The metallic tang of antiseptic salve pricked at Jai's nostrils as he dragged himself back to the waking world.
He lay still, blue eyes fixed on the ceiling, listening to the soft scrape of his maid's cloth against his bare skin.
The maid — a nervous young woman named Aanya — worked carefully on his back, terrified of hurting him further. His skin was otherwise unmarked, except for the damage: a bloody roadmap of his father's instruction, a tapestry of fading blue, sickly green, and deep purple bruises.
His father had trained him in combat since childhood, with a strictness that left no room for softness. His body, barely seventeen, looked like it had already survived a string of small wars.
"That's enough, Aanya," Jai said, voice flat. "Leave. Tell my mother not to come in."
Aanya scrambled to gather her supplies, murmured an apology, and slipped out through the heavy oak door.
Jai rose slowly, teeth gritted against the ache in his muscles, and crossed to the stone balcony. He leaned against the railing, looking out over the estate's private garden.
The sun was dipping below the horizon, the sky burning orange fading into bruised violet. A rare quiet settled over him.
I feel at peace here, he thought, eyes moving over the blooms. Maybe because I planted every one of them myself.
"Jai," his mother's voice broke the silence from the doorway.
He turned, the calm gone in an instant, replaced by irritation. "Mother. I told the maid no one comes in. Why the hell are you here?"
Mable's face carried both fear and a stubborn sadness. "I'm your mother," she said, chin trembling slightly, her Gnosis suppressing the shake in her voice. "I have the right to walk into my son's room."
His anger drained into something more tired. He forced his breathing steady. "Fine. Why are you here?"
"I was worried," she said, stepping closer. "You collapsed this morning at the worship hall. You seized on the floor."
He waved a dismissive hand. "It's nothing. I've been anxious about the ceremony, that's all. I'm fine."
She ignored the denial and set a silver platter on the low table — a bowl of amber Suna-Seed and a plate of Glimmerhoof curry, fragrant and rich, his favorite. He had no appetite for it. He turned back toward the balcony, dropped into the chair, and closed his eyes.
Beyond the estate's northern reach, where the tree line gave way to bare stone, a lone figure crouched at the base of the Black Stone Wall.
Meilin Yue tilted her head back, taking in its height — high enough that from the ground, its top disappeared against the night sky. The wall's ward hummed faintly even from a dozen paces off, a pressure that would have brought a Tier 4 cultivator to their knees just standing this close.
She didn't look for a weak point. There wasn't one.
She bent her knees and jumped.
The ground cracked where she'd been standing, a spiderweb of fractures spreading out from the print of her foot. She didn't rise so much as arrive — one moment on the earth, the next standing on top of the wall itself, the ward's field breaking uselessly around her like water around stone. It hadn't resisted her. It simply hadn't been able to.
She glanced south, toward the smaller wing of the estate, where a single dim light burned behind a shuttered window. She held there a moment longer than the errand required.
Then she turned north, and started to run.
SCCHHHHK.
A faint, scraping sound cut through his exhaustion.
His eyes snapped open. The air went cold.
He scanned the dark.
There — a figure in a black cloak, running along the top of the Black Stone Wall that circled the estate. The wall itself was an old, forgotten piece of engineering, its obsidian surface humming with a field that would strip the magic from anyone below Tier 4 who touched it.
Whoever that is has to be stronger than Tier 4, Jai thought, blood running cold. Who's insane enough to attack the Chenwongo estate?
He didn't hesitate. His hand slammed the alarm embedded in the railing.
A shriek of sound tore through the estate, followed by Jai's voice over the comms: "Intruder! North wall! Someone's running the black stone!"
The rest of the family reacted with the same disbelief he had — not just at the intrusion, but at the fact that anyone could touch that wall at all, let alone stand on it. They scrambled from their rooms, weapons drawn, toward the North towers.
The full moon lit the grounds in cold white, catching the runner's cloak and giving the figure a spectral edge.
Edward arrived and cast a spatial spell. The air shimmered, and a crystalline barrier snapped into place around the gathered family. Time inside it stopped — even the dust hung motionless.
Everyone watched, relieved, as the intruder froze mid-stride outside the barrier.
Then Jai's eyes went wide.
The cloaked figure's hand was still moving. Slowly. Deliberately.
They're moving inside the time-stop.
Before he could shout a warning, the hand produced a small glowing sphere and threw it toward the center of the group.
The blast tore through Edward's Tier 3 field like it wasn't there.
BOOM.
The north wall shuddered and came apart. The family scattered, thrown clear by the shockwave.
The realization hit everyone at once: Edward's spell was Tier 3. Nothing weaker than Tier 2 should have been able to move inside it.
"Tier Two," someone whispered from the dust. "An Eclipse-Borne."
As the family coughed and pulled themselves upright, the figure calmly pulled the cloth from their face.
A woman.
"I am Meilin Yue, Commander of the Ninth Whisper," she called over the ruin, her voice carrying like thunder. "I've brought you a small gift from my leader."
She scattered a hundred small explosive charges at their feet and vanished into the void before anyone could move.
It was Beatrice who saved them — her spatial spell locating the family instantly and teleporting the whole group across the estate to the south side, near Rena's rooms.
BOOM. The north side of the estate went up behind them.
Rena — Jai's aunt, and utterly powerless — bolted upright in bed at the sound, then again at the panicked voices suddenly filling the hall outside her door.
While the family caught their breath, Jai's mind was already racing.
Meilin Yue has to be at least seven hundred years old to have reached Tier 2. Most cultivators took three centuries of relentless fighting to climb from Tier 10 to Tier 3 alone. His own father had only managed it in ninety years — and only because the family's lineage bought him access to artifacts and resources most people never touched. Both his parents looked unnaturally young for the same reason.
Tier 2 was different. It wasn't something artifacts could buy. It meant total rebirth — body and soul — and mastery over every elemental discipline. His grandmother had done it, though she rarely showed the full extent of what she could do.
A cold sweat broke over his forehead.
Meilin Yue had attacked from the north wall. But somehow, she'd come from the south — the exact side where Beatrice had just moved them, next to Rena's rooms. The only guarded entrance to the estate was on the east side.
Why would a Tier 2 commander risk open war with a sovereign house just to deliver a bomb and a message? Unless the message wasn't the reason she came at all.
He thought of the old family rumor, the one no one in the house said out loud — that years ago, Rena had given birth to a child sired by a dragon. He'd always written it off as servants' gossip, the kind of story that got uglier with every retelling.
What if it isn't just a story?
He looked at Rena through her doorway — a fixture of quiet, submissive warmth, entirely powerless, or so everyone had always assumed. And now she was standing at the center of a threat that had just leveled part of the estate.
His heart hammered. All the training, the rules, the lineage — none of it meant anything if the real danger had been sleeping inside the walls the entire time.
If the rumors are true, Jai thought, eyes narrowing, then the threat was never outside the walls at all.