The problem with waiting for information was that Kael hated standing still.

  Wade had promised him answers — promised he'd dig through every record, and lecture scroll he could get close to before graduation. But that took time. Time the Academy never gave freely, and time Kael couldn’t afford to waste. And with Wade being dragged to the headmaster's office along with Thadon, who knew?

  So he worked. A stitched leather satchel, tightly sealed and humming with low magic, pressed into Kael’s hands behind the Horde Inn's pantry door. Dren handed it over without ceremony, eyes ringed from sleepless nights, his long coat draped with the calm air of the lower parts of the city.

  “No questions,” he said. “Straight to the east quarter. Knock twice, whistle, and drop the bag. Don’t talk unless they do. If they ask who sent it, you say Red Clover moves on whispers.”

  Kael raised an eyebrow. “Subtle.”

  Dren grinned. “Subtle gets you paid. Now go.”

  Kael had walked the old slate roads before, but never with something quite this warm tucked against his ribs. He didn’t know if it was alchemical, enchanted, or alive — but the satchel twitched twice on the way over.

  The door he knocked on belonged to a crumbling building draped in mildew and rust-choked pipes. A girl answered — no older than thirteen, at least visually, eyes like razors, hair braided in the old Thornsunder style. She whistled once, took the bag, and shut the door.

  Kael walked back with more questions than answers.

  A blood-bound parchment that needed to reach a vault broker who only worked at twilight, beneath the bones of an old chapel that had been deconsecrated a century ago. Dren rode with him this time, on a silent two-man cart.

  “Why me?” Kael asked.

  Dren lit a pipe. “Because you don’t spook easy. And because anyone who can sense mana will think twice at the very least to mess with us.”

  Kael considered that. “Not wrong.”

  They passed three guard posts. None stopped them. The symbol carved into the cart's wheel was enough: a six-petaled black flower over a coiled chain.

  “You ever going to tell me who you really work for?” Kael asked.

  Dren exhaled smoke, thin and bitter. “I forget sometimes that you are a little noble boy. The Red Clover Syndicate is older than this Kingdom. We don’t run just the capital — we run the market between the markets. Everything the crown thinks it controls passes through us. Spells, slaves, and most importantly information. Remind me to give a list of fronts we use around the kingdom, may be useful.”

  “Slaves?”

  “Relax,” Dren muttered. “We don’t touch the flesh trade anymore. Not since the Merrow Incident.”

  Kael blinked. “As in Thadon Merrow?”

  Dren grinned. “What do you think his ancestors used to traffic before he started sniffing Ghostpetal on your coin?”

  Kael looked back at the city skyline, trying not to calculate how deep he'd already fallen. He realized something that had been on the back of his mind for a while, Dren was much more than he seemed. He was not simple drug dealer and the more time Kael spent with him the most he realized this truth.

  Dren handed Kael a list with three names and a small coin with no denomination that glowed when external mana touched it. “You’re buying, not selling,” he said. “Each of these idiots thinks they’ve got a relic worth five digits. You’ll offer a fraction of that, flash the coin, and let it do the lying for you. Don’t get stabbed.”

  Kael met the first seller in a bathhouse. The “relic” was a cursed mirror shard that screamed if exposed to firelight.

  The second was much more interesting at the very least — a forged Crownbreaker seal meant to look like a relic from the old rebellion. Kael called his bluff and walked away with it for a third of the price. He doubted it was real, but it was reactive to the coin and that was worth something.

  The third deal never happened. The man was already dead when Kael arrived — throat opened ear to ear, his goods missing. Kael turned and left as if he had never even been there.

  Back at the Horde Inn, Kael sat with his drink untouched. He’d spent the last couple of days pacing the back alleys, tailing errand boys, and working for an underground Syndicate. But now? Now he waited for Wade, And then, just past sunset, the door opened.

  Wade stood there, coat heavy with night air, eyes rimmed with sleeplessness . His hair was a mess again but all Kael noticed was the satchel he held. Moments later Wade dropped the bag on the table.

  “That’s all of it. Everything I could find. Scrolls, lecture scraps, personal research. No one talks about Decay. Not openly. But it’s there.”

  Kael’s fingers twitched toward the satchel.

  “You’re lucky,” Wade added, voice quiet. “I owed you for not name-dropping me, I appreciate it, I really do. You could have ended my entire life but you took it all on yourself. I won’t count this one against you, although now everyone in the fucking Academy thinks me and Thadon get it on. Just know no one else would’ve risked this. ”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Kael nodded once.

  “I know Wade. Thank you. You may not think so but in my book, I owe you one. And you know my favors are worth a lot. If you still think we’re equal then I’ll definitely owe you one if you help me with my ritual.”

  Wade simply gave him a nod and left.

  Kael opened the satchel, the scent of old parchment washing over him like ash in the wind.

  He smiled.

  “Let's see what my future entails.”

  The candle burned low by the time Kael finished sorting through the satchel Wade had delivered. Dozens of documents — half-scorched scrolls, stolen transcripts, personal notes smuggled from the Aetherian library. Most were scattered fragments, incomplete, but enough incomplete pieces helped form an understanding. Still, what he found was more than he could have hoped. After The Shattering ethereal affinities were near extinct and information about their properties and spells were hard to come by.

  One scroll — The Spiral Path of Decay, a translated artifact from the Fractured Era — was the closest thing he’d seen to a formal theory on his Affinity. Its author was unnamed, but the language was sharp, almost reverent. Decay is the end, it read. It is release. The unwinding of tension held too long in a form that has outlived its purpose. The Affinity wasn’t described as an offensive force but as a kind of utility. Kael read those lines more than once, memorizing the phrasing.

  Other scraps were more practical. Notes, possibly from a professor hundreds of years ago, outlined early spells and how to channel them — not by pushing mana, but by letting it seep through the body. Rustmark was the most accessible spell he could find, requiring only touch and a small matrix. Motes of Wear worked through exhalation and sigil breathwork, while Dusting Veil allowed the caster to nearly dissapear. Spiral Fade was more advanced — a focused degradation of magical constructs, slow and deliberate. The structure of each spell was recorded in shorthand diagrams, barely readable without context, thankfully the core concepts were there and it turns out his professors weren’t lying about how much spell matrices have advanced because the ones he found were horribly inefficient.

  The real prize was a fragment from a ritual manual describing the Ring Rite for Ethereal-based Affinities. Ethereal affinities were rare enough but a manual describing how to alter the ritual was something likely only the Academy had. Kael had seen the Academy’s rituals, structured and clean. But this one… this was altered, crude, handwritten, and written in a matrix pattern he had never seen before. But Kael didn’t have better options. Tucked into the back of the bundle were the procedure materials, a mana-infused chalk circle, drawn precisely according to spiral resonance diagrams, a Tier 3 mana core, placed at the spiral’s heart, meant to amplify resonance and prevent rupture during attunement, and finally a catalyst mage — another caster present to steady the flow, anchoring the ritual from the outside. There was a reason why the academy waited until the student’s final year before advancing to the third ring. If a mage’s Spiral rejected the affinity or their cores and body wasn’t prepared, they’d spew mana until their core collapsed — or worse, it wouldn’t kill them.

  He tapped the pen against the corner of the page, thinking. Everything shouldn't be that hard to get, Wade would most definitely be willing to activate the ritual and monitor it, while the other two items were accessible but unfortunately very expensive.

  Kael sat at the edge of his bed, holding the coin pouch in both hands like it might start bleeding. He poured the contents out onto the table — a stream of dull gold and glinting silver. It would be enough he hoped, 33 gold, 12 silver, and 6 copper. It was enough to last him a lifetime if he was content with living as a peasant the rest of his life but to Kael, this was just money to fund his future.

  He exhaled through his nose, slow and heavy. The math hurt more than the amount.

  This was nearly everything he had on him — maybe a year’s worth of dealing. All tucked into a stitched leather pouch that lived under his coat, never touched his bank account, never even saw a ledger.

  He’d kept it off-record on purpose, cash only. If a noble son whose family couldn’t even afford his tuition started showing too much financial success, the professors or the bank started asking questions. If a nobody like Kael Virelyn — a minor noble, started pulling coin faster than some Seeker tier mages, someone would have dug deeper.

  He thought he’d been smart, except he hadn’t. Because now, staring at the pile, he realized something stupid and horrible.

  This was the same gold he made selling the drugs that got him expelled.

  He was about to spend all of it — not to build a business, not to move across the continent, not even to survive — but to perform a ritual the Academy would’ve given him for free if he hadn’t been caught. He stared at the table. Stared at the gold. And then very calmly walked over to the wall and started banging his forehead against it.

  Not hard enough to knock himself out. Just hard enough that after the fifth or sixth hit, he could feel a tiny splinter of pain behind his eyes. The candle on the desk flickered. A rat in the ceiling above skittered away in alarm.

  “Fucking Idiot,” he muttered between banging.

  When the wall finally cracked — the wall, not his skull — Kael exhaled, dragged his hands through his hair and shoved the coin back into the pouch with shaking fingers.

  He needed the core and he needed the chalk. He needed to get this done as fast as he possibly could, and that meant he needed Dren.

  The office wasn’t really an office. Just the backroom behind the weapons shop, through a reinforced door lined with three different ward-locks that Kael had watched Dren bypass with a pocketed sigil ring as a half-lit smoke hung from his lips. It was only the third time that he had been to Dren’s office and he finally started to realize the amount of wealth Dren used so casually. The door and his ring were clearly enchanted which likely meant just his damn office cost more than Kaels family made in a year.

  Dren sat at the desk, sleeves rolled up, hunched over a ledger that probably had more blood spilled on it than ink. He didn’t look up.

  “You look like shit,” Dren said without a greeting.

  “I’m here to buy,” Kael muttered, dropping the pouch onto the desk with a weighty clink. “Mana core. Grade three or higher and Attuned chalk.”

  Now Dren looked up.

  “Expensive taste,” he said. “Trying to start a cult?”

  “Just finish something.”

  Dren pulled the pouch toward him and opened it with a single finger. He made a soft, amused noise.

  “This the stash from last year?”

  Kael didn’t answer.

  Dren grinned.

  Kael rubbed his temples. “Can you get it or not?”

  “I can, let's see the core will run you about 11 gold and the chalk 13, ever since that summoning in Kharan the distribution has become much more regulated” Dren said. “But you’ll owe me a drink when this is done. And maybe a favor.”

  Kael met his eyes. “You may be the only person I can buy Driftweed from but I can get these two from any merchant worth their ware, take the gold but you're not getting a favor.”

  Dren laughed, then stood.

  “Give me a day. You’ll have what you need.”

  Kael turned and left without another word.