Chapter 8 : The Crack
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the number on the screen jumped so fast it blurred. It climbed hard, passed fifty, passed a hundred, and kept going before slowing well short of where Lukas's had stopped. It settled there, high and stubborn, refusing to move any further no matter how long his hand stayed on the stone.
Behind him, Arthur heard the particular quiet that comes right before a room decides how loud it's going to get.
He felt it from the inside too.
A pull, immediate and sharp, mana rushing toward his palm the second it made contact. More of it than he'd tried to draw in any of his sessions upstairs. His body reacted before his mind caught up, some instinct in the stone or in him deciding that ten seconds deserved everything he had.
Then, half a breath later, the pain arrived.
Small. Contained. Unmistakably familiar. The seam in his dantian objecting the way it always did, some of what the stone pulled detonating before it ever left him clean.
He'd felt it enough times on his bedroom floor to know the shape of it instantly. That brief internal flare where order and chaos collided behind his navel and decided, again, not to get along.
He kept his hand steady. It hurt. It didn't show.
A woman two rows up had her phone raised, recording without trying to hide it. A man further back muttered something about a rigged demonstration, the kind of thing people say when reality outpaces their patience for it.
The coordinator's expression had gone from bored to alert. The posture of a man doing quick math about what number this was going to be.
The screen settled.
He glanced at it twice before reading it out, checking the display against his clipboard like he suspected a malfunction and needed to rule it out first.
"Walker, Arthur. One hundred and forty."
The number hung there on the board, second only to Lukas's, and a distant second at that. Fifty points short, a gap wide enough that nobody in the room seemed to know quite how to react to either number anymore.
A few people clapped, uncertain, the way you clap when you're not sure what you just watched but sense it was impressive. To the room, this was clearly one of the best results of the morning.
Up near the front, Lukas turned in his seat to look at Arthur properly for the first time. Not with envy. With the flat, evaluating attention of someone recalculating the gap between himself and whoever had just come closest to touching his number. He held the look a second, then faced forward again, apparently having filed Arthur away the same way Arthur had filed him.
To Arthur, standing there with his palm still faintly aching, it landed closer to an insult wrapped in applause.
He stepped away from the pedestal, already doing the math.
Whatever this stone measured, it wasn't measuring all of him. The one hundred and forty on that board was only the mana that had survived the crossing. The stone had pulled everything toward his palm, and the explosion at the seam had eaten a chunk of it before it ever reached the surface for the stone to read.
So the number wasn't him. It was the part of him that made it out intact.
He thought about the percentages Zhixu had shown him during that first meditation. The scripture climbing toward completion inside his own body, twenty, eighty, a hundred. If even a fraction of that had reached the stone untouched, there wouldn't be a single name sitting above his right now.
There was one. Just one, so far. Which told him more about the hole in his own system than any amount of quiet cultivation on his bedroom floor.
Keeping them balanced will take more effort at your next breakthrough than it did just now. And more again after that.
Zhixu's voice came back flat and certain. It hadn't left much room for hope when she'd said it. It left even less now.
He walked back to his seat past a row of faces that hadn't looked at him ten minutes ago and were doing exactly that now. A boy he didn't recognize actually scooted his chair a few inches over, like proximity to a high number might rub off.
Arthur sat down without acknowledging any of it.
"You good?"
The voice came from his other side. Daniel Reyes had claimed the seat there sometime during the low numbers, and was watching him now with an easy, unhurried attention.
Daniel was Arthur's oldest friend, going back to the years before either of them had much choice in the matter. Wiry, a head shorter than Arthur, dark curls he never bothered to fully control, a face built for grinning and mostly used that way. He wore the same beat-up jacket he'd worn for two winters straight, because a new one hadn't ever been in the budget and he'd stopped pretending it might be.
"You've got a face like you just lost an argument with yourself," Daniel added.
"I'm fine."
"Sure. Very convincing." Daniel studied him another second, then let it drop, the way he usually let things drop when pushing wouldn't get him anywhere. "For what it's worth, that number looked insane from where I'm sitting."
"It wasn't the whole picture."
"None of these ever are, probably." Daniel shrugged, easy about it in a way Arthur almost envied.
Arthur didn't answer. He was still watching the board, where his seventy-one sat alone at the top like an accusation. Everyone in the room read it as the best number of the morning. He read it as evidence of exactly how much he was losing every time the mana crossed that seam inside him.
There was a strange loneliness in that. Being congratulated for a number that only he understood was a fraction of the truth. Nobody here could see the explosion behind his navel. Nobody here knew the stone had been reaching for something much larger and come away with scraps.
He let the thought go. It wasn't useful, and self-pity had never gotten him anything worth keeping.
The line kept moving.
"Ferrand, Julie. Twelve."
"García, Manuel. Eight."
"Goualard, Théo. Fifteen."
A girl got an eleven and looked thrilled about it, which under different circumstances Arthur might have found charming. Right now it barely registered. Background noise, while the ache in his stomach finished settling into something duller but still present.
"Haddad, Omar. Twenty-one."
A boy with an easy smile bounded up, touched the stone, and pumped a fist at his number like he'd won a raffle. A couple of people near him laughed, caught up in the good humor of it. Arthur watched him bounce back to his seat and thought, not for the first time, that some people were simply built to take the world lightly. He'd never quite managed it himself.
"Kane, Tobias. Seventeen."
A broad-shouldered boy, clearly an athlete, placed his hand on the stone with obvious confidence and came away visibly annoyed at the number, like it had failed to reflect how strong he knew his own body to be. He sat back down with his jaw tight, and Arthur understood that particular frustration better than he'd have liked to.
He kept turning the hundred and forty over in his head. Not a ceiling. A leftover.
"Walker, Rose."
The coordinator's voice cut clean through his thoughts.
Arthur looked up in time to see his sister rise.