Chapter 60: Saint of Swords

Draeus turned to Mary next. Mist gathered around his hand, pale and almost translucent, curling and folding over itself before settling into the shape of a bracelet. The metal caught the chandelier’s glow and seemed to hold it there, as if the light had decided to stay rather than bounce away.

"This is Moon’s Door." He held it out to her. "Bound ranked. With it, you can travel anywhere, so long as moonlight touches that place."

Mary took it and turned it slowly between her fingers, watching the faint shimmer travel across its surface even after the glow had faded. She held it up toward the chandelier, tilting it this way and that, as though trying to catch the exact angle where the metal had swallowed the light a moment ago.

"The negative effect is that you will grow poor with directions. Halls you’ve walked a hundred times may suddenly feel foreign to you. Streets you know by heart may twist into something unrecognizable."

She absorbed it without a second thought, letting it inside her core. For a moment her eyes lost focus, as though she were listening to something only she could hear, some quiet accounting the bracelet was already running through her.

"Convenient trade," she murmured, mostly to herself, though I caught the faint curve at the corner of her mouth.

"You say that now," Theodore muttered from beside me, "wait until you’re lost walking to the kitchen."

Mary didn’t answer him, only slid the bracelet onto her wrist and watched it fade into her skin, leaving nothing behind but a faint warmth that lingered a second too long to be ordinary.

Draeus’s hand shifted again, and the mist thickened into a book, brown, bound in leather, its cover creased as though countless hands had turned its pages long before this moment ever existed. Small scorch marks dotted the spine, old enough that they’d faded to a dull grey, and a thin ribbon marked some page deep inside it, as if whoever had owned it last had meant to come back and never did. He passed it to Arthur.

"Poet’s Dream. Also Bound ranked."

Arthur ran his fingers along the spine, testing its weight, the way someone tests ice before stepping onto it. He opened it partway, glanced at the blank pages inside, then closed it again, as though he wasn’t ready to see what waited on them.

"You can write poetry inside it. Whatever emotion the poem is trying to convey becomes the poem’s effect. Anger can shape the words into something that burns your enemy from the inside out. Grief, if turned toward healing, can knit a wound shut before your eyes."

"And the cost?" Arthur asked, his voice quieter now.

"You feel everything the poem carries, the instant you write it. Despair drowns you before it ever reaches whoever you aimed it at. Joy floods through you before it touches the person you meant to heal. There’s no writing from a safe distance. You live every line before anyone else does."

Arthur stayed silent for a long moment, turning the book over once more in his hands, weighing something none of us could see. His thumb pressed briefly against the ribbon marker, as if he already knew which page he’d end up writing on first, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. Then he let it dissolve into a soft glow that sank into his chest and disappeared.

Draeus watched the four of us settle, then laughed quietly, low and genuinely pleased, like someone who had waited a long time for exactly this moment to arrive. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked at each of us in turn, the way a craftsman might look over tools he’d finally finished forging.

"Now that each of you carries a license, you’ve graduated from the Academy. No thousand pounds. No more requirements standing between you and the rest of your lives. That Chapter has closed itself behind you."

He let the words hang there, watching them land, before his voice dropped and the warmth drained out of it entirely. The chandelier’s light seemed to dim with it, though nothing about the room had actually changed.

"But that isn’t why you’re here."

My stomach tightened. Beside me, Arthur’s hand curled slowly against the edge of the table. Theodore’s earlier grin had already vanished, replaced by something sharper, more alert, the kind of look he usually saved for the moment right before a fight began.

"The real reason is that we intend to make you Saints."

The word dropped into the room and stayed there, heavier than the chandelier above us, heavier than anything he had said before it. I felt it settle over my chest like a hand pressing down, slow and deliberate, giving me time to feel every ounce of it before it finished landing.

Nobody spoke and I realized I was holding my breath and forced myself to let it out slowly. Somewhere behind Draeus, one of the candles guttered, and the small movement felt louder than it should have in the sudden quiet.

"The Academy never teaches the path to a silver core," Draeus said. "Reaching it means giving up a piece of your own humanity, something no instructor tells a student who isn’t ready to hear it. From silver, you climb toward gold. From gold, toward platinum. Platinum is what the world calls a Saint."

He said it the way someone recites a fact they’ve repeated so many times it no longer carries weight for them, only for whoever’s hearing it for the first time.

I looked at Arthur, then at Mary, then at Theodore. None of us looked ready to hear it, not really, but none of us looked away either.

"You’ll learn here for two weeks," Draeus continued. "After that, you’ll be sent into the Realm of the Evil."

Theodore broke the silence first. "Why?"

"To grow strong." Draeus said it plainly, as if the answer should have been obvious the moment the question left Theodore’s mouth. "Because of the prophecy of the Apocalypse."

My pulse jumped. The word alone was enough to make the room feel smaller, as though the walls had drawn a little closer while none of us were watching.

"Why us?" I asked. My voice came out steadier than I actually felt.

"Because you carry potential the Academy never explained to you properly. It isn’t only that all four of you returned from the Realm having advanced further than expected. There’s a line separating people like you from everyone else in this kingdom. Few will ever come close to crossing it, no matter how long they try."

"Us?" I repeated, unsure how far that single word was meant to stretch, or how much of myself it was suddenly asking me to reconsider.

"Hehe... You might have heard my other name: Yu Xingxi, The Saint of Swords."