The corruption had touched him.
Kael didn't realize it at first. Not when he left the cave, not when he returned to the hut and collapsed into his straw bed, pretending to be a sickly village boy again. But deep in the silence of night, when the winds stilled and the stars blinked warily above Elmsfall, **he felt it**.
A heat.
Inside his bones.
Inside his **soul core**.
It pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat—hot, unstable, and alive.
He sat up, chest slick with sweat, eyes glowing faintly in the dark.
> "The obelisk… wasn't just leaking corruption," Kael muttered. "It was searching."
And it found him.
But instead of consuming him, it had done something stranger—it **awakened** a part of his magic that hadn't existed before. Not in his first life. Not even in the peak days of the Empire's spellcraft.
> "This isn't the Codex system… not glyph-based, not rune-linked…"
He extended his hand. Flame surged—not just from his fingers, but **from his spirit**. No incantation. No sigils. Just raw will. Unrefined, wild, **and alive**.
The flame twisted unnaturally, dancing in the shape of a symbol—a spiral inside a triangle, then shifted into something more abstract. A rune unknown even to him.
> "It's rewriting itself," he whispered. "Instinctive casting… living arcana."
That should've been impossible.
He was using **essence-based casting**—a legendary, lost art theorized but never proven. It bypassed the structured spellweaving of classical magic and instead drew power directly from the *soul core*. Dangerous. Unstable. But immensely powerful if mastered.
Kael closed his fist. The flame died.
His eyes narrowed, mind racing.
> *This new world may have weakened traditional magic… but something darker has taken root beneath it. And it's waking up.*
> *And I can feel it waking me, too.*
---
By morning, he had already begun adapting. He spent hours meditating beside the fields, acting like a contemplative orphan while secretly tracing the flow of leyline fractures beneath the land. Every pulse of decay, every whisper of the Warden's cursed obelisk, fed into his internal map.
> "I won't just relearn magic," he vowed. "I'll remake it."
---
Later that day, in the outskirts of the village, Kael approached an old willow tree. It bent low over a cracked well, long abandoned. Children said it was haunted.
Perfect.
He knelt, drawing a crude circle in the dirt with his finger. His flame flickered to life again—this time shaped into a narrow blade. A makeshift ritual knife.
He sliced his palm lightly.
The blood sizzled where it hit the earth.
> "By essence, by will, by name," he intoned in a low voice. "I claim this circle as my root."
The dirt glowed faintly. The blood vanished, sucked into the soil.
It was the beginning of a Shadow Root, a personal focus—half altar, half workshop. Ancient mages had towers. Cultivators had dantians. Kael would build something more dangerous: a secret locus of power grown from nothing.
> "The world took everything from me once," he whispered, pressing his bleeding hand to the ground. "But this time, I take first."
The ground pulsed beneath him—accepting.
A system was beginning to form, but it didn't come with bright HUDs or shiny blue notifications.
This wasn't a game.
This was a slow, grinding rebirth of an arcane truth.
---
That night, the voice returned.
> "Little flame… you stir what should stay buried."
Kael didn't flinch. He stood in the circle of his growing Shadow Root, hands behind his back, flame dancing across his shoulders like a mantle.
"I've buried things before," he said calmly. "And I know how to dig."
> "You will burn."
Kael smiled.
> "Then I'll burn everything with me."
The wind howled, and far below the village, the obelisk cracked again—just slightly.
But enough.
---
### End of Chapter 3
**Next Chapter – Chapter 4: Blood and Grain**
> A villager turns up dead—drained of essence. The priest begins to suspect witchcraft, and Kael must protect his secret while investigating a deeper threat crawling beneath the wheatfields…