Aries had been sitting cross-legged on it for what felt like twenty minutes, eyes closed, book open beside him, trying to follow instructions.

Awareness of Mana is the first gate. To see it, to feel it, to wield it — one must first sense their Arcane.

’Great. Incredibly helpful. Thank you.’

He pushed his focus inward anyway, past the floor under him and the quiet room around him, reaching toward something he had no real reference point for.

He could hear the faint creak of the building settling, distant sounds from the hallway, his own breathing slowly evening out on its own.

Nothing came.

"Come on," he muttered.

Still nothing.

He was beginning to seriously question whether he’d actually felt anything earlier or just convinced himself he had, when something shifted.

It was barely noticeable, a faint loosening at the edges of his body.

The floor softened under him. His breathing slowed further without him doing anything.

And then the room simply stopped being there.

He had no better way to describe what he was looking at.

Not darkness. Darkness was just the absence of light, and this wasn’t that.

It was vast and directionless, stretching outward with no floor and no ceiling and no logic to any of it. And scattered through all of it were lights.

Thousands of them, maybe more, drifting in loose clusters through the black, each one burning with a heat he could feel from where he floated.

Aries turned slowly, taking in the full scale of it.

"...So this is the Arcane Space."

Genuinely incredible. For about thirty seconds.

Then the practical problem hit him, there were thousands of these lights and absolutely no way to know which one belonged to him.

He looked left. Right. Up. Down. All of it the same endless blazing dark in every direction.

"How am I supposed to find mine in all of—"

The floor opened.

Something beneath him gave way without warning, and where solid dark had been was now a churning mass turning slowly in the void below.

He noticed it the same moment the pull started.

Gentle at first, barely anything. Then steadily, deliberately less gentle.

The line from the book hit him.

If one remains too long without establishing a connection, the Arcane Space will consume them.

"Shit, that’s bad—"

He grabbed for the nearest light.

The rejection hit him like a shove, a hard pulse of energy that threw him back.

He grabbed another. Same answer. Another. Same again.

Each one completely indifferent to him, the way a locked door doesn’t hate you, it’s just closed.

The pull reached his waist.

He kept grabbing. Kept getting thrown.

Panic had started quietly dismantling what remained of his focus.

Then Mirielle’s voice surfaced from somewhere in the back of his memory.

’Don’t call me your sister again.’

Something went very still inside him.

He wasn’t anger or Hurt.

A flat, quiet refusal behind his stubbornness.

He stopped reaching and held himself still in the churning dark with the void already climbing his ribs, and thought with complete clarity:

’I’m done hearing that.’

And then he saw it.

Far away, something moved. A faint, trembling point in all that black, barely there, but drifting closer.

Or he was. As the distance closed he saw it properly.

Not a constellation.

The beginning of one.

Thin threads of Mana drifted toward it from the surrounding dark, slowly weaving themselves around the fragile light.

Still forming and being built.

The void dissolved like it had never existed.

"...Is this, my Arcane?" Aries reached out and let the small trembling light settle into his hands.

The space cracked, fractures spreading outward through the dark in every direction, lights splintering, the void folding quietly in on itself.

He gasped.

The wooden floor hit his palms hard. He sat there breathing with one hand still extended and fingers open, the room exactly as he’d left it.

Overturned chair. Open book. Cold air coming through the window. His hands were shaking slightly.

"...Did that actually work."

It wasn’t quite a question.

He picked the book back up, excitement still lingering in his chest from what had just happened.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he vaguely remembered a strange feeling like brushing past a gigantic invisible wall stretching endlessly into darkness. A seal, maybe. Some kind of barrier.

But he didn’t care about that.

All that mattered right now was that he had awakened, and with that thought, he skimmed ahead to the Second Law.

Manipulation — a Conductor shapes Mana into basic form by drawing it outward. Elemental control is difficult at this stage. Foundation before everything else.

He set the book down and stared at his palm.

"Something simple. A sphere."

He focused.

Nothing happened.

He focused harder, reaching for the faint warmth from before.

Every time he pulled toward his hand it scattered before it arrived.

He reread the law once more.

Struggle with manipulation is normal at Conductor’s stage.

He sat with that for a second.

Then realized what he’d been doing wrong — trying to move it through his entire body at once, which was completely obvious and stupid.

’Just the palm. One point of flow would be enough’

He raised his right hand and narrowed everything down to a single spot.

The faint warmth came easier this time, threading upward toward exactly where he was asking it to go.

Pressure gathered.

He opened his eyes.

A small yellow sphere hovered above his palm, glowing softly, roughly the size of a marble.

The grin on his face was completely involuntary.

"Yes—" He caught himself and dropped to a fierce whisper. "Yes. Okay. That is an actual mana sphere. I did that—"

The sphere twitched.

Aries blinked. "...Huh?"

It expanded. The temperature in the room climbed noticeably.

He leaned back slightly. "Why are you—"

It doubled.

"Stop—"

Still going. Growing steadily with the deeply unbothered energy of something that had found no particular reason to quit.

Aries tried closing his fist — nothing.

Tried cutting the flow mentally — nothing.

Tried backing physically away from it across the room, which worked only in the sense that he was now in the corner and the problem was still very much present and still very much growing.

"HOW DO I TURN THIS OFF—" He snatched the book up with genuine desperation.

"You explained how to start it! Not one word about how to stop it—"

BOOM.

The wall stopped existing.

Drelan had been in the hallway when the building shook.

He was moving before the dust finished falling, Althea right behind him. And Mirielle was not far behind either.

Drelan pushed the door open.

The three of them stood in the doorway and looked at what had been a wall and was now a large, perfectly circular hole punched clean through it.

Rubble lay distributed across what remained of the floor.

Dust hung thick in the room.

Standing in the drifting smoke was Aries.