Chapter 5 : Half a Second
Arthur surfaced from the meditation with more questions than he'd started with.
The room around him hadn't moved. Same walls, same desk, same faint crack running along the ceiling from the tremor two nights before. But something in him felt rearranged, like furniture pushed an inch out of place, close enough to normal that only he would ever notice.
He sat there for a moment, replaying what Zhixu had said. Your fusion wasn't clean. It was forced. The words hadn't lost any weight since he'd heard them.
He got up and went to find Rose.
She was in the living room, sprawled sideways across the couch with her legs hanging off the armrest, flipping through channels that were all saying some version of the same thing. She caught sight of him and immediately sat up, delighted.
"Look who's back among the living. Did the mighty Chaos and Order lord finally finish his nap."
"It wasn't a nap."
"Sure it wasn't." She grabbed the couch cushion and lobbed it at his head, no real aim behind it. He caught it out of reflex.
"You're insufferable." He tossed it right back, harder than she'd thrown it, and she batted it away laughing.
"Careful, big brother. Wouldn't want the Chaos and Order lord to strain something on day one."
"I could still take you."
"You could not. I have reach and dignity on my side." She scrambled up onto her knees on the cushions, striking an exaggerated fighting pose that dissolved into laughter halfway through. "Also I know where you keep your emergency candy stash, so really, I hold all the power here."
"That's blackmail."
"That's strategy. Learn the difference." She dropped back down, grinning, and pulled her knees up to her chest, watching him with the particular look she got right before she asked something she actually cared about, wrapped in something she pretended not to. "So. Cultivation. How'd it go, big brother."
He sat down across from her.
"Strange. I'll tell you the short version. I went somewhere while I was under. A palace. There were two people there. Not people, exactly. They said they were the personification of Order and Chaos, born the moment I woke up my elements. They gave me my cultivation technique directly, and told me some things I probably needed to hear."
Rose's teasing expression dropped away, replaced by something more careful.
"Actually. Something did happen. Not nothing. Just... not much."
"What do you mean."
"I saw something. A staircase, maybe a door behind it, I don't know, it was there and then it wasn't. Half a second, if that. Before I could take a single step toward it, something just pushed me back out. Like a door slamming before I even got my foot inside." She frowned at her own memory of it. "Then the technique was just in my head all at once, like someone had thrown the book at me instead of letting me walk in and take it myself."
Arthur frowned.
"That's it. Half a second, and then nothing."
"That's it. I'm sure, Arthur. I think I'd remember more than half a second." She said it with an edge of dry humor, but her eyes had gone somewhere more careful. "It was like I got kicked out before I even got all the way in. If there was ever an in to begin with."
Neither of them said anything for a second.
"Maybe it's your element," Arthur said finally, quiet. "Karma. Maybe it doesn't let just anyone walk in and take what it's guarding. Not even you, apparently."
"Maybe." Rose shrugged, too fast, the kind of shrug that was doing a lot of work to look unbothered. "Or maybe I just don't rate a fancy palace like some people."
Chained by karma. Nine seals. The words sat in her head, exactly as she'd seen them on her own window, words she hadn't repeated out loud to him yet. Maybe that was the answer right there. Something in her was locked down before she'd even had the chance to reach for it, and whatever had pushed her out of that half second of staircase and door had done it on purpose.
She didn't say any of that. Not yet.
He let her have the joke. It felt like the wrong moment to push.
"Let's go ask Mom," he said instead. "About the rings. Maybe she knows more than she's said."
Lily was in the kitchen, elbow deep in dishes that didn't need to be that clean, the way she scrubbed things when her hands needed somewhere to go.
"Mom." Arthur leaned against the doorframe. "The rings. Dad said you'd know when it was time to give them to us. Is there anything else. Anything you didn't tell us yet."
She didn't turn around right away.
"I wish there was," she said, and her voice had none of its usual warmth left in it, just something tired and honest. "He didn't explain them to me, Arthur. He just told me to keep them safe and wait. I've had eleven years to wonder about those rings, same as you've had one night."
"You never asked him. Before he left."
"I asked him everything a person can ask in the five minutes he gave me." She finally turned around, hands still dripping over the sink. "He wasn't a man who explained himself. You know that. You remember that better than your sister does."
Rose, leaning in the doorway behind Arthur, said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
"So we're on our own with this," Arthur said.
"You've been on your own with a lot of things since he walked out that door." Lily's mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "I'm sorry I can't hand you more than I have. I gave you everything he left me."
There wasn't much to say after that. Arthur nodded, and let it go for tonight.
Dinner passed quietly. Rose, for once, didn't fill the silence with much of anything, and Lily seemed content to let the quiet sit there uncontested. Arthur ate without really tasting it, his mind circling the same handful of facts, testing them against each other like pieces that might not fit the way he wanted them to.
He excused himself early and went up to his room.
Lying on his back, staring at the crack in the ceiling, he ran through it again.
A palace only he had access to. Two entities who admitted, more or less, that his fusion had nearly killed him and would keep costing him going forward. A sister whose own soul apparently didn't work the same way his did, sealed behind something with a number attached to it, nine seals, like a countdown nobody had explained the rules of.
And a father who'd seen some version of this coming eleven years in advance, and left nothing behind except two rings and a sentence each.
Get ready, boy. You're going to have work to do.
Work. That was one word for it.
He thought about the ring on his own finger, the mana it was already pulling in three times faster than it should. He thought about the five percent Zhixu had mentioned, about the first stage taking most people six months and him potentially closing that gap in a week if his body held together long enough to let him.
He thought about what he was going to do with that, once he had it. Portals. Techniques. Whatever waited past Meridian Opening. He didn't have a plan yet, not really, just the shape of one, something built around the two words his mother kept asking him to promise.
Protect your sister.
He fell asleep somewhere in the middle of trying to turn that shape into an actual plan, still turning the ring absently around his finger.
The phone rang the next morning, before he'd even properly opened his eyes.
He fumbled for it on the nightstand and answered without checking who it was. "Hello."
"Is this Arthur Walker." The voice on the other end was clipped, professional, the kind of tone that belonged to someone reading off a list.
"Speaking." He rubbed at his face with his free hand, still half tangled in the sheets.
"This is the administrative office at your school. Given recent events, the government has organized a conference regarding the future structure of student education under the new circumstances. Attendance is mandatory for all students, and every household is being contacted this morning. You're expected at the venue by nine o'clock tomorrow morning. Details have been sent to your registered contact information."
Arthur sat up against the headboard.
"Why call me directly, if it's everyone."
There was a short pause on the other end, the kind that suggested the person on the line either didn't know the answer or wasn't allowed to give it.
"You'll receive further information at the venue, Mr. Walker. Nine o'clock, tomorrow. Please don't be late."
The line went dead.
Arthur sat there for a moment, phone still in hand, staring at nothing in particular.
Whatever this conference turned out to be, he had a feeling it wasn't going to be about homework schedules.