Noticing how glassy his stare has become, Lena drops a stack of textbooks on his lap—each one heavy enough to legally qualify as a blunt weapon.

  “Since you’re confined to bed rest, you’ll need to review these,” she says.

  “Oh, good,” Aster mutters, accepting them with all the enthusiasm of someone handed a court summons.

  “They’re theory-based. No spiritual imprinting. You’ll have to actually read it.”

  “Out loud, or will quietly weeping over the pages be sufficient?”

  She gives him a sugar-sweet smile that says, he already knew the answer, and leaves him to it.

  The nurse, meanwhile, stations herself nearby like a hawk with a clipboard—half expecting him to explode again. After the day he’s had, he wouldn’t trust him either.

  His body has spent the last twenty-four hours being torn apart and reassembled by the equivalent of spiritual war surgeons; it’s a miracle the damn thing hasn’t unionized. The nurse warned him—too much regeneration in too short a window and his body starts confusing recovery for more attacks. Cells go on strike. Aether pathways seize. The next round of treatment could easily finish what the wounds started.

  So now, bed rest.

  By order of people who probably know better, and his own screaming organs, which definitely does.

  He lies there feeling half-pickled in antiseptic, still damp from the purging process. Every nerve feels overclocked, humming faintly under the skin like a machine that doesn’t trust its operator.

  Aster spends the remainder of the day under the grim and judgmental eye of the school nurse, who hovers nearby like she’s waiting for him to turn into a firehose again.

  Not that it matters. His gate is dry. The Spirit Aether he pulled in earlier has been drained completely by the spell—sucked into a spiraling vortex of first-time-caster enthusiasm and zero impulse control. Until it refills naturally, he can’t cast again. So for now, he sits. Quiet. A little fried around the edges. Still kind of damp.

  But somewhere in the fog of his Mind Palace, the new Glyph waits—a real, executable line of code written by his own hands. His first spell. His first crack in the wall.

  He glances back at the diagrams Lena showed him. Seven elemental typings surrounding the central node—the Spirit Typing. The nucleus. The bridge between instruction and execution. And it’s his typing. Spirit. The one that doesn’t come with fireballs or earthquake punches, but instead with the quiet, terrifying promise: learn to write the laws of existence, or die trying.

  So yeah. He’s decided. Screw half-measures. He will learn the Runic Alphabet. All of it. If the universe is made of code, then he’ll study until he can debug reality itself.

  Lena leaves him to recover. Her last words are something halfway between encouragement and a warning—"Don’t try casting again without telling someone first"—before she slips off to her next class. Which leaves him, for the first time in what feels like weeks, with a pocket of silence.

  He leans back on the infirmary bed and reaches into his Stomach Palace.

  The ring. And the letter.

  The paper is cheap. Ordinary. No glyphs, no enchantments, no shimmering ink—just plain script in a hand he now recognizes. The same one from the old note. The same pen that always seems to know where he’ll be, what he’ll need.

  His throat tightens.

  He unfolds it slowly, almost reluctant to see what it says. His eyes track the first line.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  Dear Aster,

  If you’re reading this, then I have unfortunately passed on...

  He doesn’t make it far before the words blur.

  By the second paragraph, the tears are already falling—silent and steady, like the tide has broken.

  You have your father’s strength and your mother’s determination...

  Being around you feels like standing beside them once more...

  Aster presses the paper closer to his chest, trying not to fall apart. He’s spent his life fighting to survive. Not to be good. Not to be seen. Just to exist, one shitty day at a time. He hasn’t even realized how starved he is for something like this—someone who has cared. Really, truly cared.

  Though your family lost everything on the Material Plane, they were able to seal away your inheritance within the Astral Plane...

  His breath hitches. An inheritance? A foundation to rebuild his bloodline?

  ...but it will not be handed to you freely. Each level is locked behind trials meant to shape you...

  Of course. Nothing ever is.

  To start your first trial, you must learn to see what you’ve lost. Only by looking to the past will you be able to grasp the future. Some doors can only be opened by the hands that once belonged there...

  The letter ends with Matter’s name—no flourish, no title. Just him. Just Matter.

  Aster wipes his face on his sleeve and sits there, motionless for a long time. He doesn’t know what it means to “see what he’s lost,” or what hands are supposed to open what door, or even what the hell kind of Astral treasure vault comes with riddle-locks and emotional excavation as an entry fee.

  But he does know one thing.

  He’s going to find it.

  He examines the ring and presses his Will into it—half-expecting it to glow, hiss, or start whispering family secrets in ancient tongues.

  Nothing. Not even a polite buzz.

  He frowns, glancing back at the letter. That last paragraph... it says something, but like most cryptic posthumous advice, it’s irritatingly vague. Start at the beginning. See what was lost. Hands that once belonged there. He stares at the ring again. It’s just a ring. But maybe it once belonged somewhere. Or to someone.

  Whatever the trial is, he’ll find it. Rebuild his legacy. Make sure Anathi—and everyone else cursed by this system—never has to feel like they’re alone in it.

  And if Ziya Mesha stands between him and that future?

  Then she’s going to be the first wall he breaks down.

  Hard.

  With the same fury the Void Wyrm tried to consume him with—only this time, he’ll be the one in control.

  He folds the letter gently, tucks it back into his coat, and stares at the ring in his palm.

  “Let’s find the key,” he murmurs to himself, “before the world decides I’m the lock.”

  ?? [Nothing wrong in being the lock sometimes...]

  Aster spends the rest of the day sulking over his textbooks while the nurse continues to glower at him from across the room—like she’s daring him to so much as blink wrong. His entire first day, wasted. Even without the Void Wyrm, apparently fate still has a personal vendetta.

  He tries to sit upright, posture of a diligent student and all that, though his spine protests every second. The books Lena left him read less like coursework and more like a series of increasingly unhinged cult manuals.

  Artificing, for instance—supposedly an engineering discipline, but most of it sounds suspiciously like dark ritualism with better branding. Then there’s Alchemy, which masquerades as chemistry until it starts describing how to burn the soul out of a material until only the essence remains. Apparently the goal is to refine everything down to its purest form by methodically destroying the parts that aren’t wanted. Very philosophical, in a mildly horrifying way.

  Each ingredient must harmonize with the spell’s intent. The Spirit Script etched into the base material isn’t decorative—it functions like a command line, instructing the concoction on what to keep, what to discard, what to become. When done right, the result is a concentrate so pure it could punch through a Gate if ingested properly.

  When done wrong, well. He’ll probably find out the hard way.

  Aster closes the book with a sigh, already ninety percent sure he’ll accidentally invent a new poison within the month.