The transition into the dome in my vision was less like entering a room and more like stepping into the concept of “Order.”

  The interior was vast, defying the exterior dimensions of the structure. It was a cathedral library, stretching upward into a vaulted ceiling of living gold light. Floating in the air were millions of scrolls, stone tablets, and holographic data-shards. They drifted in lazy, synchronized currents, swimming through the golden air like schools of fish in a calm ocean. The air smelled of old paper, rain, and cinnamon.

  In the center of the vast, circular floor sat a desk. It was simple, made of polished driftwood that looked wildly out of place amidst the divine architecture. Behind it sat a figure.

  It wasn’t a monster. It was… a curator?

  He — if it was a he — was humanoid, slight of build, dressed in robes woven from what looked like pages of vellum and ribbons of star-stuff. His head was a smooth, porcelain mask with no mouth or nose, only two wide, mismatched eyes painted on the surface in black ink. One eye was weeping; the other was laughing.

  He held a quill made of a single, vibrant peacock feather.

  In the Glimpse, my projected self stepped forward, wary of any sudden movement.

  “I expected a trap,” I said, my voice echoing in the golden vault. “Or a monster.”

  The figure didn’t look up. He continued to write furiously on a floating piece of parchment.

  “Everyone expects a monster,” the Curator murmured. His voice didn’t come from a throat; it emanated from the surrounding scrolls, a chorus of paper whispers coalescing into speech. “It’s such a boring narrative trope. ‘Hero enters dungeon, beast roars, violence ensues.’ Dull. Dull, dull, dull.”

  He punctuated the last ‘dull’ with a flourish of his quill, dotting an ‘i’ so hard sparks flew.

  He finally looked up. The painted eyes seemed to shift, focusing on me with piercing intensity.

  “You,” he said. “You’re loud. Mentally, I mean. Your intent is practically shouting. ‘Conquest this,’ ‘Protection that.’ Do you ever stop declaiming your internal monologue?”

  “Who are you?” I asked, gripping fists tighter. My [Predator’s Gaze] was failing to lock onto him; it just slid off his robes like water off a duck.

  “Names are labels,” he dismissed, waving a hand. “Labels are reductive. But for the sake of conversation, you may call me Thoth. Or ‘The Librarian.’ Or ‘That annoying paper man.’ Whatever fits your current cognitive framework.”

  Thoth stood up. He floated an inch off the ground.

  “You want something,” he stated. “Visitors always do. Power? Knowledge? A shiny sword to hit things with?”

  “I want to grow,” I said honestly. “To learn.”

  “Ah, Growth. The classic motivation,” Thoth drifted around the desk. “But growth requires foundation. Tell me, intruder… do you own your own thoughts? Or are you just renting space in the System’s ledger?”

  He snapped his fingers.

  Suddenly, the golden light in the room shifted. It became heavy. Pressurized.

  “A test,” Thoth announced, his painted eyes seeming to grin. “Before I share my tea — or the ancient wisdom, which is honestly drier than the tea — you must prove you can hold the cup.”

  He spread his arms.

  “Hit me,” he said cheerfully.

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Hit me,” he repeated. “With magic. Mana. Shazam. Whatever you call your shiny pew-pew energy. Land a single mana-based attack on my person. Do that, and the Library is open.”

  In the Glimpse, I frowned. A single hit?

  “Be careful what you wish for,” I muttered.

  I raised my hand. Using [Mana Sovereign] to create a powerful construct. I summoned the heat of a star. I visualized the beam — a Lance of condensed plasma moving at the speed of light. I poured my Tier 6 will into it and fired.

  The beam erupted from my palm.

  It crossed the ten feet between us instantly.

  Thoth didn’t dodge. He didn’t raise a shield.

  He just… reached out with his peacock quill and swiped it through the air, crossing the beam’s path.

  The plasma beam didn’t hit him. It didn’t explode.

  Where the quill touched my magic, the beam dissolved into ink. Actual black ink splashed onto the floor. The heat, the light, the destructive potential — it was stripped of its properties and reduced to a simple conceptual form: Written intent.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Sloppy phrasing,” Thoth critiqued, clucking his tongue. “Too much adjective, not enough verb.”

  I stared at the ink puddle. My Star-fire… turned into a stain?

  “Again,” he chirped.

  I didn’t hesitate. If raw energy didn’t work, maybe complexity would. [Armory of the Ashen Soul].

  I summoned five spears of solidified void-fire. I imbued them with Phoenix flames and telekinetically launched them from five different vectors.

  Thoth twirled his quill. “Cliche.”

  As the spears closed in, the scrolls floating around the room swarmed. They wrapped themselves around my spears like paper bandages. The moment the parchment touched my constructs, I lost connection to them. The spears didn’t stop moving; they simply changed allegiance.

  They looped around Thoth in graceful arcs, transforming mid-flight into origami birds made of black metal, chirping melodically before fluttering up to the ceiling.

  “Pretty,” Thoth admired. “But derived. I’ve seen that attack vector in three thousand different iterations.”

  Frustration spiked in my gut. He was mocking my magic.

  I focused. My [Domain]. My Truth.

  I expanded the Sphere of the Ashen Phoenix. Imbuing hundreds of projectiles from my Ashen Armory with the concept of Ending, then launched it all.

  Thoth didn’t even blink. He tapped the air with his quill, right where my Domain’s boundary touched his personal space.

  A ripple of distortion spread out. My projectiles turned blue. Then green. Then plaid. Then it popped like a soap bubble, turning into a shower of confetti that rained down on us.

  “No, no, no,” he sighed, sounding genuinely disappointed. “You’re trying to shout over me. Volume isn’t Authority, child. Ownership is Authority. You’re pushing your Mana at me, but you’re still asking the ambient reality for permission to be hot. To be sharp.”

  He drifted closer, his painted face looming.

  “I don’t ask,” he whispered. “I dictate.”

  He reached out and plucked a single spark of leftover confetti from the air. He held it between his fingers.

  “This was your fire,” he said. “Now, it is a flower.”

  The spark bloomed into a white rose made of flame. It didn’t burn him. It obeyed him perfectly.

  “You own the weapon,” Thoth said, tossing the fire-rose to me. It vanished before I could catch it. “But you don’t own the medium. The Mana… it’s not yours, is it? It’s borrowed from the air. From the System. As long as you’re borrowing the ink, I can always edit your story.”

  I stood there in the vision, my strongest attacks reduced to ink and paper birds. I felt impotent. A Tier 6 powerhouse, rendered harmless by a librarian with a feather.

  “One more try,” Thoth offered. “Show me something Authorial.”

  I channeled everything. I prepared to cast [Ember’s Leap] to teleport directly into his space and unleash a point-blank blast.

  I Leaped.

  But I didn’t land.

  I leaped into a book.

  One moment I was teleporting; the next, I was flat, pressed between two giant pages of vellum, stuck like a dried flower.

  “Failed,” Thoth’s voice echoed from outside the book. “Formatting error. Please revise and resubmit.”

  My glimpse ended then.

  I gasped, stumbling back into the ridge in the real world. My lungs burned as if I had held my breath for the entire vision.

  I wiped sweat from my forehead, staring down at the glowing dome.

  A Master of Mana. A true Manipulator.

  Thoth wasn’t just strong. He was fundamentally interacting with magic on a level I hadn’t even conceived of. He wasn’t casting spells; he was editing the source code of the magic as it happened. He claimed ownership of the “Ink” — the raw mana itself — allowing him to rewrite any spell cast at him that relied on external rules.

  It was terrifying.

  And I wanted it.

  I needed that power. Thoth was offering a lesson in true ownership. If I could learn to “Dictate” the Mana rather than ask it…

  I checked my Glimpse. Five days. Five days of waiting in the bone-fields. Five days of crawling around avoiding dangers.

  Or…

  I stood up, dusting the bone-meal from my knees.

  The vision had shown me failure, yes. But it hadn’t shown me malice. Thoth mocked, he teased, but he didn’t try to kill me, which he probably could have easily done, considering his ridiculous control over Mana.

  “I can’t wait,” I muttered, checking the seal on my armor. Vayne was moving. The S-14 Protocol, whatever it was, was a ticking clock. Seven days of charge time for the portal was already gone. I couldn’t waste another five waiting for a cooldown.

  I replayed the vision in my head. “You’re still asking the ambient reality for permission.”

  That was the key. My Domain internalized my truth, yes, but my projectiles? My beams? They traveled through his air. Through the shared medium.

  To hit him... I had to make the attack self-contained. Absolute.

  I had an idea. It was risky. It required me to use my own Soul energy as the fuel, rather than my Mana, but I did not know how he would react to that.

  I looked at the golden gate.

  “No risk, no revelation,” I whispered.

  I walked down the slope for real this time. The crunch of my boots was the only sound in the dead world. The hum from the dome grew louder, singing its welcoming song.

  The metal dissolved into mist, welcoming me back.

  I stepped across the threshold, into the golden light of the library.

  It was exactly as I had seen it. The floating scrolls. The smell of cinnamon. The figure behind the driftwood desk, writing with a peacock feather.

  He didn’t look up.

  He raised his porcelain head, the mismatched painted eyes fixing on me.

  “Ah, a testee?” Thoth mused. He stood up, floating. “Welcome, loud one.”

  He spread his arms. The air thickened. The test began.

  “Hit me.”

  I closed my eyes.

  I didn’t reach for the Mana in the air. I reached inside. Past my core. Into the burning, sovereign spark of the Ashen Flame from within my own Soul.

  I pulled it out. A ball of pure, agonizingly bright white-gold fire hovered in my palm. It wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t mana from my core nor borrowed from the atmosphere. It was raw, unadulterated furious Essence powered by my Soul.

  Thoth’s quill twitched. He leaned forward, intrigued.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Dictate this,” I growled.

  And I threw it.