Kael stood in front of the mirror, staring straight ahead as his fingers traced slowly across his torso. The white fabric felt uneven and coarse against his skin. His torso was tightly wrapped in bandages, and his left shoulder was bound in the same stark white cloth.
'The wounds are healing, but the process is taking longer than I'd like.'
He scoffed under his breath.
It had been a few days since the fight with Lucian. He'd been forced to stay hidden, waiting for his body to recover.
Now, finally, he was back on his feet.
He threw himself one last glance before exiting the bathroom.
He walked around his room and gathered a few things before, placing them on his desk in front of him.
'Wolf Tiger tooth. Human heart. Liquid from a withering pasque flower. And finally… mothgrass.'
Kael's eyes moved slowly over the ingredients laid out before him, checking each one, making sure nothing was missing.
He sat down, exhaling through his nose, steady and calm.
"Moments do not wait to be claimed. They pass in silence, whether you act or not."
His voice barely stirred the air, but the weight of the words lingered.
This would be his first time refining a mote.
There was a faint sense of unease somewhere deep within him, a flicker of tension in the chest, but it was drowned out by something stronger. Excitement.
He raised his hand just above the desk, palm facing to the side.
With a thought, a tingling sensation stirred at his core. It moved upward, threading through his chest, flowing down his arm and toward his fingertips.
A slow moving crimson mist started to appear from his fingertips slowly pooling in front of his palm.
"This is what sets Luminaires apart from mortals."
Kael stared at the mist pooling in front of his palm.
It curled in slow, deliberate patterns.
His will, drawn out into reality, given shape and substance.
Upon awakening, a Luminaire gained access to something deeper.
A finer command over the three fundamental forces present in all living things: soul, will, and thought.
Mortals might speak of these things. They might study them, name them, write about them.
But they could not truly grasp them.
They could not see them. Could not feel them. Could not touch their weight.
A Luminaire could.
Awakening meant coming closer to the world's hidden laws.
Its unseen structure.
Its truth.
Beasts carried soul and will.
Motes carried will and thought.
But humans… humans alone possessed all three.
Soul. Will. Thought.
This was also why humans were the only creatures in the world capable of controlling motes.
The perfect balance between soul, will, and thought made it possible.
Through thought and will, a human could refine a mote, overwriting its will, bending it to their own.
With the help of their soul, Luminaires could store the mote within their inner realm, summoning it into reality at any moment.
That was the distinction.
That was what set humans apart.
The superior animal.
And now, through a single mental command, Kael had forced his will onto the world.
He didn't let the thought distract him.
The crimson mist continued to spiral, compressing into a dense shape.
Slowly, deliberately, it drew itself inward until it formed a small, dense orb, no larger than an egg, hovering just infront of his palm. The refinement orb.
Kael reached out and took a small handful of Wolf Tiger fang dust from the bowl. Slowly, he let it fall into the crimson refinement orb.
The dust sank in without resistance, drawn into the swirling core like a mountain swallowed by a storm cloud.
'This marks the first ingredient.'
Although humans held the potential to create motes, it was far from easy.
Every object in the world contained a soul, not in the emotional sense, but in the way it was bound to the laws of existence.
The world was held together by unseen laws, silent frameworks dictating the behavior of all things.
A rock remained solid.
A snowflake melted when it touched warmth.
Fire consumed.
Water flowed downhill.
These actions had no will behind them. No choice. They happened because the world demanded they happen.
Each thing in creation carried out its purpose, its pattern, not by thought or desire, but by quiet obedience to those laws.
That was the "soul" of a thing.
And now Kael, like all Luminaires, reached into that quiet obedience and began the act of rewriting it.
To refine a mote was not merely to assemble materials.
It was to challenge the natural order.
To bend the will of the world and make it accept something that had never existed before.
'In essence, what I'm doing is forging a will. A will not born of the heavens, but shaped by my own hand. I'm applying laws to it, giving it a will that didn't exist before.'
He watched the red orb pulse faintly in his palm as the dust dissolved into it, grain by grain.
'The tooth might imprint the law of consistency. The human heart might carry something else. There's no true way to know. Each material brings with it a rule, a truth hidden beneath its form.'
Sweat had begun to bead across his brow.
Refining a mote wasn't physically demanding, but it was mentally exhausting in a way nothing else could compare to.
Holding the refinement orb together, shaping it, feeding it, demanded total concentration.
Even the slightest lapse, and the entire process would collapse.
He kept feeding the dust into the orb, carefully, relentlessly.
Half a day passed.
Then, finally, the red glow steadied.
The process stilled.
Huff.
He exhaled heavily and dragged a hand across his face to wipe away the sweat.
Once a refinement process began, it could not be paused.
You either failed, or you finished. There was no in-between.
And this was only the first ingredient.
"Three more to go."
His voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper.
His skin had lost its color, and the edges of his thoughts had begun to fray.
Mental fatigue curled at the corners of his mind like smoke.
But he was not finished yet.
Kael picked up a pinch of moongrass and dropped it into the orb. The glowing sphere absorbed it without resistance.
Then he moved to the next ingredient.
Hours slipped by in silence, and soon only one remained.
He reached for the final piece. The human heart.
Lifting it in one hand, he glanced down at the orb still swirling with deep crimson light in his palm.
'I'm finally at the final step. And the hardest.'
He raised the heart above the orb, and let it go.
'This is the crucial moment. The one that demands absolute focus.'
The final step was always the most volatile. As each ingredient entered the orb, it brought new laws into play. The more laws, the greater the strain on the forming will.
And now, with the final component, the last truth would be added. If the recipe was valid, a mote could form. If not, the creation would collapse.
Kael watched as the heart began to dissolve. Fibers and veins unraveled into streaks of red light, absorbed into the orb's spinning core. There was nothing more he could do but wait.
Time passed.
And the weight on his mind grew heavier.
He stripped away every stray thought, focusing entirely on the process.
He could not afford a single mistake.
'Come on.'
His eyes locked on the orb.
Then, it happened.
The orb quivered once, then shrank violently, collapsing in on itself until it vanished without a trace.
No sound. No light. Just stillness.
Kael's eyes snapped wide. His head tilted back and his throat convulsed.
Blood surged into his mouth, spilling between his lips and running down his chin.
His eyes turned crimson, veins bursting within them, and a thin stream of blood slid from each corner.
He had failed.
To an onlooker, the crimson sphere would have simply vanished, snuffed out in an instant as if it had never existed.
But for the one attempting to refine it, the consequences were anything but subtle.
It felt as if a white-hot void had opened inside him.
A silent scream tore through his core. Every nerve was set alight. Every cell in his body felt as if it were being clawed at from within.
The sensation was hollow and searing, as though something vital had been ripped out and discarded.
Blood streamed from his eyes.
From his mouth.
From his ears.
He staggered, then collapsed forward, slamming against the desk.
Huff. Huff.
His breathing was shallow and uneven. With a split-second decision, he parted his consciousness and entered his inner realm.
The grand red river swirled through the white void as it always did, streaked with drifting silver specs. But something was wrong. The space around him was fractured. Cracks spread across the white expanse, and pieces broke away, floating silently into the emptiness beyond.
He reached out and grabbed one of the broken shards. It dissolved between his fingers like ash in the wind.
'A failed refinement at its final stage strikes directly at the soul.'
Kael closed his eyes and returned to the present.
Hoah—
He inhaled sharply and pushed himself off the desk. With his sleeve, he wiped the blood from his face.
He had only been inside his inner realm for a moment, but already a dark pool of blood had formed on the desk beneath him.
"I failed…"
He leaned forward, bracing himself with both hands as the words escaped him.
"Annoying."
Even though pain still clung to him and his soul would need time to heal, at least his mind was beginning to clear.
'I did everything right. Yet in the end, it still comes down to luck.'
This was the harsh truth of mote refinement.
A Luminaire's skill could carry them through every stage, all the way to the final breath of creation. But once that last piece was added, once the final law settled in, success depended on something else entirely.
Chance.
A Luminaire could repeat the same process a thousand times. Fail, succeed, then fail again. Their precision could be flawless. Their knowledge, exact.
And still, their odds of success might never rise above fifty percent.
Bringing a new mote into the world was an act of defiance, a direct challenge to the will of the world. The final moments of refinement were its way of retaliating.
The higher the rank of the mote, the more complex the process became. More ingredients were required, each one carrying its own law. With every added law, the structure grew more unstable, more fragile. It became a greater rebellion against the natural order, a deeper offense to the heavens themselves.
When the mote had backfired, the very laws he tried to impose turned inward, lashing out and wreaking havoc on his soul.
"Thankfully, it was only a rank one mote."
Kael shuddered at the thought of what could have happened if it had been anything more.
He looked over at the desk. Every ingredient was gone, consumed by the process with no way to reclaim them.