Over a year passed inside the Dilation.

  It sounds like a daunting epoch, a vast desert of stagnant time waiting to be crossed. But for someone whose existence had been defined by a looming executioner’s axe and a list of impossible enemies, a year of untroubled growth felt like the most extravagant luxury imaginable. It wasn’t a prison; it was a sanctuary. A sabbatical from survival.

  In the waking world of the Confluence, less than three days had passed. But within the transparent diamond walls of Lady Crysanthe’s sanctum, I had aged — not physically, my evolved Body and [Phoenix Rebirth] keeping my cells in a state of perpetual peak performance — but spiritually. I felt denser. My mana felt less like water flowing through a pipe and more like mercury sliding through a frictionless vacuum.

  Our training shifted from the frantic “catch up” pace of the first month to something deeper. Something rhythmic and foundational. Crysanthe wasn’t just a sparring partner; she was a curator of power, and she was determined to polish my edges until they cut reality itself.

  “Power isn’t raw input, Messy,” Crys said one evening — or what passed for it, when the white sun eclipsed the violet one, bathing the room in a bruised lavender light. She was floating upside down, meticulously building a house of cards using single-atom slices of floating crystal, holding the structure together with nothing but a hum. “It’s nuance. You don’t need to scream to be heard if the room is silent. True Sovereignty is commanding in whispers, while the World strains to listen.”

  I integrated this philosophy. My [Apex Mana Authority] evolved from a tool of domination into a second nervous system. I stopped telling mana where to go; I simply created a reality where it was already there. I learned to light a candle in a windstorm not by shielding the flame with force, but by convincing the wind to bend around the wick out of respect.

  But the physical conditioning remained brutal. Crysanthe unlocked sections of her Spire that she claimed hadn’t been used since the “Era of Shattered Moons.”

  We utilized the Gravity Wells — chambers where gravity didn’t just pull down; it pulled inwards, compressing the body from all sides. I had to maintain my combat forms while feeling like I was being squeezed by a titan’s fist. It hardened my skin, compressed my muscles into surpassing biological efficiency, and forced my internal mana flow to become powerful enough to push back against crushing conceptual pressure.

  To recover, Crys was generous to a fault. She opened her private vaults.

  “Mom always has her artisan make me too many ‘snacks’,” she complained, tossing me a vial filled with a liquid that looked like a thunderstorm trapped in oil. “This is [Draught Essence of the Orbital Storm]. Drink it. It helps expand the neural pathways for spatial perception. It tastes like licking lightning, but it works.”

  She offered me “Star Fruit,” dark purple pears that grew in the vacuum of space. They numbed the tongue but filled the Spirit attribute with a cold, dense capacity. I drank teas brewed from the petals of flowers that only bloomed during a solar eclipse.

  “Why share all this?” I asked one day, after consuming a meal that would have cost a kingdom in the Prime System.

  “Because having a hoard is boring if you can’t show it off,” she chirped, spinning a crystal tetrahedron on her finger. “And because… you’re the first person in three centuries who treats me like a person, not a localized weather event or a deity to be worshipped. You also helped me a lot more than you realize. We’re friends, Eren. Friends share snacks.”

  I smiled, genuinely touched. I kept my guard up regarding the ‘Forbidden Hybrid’ secret, never letting my Flame or affinity for Time fully mix with my Void insights in front of her, but in almost every other way, I opened up. We discussed mana theory, the nature of authority, and the burden of expectation.

  I also spent some time in the city below, exploring alone while Crys stayed within the dilation field in her Sanctum. I would activate [Void Walk] and my [Veil] whenever I step out of the Void, slipping out of the Sanctum only for very brief respites.

  Crystal City was a marvel. I drifted through the markets as an invisible observer, watching the trade of raw energy. I studied the Resonance Lords singing new bridges into existence, noting how they modulated their pitch to harden the light-constructs. I took mental notes on their architecture, wondering if Leoric could adapt the “Singing Glass” technology to reinforce Bastion’s chemical equipment. It was peaceful, a slice of a life I hoped my people could one day have — where magic wasn’t just a weapon, but the fabric of daily life.

  But my focus always returned to the Sanctum and the refinement of my skills. Specifically, healing.

  Thoth had confirmed that my Flame wasn’t just destruction; it was Change. The power of Beginning and Ending through Ash. [Phoenix Rebirth] healed by burning away the concept of injury or ailment and replacing it with the concept of “life”. I wanted to master this. I wanted to be able to pull my friends back from the brink of anything. If the S-14 Protocol somehow bypassed our defenses, it could hurt my family. I needed to be the ultimate counter balance.

  I practiced on Crys’ crystal plants. They were fragile constructs of living gem-logic. I would break a stem, crush a flower into diamond dust, then apply my green flame.

  At first, I just melted them. Or welded them back together clumsily.

  “I do not know much about healing with fire but I do know that that is way too hot!” Crys critiqued, leaning over my shoulder. “You’re treating the break like a wound. Treat it like a mistake in its state.”

  I focused. I channeled the heat not into the physical shards, but into the idea of the flower. I visualized the flower as it was ten seconds ago. I poured mana into that visualization and burned away the present reality where it was broken.

  Green fire washed over the dust.

  The dust swirled, reversed trajectory, and snapped back into place. The cracks didn’t heal; they vanished. The flower wasn’t mended; it was restored.

  “You’re not just healing,” Crys observed, eyes wide, watching the crushed rose bloom back into perfection. “You’re rewinding the object’s personal state using thermal entropy as a catalyst. It’s…”

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  “It’s effective,” I gasped, wiping sweat from my brow. I had to balance practicing my healing without showing the Flame, hiding any hints of other Primordial Affinities, but it was like trying to hug a raging river into stillness. It was a process I needed to get used to, in case hostile observers were watching. The mana cost was astronomical compared to standard. “But it’s still Legendary. I can feel the Mythic threshold, Crys. It’s right there. I need a deeper understanding of Life itself to cross it. But this… this level of restoration will save lives.”

  We also escalated our combat training. It became less about sparring and more about testing theoretical limits.

  I decided to fully integrate the [Echo] into my tactical doctrine. I wasn’t content with it just being a fighter. I wanted it to be a master of deception.

  “Let’s try a Swap-Strike scenario,” I proposed.

  Crys grinned, the diamonds of her skin shifting color to a combat-ready crimson. “Show me.”

  She unleashed a barrage of gravity-distorted light beams.

  I engaged [Echo of the Ashen Sovereign]. My clone appeared, charging her head-on with a roar, wreathed in fake fire. Simultaneously, I stepped sideways into the [Void Walk], becoming intangible.

  Crys shattered the Echo with a backhand of solid force. But as the Echo dissolved, I stepped out of the Void directly above her, blade descending.

  She blocked it — barely — with a shield of compressed space.

  “Fast!” she laughed. “But I felt a hint of your Intent as you stepped out!”

  We reset. Again. And again. I learned to mask my Intent. I learned to Step into the Void not when I was attacked, but when she blinked after my own. I also learned to activate the Echo while still inside the Void and have it step out from a different angle while I remained hidden.

  It led to our infamous “Blood Incident”.

  We were fighting atop a floating platform suspended over the endless drop of the Spire’s central shaft. Crys was unleashing hell — gravity inversions that warped light into corkscrews, lances of solidified sound.

  She cornered me. Or rather, she cornered my projection. I had swapped with the Echo a second prior, slipping into the Void to flank her.

  The Echo raised a shield. Crys shattered it with a Hammer of Pure Force and followed up with a spatial severance blade — a literal cut in reality intended to stun me by severing my mana connection.

  It hit flush. It bisected the Echo at the waist.

  But because I had fed the Echo a lot of my Essence to make it a convincing clone, and because I had layered it with my Soul Signature and biological feedback loops to mimic pain reactions to fool her senses… it acted exactly like a perfect body double.

  Blood — real, red, warm blood created from advanced mana construct — sprayed across the white platform. The top half of “Eren” slid off the bottom half with a wet thud, eyes rolling back, mouth open in a silent scream. The scent of iron filled the air.

  Crys froze. The combat madness drained from her mirror eyes instantly. The hammer dissolved into harmless mist.

  “Eren!” she screamed, a sound of pure, unadulterated horror that cracked the platform beneath her. She rushed forward, dropping to her knees, her hands glowing with frantic, blindingly bright healing light, ignoring the blood soaking her pristine diamond legs. “No, no, no! Why are you not healing?! I didn’t mean to cut the anchor line! But I didn’t think it would… Don’t you dare die on me!”

  She was panicking. Legitimately terrified she had just murdered her friend. Her mana flared wildly, destabilizing the room’s gravity. Tears of liquid diamond spilled from her eyes, clattering onto the floor like hail.

  I stepped out of the Void directly behind her, wincing slightly at the intensity of her reaction. I had maybe made it too realistic.

  “That was a new shirt,” I commented dryly, creating a small noise to alert her.

  She whipped around so fast she created a sonic boom. She looked from me, whole and alive, to the dissolving corpse on the ground, which was now fading into blue mist.

  Her expression shifted from horror to confusion to relief, and then finally to incandescent, volcanic rage in three seconds.

  “That,” she hissed, her voice vibrating the entire Spire, the air around her heating up, “was incredibly rude.”

  She then proceeded to throw me off the platform with a gravity pulse. I fell for three miles, laughing, before I Leapt back up. It was worth it for the tactical data alone — even she could not tell that was a clone.

  An entire year passed by, my improved willpower and mental fortitude making the constant training with little rest an easy task.

  I stood at the edge of the transparent sanctum, looking out at the triple sunset.

  My skills were honed to razor edges. I had gained a lot of progress over Space, Mana, and had developed Clones that offered me unparalleled utility. My Domain felt solid, a tangible weight I could drape over reality.

  I sat down to meditate on the Void. I was tracing a string that led off-world, feeling the vast, terrifying connectedness of the cosmos.

  My soul was calm. A still pond reflecting a thousand suns.

  When a sound shattered the stillness.

  It wasn’t audible. It didn’t happen in the room. It happened inside my chest, a vibration against the shell of my soul.

  A sharp, clear, undeniable chime. A resonant frequency I had encoded into a specific object months ago.

  I opened my eyes. The calm vanished instantly, replaced by a cold, sharp focus.

  Crys looked up from her book of star-charts, sensing the shift. “Eren? Is everything okay?”

  “No,” I stood up, my armor flowing onto my body with a thought, the Ashen Raiment plates locking into place. My hand went to the place in my inventory where the twin of the object lay.

  A simple token I had given to Freja, the tall, blonde leader of Noren.

  I had told her to break it only in a dire emergency.

  “It’s a beacon,” I said, my voice low and steady. “It means they need me. Now.”

  I didn’t panic. Panic was for the unprepared, and I spent over a year preparing.

  I turned to Crys.

  “I have to go.”

  She nodded, closing her book slowly. There was no sadness in her posture, only the acknowledgment of necessity. “Back home?”

  “Yeah.”

  She floated up, drifting close. She reached out and adjusted the shoulder straps of my armor, her touch cold and heavy. “You’re ready, Messy. You’re harder than diamond now. And heavier than lead.”

  “Thanks to you,” I took her hand, squeezing the fingers that could crush mountains. “I owe you, Crys. You have given me real hope. That’s a debt I can’t repay.”

  “Pay it by winning,” she said fiercely, her mirror eyes reflecting my own determined face. “Don’t let them break your song. And come back to visit! Bring your sister. I want to see this ‘Storm’ you keep bragging about.”

  “I will,” I promised. “Maybe next time, we’ll do a double sparring match. You and your Mom against me and Anna.”

  “Hah! You’d die in less than three seconds,” she laughed, a bright, chiming sound that I filed away in my memory.

  I activated the Spire interface. The connection to the Prime System flared to life, hungry and waiting.

  “Goodbye, Sparkle.”

  “Go break them, Messy.”

  The portal swirled open, indigo and red bleeding into the white vortex of transit. I took a deep breath, feeling my Essence thrumming under my skin, the Void Strings humming in my perception, the Echo waiting in my soul.

  The time of training was over. The drafting was done.