Being Cedric Valdrake was like carrying a bomb through a crowded room.
Nobody would touch you. Nobody would get close. Everyone smiled and nodded and stepped carefully aside and pretended the reason they were sweating had nothing to do with the ticking in your hands. You moved through the world in a pocket of empty space that looked like respect and felt like quarantine.
Four days into the academic term, I had not been touched by another human being since Seraphina's handshake.
Not accidentally. Not casually. Not the shoulder-brush of a crowded hallway or the brief contact of a passed document. Students adjusted their trajectories to avoid coming within arm's reach. Professors addressed me from the far side of their lecterns. Even the cafeteria staff placed my food on the counter and retreated before I picked it up, as if Cedric Valdrake's hands might contaminate whatever they touched.
They weren't wrong. Just not in the way they imagined.
I ate alone. Sat alone. Walked alone. The only person who voluntarily occupied my space was Ren, and even he maintained a two-chair buffer in public, the socially calculated distance between "attendant" and "associate" that kept him close enough to be useful and far enough to be deniable.
The Valdrake name was a fortress with the drawbridge permanently raised. It kept threats out and humanity in and the man inside could not lower the bridge without the walls collapsing.
I was beginning to understand why the original Cedric had been cruel. Not to excuse it — cruelty was a choice, always. But isolation was a pressure, and pressure without release became either madness or malice, and a seventeen-year-old boy who'd never been taught a third option had apparently chosen the one that at least gave him the illusion of control.
Cedric hadn't bullied people because he was strong. He'd bullied them because being feared was the only form of connection his world allowed.
I filed that understanding in the growing folder labeled "things about Cedric Valdrake that the game reduced to a villain archetype."
The academic curriculum, at least, was manageable.
Combat Arts was taught by Instructor Veylan Graves in the outdoor training amphitheater — a stone-tiered arena open to the sky where the ambient Aether made every technique 20% more effective and every mistake 20% more painful. Veylan was exactly as the game had depicted him: brown hair, jaw scar, expression permanently set to "unimpressed." His teaching method consisted of demonstrating a technique once, asking students to replicate it, and watching the results with the clinical detachment of a man who had seen better and expected worse.
He'd looked at me during the first session. A single, evaluating glance that lasted three seconds and covered my stance, my Aether output, and my hand position on the practice sword with the efficiency of a scanning machine.
He hadn't said anything. Hadn't commented. Hadn't adjusted my form or offered corrections.
That meant one of two things: either my performance was good enough to pass without note, or he'd seen something wrong and chosen not to say it publicly.
Given what I knew about Instructor Veylan — that the man was former military, Warden-rank, and possessed the kind of observational skills that made intelligence officers look sloppy — I was betting on the second option.
He knew. Maybe not the specifics. But he knew something about my combat output didn't add up.
Another name for the private list.
Aether Theory was taught by Professor Arconis — an eccentric, white-haired man who taught with the energy of someone who'd been waiting his entire life for an audience that might actually understand him and was perpetually disappointed when they didn't. His lectures were dense, technical, and occasionally brilliant. I absorbed them the way a sponge absorbed water — this was the science beneath the game's mechanics, the actual physics of how Aether circulation, elemental conversion, and bloodline manifestation worked. Every lecture filled gaps in my understanding and created ten new questions.
Beast Taming was elective. Alchemy was elective. History and Strategy was —
History and Strategy was Malcris.
His classroom was on the main building's third floor, room 312, with windows that overlooked the Spire of Trials. The seating was tiered. The lectern was positioned so that the professor could see every student's face without turning his head. The Aether-crystal lighting was even and clinical, eliminating shadows that might hide expressions.
The room was designed for observation. I doubted this was accidental.
Malcris taught well. I hated that. A bad teacher would have been easy to dismiss — incompetence was transparent and unthreatening. But Malcris was genuinely skilled. His lectures on imperial history were organized, engaging, and delivered with the measured warmth of someone who cared about his subject and wanted his students to care about it too. He asked questions that rewarded critical thinking. He encouraged debate. He remembered every student's name after the first class.
The mask was perfect.
On the fourth day, during a lecture on the founding of the Ducal House system, he turned to me.
"Lord Valdrake. Your family was among the first houses established, yes? Perhaps you could share your perspective on the early Void Sovereignty practitioners. There are some fascinating accounts of their meridian-based cultivation methods that diverge from standard historical —"
He paused. Adjusted his spectacles. The picture of a professor who'd gotten carried away with academic enthusiasm and caught himself before imposing on a noble's patience.
"— forgive me. I sometimes forget that family histories are private matters. Please disregard the question."
The retraction was more dangerous than the question.
I dissected it in real-time. He'd specifically mentioned "meridian-based cultivation methods." Not Void Sovereignty in general — meridian-based cultivation. The deprecated technique. The path I was currently walking, that I'd learned from an ancient text in my family vault, that no one alive should know I was practicing.
Either this was a coincidence — a history professor who happened to know about an obscure cultivation variant and chose this moment to bring it up.
Or Malcris was probing. Testing whether the mention of "meridian-based cultivation" produced a reaction in the Valdrake heir — a flinch, a glance, a spike in Aether signature — that would confirm something he suspected.
I gave him nothing.
"The early Valdrake practitioners are well-documented in the public archives," I said. My voice was Cedric's: flat, bored, carrying the implicit message that a professor's curiosity about my family was tedious rather than threatening. "I'd suggest the Imperial Library's third-era collection if you're interested. The annotations are comprehensive."
A redirect. Polite enough to avoid rudeness. Empty enough to provide nothing. And subtly dismissive in a way that said: you don't get to ask about my bloodline, professor.
Malcris smiled. The warm, understanding smile of a man who'd been gently rebuffed and accepted it with grace.
"Of course. Thank you, Lord Valdrake."
He moved on. The lecture continued. The class forgot the exchange within minutes.
I didn't.
He'd said "meridian-based cultivation methods." Not a common term. Not something you'd casually reference in a lecture on political history. That phrase came from specialized texts — the kind that existed in family vaults and restricted archives, not public libraries.
Malcris had done his homework on the Valdrakes. Detailed homework. The kind that went beyond academic interest into something more targeted.
I didn't know if he suspected me specifically or if he was fishing for information about Void Sovereignty in general — which, given his Cult connections, made perfect sense. The Cult needed a Void user for Phase 5 of their plan. Malcris was the Academy Herald. Identifying and assessing Void Sovereignty users was literally his mission.
He wasn't probing because he knew I was practicing the meridian path. He was probing because he wanted to understand Void Sovereignty's capabilities — and the Valdrake heir was his most accessible test subject.
I was a specimen to him. A data point in a Cult intelligence report.
The realization was cold and clarifying. Malcris wasn't personally interested in me. He was professionally interested in my bloodline. And that meant his attention would continue, escalate, and eventually lead him to push harder for information.
I needed to manage him. Not confront — manage. Feed him enough to satisfy his reports while withholding everything that mattered. Lead him to conclusions that were technically accurate but strategically useless.
Be the arrogant, unremarkable Valdrake heir that the game had presented. Give him the surface. Protect the depths.
The class ended. Students filed out. I walked with the unhurried pace of someone who didn't file out with crowds — crowds filed out around him.
Ren was waiting in the corridor. He fell into step two paces behind me, carrying my notebooks with the efficient silence of a well-trained attendant, and didn't speak until we'd turned two corners and entered an empty stretch of hallway.
"I found something," he said.
His voice was different when he was in research mode. The nervousness evaporated. The mouse became something else — not a lion, not a hawk, but something focused and intent, like a hound that had caught a scent.
"Walk with me," I said. "Don't look like you're reporting."
He adjusted. Fell into step beside me rather than behind — still close enough to look like an attendant's proximity, but angled so that our conversation looked like casual exchange rather than intelligence briefing. Fast learner.
"You asked me to look into Valdrake family history. The unofficial kind." He kept his eyes forward, his voice low, his body language relaxed. "The academy library doesn't have much — your family's good at controlling information. But there's a collection of personal correspondence from the Founding Era in the restricted section of the Celestial Library. Letters between the first three Valdrake patriarchs and their contemporaries."
"You have access to the restricted section?"
"I have first-rank academic credentials. The restricted section is available to top-decile scholars for research purposes." A brief pause. "Most students don't bother. The texts are in archaic Valdrian and the filing system was designed by someone who hated people."
"And?"
"One letter mentions a practice called 'the Bloodline Refinement.' Briefly. In the context of why it was banned." He swallowed. "The letter describes it as — I'll quote directly — 'the sacrifice of kin-blood to amplify the bloodline's resonance in the surviving line. A practice so abhorrent that the first Patriarch sealed the knowledge and forbade its use under penalty of erasure from the family records.'"
Erasure from the family records.
Sera. Erased from the genealogy. Missing from every archive I'd searched. Eight Gold Imperials for a memorial between the groceries and the horse feed.