Lesson One was harder than dueling a death knight blindfolded.

  The task was maddeningly simple: move a bubble the size of a marble three meters to the left.

  “You are trying to command it,” Thoth chided from his floating perch atop a pile of ancient lexicons that hovered in defiance of gravity. He was peeling an orange that seemed to be made of solidified sunlight, the zest dissolving into glowing sparks as it fell to the floor, instantly turning into tiny, scampering lizards of light. “These bubbles do not take orders, Flameborn. They are entities of surface tension and captured air. When you push, they interpret it as an attack. So they pop. It is a defense mechanism. Suicide before subjugation.”

  I gritted my teeth, sweat beading on my forehead despite the cool, cinnamon-scented air of the library. I had spent hours staring at the fragile sphere of soapy water Thoth had conjured from a memory of a rainstorm. Every time I applied my will, my [Mana Sovereign] skill roared like a combustion engine, and the bubble exploded in a tiny spray of wet defeat.

  “It’s inanimate,” I growled, frustration leaking into my aura, causing nearby scrolls to shudder. “It doesn’t interpret anything. It’s just basic physics.”

  “Everything interprets!” Thoth exclaimed, throwing a segment of sun-orange into the air where it turned into a canary and flew away, singing a few bars of a forgotten opera. “Physics is just the universe’s way of being polite until someone rude walks in. You exist in a cosmos of vibrating strings, boy! Matter is just energy that decided to slow down and take a nap. If you shout at it, you wake it up, and it gets cranky. Don’t push the bubble. Persuade the space around the bubble that it would be more comfortable over there.”

  I sighed, scrubbing my face with my hands. Persuade the space. Right. Seduce the vacuum.

  I closed my eyes. I dimmed the roaring furnace of my Soulfire. I silenced the demanding authority of my Domain, suppressing the instinct to simply overwrite reality. I reached out with just my Mana sensitivity.

  I felt the bubble. Fragile. Perfect. Terrified of disruption.

  I felt the air around it. Dense. Heavy. Charged with the Golden Library’s divinity.

  I didn’t push. Instead, I envisioned the air three inches to the left thinning. I created a localized, microscopic low-pressure zone. Not a vacuum — that would pop it — but a gentle invitation. A slope in reality. A suggestion that entropy would be lower over there.

  The bubble wobbled. It hesitated. It seemed to consider the offer. Then, lazily, it drifted.

  It floated three inches left and stopped, hovering perfectly still.

  “Huzzah!” Thoth cheered, tossing confetti made of actual starlight over my head. “You seduced it! Clumsy, like a child’s first love letter written in crayon, but effective! You stopped being a hammer and started being gravity.”

  “It… flowed,” I breathed, staring at the bubble. The mana cost was negligible. I hadn’t spent power; I had simply rearranged the existing potential. “I didn’t force it.”

  “That is Resonance,” Thoth explained, drifting down to inspect my work, his porcelain mask gleaming. “Every soul is a canvas. Yours is usually a war horn — very loud, very brassy, startling the neighbors. But Mana has its own song. To control it without breaking the world, you must harmonize. Some use rhythm — like the Tidal-Singers of the Aquatic nebulae. They pulse their magic to the heartbeat of leviathans. Some use geometry — the Architect-Mages of Crystalline Sigma. You? Your resonance is Truth. You create a new reality, and the mana rushes to fill the mold because it trusts your version of events.”

  The lessons continued. Hours blurred into what felt like days. We tested affinities, strained concepts, and broke reality in small, contained ways. During one break, while sipping tea that tasted like rain on hot asphalt and distant thunder, I checked my internal clock.

  “Thoth,” I said, anxiety spiking as I thought of Vayne and the ticking clock of Bastion. “How long have we been here? I am on a time limit, I need to head for my portal to go back soon. I feel like I’ve been training for days.”

  Thoth waved a dismissive hand, and a stack of books rearranged themselves into a comfortable chair. “Time in the Vault of the Unsung is… editorial. I have detached our local causality from the outside stream. We are currently existing in a footnote. A parentheses in the grand text. Months here will resolve to mere days in your Prime System chronology. Don’t fret. The deadline will keep. The narrative waits for the author.”

  I sagged with relief. “Time dilation. Handy.”

  “I prefer to call it ‘Pacing Adjustment’,” Thoth corrected. “Now, back to work. Your Water affinity is atrocious. It’s dry. Fix it.”

  The curriculum was brutal. He made me weave baskets out of lightning without singeing the reeds. He made me hold a localized vacuum in a glass jar without cracking the glass. He made me construct a song out of pure sonic mana that had to harmonize with the resonant frequency of a diamond.

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  During these sessions, Thoth would ramble. He dropped snippets of history that hinted at a universe far older and stranger than I had imagined.

  “You remind me of the Aurelian Lineage,” he mused once, while watching me fail to transmute stone to wood. “They carried a shard of the Flame too. Not the Primordial Spark like you, but a trace. They built an empire on combustion in the Meridian Cluster. They worshipped the pyre. They thought fire was the only answer to entropy.”

  “What happened to them?” I grunted, forcing mana into the rock, sweat dripping into my eyes.

  “They burned out. Literally. They assumed the Flame was a weapon to be wielded. They didn’t realize it was a hunger to be fed. One day, the Flame decided they were too static, so it ate them to facilitate change. Ash is the purest form of change, after all. The Meridian Cluster is now a nebula known as ‘The Aurelian Dust’. Very scenic, terrible real estate value.”

  I looked at him sharply, abandoning the stone. “You keep warning me about the Flame. But I’ve never felt it fight me. It’s… seamless. It listens.”

  Thoth’s mismatched eyes narrowed. “Curious. Perhaps your Soul acts as a containment field. Or perhaps… perhaps the Flame likes your story. A sentient weapon that likes you is infinitely more dangerous than one that hates you. Because you’ll trust it.”

  Later, I broached another subject of my skill.

  “My [Blink Echo],” I said, conjuring the spectral afterimage. “It’s a distraction. A decoy. But I want to make it real. I saw my grandfather create a clone that could think, fight, cast spells. I want to evolve this. I want an army of myself.”

  Thoth circled the flickering Echo, poking it with his quill. It rippled like water.

  “Possible,” he decreed. “The great general Raelthas the Legion-Walker did it. Sector 12-BT, roughly a billion years ago. He was frail of body, barely could lift a sword. But his mind was a fractal. He fractured his consciousness into ten thousand slivers. He fought the Void-Swarm Armada with a single mind split across ten thousand bodies. He held the line for three weeks. He won the war, of course. Lost his sanity, ended up arguing with himself for three centuries before finally dissipating, but he won.”

  He looked at me seriously. “To evolve this, you cannot just fill the shell with Mana. That makes a Golem. To make a Clone, you must partition your Will. You must invest a shard of your consciousness into the Echo. It requires dual-processing. You must be the General and the Soldier simultaneously. If your mental fortitude cracks… well, you might forget which one is the real Eren and wake up as a dissolving hologram.”

  “I can handle it,” I said.

  “We shall see,” Thoth chirped. “Lesson 452: Multi-threaded Consciousness. Prepare for a headache that transcends dimensions.”

  Eventually, the day came for the final test.

  Thoth tasked me with the ‘Harmonic Convergence’. I had to maintain a sphere of Fire, a cube of Ice, and a pyramid of pure Kinetic Force, all rotating around each other in perfect synchronization, without them touching or reacting, and while composing a poem in my head.

  It required splitting my mind into four discrete streams of intent.

  Fire: Burn, but contain.

  Ice: Freeze, but hover.

  Force: Push, but yield.

  Poetry: Rhyme, but don’t be trite.

  I closed my eyes. I sank into the flow. I stopped commanding and started conducting.

  My mana poured out, not as a flood, but as precise, surgical lines of power. The shapes formed. Red fire. Blue ice. Purple force. They spun. They danced. The heat did not melt the ice. The force did not shatter the structure.

  I felt the resonance. My will wasn’t heavy anymore; it was part of the air. The mana wasn’t a tool; it was an extension of my nervous system. I was the weaver, and the cosmos was my loom.

  The structure held. Perfectly stable. A masterpiece of contradicting physics held together by harmony.

  Thoth drifted over. He watched the rotating shapes for a long time.

  He reached out and tapped the kinetic pyramid. It rang like a crystal chime.

  “Acceptable,” he whispered. “You didn't force the rhyme.”

  [Skill Evolution Triggered]

  [Skill: Mana Sovereign (Epic) -> Requirements Met.]

  [Evolution Path Confirmed: Resonance & Absolute Control]

  [New Skill Acquired: [Apex Mana Authority] (Legendary)]

  Description: The user has transcended the role of a mere caster and become an Arbiter of Energy. Ambient mana naturally aligns with your intent before a command is even issued. Grants [Fluidity of the Architect]: Mana costs reduced by 80%, casting time removed for non-ritual spells, and the ability to hijack external mana constructs of equal or lower tier.

  “Apex Mana Authority,” I read, feeling the shift in my core. The reservoir of my power felt limitless now, because I realized I didn't need to use my reservoir. The world was my battery.

  “A grandiose title for ‘Learned to Ask Nicely’,” Thoth teased, but there was pride in his painted eyes. “But fitting. You don’t pull strings anymore. You weave the tapestry.”

  I banished the shapes, exhaling a breath that felt like releasing a held storm.

  “Thank you, Thoth,” I said, bowing deeply. “I feel… unlocked. But I do have a question. Why? Why give me this? You’re timeless. I’m a ‘Typo’. Why train me to rewrite the world? Why do you care about a human from a backwater planet?”

  Thoth drifted back to his desk, the mirth fading. He picked up his quill, turning it over in his ink-stained fingers. The eccentricity drained away, leaving a being of terrifyingly ancient intelligence. The air in the room grew heavy, charged with a gravity I hadn't felt before.

  “Because I check the upcoming chapters, Eren,” he said softly. “And I see the genre shifting. The easy adventures are over. The tutorial is done.”

  He pointed upward, past the dome, to the infinite white sky of the Ossuary. “There are… talents. Some refer to them as the ‘Mythic Five’.” Thoth said, the name dropping like a stone in water, rippling through the silence.

  I stiffened. The name sounded momentous. Dangerous.

  “The Mythic Five?” I repeated. “What are they? Monsters? System glitches?”

  Thoth turned his porcelain face to me, the mismatched eyes dark and serious.

  “That is the wrong question,” he whispered. “You should be asking… who are their Creators, and why?”