Chapter 7 : The Announcement
Arthur woke up on the floor of his own room, stiff in places that had no business being stiff, sunlight already cutting a hard line across the carpet.
He'd meant to move to the bed at some point during the night. He hadn't managed it.
His legs still ached faintly from the last cultivation attempt. That particular exhaustion again, the kind that had nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with whatever his dantian had decided to put him through.
He checked the date on his phone out of habit, then remembered why it mattered.
Today was the day.
Downstairs, Rose was already dressed, eating toast standing up at the counter because sitting down apparently took too much commitment this morning.
"You look like you fought your floor and lost," she said around a bite.
"I did, actually."
"Cool. Very reassuring, coming from the guy who's supposed to be terrifyingly overpowered."
"I never said terrifying."
"You implied it. Heavily. With your whole personality."
He didn't have the energy to argue that one. He grabbed a piece of toast off her plate instead, which earned him a swat on the arm and nothing else.
They left the house together not long after. Their mother had already gone to whatever her own morning had become since everything changed.
The walk to school took fifteen minutes. The streets looked the same as nine days ago and completely different at once. Same houses, same cracked sidewalk near the Hendersons' place. But there were soldiers now, posted at the corner near the old pharmacy, and a line outside the grocery store that hadn't been there before the world rearranged itself.
"Feels weird," Rose said, watching two kids race each other down the block like none of it mattered. For them, maybe, it didn't yet. "Like everyone's pretending really hard that this is normal."
"Maybe it is normal now. We just haven't caught up to the new definition."
"That's a very you thing to say at eight in the morning."
The school gymnasium had been repurposed overnight, and it showed.
Folding chairs in uneven rows. A banner hung crooked on one side. Soldiers at the exits with the kind of stillness that comes from people who'd rather not be needed.
Arthur found a seat near the back, Rose next to him. Both of them scanned the crowd out of habit more than curiosity.
Parents packed in alongside their kids. A few teachers Arthur recognized stood near the stage, clipboards in hand, following instructions nobody had bothered to give them until this morning.
Two rows ahead, a father kept checking his watch every few seconds like it might start telling him something useful. A woman near the aisle had brought snacks for half the row around her, handing granola bars to strangers' kids because it gave her something to do with her hands.
Arthur understood the impulse. Nine days in, everyone had found their own small way of pretending this was manageable.
"Nine days," Rose muttered, watching a woman up front hand out water bottles. "And they've already got a banner."
"People adapt fast when the alternative is falling apart."
"Very optimistic of you."
"I didn't say it was a good thing. Just a fast one."
A man in a gray suit stepped up to the microphone.
He introduced himself as a regional coordinator, a title that meant nothing yet and would probably mean everything in a year. He explained, in the flat voice of someone reading a script written the day before, that the government was rolling out mandatory cultivation instruction across every school in the district.
Students would be grouped by what came out of today. Certain groups would receive additional resources going forward.
"Additional resources," Rose repeated under her breath. "That's one way to say it."
"Meaning some of us get equipment and combat training, and the rest get a pamphlet," Arthur said.
He wasn't wrong. Nobody on stage bothered denying it.
What came next explained the banner.
Two staff members wheeled out a pedestal, waist high, holding something that didn't belong on a folding table in a school gymnasium. A stone, rough and dark, veined through with faint threads of light that shifted color slowly, the way oil moves on water.
It had clearly not been manufactured. It looked pulled out of somewhere, and the coordinator's next sentence confirmed it.
"This stone was recovered from a portal three days ago. It reacts to ambient life energy on contact. We don't fully understand the mechanism yet, and I won't pretend otherwise."
He rested a hand on the pedestal.
"What we do know is this. The stronger the reaction, the more promising the affinity. It's not a precise measurement. Think of it as a rough sort, not a verdict."
A screen behind him lit up. A single number, currently at zero. A ranking board beneath it, empty.
"Each student will place a hand on the stone for ten seconds. The reading converts to a voltage figure, and I'll call it out as it lands. Line up by last name."
Rose leaned toward Arthur's ear. "So it's a lie detector for how interesting you are."
"Something like that."
He didn't say the other thing sitting in his chest. That a device pulled fresh out of a portal, tested for three days, was exactly the kind of tool nobody should trust yet.
Saying it out loud wouldn't get him out of the line.
The line started moving.
"Adams, Clara. Six."
"Ali, Tariq. Nine."
"Andersen, Britt. Four."
The numbers came fast and low, single digits mostly, and the crowd's attention drifted almost immediately. Phones came out. Someone near the front started a quiet conversation about lunch that had nothing to do with any of this.
"Bauer, Hans. Eleven."
"Blanc, Sophie. Seven."
"Costa, Rui. Three."
A girl with a nervous laugh got a four and did her best to look unbothered walking back to her seat. Someone's little brother, too young for this to actually apply to him, wandered up out of curiosity and had to be steered away by an embarrassed parent before he could touch anything.
It went on like that. Number after number, the coordinator's voice flattening a little more with each one.
Then a boy from the front row placed his hand on the stone, and the number didn't behave like the others.
It climbed. Not a jump, a clean patient rise that kept going long after everyone else had leveled off, past twenty, past fifty, past a hundred, still climbing. By the time it stopped, the gymnasium had gone quiet enough to hear the coordinator's pen tap twice against his clipboard.
"Hoffmann, Lukas. One hundred and ninety."
He read the number like it surprised him, glancing at it a second time before looking up to find the face that went with it. A hundred and ninety, against fours and eights and nines. It didn't look like the same scale anymore.
The boy who stood was tall, close to Arthur's height, with the kind of build that came from actual training rather than luck. Fair hair cut short and neat. A squared-off jaw and pale gray eyes that moved across the room once, unhurried, cataloguing it, before he gave a single small nod and sat back down.
He looked entirely unbothered by two hundred people staring at him. Like he'd expected exactly this number and nothing more.
Arthur filed the name away without meaning to.
"You're doing the thing," Rose whispered.
"What thing."
"The filing-people-away thing. You've got a face for it."
"I don't have a face for anything."
"You have several faces. That was one of them."
His own row came up before he could argue the point.
"Walker, Arthur."
He stood, aware of Rose watching from beside him, aware of how little he actually knew about what this stone would catch and what it wouldn't. Whatever it read, it would only read the mana that made it through the mess inside him. Not the whole of what he carried.
There was no way to warn the machine about that. No way to warn the room either, without saying more than he wanted to in front of two hundred strangers.
He stepped up to the pedestal and put his hand flat against the stone.