The silence was the first thing that felt wrong.

  When Kaito fell from the "Shattered Tooth," the world had been a screaming cacophony of wind and shattering ice. Death was supposed to be loud, or at least, it was supposed to be final. But as his consciousness clawed its way back from the abyss, he didn't feel the cold of the mountain. He felt the bite of cold marble beneath his knees and the suffocating weight of silk against his skin.

  Clink.

  The sound of metal on stone made him flinch. He tried to reach for his head—his vision was a blur of gold and white—but his arms wouldn't move. A sharp, stinging tension pulled at his shoulders.

  He wasn't in a hospital. He wasn't in a body bag.

  Kaito's eyes snapped open, and the world focused into a nightmare of opulence. He was kneeling in the center of a grand, circular hall. The ceiling arched high above, painted with scenes of knights slaying titanic beasts, and the air smelled of expensive incense and old, dusty power.

  Where am I? Is this a stunt? A prank? . His heart hammered against his ribs—a small, frantic thumping that felt too fast, too weak. He looked down at his hands. They were small. Delicately shaped, but trembling uncontrollably. Most importantly, they were bound. A heavy, ornate silver cord was wrapped tightly around his wrists, biting into the flesh.

  "Elian Valerius."

  The voice boomed through the hall like a clap of thunder, dripping with an authority so heavy it felt like a physical weight on Kaito's neck.

  Kaito lifted his head, his "Nutuber" instinct to analyze a situation kicking into overdrive, even through the panic. At the end of the hall, perched upon a throne of obsidian and white gold, sat a man who looked like he had been carved out of granite. His hair was a shock of silver, his eyes two chips of frozen blue. This was the Patriarch. This was the man who was supposed to be his father.

  Beside him sat a woman in a gown of shimmering violet silk. She was beautiful, with high cheekbones and eyes the color of a stormy sea. Mother, a small, instinctual part of Kaito's brain whispered, even though he had never seen her before in his life.

  "The Awakening Ceremony has concluded," the man on the throne announced, his voice devoid of any paternal warmth. "The results are indisputable. The priests have checked the Aether-font thrice. They have confirmed that you can wield neither Mana nor Aura."

  Kaito blinked, his mind reeling. Awakening? Mana? Aura? What is he talking about? He tried to speak, to ask what was going on, but his tongue felt heavy, paralyzed by a strange, lingering magic in the air.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The Patriarch stood up, his gaze sweeping over Kaito with a disgust so thick it was physical. "In the three-hundred-year history of the Valerius line, we have produced Sovereigns, High Mages, and Grand Knights. We have never, not once, produced a defect."

  A murmur ran through the shadows of the hall. Kaito realized then that they weren't alone. Dozens of people—nobles in fine furs and shimmering robes—were watching him from the balconies. They weren't looking at him with pity. They were looking at him like he was a stain on a white rug.

  "Elian Valerius," the Patriarch continued, stepping down the dais with predatory grace. "At the age of twelve, you have been found to be Hollow. You possess neither the mana veins to cast nor the aura core to fight. You cannot hold the light of Caelum. You are a vessel with no bottom. A disgrace to the very blood that flows in your veins."

  Kaito's breath hitched. Hollow? The word felt like a death sentence. He looked toward the woman on the throne—his supposed mother. Surely, she would say something. Surely, she would defend her child.

  He caught her eyes.

  Kaito had seen many things in his old life—death on the mountains, the cruelty of the internet, the harshness of nature—but he had never seen anything as terrifying as the look in that woman's eyes.

  There was no anger. No sadness. No hatred.

  There was only indifference.

  She looked at him as if he were a piece of furniture that had finally broken beyond repair. She didn't see a son; she saw a waste of space. She looked away, daintily picking a stray thread off her silk sleeve, completely dismissing his existence.

  That look pierced through Kaito's modern armor and struck the heart of the boy he now inhabited. A sharp, physical ache bloomed in his chest—a sorrow that wasn't his, yet belonged to him now.

  "The verdict is passed," the Patriarch's voice rang out. "A Hollow has no place in the House of Valerius. You are stripped of your name. You are stripped of your rank. To pay for the resources you have wasted for twelve years, your life is forfeit to the Crown's labor debt."

  He's selling me, Kaito realized, the panic finally boiling over. My own father is selling me into slavery because I don't have magic?

  He tried to stand, to scream, to tell them he was Kaito, that he was an adventurer, that he was more than this..... —but then, the world exploded.

  A white-hot spike of agony driven into his brain.

  It started behind his eyes and spread like wildfire through his skull. Kaito let out a strangled cry, collapsing onto the marble floor.

  Memories. They weren't his, yet they were flooding in with the force of a tsumani. He saw a lonely childhood in a cold library. He felt the sting of a tutor's cane when he couldn't feel the "pull" of mana. He saw the cold, silent dinners where his parents never looked at him. He felt the desperate, 12-year-old hope that today—the Awakening Day—everything would change. That he would finally be "someone."

  The two lives crashed into each other. Kaito, the 21-year-old thrill-seeker, and Elian, the 12-year-old failure.

  The pain was too much. The "Hollow" space in his chest began to throb, not with mana or aura but with a strange, rhythmic pulse. The smell of white flowers—sweet and sickly—filled his senses, drowning out the incense of the hall.

  Insight...a whisper echoed in the back of his mind, ancient and heavy.

  His vision began to fade into a dark, swirling grey. The last thing he saw before the world vanished was the Patriarch turning his back, and his mother rising from her seat to follow, neither of them casting a single glance at the boy dying on the floor.

  The darkness swallowed his vision whole, and for the first time in two lives, Kaito truly knew what it meant to be alone.