The classroom looks like someone has summoned a boardroom from an ancient cult’s IPO. It reeks of old money and older magic, vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows bleeding light in all the wrong colours, and shelves of tomes so massive they seem more decorative than practical.

  Blackwood desks sit in regimented rows, polished to a paranoid shine. But the surface chaos tells the real story: ink pots, scuffed notebooks, talismans, charms, and the occasional twitching artifact stuffed into a carrying case that definitely isn’t regulation.

  The air smells of incense, something vaguely spicy and ceremonial, though it barely masks the more authentic classroom bouquet of nervous sweat, old parchment, and whatever dark alchemy ferments in someone’s unsealed lunch jar.

  Students scribble furiously while the instructor drones in a voice that hovers somewhere between a threat and a bedtime story. Every so often, a flare of magic sparks from a desk, quickly smothered under coughs or hisses of “Shut up, you’ll get us hexed.”

  And then, without warning, reality just… gives up.

  A jagged tear rips through the centre of the room, like space itself has been outvoted. Light and colour spill in ways physics hasn’t signed off on, and through that existential paper shredder stumbles Aster Elchen, looking like he’s just lost a bar fight with God. Gaunt, wide-eyed, and visibly seconds from faceplanting, he lands in the middle of the room like an unpaid invoice.

  Behind him comes something worse.

  Aerathena.

  Her presence hits like divine debt collection. The air buckles. The floor cracks—not dramatically, just enough to remind everyone it could—and time itself seems to flinch. Students freeze mid-breath. A few collapse entirely, clawing at their collars like the room has been vacuum-sealed. Chairs topple. Desks clatter. One poor soul vomits into what looks like an enchanted lunch tin.

  The teacher, thin, severe, built like a moral opinion in human form, remains upright, but barely. His jaw locks in academic defiance, knees trembling like a tuning fork in an earthquake.

  Aerathena clicks her tongue, unimpressed.

  With a flick of her wrist, the pressure vanishes as if it never existed. The room doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief so much as collectively collapses. Students wheeze, cry, or just lie there, reevaluating their life choices. The teacher drops to his knees with such fervour his forehead cracks a floor tile.

  “Lady Thena,” he rasps, a reverent smear of sweat and pride. “How may we serve the Sun Sovereign?”

  Aerathena’s fire-wreathed hair flickers, less ceremonial, more accidental gas leak near a bonfire. For half a heartbeat, something like embarrassment flickers across her face—the rare kind born from being too powerful to explain yourself. Then the mask snaps back on.

  “I’ve brought you a student,” she says, calm and cutting, like silk drawn across a guillotine. “He’s… complicated. Requires oversight. See that he gets it.”

  She turns to Aster, and for a moment, her infernal glare softens. Not motherly. Not gentle. Just… human. A ring and a sealed letter appear in her hand, gleaming like stolen prophecy. She holds them out.

  “These were found with you. You are heir to the Elchen and Sikewa Legacies. Your inheritance is your weapon. And the creature inside you—master it, or it will master you.”

  And then, as gods apparently do best, she tears open another hole in reality, and vanishes.

  Aster stands there for a long beat, processing the fact that he’s just been dumped like forgotten laundry into the middle of a classroom full of strangers. He looks down at the ring and letter in his hands. Inheritance. Right. Heir to powerful bloodlines. Sure. And also host to an ancient metaphysical centipede that eats karma and torpedoed his credit score.

  Someone clears their throat.

  Aster looks up to find thirty pairs of eyes staring at him with the morbid curiosity usually reserved for car crashes and public breakups.

  “Was that really Lady Thena, Mr. Xiou?” a girl’s voice from the front row. She sounds like she’s trying not to cry or convert religions.

  “Yes,” the teacher replies hoarsely, rising to his feet like it costs him something. Mr. Xiou, now clearly in that special category of educators who have stared into the abyss, graded it, and given it a B-minus, turns to Aster. “Your name?”

  Aster swallows dust. “Aster,” he manages. His voice cracks halfway through, because of course it does. “Aster Elchen.”

  Xiou’s eyes narrow, filing that away into a mental drawer labeled Hazardous Materials. “Mr. Elchen. I am Professor Xiou. You are late, under-prepared, and inexplicably escorted by a divine-class anomaly.”

  He scans the room, then fixes his gaze on a blonde girl with round glasses and the calm detachment of someone who’s already finished her coursework for the rest of the year.

  “Ms. Bramble. You’re ahead on your readings. Escort Mr. Elchen to Initiate Registration. See that he’s processed and oriented.”

  She blinks, visibly recalibrating her entire afternoon. A flicker of disappointment crosses her face, then disappears under something bright and vaguely dangerous. She stands, smiles like it’s a challenge, and practically skips over.

  “Hi! I’m Ellena Bramble,” she says, seizing Aster’s arm with alarming familiarity. “But my friends call me Lena. You should too.”

  Before he can reply, protest, or even register the scent of her perfume—lavender and overconfidence—he’s yanked out into the hallway like a misbehaving toddler in a grocery store.

  The hallway yawns around Aster, impossibly tall and wide, like it’s been designed by an architect who wants every student to feel small and deeply aware of their own insignificance. Dark marble walls gleam like they’ve been polished with the tears of overworked interns, with veins of gold that pulse in time with something—maybe the heartbeat of the school itself, or his own impending aneurysm. Carvings of creatures coil around pillars, so detailed that Aster could swear the scales ripple when he isn’t looking directly at them.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Not that he has a chance. Lena, still dragging him by the wrist, sets a pace somewhere between “urgent meeting” and “Amazon Fulfilment Centre.” She chatters nonstop, her voice light and airy, while Aster stumbles along behind, his head constantly on a swivel, every new architectural monstrosity threatening to steal what remains of his sanity.

  Above, one of the floating magical signs catches his eye, shifting through different languages: bright, cheerful Zulu, Xhosa, Swahili, Afrikaans, and then finally English:

  Dual Cultivation between faculty and students is strictly prohibited. Approved Dual Partners can be assigned at Admin Office B-4.

  Aster’s mouth opens. Closes.

  He squints at it. Dual cultivation? Isn’t that… Before he can finish the thought, Lena has already yanked him along, his brain scrambling to keep up.

  They pass another sign:

  All initiates are reminded: Do not attempt to milk the Dawn Serpents. Yes, even during mating season.

  Aster stares. “Okay. I have questions.”

  “How do you know Lady Thena?” Lena asks, ignoring his comment. Her voice is loud and pointed, like she’s already asked this more than once and is beginning to mentally file him under ‘dropped on his head as an infant.’

  Aster, now watching a group of students doing synchronized deep-breathing exercises around what looks suspiciously like a glowing egg, can’t tear his attention away when they start cheering, like some kind of sports victory, once it cracks. He barely manages the words: “She helped me.”

  “Helped you?” Lena asks as she continues to drag him through the hallway at breakneck pace. “Helped you with what, exactly?”

  A kid walks past, arguing with his own shadow. It gestures wildly behind him like it has the better points in the debate. Nobody seems concerned.

  Aster tears his eyes off the shadow kid just long enough to form the words: “From being executed.”

  Lena stops walking so abruptly he nearly trips over his own feet. “Executed?” she repeats, her voice rising an octave. “Executed for what?”

  Before he can answer, a floating fish—a bright purple thing with gold fins—beelines for Aster, nailing him in the temple with enough force to make him flinch like he’s been swatted by a wet sock.

  “NOPE.” He swats it away on reflex.

  “Don’t punch the courier fish,” Lena sighs, pressing her fingers into her eyes. “They hold grudges.”

  “Why is that a sentence people have to say here?” Aster mutters, rubbing his head.

  The fish, clearly not done with him, hovers at a distance, offended. Then, with a pop, it spits out a scroll into Aster’s chest. The label reads:

  You may already be eligible for a Rank Increase! Click to find out! Then it zips off to terrorize its next victim.

  Lena’s eye twitches as Aster tries to figure out where to click in order to find out.

  “Executed. For. What?” she repeats, pausing after each word like she’s speaking to someone who might struggle with multi-syllabic sentences.

  Aster shrugs. “For having a bug in me.”

  Lena’s mouth actually falls open this time. She closes it. Opens it again. Closes it. Then, after a long pause, her entire demeanour shifts. The brightness dims. Her smile gets tight. And when she speaks again, her voice has that careful, overly enunciated tone people use with toddlers and small dogs.

  “…Why would they want to execute you for being host to a bug?”

  Aster blinks. Confusion and rising horror dawn on him like a slow sunrise. “…Do lots of people have bugs in them here?”

  Lena’s voice slows down even further now, almost spelling out each letter. “Here?”

  He makes a vague, helpless gesture at everything—the walls, the columns, the floating fish now chasing a fleeing student down the hallway. “You know. The Astral Plane.”

  Lena’s jaw clenches. She inhales through her nose. “Okay.” She tries to gather her patience. “It depends. Cultivators sometimes use insects. For example, the Rhenus family cultivates using an Ember Hornet Queen. The Soqwe family uses an Emerald Thunder beetle. But,” she leans in, her voice dropping low like she’s explaining tax law to someone who can’t count, which would’ve done her more credit if Aster were actually listening.

  He isn’t.

  He is currently locked in a mental stare down with a stained-glass window three stories above them, where scenes shift like living dioramas. One panel depicts a battle. Another—definitely not a battle. An orgy, maybe? The third—

  Aster blinks.

  Is that… a snake… giving birth to a fully armoured man? While winking?

  Why is it smiling like that?

  Why does he feel personally implicated?

  Lena snaps her fingers in front of his face, trying to get his attention, oblivious to the existential crisis Aster is having about the snake thing.

  “Focus. I said, nobody gets executed just for having a little bug friend. So. What. Bug. Would make them want to kill you?”

  Aster, still halfway to an existential breakdown about the smug birthing snake—Is it supposed to be smiling? It looks so smug. Why is it winking?—can only manage to squeeze out four barely-coherent words:

  “Oh. A Void Wyrm.”

  Her face drains of colour.

  “A Void Wyrm?” Her voice goes thin. Too high. Like she’s trying not to shriek and cause a scene.

  “Yeah.” Aster shrugs, only now realizing that maybe that’s… not the kind of bug you casually name-drop in polite conversation. “But it’s sealed. Mostly. So, you know. Fine now. Ish.”

  Lena’s mouth opens. Closes. Then she does something that makes Aster blink—she takes an actual step away from him.

  “You have no idea what that means, do you?” she whispers, her voice suddenly shaking.

  Aster frowns. “Not really. I’ve only been… doing this,” he gestures vaguely to the marvels around them, “Astral Planening, for like… two weeks? Tops?”

  Lena’s jaw drops. “Two weeks?! And you, Void Wyrm, you got saved by Lady Thena—” She clamps her mouth shut again and visibly recalibrates every assumption she has made about him.

  “Oh my stars,” she mutters. “I thought you were… like… slow. Like, soft in the head. I thought they were making me babysit Aerothena’s slow cousin.”

  Aster’s lips twitch. “Glad we’re clarifying that. Nope. Not stupid. Just catastrophically uninformed while making life-threatening mistakes at high velocity.”

  Lena barks out a breathless, disbelieving laugh, more out of shock than humour. But then her face changes, and for a moment, her energy dims, like a curtain being drawn.

  “A friend of mine…” she says softly, voice dropping lower as they pass another fountain—this one whispering softly in a dozen languages. “She had a Void Wyrm. Class D infection. Council didn’t bother with protocol, not enough of a threat, so they were given a choice: die together, or execute her early to spare the rest.”

  Aster’s stomach drops out. He can already feel where this is going.

  “They chose together,” Lena finishes, voice brittle. “Her family was poor, barely enough Faith stored to last two years. One by one, they passed, until finally she fell into a coma. And then the officials… came. Standard protocol. It’s not even rare.” She shakes her head. “Void Wyrms don’t get cured, Aster. Those who host them are executed. No exceptions. It’s how it’s always been.”

  Guilt crawls up his spine like icewater.

  All at once, the weight of what Matter has done hits him—not just saving him, but cheating some monstrous, cruel system that has devoured countless others and achieving the impossible. His parents, his family line, they’ve burned their lives away keeping him alive long enough for someone to try this insane gambit. Now he’s cured, but countless others still face the same horrific outcome.

  The hallway seems quieter now, even as another floating fish zips by overhead. His chest tightens.

  Lena exhales shakily, then straightens. Seeing Aster’s reaction, her eyes soften.

  “Right. Well. I’m showing you the portal system next, newbie. Try not to freak out. It doesn’t bite.”

  Aster, voice dry as sand, can’t help it. “That’s what they probably said about the Dawn Serpents, too.”

  Lena actually snorts, despite herself. “Okay, maybe you’re not completely hopeless.”

  Get 10 Extra Chapters ahead of time by becoming a member on Patreon!