The garden was still around them, the moonlight sitting steady overhead, and Yong looked at Fainyx with the particular expression of someone who had just watched something that had rearranged their expectations and was still in the process of deciding what to do about it.
"Alright," he said after a moment, settling more comfortably on the grass. "Before we go any further I want to check something."
Fainyx looked at him.
Yong glanced at Ruth.
Ruth was already looking at Fainyx with his golden eyes carrying something more focused than usual, less the open curiosity from their first meeting and more the attention of someone who had noticed something and was deciding whether to say it.
"May I?" Yong asked, gesturing vaguely toward Fainyx.
Fainyx considered this for a moment then nodded once.
Yong reached out and placed two fingers lightly against Fainyx's wrist, the touch brief and careful, and then went very still. His mana extended outward in a way that was so controlled it was nearly invisible, thin and precise, moving through Fainyx's frame the way water moves through a narrow channel. Not invasive. Just reading.
A few seconds passed.
Then Yong's brows came together slightly.
He didn't say anything. He pulled his hand back and looked at Ruth and something passed between them in the silence that had no words attached to it.
Ruth stepped closer without being asked and crouched in front of Fainyx, his golden eyes level with his. "I'm going to check as well," he said. Not a request exactly. More like a courtesy warning.
Fainyx nodded again.
Ruth placed one hand against Fainyx's sternum, light as anything, and closed his eyes. The mana he extended was different from Yong's, older and heavier and considerably more thorough, moving through Fainyx's constitution with the unhurried patience of something that had been doing this for a very long time and knew exactly what it was looking for.
Fainyx sat still and kept his face neutral and waited.
Then Ruth's hand stilled completely.
Several seconds passed where nobody said anything. Yong was watching Ruth with an expression that had lost most of its usual ease. Ruth stayed where he was with his eyes closed and the particular quality of focus that meant he was making sure of something before he opened his mouth about it.
Then he pulled his hand back and opened his eyes.
The two of them looked at each other again and this time the silence between them was heavier than before, carrying the specific weight of two people who had just confirmed something neither of them particularly wanted to have confirmed.
Fainyx looked between them.
He wrote.
[ What is it. ]
Yong exhaled slowly. He looked like he was choosing his words with more care than he usually bothered with. "Your mana is fine," he said. "Your core is fine. Actually your core is more than fine, it's---" he stopped himself and redirected.
"The issue isn't your mana."
Ruth spoke then, direct the way he was always direct, without softening or redirecting. "Your constitution. The weakness in your body."
He looked at Fainyx steadily. "It isn't natural weakness. It isn't from poor health or lack of nutrition." A pause. "You have a terminal syndrome called "Hollow Constitution Syndrome"..."
The garden stayed very quiet.
Fainyx looked at Ruth.
Inside his thoughts had gone very still in the way they went still when something arrived that was too large to process immediately, when the mind needed a moment to simply sit with information before it could do anything useful with it. He had suspected for a while that something was wrong. The way his body refused to respond to training the way it should. The way no amount of food made any visible difference to his frame. The way his strength was weak when he needed it and his body stayed stubbornly, persistently small no matter what he did.
He had suspected.
But suspecting and being told were different things.
He kept his face perfectly still.
[ I see. ]
Two words. Offered calmly. As if this were mildly interesting information about someone else.
Yong looked at him with an expression that suggested he was not entirely convinced by this reaction but was choosing not to press it right now.
Ruth continued. "The syndrome suppresses your physical development. Your body will not grow the way it should regardless of how much you eat or how consistently you train. Your strength weakens throughout adulthood, and your frame will remain smaller than your actual capability suggests." He paused. "That is what the syndrome does."
Fainyx absorbed this and wrote.
[ Is there a cure. ]
Ruth was quiet for a moment. "A treatment exists... but it's hard to find" he said. "It's a full cure... But the problem is that there's a lifelong effects after you drink it." He reached into his coat and produced a small worn book from what Fainyx immediately recognized as a dimensional pocket, flipping through it with practiced efficiency until he found what he was looking for. "It requires dry world tree roots." He tapped the page. "And one other ingredient."
He held the book toward Fainyx.
The page showed a detailed illustration of a flower.
Fainyx looked at it and his expression revealed absolutely nothing because his expression never revealed anything and Ruth studied his face for a moment and got precisely nowhere with it.
"Do you want to know about this flower?" Ruth asked.
Fainyx considered for a moment.
Then wrote.
[ I have seen it before. ]
Yong nodded "Of course you still haven't seen i-... W-what?"
Yong and Ruth was surprised to know that the child who never went outside the house know about this flower. Ruth then ask, his eyes sharpened slightly.
"Where have you seen this plant?"
Fainyx kept his face completely neutral and thought about the Kalmia growing in his Aetherium, pale ivory petals catching the artificial light of his self constructed sky. He had brought one through from the annex garden when he first created the space but somewhere over the months of tending it inside something had quietly changed. The mana saturating every corner of Aetherium had seeped into the roots and the soil and now where there had been one plant there were several, growing in a quiet cluster near the cottage, more of them appearing gradually as if the space itself had decided to encourage it. Each one carried that faint luminescence that ordinary Kalmia didn't have, something that had developed slowly from living inside a space built entirely from his mana.
He had more Kalmia than Ruth had apparently encountered in a thousand years.
He said none of this.
[ In a garden of the annex where I live in the past I brought it here inside a vase. ]
Which was technically true. The one he had originally found had been in the annex garden and had belonged to his mother.
Ruth looked at him for a long moment with those golden eyes that were very good at reading things and found, as everyone eventually found, that Fainyx's face gave him absolutely nothing useful to work with. He exhaled through his nose and moved on.
"This flower is harder to find than the world tree," Ruth said, closing the book. "I have visited the world tree many times. This flower I have only encountered twice in a thousand years."
Yong let out a breath that was not quite a laugh. "Of course."
Fainyx kept his expression perfectly neutral and said nothing.
Ruth looked at him again and his expression shifted into something more careful, the look of someone about to say something they would prefer not to have to say.
"Bring that flower tomorrow I will make some medicine for you. It'll take a week to make that. But remember there's a side effect after drinking the medicine." he said it with a cautious tone.
Fainyx met his gaze.
"The treatment is not clean," Ruth continued. "Because the illness itself isn't clean." He paused. "You will throw up blood."
The silence that followed this was very complete.
Fainyx stared at him.
Inside, something that was not entirely calm made itself very briefly known before he pressed it back down with considerable effort.
"Not constantly," Ruth said. "And it may not be tied to your use of mana. It will happen randomly or when you overexert your body beyond what it can currently handle." He held Fainyx's gaze steadily. "There will be no pain attached to it and no serious complications. The blood is simply a byproduct of the illness being filtered out. Your body produces it and releases it and that is the end of it."
He paused.
"But it will happen. You should know that before you decide anything."
The garden held its quiet around them and the moonlight stayed exactly where it was and Fainyx sat with everything that had just been said settling into him the way large things settled, slowly and with considerable weight.
Yong was watching him with his arms resting loosely on his knees and his expression carrying something that had none of its usual ease in it, something more honest and more tired than the face he usually showed the world. Ruth stayed where he was, patient and unmoving, waiting.
Fainyx looked down at his notebook.
He was quiet for longer than he usually let himself be quiet.
Then he looked back up and wrote slowly.
[How long does it last? ]
"I don't know.. " Ruth said.
[ And without the treatment. ]
Ruth's jaw tightened very slightly. "The syndrome progresses," he said. "Slowly. But it progresses. You might not reach adulthood if you didn't cure it in time."
Fainyx absorbed this.
He looked at the garden around him, the moonlight and the trees and the quiet familiar shapes of the place he had been coming to since before any of this. Then he looked back at his notebook and wrote one more line.
[ I suspected something was wrong. I didn't know what. ]
A pause.
[ Thank you for telling me. I want to do the treatment. ]
Yong looked at him for a moment and then looked away toward the sky with an expression that suggested he had things he wanted to say and was deciding which ones were useful right now.
Ruth simply nodded once.
Fainyx sat with the information and kept his face calm and his breathing steady and his hands still in his lap and thought about his body that refused to grow no matter what he did, about the blood that was apparently coming, about a treatment that required ingredients one of which he happened to have in abundance in a place nobody else knew existed.
Inside he was considerably less calm than any of that suggested.
But that was his own business.
Yong looked back at him eventually. "Ruth will make the medicine tomorrow after you gave me the flower tomorrow night." he said, and the ease was mostly back in his voice but not entirely, the way things came back mostly but not entirely when something had genuinely unsettled them.
Ruth said nothing, but he nodded and didn't disagree with Yong.
Fainyx looked at both of them and thought about a dragon who had visited the world tree many times and a man whose mana moved according to rules this world hadn't written and the Kalmia multiplying quietly in his Aetherium that nobody knew about yet.
He wrote.
[ Understood. ]
And left it at that.