He beamed as if he’d conquered a continent. His mother dabbed her eyes; his father nodded with a rehearsed, stoic pride. The nobles around them murmured the usual, forgettable formalities: “Respectable marks.” “A fine showing.”
The boy hurried down the steps, clutching his bronze medallion as if it were the only thing anchoring him in a room where he barely existed.
And then— “Isolde Melborne. Step forward.”
The atmosphere in the hall shifted instantly. Postures straightened; the air seemed to sharpen. The applause that followed wasn't just polite—it was focused, ringing with the weight of expectation.
Garret let out a sharp, shameless whistle that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. Beside him, Niva was a blur of motion, clapping so hard her small hands must have stung.
Isolde rose with the effortless grace of someone who had rehearsed this moment a thousand times in the dark of her own mind. Her mage’s cloak trailed behind her, the blue fabric shimmering with silver sigil-thread that seemed to catch every stray spark of light in the room.
Halfway up the dais, her gaze flickered toward her friends. Her expression softened, a brief thaw in her icy composure. Then, she looked past them.
The seats where their parents should have been remained empty.
For a heartbeat, a quiet, practiced sadness flickered behind her eyes. She knew the reality: her father was a blade at the front lines, and her mother was the iron fist holding their estate together. In the Melborne house, duty always came before applause.
Isolde lifted her chin, reaching the podium with her dignity like armor. Headmaster Vallog stepped forward, draping a crescent-shaped medal around her neck.
A symbol of mastery. A symbol of survival.
Isolde bowed, and for the first time in years, she allowed a real smile to break through—small, rigid, and awkward, but unmistakably honest.
“Look at her,” Garret nudged Niva, grinning. “She’s actually happy. It’s terrifying.”
Niva didn't hear him. She cupped her hands around her mouth, her voice piercing the dignified silence of the hall: “ISOLDE! YOU’RE SO COOL!”
Isolde’s ear twitched—the Melborne equivalent of a breakdown—and she began her descent.
Then, she stopped.
A thin, ghostly ribbon of smoke curled across the marble step beneath her boot. Her brows knit in confusion. It wasn't rising like heat or dispersing like mist. It was crawling.
It slid across the floor in unnatural, rhythmic patterns, pooling in the shadows of the tiered seats. Her gaze swept the hall, and her pulse jumped. The smoke was everywhere, a spreading grey sea snaking past the graduates, under the faculty's chairs, and through the rows of stunned nobles.
She followed the source, tracing the tide back through the auditorium until it stopped at one seat. One boy.
Ray Melborne sat frozen, his knuckles white as he gripped the edges of his chair. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face twisted in the kind of silent agony usually reserved for nightmares. Smoke seeped from beneath his boots like a tide pulled by an invisible moon.
His breath hitched, a ragged, desperate sound.
Ray...? she mouthed, her stomach dropping.
She had seen geniuses and monsters at the Academy, but she had never seen a Vein breakthrough manifest as an environmental haunting. This wasn't a spark of mana; it was a leak in reality.
The air in the auditorium thickened, growing heavy with a pressure that made spines ache and chairs creak. The ceremony ground to a halt. The silence was no longer respectful—it was terrified.
The smoke around Ray wasn't a mystical aura. It was a force, too vast and too heavy for a first-year body to contain.
Headmaster Merinth Vallog bolted upright, his voice cutting through the tension like a snapped wand. “Engravers! Attend to the boy, now—”
He never finished the command.
A blur of white-blond hair vaulted over the front row. Lucien D’Roselle didn't run; he lunged, his boots skidding across the marble as jagged arcs of lightning began to hiss and crackle at his fingertips.
He reached Ray in a heartbeat.
Lucien slammed a crackling palm onto Ray’s shoulder. KRK-SHHH!
The lightning didn't burn; it hummed with surgical precision, acting as a conductor for the chaotic energy. The smoke convulsed, swirling violently for a second before it suddenly dissolved like ink in water.
The pressure snapped. The weight vanished.
Ray’s eyes flew open. He gasped, a long, shivering intake of air, as if he had just been pulled from the bottom of an ocean.
Lucien stood over him, his expression as cold and detached as a storm-cloud. Only the faint, dying sparks on his knuckles betrayed the effort. His voice carried through the deathly silent hall with a chilling clarity.
“Congratulations, Ray Melborne.”
Ray blinked, his vision slowly returning to the auditorium, to his sister's terrified face, and to the boy standing over him.
“You finally connected your Origin Vein...” Lucien’s hand dropped, his storm-grey eyes boring into Ray’s soul.
Even the Headmaster—ancient, unshakeable, a man carved from eras of forbidden knowledge—couldn’t hide the subtle tremor in his eyes.
Lucien finally turned toward Merinth Vallog. There was no respect in the gesture, no practiced deference of a student to a master. He moved with the unsettling confidence of a man who already knew far too much.
A faint smirk—barely a curve of the lips—crossed Lucien’s face. It wasn’t mocking or arrogant; it was cryptic. It was the smile of someone holding a secret that shouldn't exist.
Merinth stiffened as Lucien’s storm-grey eyes locked onto his. Without raising his voice, without moving a single inch, the boy’s lips moved.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
No sound escaped. Just the shape of a phrase.
But Merinth saw it. The color drained from the Headmaster’s face as if the blood had been physically siphoned away. He looked as though he had just heard the impossible—as if those silent words had reached through the air and struck a part of his soul he had thought long buried.
Lucien held the gaze for one heartbeat more, then turned away. His expression returned to its default state: cool, distant, and unreadable, as though the world hadn't just tilted on its axis.
But Merinth remained frozen. Whatever Lucien had mouthed had confirmed his worst nightmare.
The Headmaster swallowed, the movement barely noticeable against his high collar. When he finally spoke, his voice was a forced mask of authority:
“Ray Melborne. Report to the infirmary. Immediately.”
The auditorium went deathly still. Not a murmur, not a cough, not even the scrape of a shoe against the marble.
Ray blinked, still dizzy from the inner-world storm, suspended between terror and a strange, humming exhilaration. He pointed a trembling finger at his own chest.
“...Me?”
Merinth’s gaze hardened. It wasn't unkind, but it carried the weight of a man who could not—would not—handle another anomaly detonating in his ceremony.
“Yes, you. Now.”
Two instructors moved in unison, stepping forward to escort him. Lucien stepped aside without a word, but the predatory stillness in his shoulders suggested he was recording every detail of the room's reaction.
Isolde took an involuntary step toward the aisle, but Garret’s hand clamped onto her shoulder.
“He’ll be fine,” Garret muttered, though his jaw was locked so tight his words were barely intelligible. “He just had to make a show of it, didn't he?”
Isolde didn’t answer. She had been closer to the smoke than Garret. She had felt that oppressive might ripple through the floorboards and seen the way it warped the very light in the room. Ray wasn't "making a show." Something had happened to him.
Thoroughly overwhelmed, Ray glanced back at Lucien. “Uh… do I really need to—”
“Walk,” Lucien said quietly, his voice a low vibration. “Before they decide to make it an order.”
Ray squeaked and obeyed.
As the instructors led him down the aisle, the students parted instinctively. It wasn't out of politeness; it was fear. They cleared a wide, trembling corridor for him, as if Ray were a vial of volatile chemicals on the verge of shattering.
Behind them, Merinth Vallog exhaled a long, slow breath, forcing his features into a rigid mask of control.
A blanched advisor leaned in and whispered to the headmaster. “Headmaster… should we contact the Grand Duke? Or the Palace?”
Merinth’s gaze flicked upward for a fraction of a second—toward the high noble seating, toward the unseen eyes of the Empire’s political vultures.
“No,” he hissed. “We do not trouble them. A boy connected his Veins; that is all the public needs to know.” He straightened his robes, his voice returning to its ceremonial resonance. “Just go. Now.”
As Ray vanished through the heavy oak doors, the hall began to buzz with a frantic, low-frequency energy. But then the headmaster called another name, “Jaxon Morvich.” The ceremony continued as if nothing happened.
Ray lay sprawled across the infirmary cot, staring at the ceiling like someone who had just witnessed the face of God and decided the guy was actually pretty chill.
Then he giggled.
It was a soft, slightly unhinged sound that escaped him before he could choke it back. With trembling fingers, he swiped the air, dragging his status screen into existence.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
STATUS — USER: RAY MELBORNE
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
NAME: Takahara Kenji (Ray Melborne)
AGE: 15
LEVEL: 4
EXP: 74 / 100
HP: 78 / 78
STM: 33 / 33
ATTRIBUTES:
? STR: 12 (+7)
? AGI: 10 (+4)
? VIT: 14 (+6)
? DEX: 7 (+3)
? INT: 12 (+1)
? WIS: 10
NEW TRAIT UNLOCKED:
ASH CIRCUIT — VEIN II: FOUNDATION
A corrupted/altered Fire Vein.
Type: Unknown
Effect: ???
Stability: UNSTABLE
Resonance: EXTREME
Synchronization: 1.0%
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Skills — [Analyze Lv.1]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
QUEST: Unknown Origin — Investigate
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Ray slapped both hands over his mouth to smother the shriek building in his throat.
He did it. After three years of crawling toward a cliff that refused to get closer, after staring at 97.4% like it was the final boss of his existence; after nearly drowning in a subconscious smoke-ocean that tried to hollow out his soul... he’d broken through.
He reached the Foundation Vein.
Ray kicked his legs under the thin hospital blanket like a kid on a massive sugar rush. “YES! I AM NO LONGER A FAILURE!”
The infirmary curtain swayed. Ray froze mid-kick, his heart hammering against his ribs. An instructor walked past the gap, glanced in with narrowed eyes and mild suspicion, then continued on.
Ray sank back into the pillow, whispering frantically into his palms. “...I did it. I actually did it.”
He opened the screen again, lingering on the words. Unstable. Unknown. Corrupted. He didn’t care. He’d take "unstable" over "failure" any day of the week. A grin stretched across his face until his cheeks ached. He was finally on the path. Finally ascending. Finally—
“—finally,” he whispered, his breath shaking, “not being left behind.”
He closed his eyes. For the first time since entering the Academy, Ray actually felt like a main character.
He let out a long, dramatic exhale, sinking deeper into the starched mattress.
“Second time,” he muttered to the ceiling. “Second time I end up here after doing something cool. In every story I’ve ever read back home, the MC wakes up in a hospital after a legendary fight. But me?”
He pointed an accusatory finger at his own chest.
“I show up here every time I unlock a new Vein like some glitching achievement hunter.”
A faint puff of laughter escaped him. It was a trope—a classic, overused cliché. But for Ray, the pattern was starting to look like a genuine health hazard. He tapped his chin, his expression turning mock-serious.
“Okay. Note to self: every time I break through, I either pass out, explode, or drown in a psychological fog. Which means if I ever rank up in the middle of a forest or a battlefield—”
He mimed his body going limp and falling backward. “—instant death. A mob would literally just walk up and poke me to death with a stick while I’m busy soul-searching.”
He grabbed a mental quill and a sheet of parchment and scribbled in his mind memo:
RAY’S OFFICIAL SURVIVAL NOTE #1
- Do NOT rank up in unsafe environments.
- Find soft furniture before breaking through.
He stared at the final line for a moment, then added a third:
- Avoid being touched by Lucien D'Roselle (High priority).
He set the parchment aside and folded his hands behind his head, pride swelling in his chest. “Great. My personal power progression comes with patch notes. Honestly? Kind of hype.”
Ray grinned, feeling the new resonance in his blood—a low, rhythmic hum that felt more like a growl than a heartbeat. He wasn't just ranking up. Something was changing him. And whatever was inside him—the ash, the smoke, the "wrongness" that had made the Headmaster turn pale—it wasn’t finished yet.
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it felt like fire.
Click.
The infirmary door opened. Ray’s grin vanished as he scrambled to look "medically distressed."