A decade of life is typically a milestone of celebration. For the heir of House Warborn, his tenth birthday was marked only by the profound, glorious absence of his father.
Ten years old. This was the exact age Duke Warborn had specified, five years ago, to begin the "breaking" of his cursed son. It was the age when a child's mana core solidified, the age when the Duke had planned to drag Kaiser into a specialized dungeon and subject him to sensory torture until he learned to weaponize the madness of the Void Eyes.
Instead, the North Tower was perfectly quiet.
"Happy name-day, my sweet boy," Martha whispered, setting a small, warm honey-cake on the wooden table. Her mana rippled with a thick, heavy sadness.
Kaiser sat in his chair, his translucent, impossibly pale skin looking almost ghostly against the dark silk of his blindfold. He reached out with terrifying slowness, his trembling fingers brushing the edge of the plate. He projected an aura of profound lethargy, slowing his heart rate to a sluggish, pathetic crawl.
"Thank you, Martha," Kaiser breathed, his voice barely a rasp.
The old maid stayed for a moment, her heartbeat fluttering with worry. She had expected the Duke to at least visit, to acknowledge his firstborn. But the warlord had not set foot in the North Tower in over a year. The "cripple" was entirely forgotten, written off as a failed experiment waiting to die.
When Martha finally left, locking the heavy door behind her, the illusion of the dying boy vanished instantly.
Kaiser sat up straight. His breathing normalized, falling into the hyper-efficient, microscopic rhythm of a grandmaster.
Age ten, Kaiser thought, turning his blindfolded face toward the heavy oak door. The invisible chains are finally broken.
He had survived the deadline. He had successfully manipulated the greatest martial house in the Empire into leaving him completely alone. Now, he didn't just have isolation; he had absolute, unsupervised freedom within his golden cage.
He stood up, walking silently across the plush rug to the window.
Outside, the late spring air was thick with the scent of blooming iron-weed and the chaotic, roaring hum of hundreds of soldiers. The Duke's Vanguard Knights were running drills in the main courtyard below.
Kaiser expanded his Absolute Senses, focusing his two-mile sphere into a concentrated beam aimed directly at the training grounds.
He listened as two heavily armored knights clashed.
In this world, physical strength alone was not enough to be considered elite. Knights utilized something the scholars called "Aura." It was the martial counterpart to a mage's spell matrix. Instead of forming mana in the air, a knight violently forced their internal mana out through their pores and coated their weapon and armor in a dense layer of raw energy.
CLANG.
The sound of two Aura-coated broadswords striking each other was deafening. To a normal person, it looked like a brilliant flash of blue or red light. To Kaiser, it sounded like two boulders being repeatedly smashed together in a canyon.
It is so wasteful, Kaiser analyzed, his head tilted as he listened to the micro-vibrations of the knights' weapons.
Human Aura was entirely reliant on brute force. The knights shoved as much dense, heavy mana into their steel as possible to increase its blunt-force trauma and durability. It was the equivalent of trying to cut a silk ribbon with a sledgehammer. The friction was immense, the magical leakage was massive, and the physical toll on the knights' bodies was exhausting.
Kaiser turned away from the window. He walked to his bed and reached underneath the mattress, pulling out the worn, smooth wooden training sword his mother had given him seven years ago.
He stood in the center of the dark room.
If I must eventually fight knights, Kaiser reasoned, I cannot match their physical force. My body is glass. If I attempt to block a strike from a Vanguard Knight, the kinetic transfer will shatter my wrists.
He needed a way to cut through their Aura, their steel, and their flesh without exerting any physical strength. He needed a blade that cut not by force, but by fundamental physics.
He gripped the wooden hilt in his right hand.
He closed his mind to the courtyard and opened the scarred, hardened "glass veins" of his right arm. He didn't pull the mana all the way to the Void Eyes this time. Instead, he drew a precise mixture of ambient Wind and Earth mana from the air around him, holding it in the palm of his hand.
Human knights forced their own internal energy into their steel. Kaiser, having no core, was going to force the world's energy into his wood.
But he wasn't going to use brute force. He was going to use Elven harmonic theory.
Isolate and accelerate, Kaiser commanded his mind.
He pushed the raw, ambient mana into the wooden blade. Wood, unlike steel, did not naturally conduct mana well. It resisted. The sword began to vibrate violently in his hand, threatening to splinter apart.
Kaiser clamped down on the vibration with his iron will. He used the sharp, whistling frequency of the Wind mana to create an impossibly thin layer of air around the edge of the wooden sword. Then, he injected the heavy, grinding particles of the Earth mana into that air current.
Finally, he applied the principle of Absolute Senses.
He listened to the natural resonant frequency of the wooden sword itself. Every object in the universe has a frequency at which it naturally vibrates. Kaiser tuned the chaotic Wind and Earth mana to match the exact pitch of the wood.
The violent trembling stopped instantly.
The wooden sword grew eerily silent. It did not glow. It did not emit the roaring, flashy hum of a knight's Aura.
But as Kaiser listened closely to the microscopic space around the edge of the wooden blade, he heard a terrifying sound.
Hssssssss.
It was a continuous, high-pitched whine, so fast and so thin that it was completely inaudible to normal human ears. Kaiser had created a localized, microscopic chainsaw of harmonized wind and earth particles, rotating around the edge of the wood at thousands of revolutions per second.
A high-frequency blade.
Kaiser needed to test it. He looked around the room. His options were limited. He couldn't damage the stone walls or the heavy furniture without drawing suspicion.
His expanded hearing picked up an object resting on the bottom shelf of his bookcase. It was a dense, heavy iron paperweight, forged from the same dark steel used in the Duke's armor. A maid had left it there years ago to hold down a stack of blank parchments.
Kaiser walked over to the shelf. He picked up the iron paperweight with his left hand. It was solid, cold, and possessed the dull, rigid vibration of heavy metal. He set it down on the edge of the wooden table.
He took a half-step back, finding his stance perfectly.
He didn't wind up. He didn't tense his frail muscles. He merely lifted his right hand and let the weight of gravity drop the wooden sword downward in a short, lazy arc.
The edge of the wooden sword touched the solid block of dark steel.
There was no spark. There was no loud clang. There was absolutely zero physical resistance. To Kaiser's hand, it felt as though he had simply drawn the wooden stick through a basin of warm water.
The wooden blade passed completely through the iron paperweight and stopped a millimeter above the wooden table.
Kaiser stood perfectly still. He severed the flow of ambient mana, letting the microscopic chainsaw dissipate instantly back into the air.
He reached out with his left hand and touched the top half of the iron paperweight.
Clink.
The upper half of the solid steel block slid off the bottom half, hitting the table with a heavy thud. The cut was unimaginably clean. The surface of the severed iron was polished to a mirror finish by the sheer speed of the high-frequency friction.
Kaiser ran his pale thumb over the impossibly smooth cross-section of the severed steel.
A knight trained for twenty years to forge enough Aura to dent a dark steel shield. Kaiser, at ten years old, had just cut through a block of it with a child's toy, using absolutely no physical strength.
He didn't need to be strong. He didn't need thick bones or bulging muscles. The world was entirely comprised of vibrations, and he was the maestro.
Kaiser placed the two halves of the severed iron paperweight into his pocket; he would toss them out the window into the moat tonight to hide the evidence.
He turned back to the window, listening once again to the Vanguard Knights brutalizing each other in the courtyard below, shouting and roaring as their clumsy, heavy Auras clashed.
"Happy name-day to me," Kaiser whispered to the empty room.
He slid the wooden sword back under his mattress. The age of surviving the Duke's expectations was officially over. The age of forging his own absolute domain had truly begun.