All Axiros could perceive was darkness.
Not the ordinary kind, not the simple absence of light that came with closed eyes or a lightless room. This was something else entirely. A depth that seemed to swallow even the concept of distance, a void so complete that the word void didn't quite cover it.
There was no ground beneath him, no sky above, no direction that meant anything. It was as though he had sunk past every known layer of consciousness and arrived somewhere that had never been intended to be reached.
He tried to gauge how deep he had gone. Found nothing to measure against. No sensation of falling, no sensation of standing. Just existence, suspended, with no frame around it.
Then something changed.
His perception, no longer attached to physical eyes, caught sight of something ahead. If ahead even meant anything here.
Four pillars of light.
Not large. Not vast. Those words didn't begin to reach it. They were infinite in ways that bent against comprehension, stretching into dimensions his awareness strained to process.
They didn't cut through the darkness so much as the darkness arranged itself around them, keeping a careful distance, as though it understood better than to make contact.
Axiros went still.
His awareness trembled, a rare thing, for someone who had watched entire realities rise and collapse.
'Where am I?'
'I've never reached this deep before. So how did I get here now?'
Each pillar was entirely distinct. The colours they gave off belonged to no spectrum he recognised, and their presences were separate in a way that went beyond appearance, each one carrying its own dimensional signature, as though they existed simultaneously across incompatible infinite realities, anchored here anyway through some logic that didn't ask permission.
And the power they radiated.
It didn't surge. Didn't display itself. It simply was, an endless, suffocating magnitude that filled the surrounding space without effort or announcement. Against it, the techniques he had nearly destroyed himself using back in that hallway felt like struck matches held up to collapsing stars.
What unsettled him more was that they opposed each other.
Completely. Fundamentally. Aspects that should have been mutually contradicting, standing together in the same space, anchored within the depths of his own soul as though they had always been there.
He didn't remember deciding to move. He simply found himself drifting closer, the space between him and the pillars shortening without any sensation of travel.
Curiosity, maybe. Or something older than curiosity.
The first pillar came into clearer view.
It was brilliantly radiant, its colours shifting and layering into one another like living concepts given form rather than light. Being near it caused ripples to move through his awareness, ideas surfacing and dissolving faster than he could follow them, a sense of things being born continuously, endlessly, without pause or conclusion.
Creation. Emergence. Meaning in the act of becoming. Its presence felt almost overflowing, like something that contained more than any boundary could reasonably hold.
But beneath that radiance, something deeper moved.
This wasn't just light. It was a culmination of something he couldn't name, presenting itself in a form his mind could approach — lowering itself to meet him, the way an ocean lowers itself to become a wave.
He reached toward the remaining pillars-
And something seized his awareness.
Not a force, not a presence, more like a current suddenly reversing. His consciousness was pulled backward and upward, wrenched from that depth before he could resist, before he had even fully understood what he was looking at. The pillars receded. The void receded. All of it pulling away like a dream losing cohesion in the final seconds before waking.
---
His eyes snapped open. 'What the hell was that? How did I reach that deepiwithin my being?' He thought.
He was off the bed before the thought fully formed, feet on the ground, fists up, body arranged into a guard so precise it looked like it had been measured. Every joint, every angle, every breath settled into position without him deciding to put them there. Old reflex. Older than this body by a considerable distance.
The increase in strength was the next thing he noticed, arriving almost simultaneously. Subtle, not dramatic, more like a quiet shift in the way his body answered him. Muscles responding a fraction faster. Senses sitting a little sharper. His breathing coming from somewhere steadier than before.
He ran through the possibilities immediately.
Something the old man had done while he was unconscious? He doubted it. External interference left traces, and he always caught traces. He would have felt it.
The battle itself, then?
A thought formed, and it was strange enough that he turned it over twice.
Perhaps this body had a trait, something built into it, something that allowed it to refine itself through conflict. Through being pushed past its limits. A physique that grew in response to danger, or possibly something that fed on it. He had encountered similar traits before, across other lives.
A few hundred thousand times, give or take, enough to understand their value, enough to know how they developed if given the right conditions.
If this was one of them, then this life was going to be considerably more interesting than the first few hours had suggested.
He almost smiled.
"Chill, kid," Gary said, rising from the stool beside the cot. "You aren't in danger."
His voice said reassurance. His eyes said something else. They were fixed on Axiros's stance with the particular focus of someone who had seen enough real fighters to recognize when something was off.
And this was very off.
No wasted motion. No imbalance. No hesitation anywhere in the posture. Gary had spent decades watching men train to eliminate exactly those kinds of imperfections, and most of them never fully got there. This boy, who had been unconscious for three days after surviving something that should have killed him, was standing as though battle itself had shaped his skeleton.
'Some kind of special physique,' Gary thought. 'Or something I don't have a name for yet.'
Axiros had already assessed the room.
No killing intent. No hostile fluctuation in the air. No subtle tells that suggested something being withheld. Nothing in the old man's bearing pointed toward deception, but then, the most dangerous people rarely let it show in their bearing.
He lowered his hands slowly. The tension in his frame didn't leave. It just became less visible.
His eyes stayed on Gary's face, reading the small things, the slight pull at the corners of the eyes, the crease near the brow deepening as the man ran through what he remembered from the corridor. Trying to make the pieces fit.
He's suspicious. Working it through.
Which meant it was time to become someone easier to explain.
Axiros let the mask settle into place. A polite expression, carefully measured — warm enough to read as genuine, restrained enough not to overdo it. He inclined his head slightly.
"Thank you, kind sir, for saving my life," he said. "I should take my leave now, so I don't trouble you any further."
Humble. Harmless. The words of a child who felt he'd already imposed too much.
Gary's expression didn't soften.
"Sit down," he said. The tone wasn't unkind, but it wasn't a suggestion either. "There's no hurry. You aren't a burden."
Silence stretched between them for a moment.
Axiros weighed it. Ran through the variables. Then gave a small nod and sat back down on the edge of the cot, cooperative on the surface, the same coiled readiness underneath, simply less visible.
"You must be hungry," Gary said, his voice easing slightly. "Three days without eating. Let's talk over breakfast. In the meantime, get comfortable with the people here."
"Alright," Axiros replied. "I'd like to rest a little longer. Let me know when it's ready."
Calm. Cooperative.
And inwardly, already working through it.
Three days unconscious. Strangers surrounding him. A camp whose location and purpose he didn't know yet. Motives that remained unclear. And now an offer of food.
He had used poisoned food himself, in other lives. Not the crude kind, not anything that killed quickly or obviously. The patient varieties. Compounds that eroded cultivation over weeks, substances that worked on the will or the soul in ways the victim would never trace back to the source.
He had watched people walk willingly into that particular trap because they were hungry and someone had offered a warm meal with a friendly face.
He would eat. He had to, this body needed it. But he would be careful about what he concluded from what he tasted.
"Alright," Gary said, pushing up from the stool. "Make yourself comfortable." He walked out, and the tent flap fell shut behind him.
Silence returned.
Axiros exhaled slowly.
'I may as well check the soul space while I have a moment,' he thought. 'I sensed something had changed.'
He shifted into a cross-legged position, spine straight, hands settled on his knees, and let his awareness sink inward.
The difference was immediate.
The space was larger, not just expanded, but refined. The fabric of it felt denser, more deliberate, like the underlying structure had been quietly reforged while he wasn't looking. Soul energy moved through it in concentrations so thick they were almost suffocating, vast beyond easy measurement, an ocean without a visible shoreline.
He scanned it quickly, taking in the whole.
Then, in less than a fraction of a second, he found it.
The dot.
Still there. Still exactly where he had first sensed it, impossibly small against everything surrounding it, the kind of thing that should have been invisible and somehow wasn't. It carried a weight that its size had no business carrying, the way a single word in the wrong place could change the meaning of everything around it.
He studied it carefully.
It didn't belong to him. That was certain. The signature was foreign, its nature unfamiliar, and yet it sat completely inert, no resistance when he probed it, no response, no acknowledgment that it had even noticed his attention. It didn't push back. Didn't reach toward him. Just sat there in perfect, unreadable silence.
'Interesting,' he thought. 'Very interesting.'
He considered it for a moment longer.
Then his soul energy moved, precise and layered, building restraints around the object one careful stratum at a time. Not to destroy it. Not to force anything from it.
Simply to contain it, to draw a clear boundary between it and everything else, ensuring that whatever this fragment actually was, it would remain exactly where it was until he chose to revisit it.
The final layer settled into place.
He let himself relax slightly, just a fraction.
"We'll figure out what you are," he murmured quietly, more to himself than to anything, "when the time comes."