The school bag was bright yellow and had a cartoon bear on it. Lark stared at it the way a general might stare at a very obvious problem.

  "It's yellow," he said.

  "You picked it," his mother said, crouching down to zip it up for him. "You cried in the store until we got you the yellow one. You said the blue one was sad."

  "I said the blue one was sad."

  "Very loudly. Did you not want the yellow one now?"

  “I want it.” Lark said as he decided to go along with it.

  Lark decided not to think too hard about the kind of person he'd been at five the first time around. He let her zip the bag and straighten his collar, and he stood very still for it because she was being so careful about it and he didn't know what to do with that.

  "Okay." She held him by the shoulders, looked at him seriously. "Do you remember your teacher's name?"

  "Ms. Valen."

  "And if you need something?"

  "I ask Ms. Valen."

  "And if someone is mean to you?"

  "I tell Ms. Valen."

  "Good boy." She hugged him, which he was not prepared for at all, and he kind of just stood inside it with his arms at his sides for a second before he remembered that he was supposed to be a five-year-old and hugged back. "Have a good day, okay? I'll be here when you get back."

  His father was driving. Maya was in the back seat next to him, reading a chapter book with the air of someone doing him a favor by tolerating his presence.

  "You nervous?" she asked, without looking up.

  "No," Lark said.

  "It's okay if you are. First day is weird." She turned a page. "I cried on my first day."

  "You cried?"

  "I was six. I’m big now and I don’t cry." She finally looked at him. "Don't cry though. It's embarrassing."

  "I won't cry."

  "Good."

  His father glanced in the mirror. "You're going to do great, bud. Just be yourself."

  Be myself, Lark thought. Sure. I'll be a five-year-old with the memories of a five-hundred-and-ninety-six-year-old failed cultivator. That'll go great.

  He looked out the window at the streets passing by. The city. The ordinary city, with its traffic lights and bus stops and people walking dogs and none of them knowing what was above them, or how thin the ceiling between this world and everything else actually was. A root world, the figure had called it, five hundred years ago. Lark had been furious about that for decades. That something as massive and real as an entire planet could be considered a root. A footnote. A starting point.

  Now it just made him feel something quieter and more complicated.

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  I have time. That's the one thing I actually have.

  The school was small and bright and had a mural of animals painted on the outside wall. His father walked him to the gate, crouched down, straightened the collar again even though it didn't need straightening.

  "Hey. Look at me." His father had a nice face. Lark had sort of forgotten that. "You're going to be fine. Okay? Dad says so."

  "Okay," Lark said.

  "Okay." He ruffled his hair, which undid everything his mother had done. "Go on."

  Kindergarten, it turned out, was exactly as Lark remembered it. Slightly sticky tables. The smell of crayons and someone's snack that was definitely tuna. A rug with the alphabet on it, and right now Ms. Valen was trying to get everyone to sit on it, which was going about as well as herding cats.

  For Lark, seeing the kindergarten in the eyes of a five year old is really something rather than remembering it.

  "Toby, please sit down." Ms. Valen pointed at the rug. Toby sat down, then immediately stood back up to show the boy next to him that he could put his whole fist in his mouth. The boy next to him tried to do the same thing. Neither of them succeeded.

  "Toby."

  Toby sat down again.

  Lark was already sitting cross-legged on his spot, hands in his lap, watching all of this with the quiet patience of a man who had outlived entire kingdoms and was not going to lose his mind over a kindergarten rug. The girl next to him, Sera, was braiding and unbraiding the same section of her hair over and over.

  "Ms. Valen said we're doing counting today," Sera said to him.

  "Yeah," Lark said.

  "I already know how to count to a hundred."

  "That's good."

  "My mom taught me." She paused. "Can you count to a hundred?"

  "I can count higher than that."

  Sera looked at him like that was either impressive or suspicious. She hadn't decided yet.

  From across the rug, a boy named Pip, who Lark vaguely remembered as the kid who once ate a crayon on a dare, was currently trying to balance a pencil on his nose. It fell. He picked it up and tried again. He was going to keep doing this for the rest of the activity period and nothing would stop him.

  "Okay, everyone!" Ms. Valen clapped her hands twice, and the room mostly settled. "Let's start with our number chart."

  Lark sat through it. He answered when he was called on. He counted. He did not embarrass himself or accidentally demonstrate the kind of focus that a five-year-old should not have. He ate his lunch at the right time and did not comment when the boy next to him traded his apple for three crackers and acted like he'd won something.

  During drawing time, he let his mind go to where it had been circling all morning.

  The Core.

  It's Common grade. Same as before. Dormant, like it was always dormant, because this world doesn't have enough Aether floating around to trigger anything naturally. That's just what root worlds are. Low concentration. Background noise. The only reason my Core woke up the first time was because the sky split open and something from an upper realm punched through with enough Aether to shake the entire planet.

  I can't exactly wait for that to happen again.

  He pushed a crayon slowly across the paper. He knew the Core was there. He'd felt it before, knew what it felt like from the inside once it was active. The problem was getting to it from the outside, from a body that had no cultivation base yet, in a world with almost no Aether to work with.

  But I remember what the resonance felt like. I remember the path into it. If I can learn to sit still enough, go quiet enough, maybe I can find the edge of it. Just the edge. Even in a low-Aether environment, the Core itself generates something. A tiny pulse. I felt it once, way back, before I even knew what it was.

  I will find a way. No shortcuts this time, no waiting around for the world to explode and hand me an awakening. I find it myself, on my own terms, before any of it matters.

  "You're not drawing anything," Sera said.

  He looked at his paper. She was right. Just a single circle in the middle of the page.

  "I'm thinking," he said.

  "You're supposed to be drawing like teacher told us."

  "The circle is a drawing."

  She looked at it. "It's just a circle. What’s special about it?"

  "It's the sun or the moon. I like circles.”

  Lark can feel the cringe as he said those.

  I’m really acting like a child right now.

  She considered this, then went back to her own paper, which had a house, a tree, a dog, two suns for some reason, and what appeared to be a very small horse wearing a hat. Lark looked at it for a moment, then looked back at his circle.

  No matter what it takes. I will activate my Core. I will not waste this the way I wasted the first five hundred and ninety-six years.

  He picked up a second crayon and drew another circle around the first one.

  Maybe this time, I can change something.