For three days after the test, I didn't work.
Not that I had a real job, just the scraps carrying barrels, running errands, cleaning boots for half a loaf. The kind of work that let people forget I existed the moment I turned away. But even those doors stayed closed that week.
They'd heard, somehow.
Everyone in the slums always heard.
The butcher's wife looked through me when I asked for the morning sweep. The old man at the stable tossed me a coin like he was feeding a stray dog, not hiring one. I picked it up anyway. Hunger doesn't argue.
The coin was cold. It felt like the orb.
The nights came heavy. I slept behind a collapsed tavern wall, under a sheet of broken roofing I'd dragged there months ago. The rain came early this season fine, needled drops that stung the skin. I used to listen to them fall and imagine Lira humming, her voice chasing the thunder. Now it was just noise.
On the second night, I dreamt of her. Not her smile, not her laugh — just her eyes when she said, "Even blue is something, Zero."
When I woke, my throat hurt. Maybe from the rain, maybe from the memory.
By the third day, I decided to work again. You can't afford grief when your stomach folds in on itself.
I walked the merchant's lane, the stink of fruit rot and metal in the air. A man shouted for carriers, and I lifted my hand. He squinted at me.
"You're the white-grade brat, huh?"
I said nothing.
He nodded anyway. "Fine. Carry the crates. Don't drop 'em."
I didn't drop them. Even when my back screamed, even when my palms tore.
Because if I stopped, he might tell me to leave. And then I'd have to feel hungry again.
When he paid me, I bought stale bread from a cart and chewed it by the gutter. The crust scraped my mouth, and I thought, absurdly, that at least something was sharp enough to hurt.
The days blurred.
The world didn't care that I had no mana.
The sun still rose. The streets still reeked.
But inside, something changed not a spark, not power. Just a hole, and the slow realization that it wasn't going to fill itself.
I started watching the others the ones who'd awakened. Their laughter came from somewhere I couldn't reach. The street boys who mocked me before now carried tiny light-stones they'd bought with their apprentice pay. They used them to scare off rats and call it training.
I tried to remember what it felt like to believe I could be something. I couldn't. That thought had died somewhere between the crystal and the guard's spear.
That night, I went to the cliff's edge the one behind the old mill, where you could see the higher city glowing in the distance. It looked like a different world. The towers pulsed faintly with mana, each window a vein of light.
I wondered what it would feel like to be up there, to hold a piece of that glow inside you.
The wind was cold.
I whispered to the dark, "Maybe I was never meant to."
But then, in the middle of that whisper, another voice came back my own, small and stubborn.
"You said you'd find a way."
I stared at my hands.
They were calloused, trembling, cut.
But they were still mine.
Maybe the orb had said I was nothing. Maybe the world agreed.
But nothing could still move.
Nothing could still fight.
When the first light crept over the horizon, I stood up.
The streets were empty, quiet.
And for once, that quiet didn't feel like defeat. It felt like a pause — the kind before something begins.
Tomorrow, I told myself, I'd go to the Miller house.
They'd thrown me out, yes. But I needed to tell them anyway.
That I'd tried. That I wasn't useless, not yet.
Even if they didn't listen, I needed to say it.
Because silence was worse.