From May 2nd to the 12th, my life was easy. Get beaten half to death by Hinesia, get patched back together by Radellei, drag myself to Hinesia's room at night to scribble down MoDS plot notes, pass out and repeat.
That's it. That was the whole loop.
Radellei would show up with her glyphs and her calm face and drag me back from death's doorstep like it was nothing. I'm not even exaggerating. If she wasn't there, I would have been a corpse by the third spar. Hinesia doesn't pull her punches. She didn't even touch her Flux. This was just raw strength, speed and technique.
My whole background is stealth and running away. Phasnovterich was trained to disappear, strike from the shadows and survive by not being hit, not standing there and eating blows like some kind of wall. I was a runner, not a tank. I literally have superspeed and Hinesia knew that. She exploited it every single time.
By the fifth day, I lost count of how many bones she had broken. By the seventh, I couldn't even tell the difference between waking up and passing out anymore. It was all just layers of pain. And still, every morning, I dragged myself back into that arena, because that's what the training demanded.
Every evening, after Radellei rebuilt me from scratch, I stumbled to Hinesia's room. We pretended to chat formally during the day because we were being watched but at night, that's when we got to the real work. We began to piece together the plot of Masquerade of Dreams: Shattered. Every scrap of memory, every event, every name, we wrote it all down. Knowledge was our only weapon against Asmarion's corruption that would become a vital point for our survival.
Funny thing is, I actually started to enjoy the rhythm of it. The pain sucked but it was teaching me things about my body I'd never understood before. And Radellei… well, she was more than just a healer.
I came to know her pretty well over those ten days. She's Hinesia's junior by a year or two, technically the second eldest daughter but she feels more like the "nerd sister" of the family. She's the one buried in books while the others are out in combat. She's my age and unlike her elder sister, she doesn't flaunt her power. She could fight—she admitted she was trained—but she didn't want to. She said combat was a waste when she could focus on studying Flux, theory and healing applications.
Every time I woke up half-dead, she was there not just healing me but talking to me, explaining why my body felt like it was on fire or how Xana was reacting to my injuries. Without her, I wouldn't have had the faintest idea how to coat my body in Xana. She showed me the theory of how pain and pressure force the body to trigger Xana reinforcement instinctively.
If it wasn't for her, I would just be another Outer getting turned into pulp by Hinesia with no idea why.
So when I woke up again on the twelfth, I wasn't surprised to see her sitting there at my bedside with glyphs spinning lazily in her palms. My body felt whole again with no broken ribs or torn muscles. Still, the ache still lingered like a scar on my nerves. I groaned and pushed myself upright.
"Morning, doc. You really have to stop bringing me back to life. You're spoiling me."
Radellei glanced up with her blue eyes narrowing slightly.
"You should be grateful instead of sarcastic. Do you realize how many hours I spent rebuilding your circulation alone?"
"Hey, I did say thank you yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that…"
She didn't smile but I saw the twitch at the corner of her mouth. That was victory enough. But then she asked me something that actually caught me off guard.
"Why is your progress this high?"
"What do you mean?"
She set down her glyph and leaned forward, elbows on her knees.
"In ten days, your Roborare development is where most take months to reach. Even Hinesia noticed it though of course she'd never say it out loud. You've been adapting abnormally fast."
I scratched the back of my head, pretending I didn't know.
"Maybe I'm just built different?"
"No. There are three reasons."
And then she laid it all out for me, like she'd been studying me the entire time. Why did she ask me if she knew the answer?
First is regeneration. Apparently, Argemenes have an innate healing factor that can even restore limbs or organs. Also, it gets stronger as they use Flux. Something about their diet of Fluvehearts embedding that adaptation into their bloodline. You can't access yours properly because it only activates when you're in extreme danger, like actual life-or-death combat. Sparring doesn't trigger it fully. But even in half-asleep, your body tries to stitch itself together. That's already giving you an edge."
"Second, your Xana reserves. Your Xana pool is absurd and even higher even than my father's, who is considered a prodigy in the Rameses bloodline. Your Xana isn't just big but dense as well. And third, your body is basically reprogramming itself. You never used Xana seriously before coming here. Which means your muscles, nerves, bones, everything is adapting from scratch. Instead of being locked into old patterns, your body is learning how to operate on Xana as its baseline. That accelerated the growth even more."
I sat there listening to her talk. That's when it hit me. All those years of Phasnovterich running and relying on stealth didn't matter if he couldn't survive a single strike. And now, my body was catching up from not using Xana.
When Radellei finally leaned back, satisfied she had given me the full lecture, I let out a low whistle.
"So what you're saying is… I'm basically a cheat character?"
Her brow furrowed, not understanding the reference, but I waved it off.
"Never mind. Thanks for the analysis. If I make it out of this alive, I'll owe you more than a lifetime of 'thank yous.'"
She didn't answer right away.
"Just make sure you don't waste it."
°°°°°
I shut the door to my chambers behind me. My body ached so badly I thought my ribs were made of broken glass. Radellei had patched me up but the memory of the sparring match still throbbed in every bone. I lowered myself down to the floor, folding into lotus position, the old familiar way.
I closed my eyes, inhaled and exhaled. My breaths slowed down, drawn deep from the belly. That is the rhythm my 'master' drilled into me as a boy in the monastery.
I reached for Xana.
On Earth, they used words like qi, prana, chakras and so on. At the monastery, my 'masters' refused to give those forces names. They said naming it only caged it. To them, it was simply the 'Flow.'
Every day before the sun rose, I had to kneel on freezing stone until I felt the Flow enter me, burning against the cold. I'd trace it up my spine, through my chest and across the crown of my head. The monks called these stops "gates," seven in all, and each had to be opened through stillness and focus.
I spent hours without moving, insects biting my arms and my stomach growling so loud the others laughed. If I twitched, if I begged for food, if I flinched under pain, they would say the gate would close. "The body screams lies," the masters told me. "The Flow speaks truth. Listen to the truth."
It was hell back then and I hated every minute of it. They were eventually seen as a terrorist cult years later and were disbanded. It's a miracle I was even adopted by a family in a city. But now, years later, in a world where energy itself had a name, those tortures became weapons in my hand.
I have to admit, that bullshit Flow thing might not have been a scam because it's helped me a lot in Altera Earth.
When I activated my Xana this time, it wasn't just raw power thrumming through my veins. It moved the way the Flow used to move. It filled every "gate" in my body. The chamber melted away. The floor beneath me softened and turned weightless. My eyelids snapped open but the world I saw wasn't the one I left behind.
I was standing... no, floating and anchored by nothing. Around me stretched a white world. From beneath that pale surface, black smoke seeped upward like ink bleeding from a cracked jar. It curled and twisted, whispering shapes that dissolved before my eyes could name them.
"No way…"
My voice echoed into infinity.
This wasn't imagination. This wasn't a dream. Every nerve in my body screamed that this place was real. My feet pressed against solid ground, though there was nothing but light. The air carried weight, though there was no sky.
The Xana Zone.
I laughed, though it came out ragged.
"You've gotta be kidding me… I actually pulled it off?"
On Earth, the masters used to say there was a " gate of meditation," one no student had ever reached. They spoke of it like myth, calling it "the place beyond the body, where the soul sees its own reflection." I always thought it was poetry, or a scarecrow to keep young monks humble.
But here I was, standing in a world that felt exactly like that forgotten myth. And maybe that was the trick. Back on Earth, meditation was about opening the inner gates. Here, Xana gave those gates form. It took all the years of breathing, focusing, drowning out pain and it gave them a dimension I could actually step into. For the first time since arriving in this world, I realized something.
I wasn't starting from zero.
I had a foundation no one else here had. The 'Flow' of Earth and the Xana of Altera Earth weren't different things. They were the same current, just speaking a new language. And I was one of the only ones fluent in both.