S-classes stood apart from that scale entirely. Every Sage could be traced back to a Soul Rift. Rifts composed purely of core mana–a rare anomaly among anomalies–that were exponentially more destructive to reality. Unraveling a Soul Rift did more than reveal its secret. The inscription of the rift’s soul core could be etched into the alchemist’s own soul, binding them to a truth of the world, granting them S-level skills that defied the laws of mana.
Whether the S officially or colloquially stood for ‘Sage,’ ‘Soul,’ or Something else entirely, Nico never bothered to check. He didn’t really care, and by now he was too far into his career to ask. Not every Sage’s skill was known, and not every person who gained one was public about it. But Zhoumin was a notorious guy. Everyone knew his S-grade skill was Nullification.
Nico’s tail wagged lightly as he mulled over the urge to ask how the skill worked. They didn’t know each other that well—but Zhou had technically trapped him in a rift, which gave him some conversational leverage…
Zhou turned toward him with a warm smile, gesturing toward the root fence. “I’ve seen good results from your work.”
Nico squinted. The sage nullified his enthusiasm by bringing up his maybe-crime again. The fox flicked an ear and returned to his state of half-protest. The sage could probably just shift the earth beneath the—
“Not as easy to unearth a tree as you think,” Zhou said before he could finish the thought.
Did he read his mind?
Nico inhaled, gold mana igniting warm in his lungs.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED || [火 Dragon's Breath | "pretty cool fireball"]
He exhaled a sharp line of fire across the row of trees. Flames climbed fast. The roots Zhou had rendered inert burned through, bark curling and crumbling to ash. When the fire reached the trees still bright with mana, their roots snapped awake in violent motion, cracking like whips. Nico shifted his stance, mana already coiling at his paws.
|| SKILL ACTIVATED || [? Extinguish | "air removal"]
He drew the air out of the space ahead. Sound dulled as the orchard fell into an instant hush. Fire collapsed instantly, starved before smoke could even rise. The roots stopped moving, edges faintly charred where the oxygen had vanished. It seemed they only reacted to mana that could breathe.
***
Smoke trailed behind them as they climbed the low hill, which turned out to be the orchard’s center. From the top, the canopy stretched out in every direction, forming an expansive maze that blurred into a background of haze the farther it went. To the west, a clean break in the trees ran up to the base of the hill. So there had been a proper route after all, one that wasn’t still smoldering. Not that they ever would’ve found it. Whatever Zhou’s resonance had locked onto was probably the rift’s core, not the orchard’s sense of maze planning.
Something about the hill unsettled Nico. For a moment he could almost mistake it for the one that held the abandoned mana station. The hills shared some similarities: their gradual slope, overlook of the field, and simple coverings of tall grass and low lying shrub.
Except in reality, the land around the station was all swamp, all flooded plain. Here, gem-lit trees were rooted firm into the fertile soil. Comparing the two, there probably weren’t any Riftborn since the rift used up all its mana making all the trees, where interestingly, only the fruit were turned into gems.
While Nico idly gazed at the orchard, still trying his best not to contribute, Zhou paced a short circle. He crouched and pressed his palm flat to the ground. His eyes lit up as a pulse of violet seeped into the ground. “The core’s in here,” he said plainly.
Nico tilted his head to the side unhelpfully. An invisible question mark hung over him. Zhou smirked, choosing to humor the fox. “The earth under the hill is hollow.” He straightened and rocked lightly onto his heels. “It’s being held up by mana.”
The sage did a short hop, too lazy to be called a jump. But his landing cracked like thunder, ringing out in an inordinately huge tremor, violet light bursting across the slope. Soil loosened in waves and stones dislodged as the hill sank by inches, rattling the orchard down to its roots. Nico was shaken out of his sit and braced on all fours, claws digging in for balance. The tremor climbed up through his legs in a way he hated. His entire body tensed, ears starkly up, tail bushed.
Zhou lowered his eyes, carefully looking over the fox. “I’m going to compress the ground,” he said quietly. “You should head for the clearing.”
Nico looked up at the Sage while shifting his weight uncertainly from one paw to the other. He felt uneasy about something he couldn’t quite place.
Another tremor roared through the hill, also sinking the ground a few inches. He braced again, ears flattening, then shook them out as the rumble faded. With a small nod, the fox turned and ran toward the open stretch of orchard. Behind him, a low vibration built again, the sound drawn from somewhere deep in the surface. He looked back and saw Zhou still at the center of it all, hands buried in the earth, violet bleeding off him as the ground gave way.
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Cracks split through the orchard in merciless lines. Roots tore loose, snapping like twigs, as the ground collapsed inward and swallowed trees whole. Nico broke into a sprint. The land fell away beneath him as he bounded from fragment to fragment, the noise collapsing into pure pressure as the land unmade itself.
Dust rolled up in thick waves that obscured his view. Water surged in from somewhere unseen, spreading fast, flooding the crater, steam rising as it met the hot dust.
When it finally stilled, Nico stood on compacted land, panting, coat clinging with sweat and debris. He scanned the expanse once more as the last of the dust settled, but saw no sign of Zhou. He shook out his fur and refocused.
In the distance, the abandoned station stood exposed on a shallow, flooded plain where the hill had been. The water was still rippling from the collapse. Without the swamp or trees to frame it, the structure looked smaller, its steel corroded with rust. The world around it had emptied so completely that the lone structure made the landscape feel even more hollow.
Nico stared at the landscape for a long time.
This was after the rift?
It looked worse than before. The land looked stripped bare. What had been living terrain was now raw sediment. Pale rings marked the edges of the shallow basin, crusted white where the water had begun to evaporate. Veins of limestone cut through the mud, thin and uneven, while crystals of calcite caught the light where the surface had already begun to dry.
Unstable mana always tried to reconstruct reality; it rebuilt from memory, even if it was bad at it. But the soil here was spent and the water smelled saline, carrying the briney scent of leached minerals. There were some small fish darting through the water, and the occasional bird that swept low to catch them, but even grass was struggling to grow through. The place felt… depleted. Whatever orchard the rift remembered hadn’t existed in a long time.
He let his gaze drift along the horizon, eyes narrowing as water wavered against his feet. He drew a slow breath and turned toward the station. There wasn’t much else to do.
***
Nico leaned onto the monitoring console, weight braced on both palms. He looked over the board without really seeing it—switches, key caps, a few blinking status lights. Mostly, he was standing there trying to decide what to do next. The hum of old machinery filled the room, soft and uneven.
He brought the monitor online again and tabbed through the data, just to be thorough. Most of it matched what he’d seen before. Except the last graph.
A new line prominently cut across it. It started with a sharp spike, followed by a steady upward trend that stretched on for decades. Notable enough for the program itself to flag.
[Core mana detected.]
Soul rifts were few and finite, so it was more akin to studying legends. Truthfully, he hadn't researched soul rifts much at all. He had curiosity for fables, but the stories of soul rifts carried a bitterness he found difficult to digest.
Most had long ago been claimed by the Arcanites of the Forged Nation. For centuries, they built their empire by monopolizing rifts and alchemic resources. Their campaigns wore the mask of stewardship, arriving under the pretense of helping nations manage their rifts. But in practice the Forged only resolved what offered them leverage. Territories were stripped in exchange for aid; drained of their alchemic wealth until little remained but dependency.
Once emptied, the lands were abandoned to rifts the residents no longer had the means to unravel. And when the Forged Arcanites returned, it was as self-proclaimed saviors, rewriting history to favor themselves.
The terminal started letting off a high pitched tone as its monitor blinked in and out of consciousness. It was harsh on Nico’s ears but he didn’t really feel like dealing with it, having already extracted what data was relevant. He frivolously flicked one of the switches up and down, fidgeting with it as it did nothing to help the screen. He threw his ears back, trying to muffle the noise.
Ruzen had been one of those places. The homeland he’d been born into had been dismantled over nearly a century, left unstable and exhausted by design. The devastation was deliberate, yet was passed off as a misfortune that no one claimed blame for. The citizens were left living beside rifts that multiplied faster than they could unravel. The ruin was framed as inevitability—as if collapse was simply what happened when a people were left to manage themselves without Forged intervention.
And it was in Ruzen that Zhou became a Sage. His claim of a soul inscription in that land marked the first disturbance in the Forged Nation’s hold over the desert region. What followed was decades of uneven, faltering shifts and vacuums of power. While Zhoumin was a Gemfolk not of the Forged, it was still seen as merely another Arcanite power exchange at the time. Only in hindsight could his claim be read as a turning point.
Nico had been born into that in-between. Recovery was still fragile, but the worst of the collapse had already passed. Scarcity, though, lingered alongside rifts that persisted longer than they should have.
The station creaked around him, walls littered with rust. Loose wires hung like pulled roots. The graphs on the console continued to crackle, unable to hold a stable image. Nico’s eyes drifted blankly.
Now, he stood in Tellur. A neutral land, at least in name, whose resources were being extracted, smothered, and left to rot under familiar silence. And once again, the Forged Arcanites had circled back, preparing to take what remained.
Nico glazed over the shifting graphs again, wondering what Zhou had thought when he faced Ruzen half a century ago.
Zhoumin had probably recognized Nico. Not personally, but as a Ruzenian based on the fox-lycan’s skin and fur, his ears, his hair, the dialect he carried in his voice. Not difficult to place. Was Zhou in a position like this back then? Had he also encountered it by chance? Or was it a deliberate choice? Opportunistic? The Sage arrived in Tellur just as Nico and Kai had. The timing was, to undersay, suspicious. What was he here for?
Nico didn’t know. With a sigh, he did one last sweep through the logs to double check his device got everything. He’d let Effie decide what to do with them, if anything at all. His job was to take care of the rift and confirm the landscape had returned to reality. What the reality entailed wasn’t needed from him.
After all, it was the Sage who informed him of this extracurricular activity, and it was his own curiosity that took it on.
He turned his back to the failing console, to the obscured station, to the land around him. He stepped out into the basin’s pale light. The orchard was gone, the marsh was gone, only a thin layer of saltwater and wind remained, rolling through the flat expanse. He marked the coordinates, logged the decay, and started back toward the city. As he retraced his steps across the empty land, he asked himself the same question:
What was he here for?