I paused to think about it for a second, then stepped aside, waving my hand to let her look at the glowing interface.
Adda stepped up beside the metal cart, her massive arms crossed over her chest. I didn't try to hide the interface. I stepped back and let her read the screen hovering over the Resonance Reader.
She scanned the numbers in silence. I watched her dark eyes narrow as she took in my anomalous Dexterity and Spirit stats, and I saw her jaw tighten when she noticed my massive Energy pool. But it was the Skills section that made her fuzzy, bear-like ears twitch forward.
"Shit," Adda muttered, leaning in to read the floating text. "Well, that's not as bad as I was expecting. But it's definitely not good."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"If your stats were completely maxed out and you had 'Summoned Hero' stamped on your profile, I'd have figured the End Times were here and started looking to retire to my village back home," she said with a dry chuckle. "This? This is an anomaly, but we can work with it."
Her eyes caught on a specific line. "'The Architect's Eye,'" Adda read aloud, her rich baritone voice laced with genuine confusion. "Perceives magic as base-level source code... Noah, what exactly does 'source code' mean?"
I hesitated, scratching the back of my neck as I thought back to the moment I woke up in the smoking crater yesterday.
"When I first crashed into this world, before Thorek even found us, my vision was glitching out," I explained, trying to find the right words. "I got this... notification. It was a floating box of text. It explained that Snow had been exposed to massive amounts of Chakra from the impact, and that the pressure was forcing her to either explode or go into Feralburn."
I gestured vaguely to the empty air in front of my face. "Even right now, I see floating blue screens. Health bars. Numbers. When I look at the magic in this room, I don't just see glowing energy. I see structural lines of data. Code, just slightly underneath everything if I look hard enough. I thought that was just how the System worked for everyone."
Adda stared at me for a long, heavy moment. The only sound in the room was the low hum of the Resonance Reader. She looked down at Snow, who was casually grooming one of her silver-tipped tails, and then looked back up at me.
"Noah," Adda said slowly, as if speaking to a child who had just asked a baffling question. "Nobody sees floating text. The 'System' isn't a machine with a glass screen. It's the Voice of the World. It's a spiritual resonance."
"Wait, you guys don't have menus?" I asked, my stomach dropping slightly as I realized just how unnatural I actually was.
Adda shook her head, leaning her heavy frame against the edge of the metal cart. "For a normal Ascender, the Soul Bond is pure instinct. It's like breathing, or flexing a muscle you never knew you had. We don't read our beasts; we feel them. There are different ways to manifest that power—different variants of Beast Taming—but none of them involve reading 'code' in the air."
She held up a massive, grease-stained hand, ticking off her thick fingers to give me a crash course.
"Every empire utilizes the Bond differently based on their race," Adda explained concisely. "In the South, human Tamers use Aura Manifestation; they draw their beast's soul over their own skin to fight like an ethereal suit of armor. In the North, the Dwarves use Runic Channeling, binding their beast's raw Chakra into their forged armor and hammers. My people, the Beast-Men, use Focal-Augmentation to route that volatile energy through high-tech weaponry. And the Elves use Harmonic Resonance, humming or singing to perfectly sync their spirits with the beasts around them."
She dropped her hand, fixing me with a piercing, calculating stare. "It is a pulse, Noah. A shared heartbeat. If you are literally seeing the world's magic as 'code' that you can read, pause, and manipulate... that isn't a normal Tamer ability. That is something entirely unique to you."
"He is fairly useful as a manservant," Snow projected into the room, her telepathic voice carrying a distinct tone of smug superiority, "but only for me. It is a very exclusive arrangement."
Adda ignored the cat, keeping her intense focus entirely on me. "Your World Walker title isn't just a neat piece of trivia, kid. If your 'Architect's Eye' lets you see the literal blueprints of our magic... you aren't just an Ascender. You could be a great pillar of Aetheria."
She let out a heavy sigh, her Guild Master persona taking back over. "I'll put you in the Guild registry as a Silver-Rank candidate because of your raw potential. But because I can tell just by looking at you that you probably don't know which end of a sword is the pointy one, I'll have you on probation. We'll get you basic training and let you figure out how to actually use these abilities and how you and your bond fight together."
She paused, her dark eyes lingering on the top of my profile one last time. "But that right there... your Talent. Aetheric Synthesis. Now that is rare. That'll change things for you if you master it. Not everyone has a true Talent, and those who do usually end up as elites. But enough about that."
She waved her massive hand, dismissing the screen. "Follow me. I owe you a trip to the Archives, but the dusty old fool of an Elf in charge down there has locked it up for 'research' again," she grumbled with clear distaste.
Adda led me into a quieter side room off the main training area, and we sat down on a heavy wooden bench. Snow hopped gracefully onto my lap, and I began brushing her silver-tipped fur out of habit.
"Let me tell you the true story of our world," Adda said. She leaned back, crossing her muscular arms, and lifted her head as if searching the ceiling for where to begin.
After a few seconds, her deep baritone voice filled the quiet room.
"The oldest stories in the land are carried in song by the Elves, carved in stone by the Dwarves, spoken in legends by the Beast-Men, and felt in the dreams of Humans. We all tell it differently, but the truth is the same. Before the Four Empires, before the Spirit Beasts, the world was different. Soma, the Earth Mother, slept beneath us. She wasn't fully aware, but she breathed deeply, nurturing the land and her children. Her dreams birthed the sentient races, and her restless shifts shaped the continents. It was a time of peace."
Adda looked down at her own calloused hands. "Soma is the original, sleeping consciousness of the planet. She has no humanoid form; she is the tectonic plates, the magma, the oceans, and the forests. Her domain is life, physical evolution, and the cycle of decay and rebirth. Her heartbeat was the lifeblood of the world. It gave us Chakra."
"Chakra is the internal, heavy, kinetic energy found in blood, bone, and muscle. It's the raw, primal power inherent to all beasts of the land. Because the sentient races were born from her spirit and dreams, rather than her flesh, we couldn't feel Chakra's touch. We just lived in fragile harmony. That all changed with the arrival of the Lunar Exile. Anima. The Lady of the Moon and Mother of Spirits."
Snow paused her purring, her ice-blue eyes locking onto Adda with intense, unblinking focus.
"She was a foreign concept to this realm," Adda continued softly. "A being of pure spirit and Qi, completely different from native life. She was a goddess from a distant, shattered dimension who fled a collapsing realm. Lost and dying, she fell through the void from a rift, crashing into our moon. The impact literally split it in half. Her domain was the soul, and her overwhelming Qi poured down onto our world, bringing a cataclysm of spiritual pressure. Seeing the destruction her arrival caused, she made a choice."
"A sacrifice. To prevent her remaining power from shattering Aetheria into dust, the Lunar Exile intentionally detonated her own physical body in the upper atmosphere. Her spirit rained down as a silver mist, permanently coating the world in Qi. Her physical remains formed the core of the shattered moon that still hangs in the sky today."
Adda leaned forward, her voice dropping to an intense whisper. "This violent sacrifice awoke Soma for the very first time. She reached out to the dying goddess, creating a miracle. The Covenant. The Soul Bond. The birth of Mana."
"The merging of these two immense powers created an unspoken cosmic treaty. Because our races were born of dreams, we began to perfectly resonate with Anima's Qi, finally gaining innate access to our own spiritual power. To counter this cosmic balance, the beasts of the land absorbed massive amounts of Soma's Chakra. They evolved to become more. They became Spirit Beasts."
"But that was only half the gift. The other part is the Soul Bond. You see, the beasts and the races are fundamentally incomplete on their own. We have Qi; they have Chakra. However, when an Ascender and a Beast link their souls, their bond causes their energies to flow into one another and perfectly fuse. This fusion births Mana."
"Mana is true magic," Adda said reverently. "It is the absolute fuel required for Ascension. Through Mana, a beast can evolve, unlocking forms that neither Mother could have created alone. It allows spells to be cast and skills to be used. It is what our entire world runs on now. But it does not come without a cost. More so for some races than others."
She paused, her round, bear-like ears flattening against her head as she looked away. "The Curse. The Void-Rot... and Feralburn."
"If Mana is the perfect fusion of the Twin Mothers, the Void-Rot is the violent rejection of it. Their energies are fundamentally incompatible in the wild without the filtering bridge of a Soul Bond. When heavy, earthly Chakra and cold, spiritual Qi collide in the wild and fail to mix, they grind against each other at a molecular level. This friction creates a spark of anti-reality—the improper mixing of dimensions."
"The Void is not a demon or an evil god," she explained, her voice hardening. "It is just The Consequence. A violent, radioactive physical reaction. It manifests as jagged, purple crystals that consume both flesh and soul, attempting to forcibly merge them. It turns living things into mindless monsters and warps the world around them."
Adda ran a hand over her fuzzy ears, a flash of vulnerable exhaustion crossing her face. "And for Beast-Men like me... because we are half-beast and half-human, our bodies naturally absorb small amounts of both Chakra and Qi throughout our lives. When it doesn't mix right inside our own veins, we get a localized version of the Rot. We call it Feralburn."