The training room was a large, echoing chamber lined with smooth, dull grey stone. It was cold, designed, Daemon theorized, to prevent any accidental elemental eruptions from escalating. The seats were simple wooden benches, a deliberate commonality that did little to disguise the class's inherent social segregation. The nobles sat near the front, already bored or condescendingly attentive. The commoners, including Gareth, sat in the middle, eager and focused. Daemon, the orphan, occupied a space near the back wall, keeping a low profile.
The instructor, a tall, gaunt man named Master Harkan, wore the faded maroon robes of a Body Application specialist and carried the weary air of someone reciting dogma he no longer entirely believed. He spoke in flowery, mystical language, invoking the 'Divine Flow' and the 'Breath of the Cosmos.'
"The first lesson, the foundation of all we do, is not a spell, but a silence," Harkan rasped, his voice amplified by some subtle magic that made the air itself vibrate. "You must learn to draw the Aether—the raw energy that permeates the Kingdom of Berlin—into your core. You must find the Inner Well, and let the current flow. Close your eyes. Breathe. Seek the stillness."
Daemon closed his eyes, but his mind did not still. It was a buzzing hive of analytical activity. Inner Well was not a metaphor; it was a physical location—likely the magical core, a complex, high-energy neurological nexus he needed to locate and interface with. Aether was simply the ambient energy field, the constant, background force he had felt so strongly in the Temple. Harkan's meditation was, therefore, nothing more than a structured neuro-pathway exercise, a primitive form of biofeedback. They were being taught to manually shunt energy from the environment into their personal reservoir.
He tried to follow the instructions, focusing on his breath, but the effort was futile. Instead of quietude, his mind offered a continuous stream of data: How much energy is available in this room? What is the volumetric capacity of this adolescent core? If I draw in Fire and Water simultaneously, will the kinetic antagonism result in a catastrophic release? I must calculate the necessary dampening field—
He physically flinched, pulling himself back from the runaway calculation. That was the problem. His mind, trained for decades in high-speed, parallel processing, could not simply be. It had to optimize. He was too focused on the mechanism of the faucet to simply turn the handle.
Around him, the commoner students, unburdened by scientific skepticism, began to succeed.
A boy named Silas, sitting near Gareth, let out a grunt of pure concentration. A pale, crackling ribbon of Lightning snapped into existence between his fingers, illuminating his face in a flash of blue-white light. Gareth himself, with a loud, aggressive exhale, made a flicker of Fire appear, a small, aggressive orange spark that dissipated instantly, but was undeniably there. Even a girl from the merchant class, her face set in determined concentration, managed to summon a crude, dark extension from her fingertips—a sharp, obsidian Claw formed by Body Application, demonstrating control over tissue density.
A collective murmur of success and admiration swept the room.
Master Harkan nodded, a rare, tired smile touching his lips. "Good. You have found the path. Now hold it."
Daemon opened his eyes. His hands remained stubbornly empty. He tried again, focusing all his will on channeling the energy, but his thought process was a bottleneck.
The Healing affinity is passive, tied to cellular repair. The Elemental affinities require a focused conduit. If I fail to balance Fire and Water, the resulting thermal conflict—
The thought alone stopped the flow. Daemon could not access the required state of empty, receptive focus. He was trying to debug the computer's operating system while simultaneously demanding it run a program.
Harkan walked past him, his expression hardening into disapproval. "You, orphan. The celebrated Tria. I see no light."
Daemon swallowed, projecting shame onto his face. "I apologize, Master. My mind is… too noisy."
Harkan sighed, a sound of immense disappointment. "Noise? Talent is only potential, boy. You have three gifts, and yet you are outpaced by a child with a single spark. Your mind is a tempest, not a pool."
The mockery started instantly.
"Maybe the Temple made a mistake! He's just a flashy dud," Gareth sneered, his chest puffed out by his own modest success.
"No flame and no water! Just a greedy mouth!" another commoner student jeered.
The noble boy from the day before, the one with the Body Augmentation, didn't speak, but simply crossed his arms, his lip curling in a thin, superior smile. The message was clear: Anomaly or not, the orphan is weak.
The raw humiliation was an unexpected, powerful chemical cocktail in Daemon's brain. He felt the sting of public failure—not the emotional wound, but the strategic damage. His low-profile strategy required periodic, controlled demonstrations of immense power. Failure to manifest any ability instantly relegated him to the status of a political accident, a curiosity that could be safely ignored or, worse, exploited.
The rest of the session was a wash. Daemon remained seated, outwardly defeated, while internally he ran a rigorous post-mortem on the failure. The flaw was biological, not theoretical. The conscious, analytical mind was interfering with the subconscious, intuitive neuro-pathway required for channeling the Aether.
He needed to eliminate the analytical mind. He needed to force a state of sensory shock and neurological stillness.
Hours later, long after the Academy's lights had dimmed and the halls were silent save for the occasional patrolling instructor, Daemon slipped out of his dormitory room. He found the communal washhouse, a utilitarian space of grey stone and cold metal, and located the rarely-used bathing tubs.
He filled a large tub with the coldest water he could find, adding handfuls of rough, caustic salt he had scrounged from the kitchens—a primitive form of sensory irritant, maximizing the physical shock.
He stripped down and, without hesitation, submerged his entire body.
The initial shock was brutal. The ice-cold water instantly constricted his muscles, and the coarse salt stung every cut and scrape on his skin. Daemon gritted his teeth, suppressing the immediate, painful gasp. The cold was overwhelming, a complete physical invasion that demanded his entire conscious mind focus on nothing but core temperature regulation.
No room for calculation. No room for scenario planning. Only sensory input.
With his body screaming at him, Daemon seized the moment of mandatory sensory stillness. He closed his eyes again, but this time, he didn't seek the quiet. He simply allowed the chaotic screams of his body to cancel out the complex calculations of his mind.
For the first time since the transmigration, his inner space was empty.
He focused on the Inner Well, the point below his sternum where the Temple had felt the greatest energy resonance. Now, with the interference of his conscious mind gone, the connection was immediately clear. It wasn't a metaphor. It was a dense, rotating point of pure energy.
He reached out with his forced, vacant mind and gently, intuitively, manipulated the flow.
First, he drew on the Healing affinity. The green-tinged energy, cool and restorative, was instantly channeled into his core. He could feel it working—a gentle heat that countered the icy water, repairing the micro-tears in his muscles and soothing the raw sting of the salt. He was, in effect, self-repairing the thermal shock.
Next, he tested the elements. He separated the mental command, isolating the destructive aspect. A bead of intense, shimmering Crimson Fire instantly coalesced, not on his skin, but suspended just above the water's surface. It burned with a perfect, controlled heat, creating a thin mist where it met the icy air. It was a precise, quarter-inch sphere of pure, focused destruction.
Then, the opposite. He extinguished the fire and focused on the energy of flow and control. A heavy, perfect sphere of swirling, luminous Sapphire Water manifested inches from the Fire's previous location. It defied gravity, holding its perfect shape, a ball of heavy liquid energy held in place by pure will.
He held all three separate channels open for a full minute, the Healing energy regulating his body, the Fire and Water hovering side-by-side, perfectly balanced, perfectly controlled.
Daemon finally opened his eyes, the shock of the cold fading as his internal regulator took over. He felt no thrill of victory, only the deep, cold satisfaction of a successful experiment. The problem had been identified, the variables controlled, and the solution implemented.
He was not a spiritual genius. He was a scientific genius who had found the biological override for this world's magic. The nobles and priests could preach their meditation and their Divine Flow. Daemon had found the cold switch—the simple, elegant method to bypass the mental block and unleash his Tria power.
He slowly rose from the tub, the residual magical heat radiating from his skin. The water dripped off his thin body, leaving the scars and calluses that were his only physical history. He now knew his true advantage. They saw a mystic; he was an engineer.
He was ready for class tomorrow.