The morning after the test, the world seemed smaller.
It wasn't just the way the villagers avoided looking at him—it was the silence of finality. A silence that followed him like a shadow. The kind that told a child not to ask why, because the answer would only hurt more.
The hut where Arion stayed—little more than stone and straw lashed together—felt colder than usual.
He sat near the edge of the cracked threshold, knees to chest, watching children with glowing roots walk past with food in their hands.
The ones who failed had been handed dull knives and broom handles.
He hadn't been handed anything.
---
Old man Trayn, the village's fish-drier, passed by and clicked his tongue. "Should've died at birth. Would've saved the tribe a bowl of rice."
He didn't say it cruelly. He said it like fact.
That was worse.
In this world, cultivation wasn't a dream—it was food, defense, worth. Without it, you were neither protected nor valuable. The wolves would eat you first. The beasts would smell your weakness. Even hunger found you faster.
Arion said nothing.
He didn't cry. He didn't scream.
He watched.
He remembered.
And he began to calculate.
---
By the time the midday sun painted shadows like spears across the dirt, Arion had wandered to the outskirts of the village—past the crumbling fences, past the water barrels, into the dry ravine where few bothered to go anymore.
This place was forgotten, just like him.
He picked up a dry branch and began drawing again—diagrams he barely remembered from his past life: pressure pumps, spiral water lifts, anatomical joints, farming rows.
None of it was cultivation.
All of it was power.
Just not the kind anyone in this world respected.
But Arion had watched enough by now to understand: not all power had to glow.
---
He watched the young cultivators train that evening, sweating and panting as they mimicked movements taught by the village's only copper-ranked elder, Master Rynn. Their punches were wild. Their balance laughable.
They knew only what they were told.
"More chi! Feel the flow!" Rynn barked, slapping one child's shoulder.
Arion squinted, noticing something no one else did—the way their feet slid too far, the way their stances bled force, the lack of rhythm.
No foundation, Arion thought. No physics. No leverage. Just brute belief.
He pressed his hand against his own chest.
No glow. No flow.
But he felt the beat of his heart.
A rhythm.
I may not walk their path, he thought, but I can build one of my own.
---
Later that night, Arion sat near the cooking pit as the village elders laughed over roast root and fermented goat milk. His stomach twisted from hunger, but his mind gnawed on something deeper.
That's when he heard it.
A wheezing laugh—dry, knowing—coming from behind the grain silo.
"You think too loud, boy."
The voice was old, cracked like bone under strain.
Arion turned his head.
A hunched figure leaned against the wall in the shadows, wrapped in ragged furs and burlap.
Eyes like dying stars shimmered from beneath a hood.
The beggar.
He had seen the man before. People said he was mad. That he had once touched the copper path but lost his mind to it. Now he mumbled to himself and begged for rotten fruit.
"You've no root," the beggar said, scratching his beard.
"But you've a fire under your skin. I smell it. I remember it."
Arion met his eyes without flinching. "What are you talking about?"
The beggar smiled.
And Arion knew in that moment—he wasn't the only one who saw through the lies of this world.