Adrian was sleeping soundly on a bed. His eyes fluttered slightly before opening to the light streaming in from the window. He had been asleep for four hours in this hourly hotel.
For a moment he simply lay there, blinking up at an unfamiliar ceiling, his mind still thick with sleep. He tried, briefly, to remember the shape of his own bedroom ceiling back home and found he couldn't quite picture it against this one.
After leaving Visie's place, his headache had grown unbearable, the kind that made him genuinely wonder whether his skull was about to give out as an overripe watermelon dropped from a height. Eric had refused to return to Earth right away. He'd wanted more time first, time to walk Adrian through as much as he could before they parted ways, and so they'd brought him here instead and told him, more or less, to sleep it off.
Adrian was, by any measure of this place's economy, poorer than a beggar, so every last bit of it had been paid for in Aura stones, the local currency, none of which he possessed even a single one of.
For one lingering moment after his eyes opened, he let himself believe he was home. That none of it had happened. That the headache, the golden light, the impossible conversations, all of it had simply been the fever dream of someone who'd stayed up too late reading superhero comics again.
Then his hand shifted against the sheets, and the fabric felt wrong beneath his fingers, too fine, too unfamiliar, and the pillow gave slightly differently than his own ever did. That was enough to break the illusion completely. This was not his room. This was not his house.
Everything came back to him at once, unhurried but total, the way memory tends to arrive once the body finally admits it's awake. He turned his head toward the window, and beyond the glass the city was already alive with sound, footsteps, scattered conversation, someone laughing too loudly at something, someone else shouting a name further off, a whole tangle of human noise stirring up feelings in him he didn't have a name for yet.
"This place sure is lively," he thought, and something in the observation almost made him laugh. Back home, this same racket outside his window at whatever hour it was would have earned a noise complaint within the week. Here it just seemed to be the default setting.
He pushed himself upright and swung his legs over the side of the bed, stretching his arms high above his head until something in his shoulder popped satisfyingly. His head, he noticed, felt lighter than it had in hours. Lighter than it had any right to, honestly, given how close to exploding it had apparently been not that long ago. The pain was simply gone, vanished as completely as if it had never been there at all, and in its place sat something calmer, fuller, as though every piece of knowledge poured into him earlier had finally finished settling somewhere deep in the back of his mind, quietly filed away by whatever part of him did that sort of filing without asking permission first.
"Well," Adrian muttered to the empty room, glancing down at himself, still fully dressed, still faintly rumpled from the nap, "apparently getting your entire worldview shattered in one afternoon really takes it out of you."
Adrian didn't know what the world of consciousness and subconsciousness was, or what "comprehension" exactly meant. Everything was new to him. He would have to ask Eric.
He quickly picked up his shirt from the chair and put it on, washed his mouth and face, and combed his hair, moving through the motions with the slow, half-present clumsiness of someone still only half awake.
After doing all that, he opened the red door of his room and walked through the hallway with its red carpets and rooms with red doors, golden number plates indicating the room numbers. The hallway blurred past him without really registering, the way familiar places always did when his mind hadn't fully caught up to his body yet.
Adrian took a turn at the stairs and walked down to the cafeteria zone. There he saw Eric and Max sitting and eating lunch. Max was fully focused on the food; he wasn't eating so much as inhaling it at an alarming rate, cheeks stuffed, elbows braced on either side of his tray like he was defending it from an invisible threat.
Eric was talking to a man in a black bodysuit with black hair. He said something, to which the man nodded, got up, and left before Adrian could even get close.
Adrian blinked after him, too sleepy to muster real curiosity. "Who was that?"
"Someone you'll want to be awake for," Eric said, not looking up from his food.
Adrian didn't have the energy to ask what that meant. He dropped into the seat across from Max, who spared him half a glance and a grunt before returning to the serious business of finishing his plate before anyone could take it from him. Adrian rested his chin on his hand, eyes drifting half shut, the low hum of the cafeteria doing nothing to keep him tethered to the waking world.
He almost dozed off sitting upright. He might have, if a shadow hadn't fallen over the table a few minutes later.
The man in the black bodysuit had returned, and this time he didn't leave. He set something down on the table in front of Adrian, a folded bundle of dark, tightly woven fabric that seemed to drink in the light around it rather than reflect it, and pulled out the chair beside him without waiting for an invitation.
"You're Adrian." It wasn't a question. The man's voice was even, unhurried, the voice of someone who had said a great many names in his life and had long since stopped needing to make them sound like anything more than facts. "I'm here to fit you for your bodysuit."
Adrian stared at him, then at the bundle of fabric, then back at him, his sleep-fogged brain taking a long moment to process the words in order. "My... what?"
"Your bodysuit," the man repeated, patient in the way of someone who dealt with groggy new arrivals often enough to have stopped finding it strange. "Every Awakened gets one; it is fitted to their Aura signature and helps you regulate your Aura flow during combat, reinforcing your body against impact, and adapts to most techniques you'll use. You'll be wearing it more than your own skin, soon enough."
That got through. Adrian sat up a little straighter, some of the fog behind his eyes starting to clear. "Wait. Like... a real one? For fighting?"
"For fighting. For training. For staying alive." The man's mouth twitched at one corner, not quite a smile. "It won't do the last part for you, but it helps."
Adrian looked down at the fabric again, more awake now than he had been all morning, something bright and unfamiliar stirring behind his ribs. He reached out and touched the edge of it, half expecting it to feel like ordinary cloth. However, it didn't. It felt cool and strangely alive under his fingers, like it was waiting for something.
"So this is..." he started, and then didn't quite know how to finish the sentence.
"It is not finished yet," the man said. "The base weave is done. The color still needs to be chosen." He tilted his head slightly, studying Adrian the way someone might study a canvas before the first stroke. "That part's yours to decide."
Adrian blinked. "I get to pick?"
"You get to pick." A faint note of amusement crept into the man's otherwise flat delivery. "So, what do you want?"
For a moment, Adrian didn't answer. Across the table, Max had finally slowed down enough to glance over, still chewing, clearly listening now. Eric had looked up from his own plate too, watching with the faint, knowing patience of someone who already suspected where this was going.
Adrian's mind, still shaking off the last of its sleepiness, began turning the question over properly for the first time. A color. His color. Something that would be his in every fight from here on, something other people would see coming before they saw him.
He thought of the Apocalypse Pathway first, the deep, absolute black that had settled into him the moment he'd awakened it, the color that ran under his skin now whenever he pushed himself hard enough to touch its edge. Black wasn't just a color to him anymore. It was the shape of what he was becoming.
And then, unbidden, another image surfaced behind that one: a boy in a black leather suit with cat ears and green eyes, leaping across rooftops in some old cartoon he used to watch back when the world still made sense, back before any of this. Cat Noir. He hadn't thought about that show that much in years until recently, but the image arrived fully formed anyway, sharp and oddly comforting, black and sleek and quick, always landing on his feet no matter how far he fell.
The two ideas sat together in his head, and somehow they fit.
A slow grin started to pull at the corner of his mouth, the last of the sleepiness burning off entirely now, replaced by something closer to excitement than he'd felt in days.
"Black," Adrian said. "I want it black."
The man studied him for a moment, something unreadable passing behind his eyes, and then he nodded once, like the answer had confirmed something he'd already suspected. "Black it is." He rose from his seat, gathering the fabric back into his arms with the same unhurried efficiency he'd set it down with. "I will start the fitting tomorrow morning and have it sent to you shortly. And Adrian?"
Adrian looked up at him, still grinning.
"Wear it well."
Eric turned his head to look at Adrian and asked with an indifferent expression, "Did you sleep well?"
Adrian nodded and answered as he sat down on a chair, "Yes, I did. My head feels a lot better now."
Max, still shoving food into his mouth like a vacuum, said while chewing, "Ywah, slrep is vjey gowd to cwlm tke minw!"
Adrian could hardly understand what he was saying. He just nodded to Max and then turned to Eric. "So, Eric, what exactly is this 'comprehension' you've been talking about?"
"Comprehension?" Eric muttered, resting his chin on one hand. After a pause, he asked, "Tell me, Adrian, what separates the mind of an Aura user from everyone else's?"
Adrian's fingers fidgeted while he thought of the answer. "Aura users have a world of consciousness and subconsciousness in their minds. It's a metaphysical place formed from the combination of your Aura and soul. It's what makes their brains more efficient, better at learning and remembering, better at focusing on different things, faster at thinking overall. And it gets stronger and bigger the more you advance." He paused, a little surprised at himself. "That's... all you told me before, right? Before I couldn't even stand?"
He was quite shocked after answering. He'd said all of that fluently, without stumbling once, and he wasn't academically superior in any way, just an average student who'd always struggled to hold onto anything for exams. The thought that he might actually be good at remembering things now sent a small thrill through him, one he didn't let show on his face.
Eric nodded in satisfaction. "Good. That's the shape of it. But there's more to it than storage."
Adrian leaned forward slightly. "More how?"
"That world isn't just where your intelligence lives. It's where your memories are kept, your instincts, the subconscious layer of your Aura itself. It's a vital part of your body, Adrian. A direct hit to it is as dangerous as a shot to the head or the heart."
Adrian's stomach dropped a little at that. "Wait, someone can actually attack it? Directly?"
"Some pathways are built for exactly that. Mind, Imagination, and Knowledge pathways all center around this domain more than most." Eric held up a finger for each as he listed them. "Knowledge pathway users grow a much larger world of consciousness and subconsciousness than most, and they think faster than almost anyone else because of it. Not only that, their comprehension capacity and ability are also superior in all aspects compared to all the other pathways. Mind pathway users build their entire fighting style around it. Fight one of them without any defense for your own mind, and you'd better kill them first, because if you don't, you should already consider yourself dead."
Adrian swallowed. "That's... terrifying, honestly."
"It should be." Eric's tone stayed even. "Every Aura user's world of consciousness and subconsciousness looks different too. They are shaped by pathway, mindset, thoughts, ideology, whatever a person actually wants deep down. No two ever look the same."
Adrian sat with that for a second, trying to imagine what his own might look like, and came up blank. He filed the question away for later and asked instead, "Okay, so, comprehension. You still haven't actually told me what that means."
"I'm getting there." A faint, almost amused look crossed Eric's face at Adrian's impatience. "You can read the rest in the books Visie gave you. This is the last piece I'm handing you for free, so listen well."
Adrian straightened up in his seat.
"Comprehension is simple, but it's vital. Your world of consciousness and subconsciousness doesn't just store knowledge, Adrian. It comprehends it." Eric watched him carefully as he said it. "Think back. After you awakened, did it ever feel like your mind opened up, like a balloon expanding, and things you'd forgotten years ago just came back to you?"
Adrian's eyes went wide. "Yes! Actually, yes, that happened. I remembered things from when I was a kid, stuff I hadn't thought about in forever." He blurted the answer out in something close to a whisper, staring at Eric as if he'd just been handed the answer to something he hadn't known was a question.
"That was your world of consciousness and subconsciousness building itself inside your mind." Eric nodded, pleased. "And if you tried right now, you could probably remember almost everything you've been told or shown since the hour you awakened. Word for word."
"Wait, really? Everything?" Adrian's mind immediately jumped backward, chasing fragments of the last several hours, and to his own surprise, they came easily, sharper than memories had any right to be.
"Everything an Aura user takes in gets absorbed and comprehended by that world, letting you understand it as deeply as the knowledge itself allows. The higher your rank, the deeper you're able to comprehend things, right down to their core. And once something's been comprehended, you don't forget it. Not really. Some details might fade over the years, or if the world of consciousness and subconsciousness itself gets damaged, but otherwise it stays." Eric paused, letting that settle, then tilted his head. "So tell me, Adrian. Why do you think Aura users shouldn't learn knowledge above their rank? Or anything too complex for where they're at?"
Adrian opened his mouth, closed it, and thought for a few seconds. Then his back jolted upright as the answer clicked into place. "Because the world of consciousness and subconsciousness is only as strong as the user's rank! So if you shove knowledge into it that's too complex, too advanced, it stretches the walls past what they can hold and ruptures them. It damages the whole thing." He blinked, almost startled by his own answer. "It's basically the same as stuffing your head with junk you can't actually use."
Max, who had finally finished his meal, burst into applause, praising Adrian loudly enough that a few nearby tables turned to look. Adrian felt a rush of pride he hadn't expected, the kind that came from actually understanding something instead of just memorizing it for a test. For a moment, sitting there between Eric's approval and Max's noise, he felt like he was finally starting to belong in this world, like all of it was becoming real instead of something happening around him.
Eric gave a light clap of his own, satisfied. "Not bad."
"Wait, one more thing," Adrian said quickly, before Eric could stand up. "If comprehension goes deeper, the higher my rank gets, does that mean I'll eventually understand stuff I don't get right now, just by being stronger? Or do I have to relearn it?"
Eric considered that for a moment. "A bit of both. You'll come back to old knowledge and suddenly see it more clearly, the same way that balloon feeling doesn't fully stop happening after the first time. But nothing forces itself deeper on its own. You still have to push it."
Adrian nodded slowly, already trying to sort that answer into somewhere he could keep it.
They stood up, paid the bill to the waiter, and left with two Aura stones. Max had eaten an enormous amount, but that was nothing new. Adrian's heart skipped when he recalled just how much a single Aura stone was worth in dollars, and he stared, cartoonishly wide-eyed, up at Max, who was busy rubbing his stomach and burping without a hint of self-consciousness.
Adrian picked up his books, and the three of them left the hotel, folding back into the crowd outside. He didn't let Max take the books from him this time. Something about answering Eric's questions correctly, about actually understanding the answers instead of guessing at them, had lit a spark of motivation in him he hadn't felt in a long time. For some reason, carrying the weight of the books himself felt like it counted for something, like it was its own small step toward becoming stronger.
They stayed quiet during the walk after that. Adrian was too busy turning everything over in his head- the law of symbiosis, the pathways, ranks, all of it settling into place piece by piece and so on—to comprehend even the little bits of the topics that had been left.
...
Soon, they stopped in front of a huge building. It was so tall that it almost touched the ceiling of this layer of the Meditation Realm, its upper floors vanishing into a haze of ambient light that made it hard to tell where the structure ended and the sky began. Golden letters arced across the front facade, spelling out something in a script Adrian couldn't read yet, flanked by twin banners bearing a crest of crossed swords wrapped in a ring of stars.
"Okay, that's a lot of building for one guild," Adrian muttered, tilting his head back so far he nearly lost his footing.
Eric and Max walked toward the front door, opened it, and walked in as Adrian followed them inside, and the noise hit him before his eyes had even finished adjusting to the light.
Inside, there were many Aura users wearing bodysuits of different colors with capes or pieces of armor layered on top, the whole hall a moving wash of color and sound. Most of them were newly advanced Nova-rank Aura users who had come to register, standing in loose, nervous clusters near the front desks, while the rest were Auri Novas moving with the easy confidence of people who'd already been through this once, scanning boards and kiosks for missions, dungeons, raids, or hunts to claim resources or rewards.
Adrian immediately noticed that there wasn't a single Lysi Nova here except for Max and Eric, and he asked Eric, demanding an answer as to know why there wasn't a single Lysi Nova left in the lower layers.
Eric gave a dry, humorless laugh. "You think they just stay here out of the goodness of their hearts? Becoming a Lysi Nova isn't cheap. People take out massive loans they'll be paying off for decades, or they work themselves to the bone day and night, risking their necks on high-stakes runs just to scrape together enough resources for the next advancement. It costs a fortune."
He leaned back. "Once they actually make it, they don't stick around in a place like this. They clear out. They head up to Lumenia or sign on for off-world missions where the risk actually matches the paycheck. They lead squads, get scooped up by the noble families, and move on with their lives. And as for the ranks above Lysi Nova? Well, use your head. If a Lysi Nova won't stay here, you can guess where the rest of them went."
Adrian nodded as he let his eyes wander as they walked further in, and the hall only got busier the deeper they went. To his left, a cluster of four Aura users in matching teal bodysuits huddled over a floating quest board, arguing in hushed, urgent voices.
"I'm telling you, the Hollow Fang dungeon dropped two Verdant Cores last week; we could split that four ways and still walk out ahead," one of them insisted, jabbing a finger at a listing.
"And I'm telling you Verdant Cores are trading low right now because half the association's been farming that dungeon since the discovery of the mother spiders there," another shot back. "We'd make more off a single Rimeglass Shard, if we could even find someone selling one."
Further along, near a wall lined with locked display cases, an older man in patched gray armor was loudly complaining to no one in particular, his voice carrying easily over the general din. "Fourth time this month the Ashlight Emporium's been out of Duskthorn Powder. Fourth time! You'd think a Rank 4 material wouldn't just vanish off the shelves like that." A woman standing near him, clearly uninvolved, gave him a sympathetic nod without breaking stride, the universal gesture of someone who had heard this particular complaint before and had no intention of getting pulled into it.
Not everyone looked tense. A pair of Aura users near a cafeteria alcove were laughing hard enough to draw glances, one of them slapping the table as the other recounted some story with wild, exaggerated hand gestures, something about a Gravehound hunt gone sideways. A woman sitting alone at a corner table had her eyes closed, a faint golden light pulsing steadily around her folded hands, entirely unbothered by the noise around her, deep in what looked like meditation. Two teenagers who couldn't have been much older than Adrian himself stood near a recruitment board, one of them pointing excitedly at a team-formation notice while the other hung back, arms crossed, clearly the more skeptical of the pair.
"See, this is a team looking for a fourth member for the Wysterin Cave hunt; they're offering a cut of any Bloomsteel Ore we find plus—"
"Or," the skeptical one cut in flatly, "we could not join a team led by someone who spelled 'reliable' wrong on their own recruitment post."
Adrian snorted before he could stop himself, quickly disguising it as a cough when Max glanced back at him.
After they entered, almost every Aura user's attention turned to them, if only for a moment. Everybody there could tell just by how they walked that the tall, strong-looking men were definitely Lysi Novas. If they could talk to them, get advice out of them, maybe even convince one to buy a mystical relic on their behalf, they'd be able to collect resources much faster and advance in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.
However, it was all in their minds. None of them dared to actually go and talk to one Lysi Nova, especially two in a group. The smiles that had formed in their minds faded away against the harshness of reality and their own cowardice. The gaze from the pink-haired man also wasn't very welcoming, sweeping the room once with the flat disinterest of someone who had long since stopped noticing being watched.
Adrian, meanwhile, was getting completely ignored. He was invisible to the other Aura users, and honestly, he didn't mind it at all. Getting stared at by a room full of strangers who could probably bench-press a car sounded like exactly the kind of attention he could live without.
"You know," Adrian said to Max under his breath, eyeing the crowd, "I feel like the world's least intimidating bodyguard right now. Nobody's scared of me. If anything, that guy over there just looked at me like I was lost."
"You are lost," Max said cheerfully, not even glancing down at him.
"That's not the point, Max."
Eric walked up to the average-looking guy at registration and said coldly, "Hello, Jacob. It has been a while. I have brought someone to register."
The average-looking man looked up, and a smile crept onto his face as he realized it was Eric. "Oh, Eric, it's you. How have you been...?"
Eric and Jacob quickly got into their own conversation, and Eric started giving Adrian's info to write on the registration form. Adrian pounced on the chance and looked up at Max. "So what is this place, exactly? Besides loud."
Max looked down at Adrian with his usual smile on his face as he explained happily, "This is the headquarters of the Adventure Association of Lumenia in this layer of the Meditation Realm. There are different areas in this layer, and every area has a building like this one. The main one is in this region for reasons I don't know or care about." Max said the last line while shrugging his shoulders. He continued, "There are different associations that exist to handle matters of all kinds in Lumenia. Every major association has multiple branch associations, which make up multiple buildings and handle matters. In the Adventure Association, you can register yourself as an Aura user and become someone who can accept or hand out missions and claim rewards after completing them. You can even build a team of your own or join others to go into dungeons, raids, hunts, whatever fits. In this building alone, there are libraries, shops, cafeterias, bars, and whatnot."
Adrian glanced around at the sheer scale of the place again, a slow grin spreading across his face. "So it's basically a mall. A mall where everyone could accidentally punch a hole through a wall."
"Pretty much, but since the building is a formation made up of hundreds of charms and a few relics, it isn't that easy to punch a hole through the walls," Max said, entirely unbothered by the comparison.
"Is it mandatory to register?" Adrian asked. Max raised his arms in surrender and replied while looking away, "I don't know."
"HUH!?" Adrian screamed in disbelief and shock, loud enough that a few nearby heads actually turned this time, which he supposed was one way to finally get noticed. But Max wasn't Eric. He needed to understand this. Before he could blurt out anything else, Eric quickly walked up to him and handed him a registration form. "Check if all the information here is correct and sign here."
"Great, thanks, very reassuring, love that nobody actually knows if this is mandatory," Adrian muttered, taking the form anyway.
Adrian checked all the information on the registration form, such as the planet he lives on, his address, his pathway, his rank, his age, name, father's name, mother's name, and everything else you can think of. It was really long; just know that.
Adrian checked everything several times before taking a pen from Eric and signing at the bottom right. He walked up to Jacob and handed him the registration form. Jacob took another look at the registration form and asked, "Do you want to check again?"
Adrian shook his head. "If I get this wrong, I feel like the paperwork alone might kill me before any dungeon does."
Jacob blinked as he saw the surname 'Blackbell,' then let out a short laugh despite himself, glancing briefly at Eric as if silently asking whether this one was going to be trouble.
But regardless, after getting the answer from Adrian, Jacob took out a stamp and pressed it down onto Adrian's registration form with a heavy, satisfying thunk, the kind of sound that felt like it meant something. He then stood up and offered his hand to Adrian to shake. Adrian shook it, and Jacob congratulated him. "Congratulations! Adrian Blackbell, you are now an official Aura user under the Adventure Association. You can come here anytime to take on missions, join teams, go to raids and dungeons, or just hang out with your friends or buy some charms or relics."
Adrian scratched the back of his head with his right hand as he laughed awkwardly. This Jacob guy's grip was too strong, firm enough that Adrian felt it in his knuckles for a second after letting go.
"Thanks," Adrian said, still shaking out his hand a little. "I think. Is it normal for a handshake to almost qualify as a mission on its own?"
Jacob let out another short laugh, waving him off, and turned back to his desk to file the form away into a drawer that already looked stuffed with dozens of identical ones, Adrian's now just one more name among however many others had walked through those doors that same day.
Adrian looked down at his own hand for a moment, flexing his fingers, and something about the whole thing hadn't fully settled in yet. An official Aura user. Registered. A name in a system that, up until a few weeks ago, he hadn't even known existed. He glanced back over his shoulder at the hall behind him, at the teal-suited group still arguing over Verdant Cores, at the two teenagers still bickering over spelling errors, at the woman meditating in the corner as if none of the noise around her existed at all. Somewhere in all of that chaos, he supposed, was where he belonged now too.
"So that's it?" Adrian asked, turning back to Eric and Max. "I just walk around collecting rewards and buying charms now?"
"That's the easy part," Eric said, and something in the way he said it made Adrian's stomach tighten just slightly.
"...There's a hard part?"
Max clapped a heavy hand on Adrian's shoulder, nearly knocking him forward a step, his grin wide and entirely unhelpful. "Don't worry about that yet. Today's a good day. Enjoy it."