Albion opened his eyes to an empty black void. It wasn't the library, and it wasn't his inner world. It was a vacuum of absolute nothingness.
'This place doesn't even have a smell,' he realized, his instincts instantly on high alert.
Suddenly, a heavy leather-bound tome materialized in his field of vision.
Albion recognized it instantly: The Architecture of Magic, the very book he had been holding in the library.
The tome snapped open, its pages turning in a blinding blur of light. Thousands of glowing text characters began to drift from the parchment. Unconsciously, the five-year-old boy reached out a hand, trying to grasp the floating letters.
As if responding to his touch, the stream of light surged. The glowing letters accelerated, swarming toward him and pouring directly into Albion's temple, phasing seamlessly straight into his skull.
A sharp gasp escaped his throat. An eerie, electric shockwave rattled his entire skeleton. His eyes went wide, his mouth hung open, and his muscles locked up completely.
"What is this…?!" he choked out.
The text didn't stop. It kept flooding his mind without a single break, hammering into his consciousness like an endless stream of raw data.
Without ever reading a single sentence, every ounce of knowledge, history, and magical theory contained within the book was forcibly downloaded into his brain.
It wasn't painful, but it was deeply uncomfortable—a suffocating, restless pressure as his mind was violently expanded to fit the information.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, the light snapped shut. The void shattered.
Albion crashed hard onto his hands and knees, the polished wooden floor of the library rushing back beneath him. He was panting heavily, sweat dripping from his chin, a look of total shock plastered across his face.
"What the heck was that?" Albion stammered, clutching his head. "My brain… it feels like it's on fire!"
It felt as though a massive fragment of complex knowledge had been permanently branded into his soul. 'My body, my mind… What's happening to me? Could this be what Gajeel was talking about?'
Gajeel's rough voice echoed clearly in his memory:
"[It's not just about a sudden burst of power showing up. It's more like a missing puzzle piece finally settling into place inside your soul. In an instant, you suddenly understand exactly what your magic is. What elements it reacts to. How it naturally wants to move.]"
Using a nearby bookshelf for leverage, Albion dragged himself back up to his feet. He forced his ragged breathing to slow down, deliberately calming his racing pulse as the pieces connected.
"There's no doubt about it," he muttered. "This is an Ethernal Awakening."
He knew the baseline theory. Up until the age of five or six, children were completely indistinguishable from ordinary citizens. The exact moment a person's internal magic container matures and manifests for the very first time is known as the Awakening.
Still, the sheer speed of it left Albion with burning questions. "If this really is my awakening, then what triggered it? Was it just pure luck?"
At first, he wondered if his recent physical conditioning had forced the change, but he quickly dismissed the thought.
'If someone could awaken just from building raw physical strength, then Gajeel would have gone through it a long time ago.' From what Albion knew, Gajeel had never experienced an Ethernal Awakening, meaning the Dragon Slayer didn't possess a unique Innate Magic.
An Innate attribute was something carved directly into a person's soul at birth—a singular, unchangeable genetic trait. If Albion had truly crossed that threshold just now, the shift must have started while he was unconscious.
Specifically, while he was trapped in that dark inner world.
The terrifying silhouette of Amon flashed through his mind. Albion fiercely shook his head, forcing the memory away. "The last thing I want to believe is that he had a hand in causing this."
There was no point in wasting energy on questions he didn't have the information to solve yet. Brushing the lingering static from his mind, Albion decided to focus entirely on the tangible reality right in front of him.
"If I really did just survive an awakening," Albion said, looking down at his trembling hands, "that means I finally have my own Innate Magic. Now, what can it do?"
Albion looked ahead, keeping his bare feet completely locked to the floorboards. The leather-bound tome still lay open on the ground right in front of him, but the world around it had completely transformed.
Scattered across his entire field of vision were thousands of luminescent, pale blue threads, weaving and pulsing out of almost every object in the room. Because the air was practically choked with them, it was nearly impossible to see where one ended and another began.
They were spooling rapidly out of the floating Lexis Orbs, the support pillars, and the shelves. Not just one or two books, either—the threads were bleeding out of every single text in the entire archive.
He didn't have a technical name for them yet, but he vividly remembered the sensory overload of touching just one.
His eyes locked onto the glowing strand tethered to The Architecture of Magic. 'If I touch a thread connected to an object, does that mean I automatically absorb all the data within it? If that's the baseline rule, I can't just go stumbling around here. If I accidentally bump into a cluster of these things, the sheer information dump will fry me.'
The memory of that suffocating pressure made his skin crawl. Crouching low, he used his explosive leg strength to leap several feet straight into the air, completely clearing the cluster on the floor.
'Better to avoid all physical contact with them for now.'
Landing soundlessly on the narrow top ridge of a massive bookshelf, Albion looked out across the cavernous room. Far on the other side of the library, he spotted a secluded alcove that seemed to hold significantly fewer threads than the rest of the hall.
Leaping from one high shelf to the next, Albion began navigating his way across the upper levels of the library. As he moved, his newly expanded mind began to effortlessly process the massive payload of fundamental theory he had just absorbed:
'Magic… Mahō…'
'That's what the world calls it.'
'It isn't some divine miracle or a blessing from the heavens. It's simply life itself, given form. Every single living thing possesses it—humans, beasts, even the smallest insects crawling beneath the dirt. As long as a heart beats, Mahō exists within it, flowing through the world as naturally as blood moves through a vein.'
Thanks to a physical constitution that was already bordering on superhuman, it took him less than a minute to traverse the high ceilings and reach the designated safe zone. He perched on the final bookshelf, looking down into the dim light.
'Mahō itself is composed of countless microscopic particles called Ethernano. They're entirely invisible to the naked eye, drifting endlessly through the atmosphere, saturating the oceans, and existing within the cells of every living creature.'
'When those ambient particles are drawn into a biological system and refined through a Magic Container, they convert into Magic Power—the fuel a caster can actually manipulate. Magic isn't generated from nothing. It's simply Ethernano shaped by the user's raw will.'
He dropped from the high shelf, letting gravity pull him down until his feet hit the floor with a soft, muted click.
'Every living thing contains Ethernano… but only a fraction can actually learn to wield it.'
Directly in front of him sat the long, communal study tables where he had shared a meal with Gajeel earlier. The smooth wooden surfaces and low-backed, metal-framed chairs were lined with faint reinforcement sigils carved beneath the armrests.
It had been a brief, quiet moment in a violent guild, but a pleasant one nonetheless. A phantom smirk flickered across his face, disappearing just as quickly as it came.
Then, he noticed it. Spooling slowly out of the corner of one of the heavy wooden chairs was a singular, isolated pale blue thread.
Albion stopped. He slowly extended his right hand toward the strand, testing his limits. In immediate response to his proximity, the pale thread stretched, drifting through the air like a web toward his fingertips.
"If I want to map out the exact boundaries of this power," Albion muttered, his jaw tightening as he prepared for the mental impact, "I have to collect more data."
He closed his eyes, grimacing in advance as the glowing blue line made contact with his skin.
'This is going to feel so incredibly uncomfortable.'
Within moments, the information rushed into Albion's mind. It wasn't a voice narrating facts, but rather a sudden, instant understanding.
In just a few seconds, he learned everything about the chair: the exact type of wood, its density, its weight, its age, and its structural weak points. He knew exactly where the wood had been repaired and precisely how much weight it could take before it snapped. To anyone watching, it only lasted a moment, but to Albion, it was a heavy flash of overwhelming detail.
He ripped his hand away from the thread and staggered back, pressing a palm hard against his throbbing temple.
"Well, that confirms it," Albion muttered, pressing a hand against his aching temple. "Touching a thread lets me understand whatever it's connected to."
He took a slow breath, organizing his thoughts. "The amount of information depends on both the object itself... and how long I stay connected."
A simple wooden chair had only left him with a headache, but the magic tome—filled with history, theory, and centuries of accumulated knowledge—had nearly overwhelmed him.
Albion let out a tired groan. "This power is going to be a real pain."
The realization settled heavily in his mind. Information wasn't the reward for using his magic.
It was the price.
Brushing his hair out of his eyes, he looked back out at the room and noticed the bigger picture.
"Every single thing in here… all of it has a thread." The pale blue lines were everywhere, blanketing the library. By interacting with them, he could pull knowledge straight out of whatever they were attached to.
But as he looked back down at the wooden chair, he realized the blue strand hadn't vanished.
He raised an eyebrow. 'What happens if I touch it again? Am I going to get shoved full of the exact same details all over again?'
Taking a deep breath, he braced himself for another uncomfortable rush of words, squared his shoulders, and reached out to grab the thread a second time.
...Nothing.
Absolutely nothing happened.
"Okay, now I'm just confused," Albion said, rolling his eyes. There was no weird sensation, no headache, and no sudden burst of knowledge. It was just a regular piece of string.
"This is so annoying…!" he complained loudly, running both hands through his messy black hair.
He closed his eyes, taking a second to force down the frustration and steady his breathing. When he opened them again, he froze.
The wooden chair was no longer resting on the floor. It was floating right in front of him, hovering completely still a few feet off the ground.
Blinking in confusion, Albion slowly moved his hand to the right. As if tethered to his skin, the chair glided smoothly through the air, matching his movement exactly.
'Wait a sec…' He tried a few more gestures. Up. Down. Left. Right. The heavy wooden chair followed every twitch of his fingers like a loyal pet.
An idea clicked in his mind. Keeping his left hand steady to hold the chair in place, Albion extended his right hand toward the darkness of the library.
He waited, concentrating on the invisible pull, and after a few tense seconds, a familiar heavy shape came flying out from the shadows of the shelves.
The Architecture of Magic soared through the air and snapped to a sudden halt right next to his right hand.
'Let's try a little test.' A small smirk finally broke through Albion's confusion.
He began moving both hands at the same time. Responding to his left wrist, the wooden chair spun like a top before flipping completely upside down in midair. Meanwhile, the leather-bound tome responded perfectly to his right hand, mirroring the chair's wild acrobatics without a single stutter.
The two objects danced through the air simultaneously, completely locked onto the movements of his five-year-old hands.
He looked over at the inverted chair. "Well, that settles it. After I learn everything about an object, I can control it through its blue thread."
He shifted his gaze to the floating magic book. "And once I already know what it is, I don't have to go through that horrible rush of words a second time."
The rules were clear now. If he wanted to control a weapon, a rock, or a piece of furniture, he had to pay the price first—surviving the uncomfortable flood of information.
But once that data was bought and paid for, the object belonged to him.
He dropped both hands to his sides. Instantly, the blue light snapped, and the chair and book crashed heavily back to the floor.
"It seems… this innate magic of mine is going to be pretty complicated," Albion muttered, looking at his palms. "I'm going to have to run a lot of tests if I want to actually get good at this."
For a brief second, his thoughts drifted back toward the rest of the guild. The massive structural vibrations he had felt through the floorboards earlier definitely weren't a good sign.
He couldn't help but wonder what kind of stupid trouble Gajeel had managed to find himself in.
Albion sharply slapped both of his cheeks with his hands, the stinging pain snapping him out of it. "No. I need to focus on myself right now. Forget about Gajeel."
Turning back toward the endless sea of pale blue threads weaving through the massive bookshelves, his expression hardened with absolute resolve.
"I swear it…" The heavy words he had spoken to a terrifying entity in the dark echoed clearly in his chest:
"[I may not have the power to break fate… But I do have the courage to build a path. One that stands tall. One that will never break. And if I want to reach that future… then I'm going to need your help.]"
As the restless, burning ambition swelled within the boy's chest, his eyes—completely unbeknownst to him—began to bleed into that eerie, unnatural glow.
"I'm going to get stronger if it's the last thing I do," Albion whispered into the empty room, his glowing eyes reflecting the blue light of the threads. "I swear it. I swore it to you, didn't I, Amon?"
Still completely unaware of the light shining in his own eyes, Albion stared down the thousands of books waiting for him in the silence.
"Time to see what else this magic can do."