The sun rose from within the white clouds, spilling warmth back into the world. Birds gathered on the rooftops and chirped to one another before spreading their wings and scattering off in search of food, free to live their small, simple lives without a single burden on their shoulders.
Adrian's eyes flickered as sunlight fell across his face, pulling him out of sleep.
He blinked awake slowly and turned his head to the right, where Mr. Clown stood by the window, curtains already yanked wide open, sunlight pouring in without mercy.
Adrian groaned, long and dramatic, and pulled the blanket halfway back over his face. He was an ordinary teenager in that one regard at least. Sunday mornings were not meant for waking up early.
"Mr. Clown. Good morning." He squinted against the light. "Why'd you wake me up so early? Wait. Did you even sleep?"
Adrian had stayed up late the night before, buried in books about the domain of emotions. He'd absorbed a fair amount, though nowhere near all of it, and the process was slower than it should have been. He could only read the material at all because of Mr. Clown's Fooling Aura, and that borrowed comprehension came at a cost. Nothing stuck the first time. He had to read the same passages over and over just to keep the knowledge from slipping away, when a native reader would have absorbed it all in a single pass.
Adrian, for his part, didn't know the first letter of Ancient Lumenian. Not one. Learning even the shape of the language was going to take time, effort, and no small amount of stubbornness.
Mr. Clown spun on his heel with a flourish, robes snapping dramatically around him, and pressed a gloved hand to his painted chest in mock offense. "An Aura user should never slacken! Never fall into sloth!" His voice rose and cracked theatrically on the last word, one eyebrow arched impossibly high. "I stand here, dutifully, protecting you from harm, and how do you repay me? With snoring!" He spread his arms wide, robes billowing. "What will you do once I am gone, hm? Gone! Vanished! Poof!" He snapped his fingers with a flourish. "Didn't you swear to me, just last night, with your own two lips, that you would rise early and devour those seven books before the week was through? Or did my aura simply eat that memory whole?"
Predictable. He always forgets the promises he makes to himself after midnight. The resolve of the young burns bright and dies faster than a matchstick.
"Oh. Yeah. I did say that." Adrian rubbed at his face, the memory surfacing reluctantly, and grimaced at his own forgetfulness.
He gritted his teeth and forced himself upright, head throbbing dully from the lack of sleep. After a long stretch that popped something in his spine, he shuffled toward the bathroom attached to his room.
His hand landed on the door handle before he glanced back. "You don't need to follow me in there. I think I can manage."
Mr. Clown gave an exaggerated bow, sweeping one arm across his waist. "As my young master commands."
As if I would waste my attention on something so mundane. There are far more interesting things to observe than a boy relieving himself.
Adrian stepped inside, walked to the sink, and caught his own reflection in the mirror. He hadn't noticed any real changes to himself since his awakening, not at a glance.
But looking closer now, the differences were obvious. His skin had smoothed out, clearer than it had ever been. His face seemed to carry a faint natural glow. His body felt sharper, lighter, the dull headache that used to sit behind his eyes gone entirely, replaced by something closer to feeling fully rested for the first time in his life. No fatigue lingered anywhere in him. Even his senses felt different, hearing crisper, vision sharper at the edges, smell picking up things he'd never noticed before.
While he stood there turning his face side to side in the mirror, Mr. Clown's voice slid directly into his mind, smooth and sudden.
"Once an Aura user awakens, the body cleanses itself and settles into perfect health. The mind develops further, giving rise to the world of consciousness and the subconscious beneath it. The heart forms its own domain of emotions, granting far greater emotional stability than before. Certain pathways, the War Pathway and the Element Pathway among them, carry unique properties that push the body's constitution to entirely new heights."
"You were spying on me!" Adrian shouted at the closed door, mortified.
Mr. Clown said nothing at all, offering only silence from the other side.
Spying is such an ugly word for observation.
Adrian huffed and got through the rest of his routine quickly, brushing his teeth, showering, and finishing everything else his body needed before storming out and heading downstairs into the kitchen.
Lily hadn't woken up yet.
A small knot of worry formed in Adrian's stomach. He couldn't cook, not really, not beyond the basics that wouldn't set anything on fire. Lily handled all of that normally, while the rest of the household chores were split evenly between them.
Mr. Clown drifted into the kitchen not long after, his painted face scanning the room with theatrical blankness. Then, quietly, he let out a low chuckle to himself, the sound almost fond.
Adrian is still young, raised his whole life in a peaceful world with nothing truly threatening him. No wonder he understands so little and can do even less. It isn't his fault. It simply hasn't been tested out of him yet.
He stepped forward without warning and began pulling ingredients off the shelves like a man on a mission only he understood. Adrian blinked, caught completely off guard.
Before he could get a word out, Mr. Clown spoke without so much as turning around, robes swishing dramatically with every movement.
"Come. I shall teach you the sacred art of cooking." He raised a single egg above his head like it was a holy relic. "An Aura user who cannot feed himself is an Aura user who deserves to starve! What will you do, hm? Lost alone in some cursed jungle, forced to wrestle a python twice your size for dinner? Reduced to eating rotten eggs, or, gods forbid, the saliva of wild monkeys, or scorpion meat crunchy enough to shatter your teeth?" He spun the egg dramatically between two fingers without dropping it. "At the very least, you shall not die of starvation on my watch. That would reflect very poorly on me."
Adrian's brow furrowed so hard it nearly met in the middle. Just what has this man been through?
He wanted to ask. He wanted to ask so badly. But he'd promised himself, back when they first met, that he wouldn't pry into Mr. Clown's past uninvited, so he swallowed the question along with his dignity and shuffled over to the counter to learn.
What they made was nothing fancy. No secret techniques, no complicated plating. Just a simple yellow omelette, split into two portions.
Adrian sliced into his piece, speared a bite with his fork, and popped it into his mouth.
His eyes went wide.
Flavor exploded across his tongue, spice and sweetness locked in some kind of perfect, impossible balance, like two rival kingdoms that had finally signed a peace treaty inside his mouth. He chewed slower just to savor it, eyes practically watering.
"Okay, wow." He looked up at Mr. Clown, who sat across the table with his usual painted, unreadable smile. "What is in this red sauce? This is unreal."
Mr. Clown finished his own bite, dabbed the corner of his mouth with theatrical delicacy, and leaned forward with a glint in his black eyes that should have set off every alarm bell Adrian owned.
"Hmm. I don't quite recall the exact recipe," he said breezily, "but the main ingredients are the saliva of a hairy monkey, and the droppings of a muddy centipede."
Silence.
Adrian's fork, halfway to his mouth with a second bite, clattered onto the table. The bite already in his mouth sat there, forgotten, betrayed.
"Mmph, MPH!" He spat the omelette straight back onto his plate and lunged for his water glass, gargling as if he'd just licked a doorknob in a hospital. He shoved his chair back so hard it nearly toppled, one hand already clawing toward the bathroom door, fully prepared to scrub his tongue with soap if that's what it took.
That was when he heard it. Loud, booming, unhinged laughter, followed by the sound of a fist slamming the table hard enough to rattle the plates.
"HAHAHAHA! Oh, your FACE!" Mr. Clown wheezed, wiping an imaginary tear from his painted eye. "You should have seen it! Priceless! Absolutely priceless!"
Adrian froze halfway out of his chair, one hand still clutching his throat like a man who'd narrowly escaped death. Slowly, painfully, the pieces clicked together. The jungle. The python. The rotten eggs and monkey saliva. All of it, every disgusting detail, had been carefully planted earlier just to prime his imagination for exactly this moment.
"You," Adrian said flatly, "have been planning this since breakfast."
"Since before breakfast," Mr. Clown corrected proudly, still cackling.
Adrian's eye twitched. He sat back down with the stiff, wounded dignity of a man who had just lost a war he didn't know he was fighting, and silently cursed himself for falling for something so obviously, pettily engineered.
Mr. Clown eventually settled down, wiped his face clean of laughter, and popped another bite into his mouth as if nothing had happened. "The sauce is made from special spices native to my village back in Lumenia. Nothing more sinister than that."
Adrian eyed his plate with deep, lingering suspicion, as if it might bite back. But what if he was telling the truth the first time and this is the lie? A fresh wave of nausea rolled through him just imagining it.
He ate the rest anyway. Every last bite. His pride demanded it.
Once his stomach was full and his trust in Mr. Clown thoroughly, permanently shattered, Adrian narrowed his eyes across the table.
"You're way too relaxed for a bodyguard, you know that? Where does all this confidence even come from?"
Mr. Clown looked at Adrian with a calm, steady gaze. "That is because I have already set up a small domain around this house."
Adrian blinked. "A domain?"
"A domain," Mr. Clown said, folding his hands behind his back, "is what forms when an Aura user saturates a defined area with their Aura through continuous, deliberate instillation into the surroundings. It is not quick work. It is not cheap work either. The wider the range you want covered, the greater the time and cost required to sustain it." He paused, letting that sink in before continuing. "In essence, think of it as the infant form of a formation. A seed that hasn't grown into its full shape yet. I could not have built it alone, mind you. The third one helped me construct it." He tapped a finger lightly against the wall beside him. "Now, should anyone set foot inside this house, I would feel it instantly, through the law of Aura Symbiosis."
Adrian's brow furrowed. "The third one? Who's that?"
"Guess."
"I don't even know what any of these numbers mean."
"You don't need to." Mr. Clown shrugged lightly, entirely unbothered. "Because, frankly, neither do I. All I know is that you are the first one. Mr. Max is the second. And Mr. Eric is the third."
"Eric? He's the third one?" Adrian scratched the back of his head. "Whatever that even means. Wait, so he knows how to build domains too?"
"Domains would be an understatement." Mr. Clown's tone shifted, something almost like reverence slipping in beneath the theatrics. "His true specialty lies in formations. Full formations, not just domains. If you're ever unfortunate enough to fight alongside him in a large-scale battle, you'll see exactly what I mean."
"I sincerely hope I never get involved in a large-scale battle." Adrian shuddered at the thought.
A beat of silence passed between them before something occurred to Adrian, and he tilted his head. "Wait, hold on. If Eric's specialty is formations, why didn't he just set up a full formation around this house instead of you slapping together a domain? Wouldn't that be way stronger?"
"Because, unlike me, Mr. Eric has an actual life to attend to." Mr. Clown said it plainly, without malice. "He is busy. Constantly busy. Formations of any real strength take enormous stretches of time to properly construct, time he simply does not have to spare on a house that isn't even his own." He spread his hands. "And building one is not cheap either. Formations demand Aura stones as fuel and anchor points, sometimes dozens of them depending on the scale."
Adrian's whole body gave an involuntary shudder. He'd found out about the value of a single Lysi Nova grade Aura stone just yesterday. A hundred thousand dollars. For one stone.
"Okay, yeah, no, that's fair." Adrian rubbed his arms as if he could physically shake the number off. "So wait, shouldn't we be paying him, then? If he's spending that kind of money and time on us for no real reason?"
"An excellent question," Mr. Clown said, sounding genuinely pleased that Adrian had thought of it. "One you're welcome to bring up with him directly, should you ever find the nerve."
Adrian decided, wisely, to let that one go for now.
"Anyway." He cleared his throat and steered back on track. "So if someone with a pathway close to the Deceiver Pathway tried sneaking in, you'd sense them?"
"I would feel the resonance the moment they crossed the threshold."
"And if it's a neutral pathway? Something with no obvious overlap?"
"I would still feel the intruding waves ripple through the domain regardless." Mr. Clown's smile sharpened just slightly. "Anything that happens inside this house reaches me one way or another. How do you think I knew precisely what you were up to in the bathroom earlier?"
Adrian opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again.
He gathered the plates instead, carried them to the sink without another word, and the two of them made their way back upstairs to his room.
Adrian settled into the chair at his desk and pulled one of the seven books toward him, opening it to the title page: Introduction to the Thirty Primary Pathways.
"I want to find out the names of all the pathways," he said, glancing over at Mr. Clown, who sat cross-legged on the bed with a novel already open in his lap. "Their sub-pathways too, what they actually do, their strengths, their weaknesses. Especially my own. The Apocalypse Pathway."
Mr. Clown didn't look up from his page, but he understood well enough. He drew out a thin thread of his Aura and flicked it toward Adrian without ceremony. A moment later, a fine red liquid washed over Adrian's body, the Fooling Aura settling into him like something sinking quietly beneath his skin.
It slipped into his mind next, unraveling the dense, unfamiliar script of Ancient Lumenian into something Adrian could actually read. Every character on the page rearranged itself into plain English the instant his eyes landed on it.
Adrian opened the book properly and began to read.
Aura. What is it? It is the natural energy of the universe...
He worked through the first page, then began flipping steadily forward, chasing the section he actually cared about. The book itself was absurdly thick, heavier and denser than anything he'd ever cracked open back home, thick enough that it could have doubled as a weapon in a pinch. He ignored most of it for now. Curiosity could only stretch so far before impatience won out.
He finally slowed when he reached a new heading.
Sub-pathways of a pathway refer to the categorized divisions of that pathway's authority and powers...
Adrian's eyes lit up. He skimmed straight past the formal definition, barely registering it, and scanned down the page until he found exactly what he was looking for: the full list of sub-pathways, broken down one by one, starting with his own.
Adrian turned the page, eyes tracking eagerly down the list as the Overseeing Pathway unfolded beneath its heading.
The Overseeing Pathway branched into three recognized sub-pathways: the Fate Pathway, governing the threads that bound events together before they occurred; the Destiny Pathway, said to influence the broader arc of a person's life rather than any single moment within it; and, oddly enough, the Entertainment Pathway.
Adrian snorted out loud. "Wait, hold on. Entertainment Pathway? That's a real thing?"
He pictured it immediately, some cosmic being flipping through channels of people's lives like daytime television, occasionally throwing in a plot twist just to keep things interesting. "So somewhere out there, some guy's whole superpower is basically being a director. Incredible. Truly the pinnacle of universal design."
He kept reading anyway, filing the thought away for later mockery.
The Boundless Pathway came next, its authority split across the Space Pathway, which manipulated distance and physical positioning, the Void Pathway, tied to emptiness and the absence of matter itself, and the Journey Pathway, which governed movement and travel in ways the book only vaguely hinted at without fully explaining.
Adrian flipped forward, scanning now that he'd built up some momentum.
The Dimension Pathway followed, broken into the Layer Pathway, concerned with stacking or separating planes of existence; the Parallel Pathway, dealing in branching realities that ran alongside one another; and the Dwelling Pathway, which apparently allowed a user to construct livable spaces within folded dimensional pockets and also control Dimension Dwellers and the travelling of the layers.
"Okay, that one's actually kind of sick," Adrian muttered, already imagining a pocket apartment tucked into some fold of reality where rent presumably didn't exist.
The Quantum Pathway split into the Property Pathway, tied to the fundamental traits and characteristics of matter; the Ability Pathway, which, as far as Adrian could tell, governed the manipulation of abilities themselves, a concept that made his head hurt a little just reading it; and the Atom Pathway, focused on the smallest measurable units of existence.
"This is the Pathway Max is from. His Aura certainly matches what is described here."
The Energy Pathway carried its own three divisions: the Force Pathway, governing raw kinetic and physical force, the Transfer Pathway, allowing energy to move from one source or vessel to another, and the Disruption Pathway, which specialized in destabilizing or corrupting existing energy structures entirely.
Adrian paused there for a moment, quietly grateful his own pathway had nothing to do with any of that. Physics had never been his strong suit even back on a peaceful, ordinary planet with none of this nonsense.
"Eric has the power of the Gravitation Aura. So, he belongs to the Force Sub-Pathway of the Energy Pathway. I am happy I am not of this pathway."
The Birth Pathway followed, and Adrian felt his face twist slightly before he'd even finished reading the names. The Reproduction Pathway, the Pregnancy Pathway, and the Fluid Pathway sat listed together beneath it, each one governing some aspect of creation and biological process that the book described in far more clinical detail than Adrian was emotionally prepared for on a Sunday morning.
"Yeah, no, moving on." He flipped the page a little faster than strictly necessary. "I am definitely not lingering there."
The Mind Pathway offered a welcome change of subject, split into the Consciousness Pathway, tied to awareness and perception, the Will Pathway, governing raw mental fortitude, wills and resistance, and, curiously, the Therapist Pathway, which the book described as specializing in the healing and stabilization of another person's mental and emotional state.
Adrian blinked at that one. "Huh. Didn't expect actual therapy to be a superpower category. Guess somewhere out there, someone's literally getting paid in Aura stones to just listen to people's problems."
The Deceiver Pathway came right after, carrying the Illusion Pathway, built around crafting false sensory experiences, the Manipulation Pathway, focused on bending perception, thought, or intention to the user's will, and the Masquerade Pathway, which specialized in disguise, identity theft in the most literal sense, and full sensory impersonation.
Adrian's brow furrowed slightly reading that last one. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small, uneasy thought about Mr. Clown flickered and passed before he could fully catch hold of it.
Finally, after working steadily through every other pathway listed in the section, Adrian reached the one he'd been waiting for since he first opened the book.
The Apocalypse Pathway.
His own pathway split into three sub-pathways: the Luck Pathway, tied to the manipulation of probability and fortune; the Chaos Pathway, governing entropy and the unraveling of order, bending outcomes toward randomness and instability wherever it took hold; and the Disaster Pathway, associated with catastrophic, world-altering events on a scale the book didn't even attempt to fully quantify.
Adrian stared at the three names for a long moment, something between pride and mild horror settling over his face in equal measure.
"So I'm either going to get incredibly lucky my whole life," he said slowly, "or I'm going to accidentally end the world. Cool. Cool cool cool. Great pathway. Very balanced. Very reasonable."
This was already known to Adrian, but he still felt a little relaxed and excited. There was knowledge about all the pathways and examples of them, but he ignored them for the moment.
Adrian let out a long breath and closed the book halfway, resting his palm flat against the cover as the weight of everything he'd just skimmed settled over him. Thirty pathways, each splitting into three sub-pathways of their own, and he'd barely scratched the surface of what any of them actually meant in practice. Just the names alone had already rewired half of what he thought he understood about how this world worked.
"Okay." He nodded to himself, mostly to shake off the leftover shock of Disaster Pathway still rattling around in his skull. "Skimming clearly isn't going to cut it. If I actually want to understand any of this instead of just knowing the names, I need to read it properly. Cover to cover, no skipping ahead."
He flipped the book back open to the very first page, the dense wall of Ancient Lumenian text folding itself into English the moment his eyes settled on it, and squared his shoulders like he was preparing for battle rather than reading.
"Now, I should read it all thoroughly," he muttered, mostly to himself, and bent over the page with full focus this time, determined not to let his eyes glaze over the way they had during the last three chapters.
From the bed, Mr. Clown glanced up from his own novel just long enough to watch Adrian hunch over the book with newfound, almost aggressive dedication. A faint, amused smile tugged at the corner of his painted mouth.
"Careful now," he said lightly, turning a page of his own book without looking up again. "Read too thoroughly, and you might accidentally learn something. Wouldn't want to shock that poor Apocalypse Pathway of yours into activating early."