Chapter 35

Later that evening, the training courtyard lay empty beneath the floodlamps.

The rain had finally stopped, but the stone still glistened wetly, thin coils of mist curling upward where residual heat bled from the academy's underground Faith grid.

Aster moved through another Point Burst sequence.

Anchor. Pull. Rebound.

The staff cracked through the air hard enough to sting his palms. White-gold tether lines flared briefly around him before collapsing back into invisibility. His body followed half a second later, slingshotting sideways across the slick courtyard in a violent burst of acceleration that nearly tore his shoulder out of alignment.

That part had gotten easier, at least.

A month ago every activation felt like trying to perform surgery with a live grenade wired directly into his nervous system. Now it was more like performing surgery with a grenade that had started to respect him. Slightly. Under protest.

His fight with Rohan had finally let the Scripture's underlying logic click into place. Musa called it combat conditioning. Aster personally thought that repeatedly surviving your own martial art should legally qualify as workplace abuse.

Another anchor ignited. His body jerked sideways. Smoother this time. Less panic. More instinct.

The tether responded instantly now — the connection threading from his spine into the staff with almost frightening obedience. Faith bled carefully through the valve structure in his Core Palace, just enough to reinforce muscle and bone as he continued the conditioning process without liquefying something medically important.

He wiped his face with a towel, steam curling from his breath in the chill air, when he noticed someone standing near the edge of the ring.

Rohan.

The boy looked less like death than usual. The bruising around his jaw had faded from black to yellow-green, though one side of his ribs was still tightly bound beneath his training clothes. He stood with the careful stiffness of somebody whose body no longer actively wanted to die but hadn't fully forgiven him yet either.

For a while, he just watched.

"You know, I think you're trending," Rohan said eventually.

Aster lowered the towel. "That supposed to mean something?"

Rhoan smirked. “Means half the school thinks you committed a hate crime against a trust fund.”

Aster's grin flickered. "They’re not wrong." He paused. "You healing alright?"

Rohan shrugged one shoulder. "Been hit worse."

Aster believed him. There was a particular kind of exhaustion certain people carried — the kind that settled into the joints permanently after life punched you enough times without consequences. Rohan had it.

The floodlights hummed overhead while wind pushed mist through the courtyard in pale ribbons.

"They ever tell you what I am?"

"A Wanderer," Aster ventured.

Rohan chuckled under his breath — a sound more tired than amused. "You know what that means?"

"I've heard enough people say it like a slur," Aster said. "Didn't sound like they used it as a compliment."

"It's not."

Rohan stepped closer to the ring's edge, staring at the boundary lines like they marked more than a training circle. Maybe they did.

"Wanderers are what they call people who weren't born into this," he said. "No ancestors who built cities in the Archipelago before most countries on the Material Plane figured out plumbing."

He looked up at Aster. "I heard you only found out about the Astral Plane because of the man who sealed that thing in your core. You know how most others find out?"

Aster shook his head.

"Legacies have a whole tradition bridging both planes. Their kids grow up knowing about this place from the time they can walk — prepared for their eventual crossing, given access to archives that hand them a head start everyone else has to bleed for. But us Wanderers?" His jaw set. "We find our way here the wrong way. Through blind luck, half-burned grimoires, cult rumours, scraps of old knowledge, favours bought from Legacy families. Some of us earn our passage. Some beg. Some bleed for it. Either way, we arrive after the gates are already closed."

Aster listened. The staff feeling heavier in his hands.

"The Astral Plane belongs to the Legacies," Rohan continued. "Always has. Their families carved empires out of the Archipelago generations back. Ancestral scriptures older than nations. Vaults of Aether formulas no one outside their bloodlines is allowed to read. Every spell, every technique, every inch of sky up there" — he nodded upward — "is built on their inheritance. Every inch of the Astral Plane that isn't wilderness has their seal burned into it. They say they were the ones who tamed the Planes, built civilisation out of chaos, so now they get to charge us rent on the soul of reality."

Aster's lips twitched. "Efficient, I'll give them that."

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Rohan didn't laugh. "The rest of us — Wanderers, Bastards, whoever didn't crawl out of one of their direct bloodlines — we either make our own way here or we work under them. Guild labourers, Spellwrights, Astral miners. The Bastards at least have a name on a family tree. We don't even get that. We barely get the scraps, even when we work ourselves half to death."

Aster thought of Musa — careful, measured Musa, who always sidestepped questions about his own past with the smooth precision of someone who'd had years of practice doing it. The thought settled like grit behind his ribs.

Rohan kept going, voice calm the way exhausted people become calm after anger burns itself out completely. "They call us 'free agents,' but it's a joke. No Wanderer gets far without a sponsor, and sponsors always collect. Some get noticed early if they're talented enough. Most don't. Most spend years doing contract work for Guilds hoping somebody important eventually decides they're useful enough for them to get funding to cultivate properly."

"The Guilds are Legacy-owned?"

Rohan gave him a look.

"The mines are Legacy-owned. The hunting routes are Legacy-owned. The shipping gates are Legacy-owned." He counted slowly against his fingers. "Scripture patents. Artifact licensing. Most of the cultivation manuals in public circulation are censored versions missing half the important pages."

Aster raised an eyebrow. "That legal?"

Rohan laughed once. "There's no such thing as illegal when your grandfather helped invent the courts."

Fair enough. That explained several governments back home too.

The wind shifted, carrying the distant hum of the island beyond the academy walls.

"That's why you hated me," Aster said eventually.

Rohan's jaw flexed once. "I didn't hate you."

"That is objectively false."

"I disliked what you represented."

"Ah. Much healthier."

That earned another reluctant snort.

Rohan folded his arms tighter across his ribs.

"You showed up from nowhere," he said. "Didn't know anything about the Astral Plane." He paused. "Then suddenly everybody important starts circling you because you're carrying some ancient, sealed horror in your chest and technically belong to a powerful Legacy bloodline."

Aster looked away briefly.

He understood that feeling more than he'd like to admit. Watching people born closer to the finish line call themselves self-made was practically the Material Plane's favourite religion.

Rohan exhaled through his nose. "You know how many Wanderers would kill for the resources you got handed in the last month?"

Aster winced faintly. "Probably a statistically uncomfortable amount."

"Yeah."

For a while neither of them spoke. The courtyard lights reflected in shallow puddles around the ring, trembling gold against black stone.

Aster finally slung his towel over his shoulder. "So if Wanderers aren't born into this... what keeps you here?"

Rohan shrugged. "Same thing that keeps anyone here. Faith, Destiny, and Power. If I can make it to Hierophant tier, I can enter the caverns. The riches buried there would be enough to establish my own Legacy bloodline — give my future children the inheritance they're supposed to have." His grin returned, wry and thin. "Also, someone's got to remind the Legacies they don't own every breath of Faith that moves through this plane."

Aster smirked. "Revolutionary of you."

"Careful," Rohan said, deadpan. "If they hear you say that, they'll revoke your dining privileges."

That earned a real laugh — short, sharp, unexpected.

"You don't get it yet," Rohan said, quieter now. "People like Cassian — they think hierarchy is natural law. They genuinely believe the Legacies own civilisation because they inherited it." His eyes flicked toward Aster. "But that doesn't mean they won't strike back at their own. Wanderers and Bastards are pawns to them, but they see each other as rivals. Striking back at Cassian the way you did — his family will see you as a real target now."

Aster snorted. "They can try. The Celestial Council has specifically forbidden harm to come to me."

Rohan looked sceptical. "Legacies aren't used to being told no. Celestial Council or not. You should expect a response."

By the next day, the story had metastasized.

Every hallway Aster walked through hummed with half-whispered versions of it — the details shifting with each retelling, like an urban legend filtered through bored aristocrats.

In one version, he broke Cassian's jaw.

In another, the spider artifact had been an ancient torture relic banned by three separate councils.

In a particularly creative version overheard near the dining hall, he'd apparently called Cassian a "Faithless earthworm" before hurling a divine spider straight through his skull.

Aster had to admit, he kind of liked that last one.

It had style.

He sat alone near the edge of the mess hall, mechanically stirring a bowl of something grey enough to qualify as emotional weather, watching the students orbit each other like planets caught in different gravitational fields.

Hundreds of students crowded the tables in clusters defined almost entirely by wealth, lineage, and inherited social gravity. The Legacies occupied the central tables. Naturally. Nothing said "divinely ordained superiority" quite like instinctively arranging yourself into a feudal solar system during lunch. The Wanderers orbited the edges — less polished uniforms, older equipment, smaller social circles.

Aster noticed now what he hadn't before. Who interrupted who. Who lowered their voice around certain surnames. Who apologised first. The entire academy ran on invisible pressure gradients, and everyone had learned them so thoroughly they'd stopped noticing.

Musa dropped his tray across from him. The stew sloshed, grey and shapeless.

"Didn't peg you for a cafeteria eater," Aster said.

Musa's expression was the look of a disappointed saint trying to resist swearing. "You're a hard man to corner otherwise."

"That's because corners are where people get stabbed."

"Good instinct."

They sat for a beat, listening to the dull clatter of spoons from across the room. Aster's name still drifted through the air sometimes.

"I heard about the incident," Musa said, voice deceptively calm. "Do I even want to know how you managed to weaponize a binding artifact against the person who gave it to you?"

Aster poked at the sludge on his tray. "In my defence, he asked for it."

Musa blinked. "He asked—"

"Literally." Aster said. "'Show him what a real cultivator looks like.' So, I did."

Musa didn't smile.

That immediately got Aster's attention.

Ah. So, this wasn't a casual visit.

"You need to start being careful," Musa said quietly.

Aster leaned back slightly. "That ominous enough for you, or should lightning strike dramatically outside too?"

"I'm serious."

Something in Musa's tone cut through the joke. Aster studied him more carefully — the tension around his shoulders, the measured cadence.

"You think Cassian's going to retaliate."

"I know he is."

Aster shrugged. "Professor Lerato basically threatened to collapse his bloodline into a fine paste if he touched me."

"That protects you from impulsive retaliation." Musa's fingers tightened slightly around his spoon. "Not structured retaliation."

That phrase alone sounded deeply unhealthy.

"House Vale doesn't think emotionally," he said carefully. "They think institutionally. If someone humiliates them publicly, they don't lash out immediately. They restore narrative control."

Aster snorted softly. "Ah. So just regular rich people, then. I'll add it to the list."

Musa pinched the bridge of his nose. "I swear, if you weren't progressing faster than most first-years, I'd assume you were suicidal."

Aster looked up. "Progressing?"

Musa's tone softened. "You fight better today than you have in weeks. Your Will Tethers hold under pressure, your Faith valve control stays stable, and—" a reluctant smile crept through, "—you show restraint. By your standards, that's miraculous."

Before Musa could elaborate—