The Grand Hall of the National Academy stood proud and tall.
High above, the banners of the Five Pillars fluttered in a choreographed draft, representing the forces that held the Kingdom of Aetherion together.
The roaring flame of House Ignis.
The unyielding mountain of House Terra.
The swift gale of House Zephyr.
The crackling arc of House Fulgur.
The crested wave of House Valerius.
"Next," the Proctor spoke with the boredom of a man who couldn't wait to get this over with, "Isaac Valerius. Evaluation of Mana Affinity."
In silence, Isaac stepped forward, presenting himself before the crowd.
He looked up, at the high table.
Father, I…
At the high table, the Patriarch of Valerius—his father—sat like a statue of granite. His aura was heavy, as though his very presence demanded a result to justify his seat.
Beside him stood Caspian, the golden son. Caspian didn't look at his younger brother. He was busy adjusting the silk cuffs of his uniform, entirely uninterested in anything else.
Isaac silently turned away from his family. His heart ached, but he couldn't let that be seen.
"The wand, boy," the Proctor said, gesturing to the very wand in Isaac's grasp. "Expel a standard E-rank: [Water Shot]."
Isaac raised the wand. Exerted mana into it.
Nothing happened.
To the onlookers, it looked like struggle. He looked tense, for the wand produced nothing in contrast to his effort.
But Isaac wasn't struggling with his mana.
He was struggling with the wand.
Gather. Transfer. Discharge.
The theory was simple. Mana in his body is tangible. It circulates around the body with a finite mass. Mass times acceleration equals force—force here represents the mana output. He simply had to inject this output unto the wand, and this was exactly what he was doing.
The wand was the problem. The mana arrived at the wand and met resistance it shouldn't have encountered. It meant that the wand was faulty to an unnatural extent.
Creeeeeak.
A faint, unsettling sound resonated from the wand's base.
The Proctor leaned in, brow furrowing. "What are you doing? Just release the flow, Valerius. Don't choke the catalyst."
"Amusing," one student snickered, leaning toward his peers. "Imagine failing something that so easy that no one else failed."
Isaac's eyes narrowed. He had concluded that someone sabotaged his wand.
CRACK.
The sound was sharp and disturbing. Just as he made such conclusion, the wand in his grasp—it shattered.
Shrapnel of enchanted wood whistled through the air. Among the debris, a thin high-pitched hiss escaped—the sound of pressure that suddenly found its way out.
The moisture in the fragments caught the hall's lamplight briefly before dispersing. It was negligible.
"Wand destruction," the Proctor announced, his voice tinged with reflexive disgust as he brushed splinters from his robes. He didn't look at the target. "Negligible output recorded. Complete failure in mana synchronization. Next!"
Isaac gazed upon the shattered pieces of the wand that were scattered beneath him.
"…"
The strength, the resolve—the mindset which he came into this room with, the hope… everything diminished.
The Patriarch stood up, his face containing a suppressed anger.
"Ten years," he hissed, his voice carrying to every corner of the hall. "Ten years of training, Isaac Valerius, and you can't even discharge a basic catalyst without destroying it. I believe I gave you enough chances."
Caspian finally turned his gaze toward his brother. His eyes were filled with the small light of sympathy. "Tomorrow is your Rite of Manifestation, Isaac." A pause. "Some are born to be the tide. Others are just... dry."
Isaac didn't argue. He didn't beg. He stood amidst the splinters with a blank expression. He gazed at his wounded hand. Looked up and found Caspian's gaze on him.
Sabotaged wand? There was nothing that he could say about it. The moment the wand shattered, the evidence was gone.
There wasn't supposed to be much of a significance in this wand assessment. It was naught but a custom to mentally "prepare" students for the big event tomorrow—the Rite of Manifestation.
Yet, it ended up being significant for him, in a bad way.
In a stoic expression, Isaac walked away.
...
The heavy oak doors of the Grand Hall opened onto the sprawling Academy courtyard, where the afternoon light felt clean and indifferent on everything it touched.
"Isaac! Wait up!"
His one friend, Elara, came toward him at a half-run, with her messy auburn hair carrying the specific dishevelment of someone who had been working.
She wore the soot-stained apron, and her face was smudged in a way that suggested that she wasn't aware of it.
"I heard your father… Valerius Patriarch, storming out," she said, her eyes scanning his face in worry. "Did… something go wrong—your hand!"
Isaac looked at his wounded palm that Elara was surprised of. "I… broke the wand, Elara. The Proctor called it a synchronization failure."
"But that's not possible. Your precision is—if the wand broke, it's because it couldn't handle the—"
"It doesn't matter," Isaac said quietly. " Whatever the wand did or didn't do today, the result is the result."
"Don't say it like that," Elara said, dropping her voice. No high nobles in immediate range, but proximity was always worth checking. "You've worked harder than anyone in the junior class. Besides, it's not like today's test holds much significance anyway. The Acacia Tree will definitely reward your hard work with an equivalent skill."
"Reward," Isaac said, "I've given up seeking for a reward a long time ago, Elara."
She didn't have a word for that. After watching all that he's gone through, she couldn't think of a word to refute his claim.
"Reward? Is that what they call pity these days?"
Then, a group of students had arranged themselves across the path with the specific geometry of people who wanted to be observed blocking someone.
At the center stood the one who called out—tall and sharp-featured.
"Silas," Isaac said. His voice was cold and stoic, knowing that the tall noble wasn't here to comfort him.
Silas Fulgur. He was the son of the Fulgur House, praised as the genius whose potential matches that of the golden child, Caspian Valerius. Arrogant, but the public deemed that he deserved to be arrogant.
"I witnessed your clown fiesta, Isaac," Silas said, stepping forward with the ease of someone who had never had to consider whether he had the right to take space. "All that hard work, and you've learned how to fail successfully. My family's servants produce better output clearing their throats."
The students behind him managed a snicker.
Silas leaned in, smiling. "I bet that your father is already making accommodations. At this rate, pulling S-rank skill is your only salvation… but that won't happen to someone as insignificant as you. I suggest that you cry about it—your eyes probably generate more water than your wand anyway."
Isaac looked at him. He may be powerless and insignificant, but if there was one thing that he wasn't, it was being a coward.
"I suggest that you stick to your own matter, Silas." Isaac stated, nonchalantly.
"…What did you say?" Silas, not having expected such a bold response, growled as he wrinkled his face.
"What? Did you not get my words? Is it that you are deaf, or that you are too incapable to comprehend language?"
Silas glared at him. He stared the tall peer back. In silence, the tension remained.
Elara looked back and forth in nervousness.
Just then, Silas backed off, chuckling as if his rage-filled emotion was nothing but an act.
"I love the way you bark, Isaac. Always so entertaining to watch, heh."
Turning, he then proceeded to leave, his group following.
Isaac watched them leave with Elara by the side.
...
The Valerius estate was cold that evening.
The dining hall should have been different the night before a Manifestation. By tradition, the eve of the Rite was the family's occasion to acknowledge what a child had built across a decade of preparation.
Yet, the Patriarch sat at the head of the table, mundanely cutting a piece of steak as if Isaac's upcoming Rite was nothing worthy of celebrating.
Caspian sat at the opposite side, reading a tactical map of the borderlands. Neither of them looked up when Isaac came in.
"I have spoken to the Registrar," his father said, without looking up. "Regardless of your result tomorrow, you will live your second-year as the 'Residue.' Your tuition will be paid, but you will no longer be one of us."
"Father," Isaac said. "If I draw a skill above—"
"A-rank?" The Patriarch's voice was ice over stone. "There is no point. Caspian at your age was a known genius with perfect control over his mana. Then, he acquired S-rank: [Great Deluge] as his skill during the Rite." He sighed. "Control over one's mana is crucial in operating a skill. Your failure to demonstrate an adequate level of control proves that even a high-rank skill won't see its full potential at your hands. Pointless."
Caspian looked up from the map. His expression carried the specific quality of someone who had already thought through the situation and arrived at his conclusion some time ago. "It's for the best, Isaac… given how you suffered throughout years because of the mismatch between your status and skill."
Isaac looked at the two of them—the people he had spent ten years trying to justify himself to—and understood something he should perhaps have understood earlier.
They weren't… disappointed in him. Disappointment required the prior existence of hope.
What they felt was something simpler and colder: the irritation of a variable that kept producing the wrong output for its assigned function.
No matter what he did, he was the imperfection to be managed.
"...Is that so," he said.
Under the table, his fists closed. His face did not change.
His heart felt hollower than ever—even though it should've been filled with hope and joy for the upcoming Rite—the step into the adulthood.
In his mind lingered the face of his deceased mother.
...
The morning of the Rite arrived the next day—in the first day of the new year. It was the year that Isaac would become eighteen in terms of age.
Outside, Isaac walked toward the Sleep Room—the specialized location where students were monitored during their Rite of Manifestation.
"Good luck, Isaac."
Elara was waiting near the furnace rooms, her eyes red in the way of someone who had spent the night worrying instead of sleeping.
She pressed something into his palm as he passed—a small iron charm, the kind that held no significance in value.
"After living for eighteen years, our time have come. Today is the day," she said, "You got this. This time, it will be different."
…Elara, she was the only one who wished him a luck.
"Thank you, Elara. I wish you the same." Isaac said after a pause. The iron was cold in his palm. He would cherish it.
They walked together.
The Sleep Room was a hall of rows of silver-trimmed couches, each etched with stabilization runes. The air was lavender and cold ozone. Students were finding their assigned positions with the specific energy of people who had been preparing for this moment their entire lives and were now inside it.
"Find your assigned couches," a Senior Inquisitor said, his voice carrying the rote precision of a man who had given this instruction many times. "The Rite is not a dream. It is a resonance. Your soul knows what it needs. Do not resist the pull."
From some distance away, Silas Fulgur was already reclining, adjusting his collar with the casual confidence of someone who had never seriously considered the possibility that the System might have a different verdict than the one he expected.
Isaac lay down. He closed his eyes and reached inward, finding the mana flow he had spent a decade building.
His mana flow wasn't the "sluggish sludge" the Academy's framework said a failure like him produced, but the quiet, precise current that moved exactly where he directed it, clean and unhurried, as if his decade of desperate training wasn't meaningless.
The Rite of Manifestation was the day where the boys and girls who turn eighteen "awaken" their skills.
It said that there were advantages that certain bloodlines provided, but the skills which they awaken were generally spoken to be mostly random—it was essentially a randomized draw.
No one knew, except the prestigious ones like Silas Fulgur, of whether they would draw a F-rank, D-rank, or A-rank skill.
The runes activated. The incense lit. The world compressed into a singular, absolute dark as Isaac entered the forced slumber.