"No! Don't—!"
The air in the storeroom was cold and smelled of damp sawdust. Ruhan's eyes snapped open, his vision a blurred mess of shadows and dust motes. His throat felt like he'd been swallowing hot sand, the remnants of a scream still vibrating in his chest.
He didn't move. He lay there on the thin, lumpy mattress, listening to the frantic, irregular thump-thump of his heart. It sounded like someone was knocking on a heavy wooden door, demanding to be let in.
Just a dream. It was just the axe. The mud. The man with the cold.
He reached up to touch his neck, his fingers trembling. The skin was intact. There was no jagged bone, no "wet pop" of a severed spine. Just a layer of cold sweat that felt like a thin, oily film.
He sat up slowly, his joints protesting with a series of dry clicks. This wasn't the muddy canal at the bottom of the world. It was his room—a repurposed garden shed beside the old mango trees, at the farthest, most neglected edge of the Ahmed Estate.
The walls were thin, their old wooden slats warped with age, enough to let in the whistling wind, and the uneven stone floor—once meant for storing grain—leached the warmth from his heels.
He looked toward the window. The Bloodmoon hung in the sky, a bloated, crimson eye peering through the rusted iron bars.
I forgot the evening rites, Ruhan thought, a dull sense of guilt settling in his stomach. The Longing Goddess won't protect a mind that can't even remember a simple prayer.
His mouth was parched. He reached for the tarnished brass jug on the crate he used as a nightstand. His grip was clumsy, his nerves still misfiring from the lingering shock of the nightmare.
Clang.
The jug hit the stone floor with a heavy, metallic resonance that seemed to echo far too long in the small space. Water spread across the floor in a dark, jagged shape. Under the crimson moonlight, the puddle lost its transparency. It turned thick, dark, and opaque.
It looked exactly like the pool of blood from his dream.
Ruhan flinched, pulling his feet back onto the bed. His breath hitched. It's just water. It's just physics and light. But the logic didn't stop the cold prickle of fear from crawling up his spine.
He turned his gaze away, focusing instead on the small, crumpled piece of parchment on his desk: his High-School Final Year Result Card.
The letter 'F' sat in the center, written in a red ink so aggressive it looked like a fresh wound.
The Theoretical Exam had been a slaughter. It wasn't that he hadn't studied; he had memorized the 'Sentira' lineages until his eyes bled. But the moment the proctor had announced the start, a heavy, suffocating fog had descended on his mind. It felt like his memories were being physically pushed out of his skull to make room for... nothing.
Five days until the Physical Exam. Fifteen days until the Sentira Test.
He looked at his palm, closing his eyes and trying to find that "pulse"—the spark of Prana that every Ahmed was born with. He searched for the wind-crackel of Akira or the sharp, leafy scent of Linara's power.
He found nothing but the rhythmic throb of his own blood.
Ten percent.
The instructor's voice hissed in his memory, dripping with a very human kind of disgust. "Still stuck at ten, Ruhan? A common street-rat has a Soul Mastery of eleven. You're not a 'Masterer' in training. You're just a walking waste of resources."
Without crossing the twenty-percent threshold, the Soul Realm remained a locked room. Prana was a currency he would never own.
He was a prince of the Ahmed line, but in reality, he was just a "crawling worm"—a tenant living in a body that refused to pay rent.
His parents were returning tonight. His father, a man who measured worth in "Rank" and "Prana," would see that 'F'. He wouldn't see a son; he would see a defect.
I don't need glory, Ruhan thought, his gaze drifting to the floor. I just don't want to turn into someone everyone regrets believing in.
He knelt on the cold stone, his knees bruising against the grit. He reached deep under the bed-frame and dragged out a bundle wrapped in heavy, grease-stained rags.
He unwrapped it with the care of a priest handling a holy relic, though the object inside was anything but holy. It was a sword, or at least it had been once. Now, it was a slab of iron so caked in dark, crusty rust that the edge had completely disappeared.
It looked like something pulled from a shipwreck.
At the base of the hilt, a small geometric carving caught the moonlight—a circle split perfectly in half. A crescent. A half-sun.
"True strength doesn't live in the shine, Ruhan..."
His Grandmother's voice was a dry rasp in his head. She had been half-mad by the end, smelling of mothballs and bitter tea. "Wait for the day the rust remembers what it once was."
Ruhan gripped the hilt. The metal was cold, smelling strongly of old blood and oxidized iron. The "half-sun" carving bit into his palm, a sharp, grounding pain that finally pushed the last of the nightmare away.
He had swung this blunt, useless thing every morning for three years. It hadn't cut a single leaf. It was a joke. A dying woman's lie to a broken boy.
And yet, it was the only thing in this shed that belonged to him.
"Five days," he whispered. The sound of his own voice felt small and thin against the vast silence of the estate.
He didn't pray for victory. He didn't ask the Longing Goddess for power. He just tightened his grip until his knuckles turned the color of bone.
"I just need to stay alive, just need to survive."
He wrapped the sword back in its rags and slid it into the dark. As he lay back down, the crimson light of the Bloodmoon continued to watch him, but Ruhan didn't blink. He watched back, his eyes as cold and hollow as the rusted iron beneath his bed.