It took a year.
A year of nightly cultivation. A year of three-hour sessions in the dark, pushing aura through channels that were slowly agonizingly slowly widening and deepening. A year of the body resisting, adapting, resisting again, adapting again, in a cycle that the manuals described as 'natural progression' and Esigie experienced as a war of attrition between his will and his flesh.
Veil Basic to Veil Intermediate. One sub-tier. The smallest measurable unit of progress on the smallest level of the smallest ranking system.
It took a year.
The manuals the introductory texts on the public shelves, written for noble children with formal instruction and proper nutrition and cultivation aids that Esigie couldn't even name, let alone access described this transition as 'typically achieved within three to six months under guided practice.'
Esigie had no guide. No nutrition program. No cultivation aids. He had a straw mat, three hours of stolen darkness, and a will forged in the slums of a city that this world had never heard of.
A year.
* * *
I want to be honest about the frustration. Because the stories people tell about cultivation the legends in the chronicle, the tales soldiers swap in the training yard they always focus on the breakthroughs. The moments of transcendence. The flash of light when the wall crumbles and the power surges and everything changes.
They don't talk about the eleven months before the breakthrough. The nights where nothing happens. The sessions where you sit for three hours and the energy moves half an inch further than it moved yesterday and you want to scream because half an inch is nothing, is less than nothing, is a rounding error in the vast distance between where you are and where you need to be.
They don't talk about the doubt. The voice in the back of your head the Lagos voice, the practical voice, the one that says 'you're wasting your time, boy, this isn't for you, this was never for you, you were born in the gutter and the gutter is where you'll stay no matter what body you're wearing.'
They don't talk about the mornings after dragging yourself through a full day of library duty on three hours of sleep, your body aching from the cultivation, your eyes dry, your concentration fraying at the edges. Idemudia scolding you for shelving a book spine-inward. Adesua noticing the circles under your eyes and pressing an extra portion of stew into your hands with a look that said 'eat, child, you look like death.'
Eleven months of nothing. Nothing visible, nothing measurable, nothing that the system still dormant, still dark, still sleeping in the space between my souls would have registered as progress.
And then, on a night in the cold season, in the third hour of a session that felt no different from the four hundred that preceded it, the wall moved.
Not crumbled. Moved. Like a door shifting on its hinges. A fraction. A millimeter. But enough.
The aura current, which had been pressing against a barrier at the base of my spine for months, pushed through. Not surging seeping. Like water finding a crack in a dam. The energy flowed into a new space a deeper channel, a wider pathway and my body responded. A warmth spread through me that was different from the cultivation warmth. This was structural. Permanent. The body accepting a new configuration and locking it in.
Veil Intermediate.
I sat on my mat in the dark and felt the new configuration settle into my bones, and I didn't celebrate. I didn't pump my fist or shout into my pillow or allow myself the luxury of satisfaction.
I calculated.
Veil Intermediate. One year. If the progression scaled linearly which it wouldn't, the manuals were clear that each sub-tier demanded more than the last then Veil Peak would take a year and a half. Shroud Basic another two. Shroud Intermediate two more.
I was seven years old. At this rate, I would reach Shroud by my early teens. Clad by my late teens. Temper by my twenties. And that was just aura, just the body's river, just one of the two systems I needed to cultivate.
The staircase stretched above me. Infinite. Crushing.
I breathed. I let the calculation settle. I let the weight of it press down on me and then the way a man who has carried heavy loads his entire life lets the weight settle into his legs instead of his back I adjusted.
One step.
That was all any climb was. One step, repeated. The Lagos boy knew this. He had climbed out of Ajegunle one naira at a time, one job at a time, one day at a time. He had never seen the top. He had only ever seen the next step.
Good enough.
* * *
The changes were more pronounced this time.
His senses sharpened. Not dramatically the world didn't suddenly become louder or brighter. But the edges of things became clearer. He could hear conversations from further away. He could see in dimmer light. The dust motes in the library, which had always been a lazy drift of particles, resolved into individual specks that he could track with his eyes.
His body recovered even faster. A full night's cultivation no longer left him exhausted the following day his endurance had increased enough that three hours of internal work was manageable, though four still left him drained.
And the library had given him everything it could.
He had read every accessible text on the public shelves. Every history, every geography, every primer on magical theory and aura cultivation. Every military treatise and economic analysis and cultural study that the lower shelves contained. The middle and upper shelves held more he could see the spines, read the titles but they were out of reach for a boy his size without a stool, and requesting a stool would draw attention to the fact that he had exhausted the lower collection.
He was hitting the ceiling. The glass ceiling of the public library. Beyond it above it, behind the locked door on the third floor the advanced texts waited. The cultivation manuals that went past the introductory level. The magical theory that addressed dual-energy systems. The knowledge he needed to safely cultivate his mana without destabilizing his aura.
The Count's private study.
Not yet. He wasn't ready. The risk was too great, the gap between his level and the Count's too vast, the consequences of discovery too severe.
But the ceiling was pressing down. And Esigie was not the kind of person who accepted ceilings.