"I think the old bastard has been planning it for a while." He took the book back. "The body he put me in. The Core Attribute. The system that specifically caters to a summoner who can fight independently." He glanced at the wall writing again. "Someone left a manual two hundred years ago for someone with a Sovereign Core. And now there’s a person with a Sovereign Core standing in front of it."

"...That’s a long setup."

"Old bastards have time," Orion said.

Luna stared at the writing on the wall for a long moment. Her tail was very still. The kind of still that meant she was working through something serious underneath the surface. "Master."

"Yeah."

"If someone prepared this much for you." She turned back to him and her expression was stripped of its usual warmth, just direct and clear and slightly fierce. "Then what they need you to do is equally significant."

He’d had the same thought.

He just hadn’t said it out loud yet because saying it out loud made it real and he was still metabolizing the previous fifteen things that had become real in the last hour.

"We’ll find out," he said.

"That’s not reassuring."

"Wasn’t meant to be." He tucked the book under his arm. "Reassuring is for people who don’t want accurate information."

She stared at him.

Then the warmth came back. Slower than usual. "Hehe. Master is strange."

"Consistently."

He did a final sweep of the room. The shelf had three other objects on it. He catalogued them quickly. A small vial of something dark that had probably been liquid once and wasn’t quite anymore. A folded piece of paper that crumbled slightly at the edges when he carefully opened it and turned out to be a rough sketch of something he couldn’t identify, geometric shapes arranged in a pattern that might have been a formation diagram. And a flat stone disc with the same symbol from the wall and the cover carved into one face.

He took all three.

The orange cat jumped off the shelf and walked past him back through the door. Presumably satisfied. Presumably going wherever it normally existed when it wasn’t being cryptic on behalf of cosmic entities.

Orion watched it go.

Then he looked at Luna. "We need to be back before anyone notices we left."

They went back through the passage. He replaced the stones in the wall, pressing the mortar back into place where he could. It wouldn’t fool a close inspection. But it didn’t need to. It just needed to not announce itself.

The walk back to the manor was quiet and fast and they made it without encountering anyone, which felt lucky until Orion thought about the passive skill he’d gotten and the instinct that had kept his pace controlled and his route efficient without him consciously planning it.

Maybe not luck.

Maybe just development.

I’ll take it either way.

He spent the next two hours in his room reading.

Not skimming. Actually reading. Slowly and deliberately, going back over sections that were dense, letting the information settle properly rather than trying to absorb it all in one pass.

The Sovereignty of Self was thorough in a way that academic texts usually weren’t. It didn’t just describe what to do, it explained why the body did it, what was happening at a mana level, what the physical sensations corresponded to, what to expect at each stage and when to push through and when to back off.

Stage One was called Circulation.

The principle was straightforward. The Sovereign Core naturally retained mana rather than externalizing it. Left alone it would circulate randomly, inefficiently, building up in certain areas and creating the irregular patterns the system had already noted. Stage One was about taking manual control of that circulation. Learning to feel where the mana pooled and directing it deliberately through specific pathways in the body.

In conventional cultivation this was entry level stuff. Basic circulation theory was taught to children in this world.

For a Sovereign Core it was apparently a completely different experience because you were working with a system that didn’t match any of the established frameworks, not against it.

The book had a specific note about that.

Do not attempt to apply standard circulation pathways to a Sovereign Core. The pathways are not different in location but in direction. What flows outward in conventional cultivation flows inward in Sovereign cultivation. Attempting to force the outward direction will result in immediate destabilization.

He sat back. Looked at the ceiling.

Then he closed his eyes and tried to feel it.

The mana was there. He could feel it the way he’d always vaguely felt it, that background energy that had gotten more noticeable as his physical training intensified. But now he was paying deliberate attention to it and there was a texture to it that he hadn’t registered before. A direction. Like water with a current in it.

Flowing inward.

Toward the center. Toward his core. Not out into his limbs, not outward into a summoning circle. In.

He stopped trying to redirect it and just followed it.

Let his attention move with the current rather than against it.

Something shifted.

Not dramatically. Not like a breakthrough in those cultivation novels where the protagonist glows and rocks explode. Just a sensation of something slotting into a more correct position. A tightness he hadn’t known was there releasing slightly. His breathing slowed on its own.

He sat there for a while.

When he opened his eyes Luna was watching him from the bed in cat form with her chin on her paws and her eyes half closed.

"Something happened," she said.

"Cultivation. First stage. Beginning of it." He looked at his hands. "How long was I doing that."

"Forty minutes."

That long. It had felt like five.

He stood. Worked his shoulders. The general body ache from the night’s training was still there but there was something else mixed in now, a different quality of warmth distributed through his core that hadn’t been there before. Faint. Early stage. But present.

He pulled up the status screen.

◈ MYTHIC SUMMONING SYSTEM ◈

Host: Orion Ashbourne

Age: 15

Rank: Elite

Mythic Energy: 194 / 100

Core Attribute: SOVEREIGN

Sovereign Cultivation: Stage 1 [Circulation]

Progress: 3%

Internal Mana Density: Low [Increasing]

Contracts: 1

[LUNA :: Mythic Feline :: Elite] 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

Active Passive Skills:

[Combat Instinct :: Basic]

[Sovereign Reinforcement]

Shadow Step Compatibility: 79%

Sub-Skill Copy: [Cooldown 11h 08m]

◈ ACTIVE MISSIONS ◈

[MAIN] Survive the Academy Selection Trial

[SIDE] Increase Shadow Step compatibility to 90%

[NEW SIDE] Complete Sovereign Cultivation Stage 1

Reward: Stage 2 Unlocked / Physical Enhancement Upgrade / Mythic Energy x50

◈ ◈ ◈

Fifty Mythic Energy for finishing Stage One.

He was going to be very difficult to afford by the time he was done.

He almost smiled at that.

Then someone knocked on his door and the feeling evaporated immediately because no knock at this manor at this hour had ever come with good news attached.

"Young master," Aria’s voice. She sounded careful in a specific way. The way people sounded when they were delivering information they were personally unhappy to deliver. "You’ve been asked to present yourself at the main estate."

"The Duke again?"

A pause. "...No, young master. Your brother Seth has arranged a gathering of the younger generation. All of the Grand Duke’s children." Another pause. "And you have been formally included in the invitation."

Orion looked at Luna.

Luna looked at Orion.

Her ears were flat. Her tail was not moving.

He thought about Seth arriving at his door this morning with his bandaged wrist and his step back quietly offer and his very specifically promised things will get complicated.

He thought about the elders watching from windows.

He thought about three weeks to the selection trial and the fact that a gathering of the entire younger generation of the Ashbourne main line was exactly the kind of controlled environment where an accident would be most plausible.

He also thought about the cultivation session he’d just finished and the passive skills sitting in his status screen and the fact that Seth had been working with yesterday’s information and had no idea what the last twelve hours had looked like.

"Tell him I’ll be there," Orion said.

Aria’s careful voice got more careful. "Are you certain, young master."

"Completely."

A pause that suggested she disagreed but knew better than to say so. "Very well."

Her footsteps retreated down the hallway.

Luna dropped off the bed and was at his side in one smooth motion. "Master."

"I know."

"This is a trap."

"Almost certainly."

"Then why are we going."

Orion tucked the book into the desk drawer. Looked at himself in the small mirror above it. His white hair was a disaster from training and the night on the stone floor. His pale eyes looked awake though. Focused.

He fixed his hair with two passes of his hand, which didn’t fully solve the problem but addressed the worst of it.

"Because traps only work," he said, "if the person walking into them doesn’t know what they are."

He turned from the mirror.

"Let’s go see what my dear older brother has prepared."

Luna studied him for a moment. The teeth smile appeared. The one with too much in it. "Hehe. Master is excited."

"Little bit," he admitted.

"Should I be restrained or unrestrained."

"Restrained," he said. "For now."

"And if they try to hurt master."

He looked at her sideways as they moved toward the door. "Then use your judgment."

Her smile sharpened. "I have very good judgment."

"I know," he said. "That’s what I’m counting on."

The door opened onto the hallway and the morning light and whatever came next.

He walked into it without slowing down.