ARC I - PROLOGUE

[REPORT #133301]

[SECURITY LEVEL: ALPHA ZERO]

In "???", power rules.

The world is plagued with a thousand dangers and terrors, ready to claim the lives of all that are unprepared. When the beasts that roam the lands could split apart the skies with their roars, and shatter mountains with their will, Humans learned that their fragile, mortal nature would not be enough. Defying the will of Heaven, and against the rules of nature, Humans began to fight back. Instead of fearing them, they began to manipulate the elements, turning the energy of the universe back against it. When unkillable, ancient beasts threatened them, Humans decided it was time to threaten them back. Reaching into the heavens and earth, they began to search for the true source of all power.

In their quest for power, their quest to move past their fragile nature, Humans became heaven-defying immortal cultivators of power.

And in the world where man can split apart the sky with a shout and shatter mountains with his fist, it is the power inside you that decides your fate.

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[FURTHER ACCESS DENIED]

On the eastern edge of the Sachild continent, a large city has been living in relative isolation for generations. The heavy rain clouds that cover it spell good times for the many farmers, who shall soon have a plentiful harvest. But in the late night, as the rain pours, the entire city of Eternium lays silent, for it has finally gone to sleep. A woman that channels the power of the wind itself runs through the streets, going home after a long day of work. Unseen by others, she dances and runs through, floating with the power of the wind element. The energy feels free and unshackled as she floats further and faster. Not a single drop of rain touches her.

But through the sound of the rain, she heard something else. A child.

This piqued her curiosity, as there should be absolutely no children in the industrial district at this hour. Deciding to investigate, she changed her path and began to float toward the sound.

The origin of the sound was not far away. An umbrella dug into the ground protected the crying child from the pelting rain. Not even a child, this was barely an infant! What kind of parent would leave their child out like this!

Bending down to pick the child up, she extended the layer of wind around her onto it, cradling the infant in her arms. She was no mother, barely twenty-two years of age herself, but even she had learned how to properly handle a child.

Reigniting the spiritual technique that let her float, she started to move again, holding the child tightly as she flew towards the one place where she could report this.

Two elders and a young woman huddled around a makeshift bed they had made out of two large stools and a cushion.

"So you just… found him out in the industrial district?" Said Elder Myca. Despite his title, the man was not too old. He was tall, built like a warrior with curly blonde hair and the signature red eyes of Eternium natives. "Are you sure?"

"Swear on my soul." Sylvia said, the Wind cultivator who had found the infant. "Just laying there, crying like someone took his favourite bottle. No parents in sight."

"He's an outsider," Elder Padya said. The man truly embodied the nature of his title, the golden curls of his hair had long faded into a silver that trailed down his shoulders, faded dark red eyes a sign of his age. "That is no child of Eternium, we have perfect records on all born here, he was likely part of the people that snuck in recently."

Myca sighed. "So what are we going to do with it? We don't exactly have an orphanage"

"Him" Sylvia corrected "He is a child, not one of your chickens."

"It doesn't matter." Myca argued. "We don't exactly have infrastructure for orphans." He channelled a technique as he spoke, creating strings of dark solidified shadows that grabbed a stack of papers for him. "He does not match any of the records of newborns from the past few months, but he looks like he could be from one of the smaller clans.."

Padya bent down to have a closer look at the simple blanket covering the child. It had simple letters stitched into it, one that only he could read in the room.

"Shah Aiden." He stated "The child is named Shah Aiden."

Myca frowned further. "That wouldn't sound completely out of place, just leave out the family name, still no home for him. Unless…" He turned his head to look at Sylvia. "That outsider friend of yours, he lives alone doesn't he?"

Sylvia crossed her arms. "Saw an outsider and decided to hitch him to the other one, did you?"

"It will suffice." Padya said, sitting back on his chair. "He is our best bet. This is a land of safety, and we shall make sure to harbour this child. Myca, start writing the birth certificate."

Fourteen years later

Aiden is fourteen, and it is finally his day. He is a young boy, with short brown hair and dark red eyes. He lives in, where they held their seasonal awakening ceremony. Aiden has studied for long about this ceremony, about the long history of Eternium and why this ceremony is so important. It marks the coming of age for children in Eternium, a jump from mortal children to the first stages of their cultivation.

"Merdith Kleda!" the operator shouts, the same man Aiden had seen carry out this procedure for the past four years. Merdith Kleda, a tall girl with the signature blonde hair of the Kleda clan walks forward. From this close, Aiden can hear the hushed words the operator tells her.

"Calm your breathing, put your hand on the orb and just focus on the elements."

The nervous girl did so, putting her hands on the gleaming surface of the device. After a few seconds, a spray of water falls around her. "Water!" the operator shouts. "Congratulations, young cultivator!" he shouted, as the girl stepped off the platform to the cheers of her family. The musicians to the side played a happy tune.

This had gone on the entire day. The children would be chosen by one of the six basic elements, representing the six major schools of martial arts in the city, assigned to them by the ancient artefact. He saw shards of crystal form around those chosen by Earth, Gusts for those chosen by Wind, bright flashes for the Light and the same lights slinking away when people were claimed by Shadow.

Aiden moves forward, it is finally his turn, and his aching legs and nervousness were forgotten for the excitement of what lay ahead of him. He didn't even hear the words of the operator, as he repeated instructions in a bored voice.

In his mind, Aiden could only think of one thing: Fire.

There was no proper way to influence which School would be assigned to you, but his Father told him that intent mattered.

Fire. Flames. Sparks. Embers. The child kept a constant image of those burning in his head as he moved forward to touch the sleek surface of the artefact. He had seen his father use the power of Fire every single day, he had long studied how fireplaces burned and read too many books on the nature of the fire element.

When his hands were on the surface of the ancient artefact, six presences entered his head. Aiden had felt this type of power before, when practising simple meditation in school.

The very every of the universe that had been extracted and purified with the human spirit, a power that permeated from every element around him, aura.

The elemental energy vibrated as he put his attention towards them.

'Fire, please, fire.' He thought, focusing on one particular element. It was hard for him to separate the different types of aura from each other, his sixth, spiritual sense being largely untrained. Yet, he still tried.

The aura inside the artefact became restless, and filled his vision. In front of his eyes, colours began to flash. Bright light, dancing orange, still yellow, shifting blue, pitch black and restless white.

And then… slate grey.

Aiden had read about how the artefact worked. When his city was founded, the original inhabitants of Eternium created six schools of cultivation, each learning a unique aspect of aura. The artefact put the user into a meditative state, making the seconds of time it took to assign an element feel like minutes. The artefact should have kept him in the cycle of elements for much longer.

So when he was ripped out of the meditative state and thrown onto his back, Aiden was shocked. As his eyes began to adjust, he noticed something wrong. There was no bright sunlight in the morning, there was no sound of instruments, and there was no polite talk among the crowd.

The entire world felt… silent, muted.

Then he looked around, and saw the bodies.

People lay on the ground, bleeding. The entire crowd below the stage had turned into a mass of lifeless and bleeding bodies. Fear gripped at him, and he tried to move, but his limbs seemed to be completely locked, held in place by terror.

He felt a familiar presence in his sixth sense, and managed to turn his head in time to notice a man covered in crimson fire burst onto the stage, clashing with a strange mass of grey.

The man, his father, had flames lit on every inch of his skin and moved like a speeding blur. Thamus fought like a seasoned warrior, despite his years spent in the forge, a tough kind of man and an impressive cultivator among the commoners of Eternium, having moved past Body Refinement at a young age.

His father fought with the intensity of someone with advanced martial arts, with calculated strikes and the explosive power granted by fire aura.

Thamus destroyed his enemy with a few quick blows, landing a powerful punch onto the mass of grey energy and blasting it into a thousand pieces. He turned to Aiden, the burning fire around his face dissipating to let his son see his face.

"Move!"

Aiden didn't comprehend the command in time. A burning pain erupted through his stomach, and Thamus turned into a blur of movement in his fading sight. The pain dulled, but stayed constant, and Aiden fell onto his back.

The next few minutes were a blur. When he finally had his bearings back, there was a bandage tied around his stomach, and his entire body felt numb. Thamus was kneeled in front of him, sorting through bottles of pills. He found the one he wanted after a few seconds, and made his son swallow it with a quick sip of water from a flask.

Near instantly, the numbness began to fade.

"That pill should help you recover, that attack reached your core, but you should be… fine."

He looked at Aiden with a complicated look.

"I'm going to go see if there is anyone else left, if I don't come back… forget that. I'm going to come back, and you should stay safe here, burn that into your head." He said, then took a deep breath.

"But in the unlikely case I don't, that bag has everything you could need, and your mother will find you. IF she doesn't, listen to the people that come to help. Understood?"

Aiden nodded weakly. His father looked at him for one more moment with a look he couldn't decipher, before fire ignited around his limbs. He turned into a blur of movement, disappearing from his sight. The child felt another bout of unconsciousness take him.

When Aiden woke one last time, he didn't know how much time had passed. Through the dim light in the room, he searched through the satchel his father had left him, finding a familiar small orb. He pressed a small button on the surface of the simple runelamp, and it lit up the room with the power of Light-aspected aura.

He was in the room of one of the many city watchtowers. It was empty, except for a single chair and a half-eaten box of pastry on a table, likely what the guard was snacking on.

But there was no guard, and a strangely coloured light filtered in from one of the windows behind him. He grabbed the small knife he found in the satchel, just for comfort, and tried to fight his weakness to get up.

He eventually managed it, getting on two wobbly legs and slowly turning around. Aiden had seen the view out of the watchtowers before, and it was beautiful. Buildings in Eternium had a tradition of growing flowering plants on the rooftops, so the view from the high watchtowers in the summer was glorious and colourful.

He almost fell back down when he saw the view now. Fires, destroyed buildings, entire streets filled with dead bodies.

The sky was dark, but not the dark of the night. It was strange and grey, with small silver points that shone like stars. They cast an ominous light on the city, something that felt fundamentally wrong. Worse were the strange masses of grey and silver energy that roamed the city, destroying everything around them. Some of them were vaguely humanoid, and looked like the elemental spirits he had seen when hunting with his father.

But worst of all, was the giant in the middle of the city. It stood three buildings high. An absolute titan wearing silver armour. It was a massive monster, and the boy couldn't do much other than marvel and fear at its absolute scale. The titan in silver armour crushed a whole building with a single swing of his hand. Aiden flinched at the loud sound, and was thrown out of his trance. Fear threatened to freeze him into place again, but he fought against it to get back on his position on the floor. The watchtower was on the outskirts of the city, so this was probably the safest place, especially if his father had brought him here. Even the armoured titan was far away from his location. He needed more light, the small runelamp was starting to flicker. It would need to charge, but there wasn't enough light aspect aura here to charge it.

He dug around in the satchel, and finally found a small candle and lighter. The candle was too small to give sufficient light, but the boy brought out a piece of chalk from his jacket pocket. He had learned to always carry this around, you never knew when you had to create magical runes.

From memory, Aiden sketched a circle of ancient symbols on the ground, a simple configuration he had learned in school. His father regularly used this script of runes, to light up small areas during his night patrols, or to lure animals while he hunted. It glowed with a scarlet light when he activated it, the colour of his aura.

Aiden didn't know how to do that, of course. It was apparently a simple use of a cultivator's power, but even an action that simple was alien to his weak spirit. He looked inwards, and found that even the natural flowing of aura around that body, a process of the body which everyone had, slowed down in his body, a side effect of his ceremony.

Aiden instead used a trick that he had learned from his mother. He lit up the candle, and let the flame touch the circle of runes for just a second.

As was their purpose, the runes caught the natural energy of the flame and filled the room with orange light. It was warm, like a fireplace, and gave him a bit of

comfort. Trying to relax and ignore the loud sounds of destruction outside, the boy closed his eyes.

"Hello? Anyone there?"

Aiden didn't recognise the voice. It came from the spiral stairs that lead up to the watchtower's room, the heavy steps of combat boots echoing up.

He grabbed the knife by his side out of instinct, and stood up to face the new arrival. After a few seconds, someone walked up, reaching the room.

It was… a woman dressed in black clothes, dyed a darker colour than Aiden had ever seen. There were small shining spots on her clothes, like glittering stars that reflected the light of the room.

She scanned the room for a moment, then her eyes finally landed on Aiden, and the knife in his hand.

"Hey there!" She said, with a friendly voice and a wide smile that looked awkward on her face. "Don't worry, I'm friendly! You can put the knife down."

Aiden didn't put the knife down. In fact, he held it up higher.

"Who are you?" He asked, in a shaky voice. Strangers in Eternium were never good news, he had learned that as a child. Her accent was strange, nobody from Eternium spoke like that, and few had clothes like hers. Clear indications of a foreigner.

She raised her arms, showing they were empty, if gloved in dark leather.

"My name is Pasho, your father sent me. You're Raiden right?"

"Aiden" He corrected, but began to slowly lower his knife.

"My father sent you?"

Pasho nodded, putting her hands down. "He's busy helping combat the effects of the wraith, saving people and all that. He sent me here to make sure you're safe."

"How can I trust you? You're an outsider."

The black-clad woman sighed, and fiddled around in her pocket before removing a small object. Flipping it over, she showed it to Aiden. "Here, the royal seal. This should be enough proof, got it straight from the Emperor"

Aiden squinted at the object. It looked like a plate of metal, with a glistening symbol made from a green material that he didn't recognise. What was this?

"....You don't know who that is, do you?" Pasho asked.

Aiden shook his head, confused.

She sighed again, and a shiver passed through Aiden's entire body. "I forgot where I was, sorry. Turn around and look out, you will get a good look of the Emperor now."

Aiden heard the sound of loud thunder, and turned around quickly. There was a flash of bright green lightning outside, followed by the sound of loud squealing that made Aiden cover his ears.

Suddenly, there was a powerful presence that loomed over the entire city like a guillotine. Between the dark sky, and low light, the heavens looked like an absolute void. But in the void of the sky, there it was like the stars had returned to the sky. A single star, to be exact, a single green star.

It burned with energy that was denser and more powerful than anything Aiden had ever felt. There were plenty of martial artists in Eternium that focused on their cultivation over all else. His own father had one of the most powerful spirits in the city.

But this was beyond anything he had ever seen or felt.

"Grand, isn't he?" Pasho asked behind him.

The green star felt… dense. Dense like the hot fires of a furnace, or the destructive power of a lightning strike. It zipped across the battlefield, crashing into the grey titan. The collision exploded with immense force, shocking Aiden out of his stupor.

"Who is that?" Aiden asked again, turning around to face the strange outsider.

"The emperor. He owns these lands, and most of the continent, really."

Aiden didn't know of anyone who owned Eternium, but he didn't feel like objecting. He turned back around, watching the star of green light collide with the titan multiple times. Until the pain in his back returned, and he lost his balance. He hadn't even noticed it rise up, but the wound he had suffered had decided to start pulsing with pain again. He groaned in agony. It hurt badly, and every other thought in his head was blinded by the flash of pain.

Something caught him before he could fall to the ground, and laid him on his back.

"There there," said Pasho's voice, barely comprehended. "That's a nasty wound on your core."

Something pushed against his stomach, near his core, he realised. His entire body felt numb. But he could feel… something, but wasn't the familiar warmth of the fire element. It was worse. Searing pain spread from his centre to his entire body, in arcs and lines, as his body began to fully accept the new element inside his spirit.

"Gods above…" Pasho muttered. "What did they do to you?"

Aiden is fifteen. His mother has died.

He buried her underneath a fig tree in the graveyard. She always liked the fruit, despite her condition, often sending her son to pick some. In the attack on Eternium, she had worked dutifully, saving the children of the school from a mob of monsters. But her injuries had crippled her. She could barely walk, one of her arms had lost most functionality, and the damage she took to her spirit made her health worse every year. They still lived in the refugee camp, in some unnamed village, mixed with the other victims of razed settlements. She had died inside the barn, finally succumbing to her sickness. "Here lies Shah Sylvia. May the winds bring her to the heavens." was her tombstone. His mother had always talked about being buried near her husband, but Shah Thamus was never found. Like his wife, he had heroically saved many people and fought off countless monsters. During late nights, when Aiden should have been asleep, he could hear his mother weeping, clutching her wedding ring. He had buried her with the ring.

Aiden felt empty. There was nothing left for him anymore. The only reason he had stayed in this camp was to take care of his mother, and for some sense of stability. The people in the camp didn't care for them. The food rations had gotten thinner and thinner. The camp was a mess of death, sickness and struggle. He couldn't stay here, not if he wanted to be something greater. He still felt the call of power, whenever he cycled the energy inside his spirit. It was rare, hard to quantify and harder to sense in everyday life, but the tiny specs he could cultivate gave him the slight rush of power. It called him to move forward, to call on it for power. He finally accepted it. Aiden didn't own much anymore, but he searched through his meagre belongings to find the small coin of dark metal.

In the morning, he would journey to the nearby village, and finally accept his nature. The heavens had beckoned fate to destroy his home, his family, and his future.

So he would defy the heavens.