cut on his neck.
Unknown particles seeped into his body and ignited like acid.
He ignored it and pushed deeper.
He didn't understand what he was doing. He only understood that he had to hold on.
He choked and was feeling himself suffcocated almost to death.
A restlessness clawed at the inside of his chest, the stream pressing against his lungs.
His consciousness flickered at the edges, beginning to fray.
The urge rose anyway, suicidal and irrational, to open his mouth and breathe in deeply and end the burning. His muscles spasmed.
His body screamed for oxygen that had never existed here.
And then his head broke the surface.
He gasped. Coughed violently, dragging in breath after ragged breath, his whole body shaking with it.
Above him, impossibly, the two severed ends of the magenta smoke drifted back toward each other and reconnected.
A portal bloomed from the colorful water below, its edges shimmering and stable and real in a way nothing else here had been.
Then a voice spoke. Not from any direction in particular. Not from anyone standing nearby.
It was his own voice, older and steadier, coming from somewhere inside and outside at the same time.
"You have completed the trial. You have been assessed."
"The discontinuity was not a place. It was a gap between forces. The severed smoke and the moving current. Pressure alone could not close it. Only a consciousness capable of enduring both sides, stillness and motion, absence and presence, could serve as the bridge."
"You did not fight the stream. You became its container. You let it fill you, and in doing so, equalized what was broken."
"Skill: Portal Creation acquired."
A pause settled over everything, heavy with something that felt almost like pride.
"Nothing, not even fate, dictates your future. Live well, boy born during Heaven's Hell."