The Vale Ascension School was nothing like North Hollow Academy.
Gone were the dull lectures and slow drills. Here, students stood in meditation circles at dawn, ran until their legs burned, and studied charts of meridians and energy flows instead of dusty histories. Spirit stones glowed in quiet halls. Teachers no longer carried books—they carried auras.
Arin Vale sat cross-legged in the courtyard garden, his breath steady as he followed the instructor's voice.
"Feel the world breathe with you. The energy is not summoned—it is remembered."
He let the words pass through him. Around him, students strained to sense what they called spiritual resonance, trying to guide energy into their cores.
Arin didn't try.
He just listened.
And the hum inside him responded—not loud, not bright, just... steady.
A quiet presence, like a thread running through all things.
Arin's talent wasn't obvious.
Others could summon flickers of light or shift the air with their thoughts. Some shouted with joy when they formed their first spirit whirlpool. Arin did none of that.
But what he did was noticed.
He advanced without rushing.
Exercises that took others weeks, he grasped in days—not with force, but with subtlety. His movements aligned perfectly with the flow of breath. His energy never flared; it pulsed in harmony with the world.
Some called him lucky. Others whispered he was slow and strange.
But the instructors watched him closely.
Especially Master Rin, an old cultivator with one eye and an aura like still water.
"You don't push," she said to him one afternoon after class. "You follow."
Arin nodded. "It feels wrong to force it."
"It is wrong," she replied simply.
Outside the school, the world stirred.
More nations had opened schools. Some clashed over teachings—sword sects, alchemy sects, elemental theories. Borders shifted, alliances changed. Cultivation had become political, and the gods watched with unease.
But none could stop it.
And in some places, spiritual storms formed without warning, tearing through land and sky—signs that the balance between realms was thinning.
At Vale Ascension, rumors of a storm forming near the border spread quickly.
Some students cheered at the thought of witnessing one.
Arin felt something else.
A pull.
That night, he dreamed again.
The spiral returned—this time turning slowly in the air before him. He stood in a black sky, stars frozen all around, and in the center of the spiral was a figure made of light and shadow.
No face.
No voice.
Just a presence.
And the sense that it was… watching him.
It raised a hand.
A single thread of silver light stretched from its palm toward Arin.
And when it touched him—
He remembered.
The battlefield.
The vanishing.
The voice that was never a voice:
"This is the correction."
He woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat.
The hum in his chest had changed.
It now pulsed with purpose.