Chapter 27G — The Path of Two Storms
The inner passage did not wait for him.
It reached for him.
The moment Aiden crossed the threshold, the corridor closed in—roots knitting tighter overhead, mist pressing against his skin like damp cloth. The pale-blue glow he'd seen from the Thorn-Hollow wasn't coming from torches or crystals.
It was coming from the air itself.
Lightning veins threaded through the fog, thin and faint, like distant storms reflected on glass. They pulsed in slow, uneven flashes that had nothing to do with his heartbeat.
His own storm reacted instantly.
It surged against his ribs, eager, restless, pulling toward the glow the way a tide follows the moon.
"Hey," Aiden muttered, pressing a palm to his chest. "We walk. We don't leap into strange light like an idiot moth. Deal?"
The storm clawed once, then settled into a prowling pace beneath his skin.
Not agreement.
Not disagreement.
Just waiting.
The corridor sloped gently downward. His boots crunched on something that sounded like gravel but felt… wrong. Not stone. Not bone. Tiny shards of hardened sap, maybe—residue from a thousand old trials ground underfoot.
As he moved deeper, the Thorn-Hollow's green faded behind him. The blue intensified, shifting from distant flickers to slow, rolling flashes that chased themselves along the root-walls.
They reminded him of the Aberration's eyes.
He didn't like that.
A whisper brushed along the back of his mind—not words, just a pressure. The same attention he'd felt earlier, when the Thorn-Beast fell apart and the corridor opened.
Someone—or something—was still watching.
Not the Academy.
Something older. Hungrier. Curious in a way predators were.
He kept walking.
The corridor widened suddenly, roots arching back to form a rough dome.
Two paths opened ahead.
Not subtle ones.
Not symbolic cracks in the wall.
Two doors, side by side, grown straight out of the Hollow's bones.
The first door was woven from smooth roots and polished darkwood, the surface carved into spiraling patterns that drew the eye inward. Faint, warm light shone beneath it, the color of firelight through a cottage window. He could hear something behind it: voices, laughter, familiar tones warped by distance.
Myra's laugh. Nellie's squeak. Runa's dry snort.
The second door was jagged.
Thorns and root-knots twisted together into something that didn't understand symmetry and didn't care. Blue-white lightning crawled along its surface like restless spiders. The air around it vibrated with the same off-key hum he'd felt in Verdant Hall when Elowen touched the water.
From behind it came no sound.
No warmth.
Just a steady, low thrum.
Like a machine that had been running for a very, very long time.
Words burned across his vision, cold and clean:
[SECOND TRIAL: PATH]
[CHOOSE YOUR STORM.]
Aiden flinched.
The text wasn't loud. It didn't slam into his mind like alerts sometimes did. But the fact that it appeared at all, here, in the Academy's own trial, made his skin crawl.
He stared at the two doors.
"This is a trick," he said softly. "Of course it's a trick."
The warm door pulsed faintly.
The sound of voices sharpened—still muffled, but clearer.
"Aiden!"
"Don't be slow—"
"Storm-brain, get in here—"
He knew those voices. Every cadence. Every sarcastic lilt and worried tremor.
They tugged at him like gravity.
He took a half-step toward that door before catching himself.
Trial.
He forced his eyes away and looked at the jagged door instead.
The lightning there wasn't warm. It was clinical, almost surgical, running in precise lines along thorn-edges and root-grain. The humming behind it wasn't natural.
It sounded like the System.
Not literally. The System didn't have a sound. But if the numbers that haunted his vision and the cold logic that measured his life ever decided to sing, it would sound like that.
[PATH ONE: BOND]
[PATH TWO: POWER]
The text overlaid both doors, no matter which he looked at.
His throat went dry.
"Subtle," he muttered. "Really subtle."
Bond.
Power.
Warmth.
Lightning.
Friends.
Something else.
He thought of Elowen in Verdant Hall, her voice quiet but unforgiving:
"There are enough people in this world who chain what they do not understand."
He thought of the fog-entity in the marsh whispering found you as the Aberration tried to tear the Hollow open.
He thought of waking up in this world, gasp already halfway out of his stolen chest, the System whispering new life | parameters set like it was filling in a form.
Was this the Academy's trial?
Or had something else woven itself into it?
His storm hissed under his ribs, unsettled.
Aiden stepped closer to the first door.
Warmth rolled off it in waves. The memories behind the voices sharpened—not just sound now. Smell. Sight. Fragment-flashes of Myra perched on a railing, grinning at him. Nellie hunched over a notebook, tongue peeking from the corner of her mouth. Runa leaning against a wall, arms crossed, pretending not to listen when Nellie talked.
Home, some traitorous part of him whispered.
Not yet, he answered it. But close.
He lifted a hand—
—and stopped.
The wood beneath his fingers didn't quite look right.
The carving was beautiful. Too beautiful. Every line perfect, every curve designed to pull his eye inward. There were no nicks. No scratches. No signs of use.
No sign anyone had ever opened this door from this side.
Aiden's fingers hovered an inch away.
"If this is what it looks like," he said, "why show it to me at all?"
The Hollow didn't answer.
The other door crackled faintly, blue-white arcs jumping between thorns.
He forced himself to turn toward it.
Up close, the jagged door wasn't ugly.
It was… honest.
The roots that formed it were twisted, uneven, scarred by old cuts that had never grown smooth. Some thorns had snapped at the tip; others were longer than they should've been, curving in ways that looked painful.
He lifted his hand.
Static brushed his skin before he touched it, raising hairs on his arm.
Cold words slid in again:
[PATH TWO ACCEPTANCE: INCREASED RESONANCE. DIMINISHED ATTACHMENT.]
[PROJECTED OUTCOME: HIGH EFFICIENCY. LOW SURVIVAL OF ASSOCIATES.]
His stomach lurched.
"Oh, I hate you," he whispered. "I really, really hate you."
Bond.
Power.
Pick the people, the story in his head said. That's what heroes do. They choose their friends, their hearts, their found family. They walk through the warm door, punch whatever horror lies behind it, and come back with a joke on their lips and a lesson in their pocket.
But this wasn't a story written to make him feel good.
It was a trial designed to see what he did when both options tasted like failure.
He stepped back from both doors.
The corridor hummed, displeased.
"No," he said.
Nothing changed.
[CHOOSE.]
The command tightened like a noose.
Lightning crackled along the jagged door, brighter now. The voices behind the warm door grew urgent, rippling with panic.
"Aiden! Where are you—?"
"Don't—don't leave us—"
"Please—"
He shut his eyes.
"So that's how it is," he said through his teeth. "You don't want my preference. You want my obedience."
His storm flared in hot, sharp anger.
This felt wrong.
Not like the Thorn-Beast, which had tested him but never lied.
This felt like something had crawled into the trial's bones and puppeted them, using the Hollow's rules as fingers.
Know yourself, the first mark had whispered.
Control yourself, the second had demanded.
What did this one want?
He listened.
Past the fake voices. Past the humming. Past the System text.
Under all of it, buried deep in the root-walls, something rasped like claws against stone.
Searching.
Dragging.
Persistent.
The Aberration.
He remembered the Hollow sealing, the monster's roar cut off behind tons of stone and fog.
Elowen's warning echoed in his bones:
"The Aberration did not lose your scent in the Hollow."
What if it hadn't given up?
What if it had chewed its way along whatever thread connected him to the Warden, following that thin, stubborn line all the way into the Academy's wards—
—and into the Gate.
His heart hammered.
If that thing had gotten its teeth into the trial-space, maybe these doors weren't choices at all.
Maybe they were bait.
He opened his eyes.
The mist was thicker now, creeping closer with every second he refused to move. It curled around his ankles, his knees, reaching for his chest.
[NON-COMPLIANCE: RISK OF TRIAL FAILURE INCREASING.]
[REWARD LOSS.]
[POTENTIAL EXCLUSION.]
[POTENTIAL—]
"Shut up," he snapped.
The text flickered.
Not much.
But enough.
Aiden laughed once—short and shaky, but real.
"You're not the one who dragged me out of a truck and gave me a second life," he said. "You're just whatever came with the fine print."
He looked at the doors again.
Not as paths.
As tools.
"Okay," he said softly. "If you're partly Aberration and partly whatever ancient storm thing is sniffing around my soul… then the smartest thing I can do isn't choose one of you."
He inhaled.
Exhaled.
Let his storm rise—not all the way, not into a full blast, but into that precise edge he'd found with the Thorn-Beast. Enough to sharpen. Enough to touch.
Lightning crawled under his skin, tracing faint lines along his arms and neck.
The Hollow responded.
Root-walls vibrated. The floor thrummed.
The warm door brightened desperately, voices overlapping now, pleading, accusing:
"If you cared, you'd come—"
"You'll let us die?"
"You promised—"
He didn't flinch.
"I promised the real them," he said. "Not you."
He turned to the jagged door.
The cold humming deepened, filling his bones. Numbers whispered at the edges of his vision—charts, projections, efficiency estimates, survival curves. It was everything the System liked.
And it came with a cost measured in other people.
He smiled at it.
It wasn't a kind smile.
"You're not me," he told it. "You're just the easiest version."
His storm surged hotter.
He lifted both hands, fingers spread, palms facing each door.
"Here's my answer."
He didn't blast them apart.
He reached.
Thin threads of lightning unspooled from his fingertips—one line to each door, drawn not in force but in resonance. His storm brushed the warm door's surface, feeling for the pattern in the illusion.
Under the carved wood and beckoning light, there was… nothing.
No weight.
No memory.
No anchor.
Just hunger wearing his friends' voices like borrowed clothes.
He cut the thread.
The lightning snapped backward into him.
He staggered but stayed on his feet.
He turned his attention to the jagged door. His storm crawled along its thorns, slipping through the cracks between root-knots, tasting the power pulsing inside.
This one had weight.
History.
It wasn't wholly false.
But it wasn't his.
The rhythm was wrong—too even. Too cold. No hesitation, no doubt, no mess. It was a life reduced to numbers and outcomes.
Aiden's throat burned.
"I've died once already," he whispered to it. "I'm not spending this life as a clean line on someone else's chart."
He withdrew his lightning from that door too.
Both threads snapped back into his chest, hard enough to make his teeth clack.
Pain bloomed behind his eyes.
The trial did not like that.
The mist surged.
The doors shuddered.
For a moment, the whole corridor seemed to convulse in on itself, thorns pressing inward, roots tightening, the air turning to ice water in his lungs.
[PATH REFUSAL: UNEXPECTED.]
[RECALIBRATING PARAMETERS—]
The words jittered, then fragmented.
Symbols Aiden had never seen crawled across his vision, glitching in and out:
[ ∴ ∴ ∴ / MARKED THREAD RESISTS / ∴ ∴ ∴ ]
He dropped to one knee, gasping.
It felt like someone was trying to pry open his chest from the inside. The System pushed. The Hollow pushed. The thing dragging its claws through the Gate's foundation pushed hardest of all.
Something else pushed back.
A memory rose—not his, not exactly.
Fog swirling around a massive, distant shape. A presence like a mountain wrapped in cloud. A word, not in his language, but heavy with meaning.
Warden.
The same awareness he'd felt in the marsh when the fog-entity had turned and looked through him, not like he was prey, but like he was… a pattern.
Lightning flared through the corridor.
Not his.
Not the Gate's.
A single, sharp crack of white-blue split the mist overhead, searing a jagged line along the ceiling before vanishing.
The pressure broke.
The mist recoiled.
Both doors shivered, their structures unraveling.
The warm one rotted in an instant—wood sagging, carvings melting into sticky, tar-black sludge that hit the ground with wet slaps. The cold jagged one crumbled, thorns splintering into dead, gray dust.
Underneath them was only smooth, pale root.
No doorway.
No fork.
Just forward.
A final line slid gently into his vision:
[SECOND TRIAL: PASSED]
[METRIC: REFUSAL TO BE LED BY FEAR OR EFFICIENCY ALONE.]
[NOTE: EXTERNAL INFLUENCE DETECTED. WARDENS: ALERTED.]
Aiden stared at that last word until his eyes blurred.
"Good," he rasped. "Let someone else worry about whatever's trying to hijack this place for a minute."
He pushed himself back to his feet.
The corridor ahead brightened.
Not green.
Not blue.
A softer light, colorless, like dawn spreading through fog.
He took a step.
His storm was tired now—not dormant, but stretched thin. The marks the Thorn-Hollow had burned into his skin itched faintly, like healing bruises.
He thought of Myra, probably pacing outside the Gate, pretending she wasn't worried.
He thought of Nellie, likely biting her nails and reviewing healing protocols she'd never need for him if he did his job.
He thought of Runa, leaning on her hammer, betting silently against the Academy's odds.
He was not walking this path alone.
Even if his feet were the only ones inside the Hollow.
"Third test," he said softly. "You're next, aren't you?"
The mist stirred ahead.
He walked into it.
Behind him, unseen, dead bark flaked away from the ruined doors, exposing fresh green shoots beneath, already curling toward where he'd stood—
as if the Hollow itself was quietly taking notes.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Alright, real talk for a second.
WebNovel rejected Reborn with the Beastbinder System.
Yeah. They said it "wouldn't make money."
So now it's up to us to prove them wrong.
If you're enjoying the story even a little—Aiden, the lightning pup, the worldbuilding, the fights—
then please help this book climb:
⭐ Power Stones → they matter way more than people realize
📚 Add to Collection → boosts the book in the algorithms
💬 Leave a Comment → even "nice chapter" helps more than you think
Right now, every push tells the system,
"Hey, this story actually can compete."
If you want to support the journey even more (never required), my Patreon is here:
My patreon is CB GodSent
(Early chapters, and it helps me keep writing.)
Thank you for reading.
Seriously.
Let's show them what this story can do.