CHAPTER 85: FOLDING THE VOID

The air in the training yard remained thick with the scent of scorched stone and ionized mana. Orven stared at the deep fissure in the granite wall where Caius’s obsidian needle had struck, his mind working frantically to re-evaluate the boy standing before him.

The initial shock in the elder’s eyes slowly burned away, replaced by an intense, consuming fire. The hesitation, the detached boredom, the clinical distance he had maintained for years. All of it shattered. A raw, scholarly fanaticism gripped Orven's heart. For decades, he had believed dark magic had reached its ceiling among the Nyx'ari, bound by rigid rules and ancient limitations. Yet here sat a living anomaly, a blank canvas of terrifying density, waiting to be shaped.

Orven took a step forward, his eyes locked onto Caius with a desperate, hungry focus. He was no longer just fulfilling a mandate for the Patriarch; he was consumed by a sudden, desperate urge to see just how far this boy could be pushed, to witness the birth of something unprecedented.

"Forget basic construct shape," Orven said, his voice trembling slightly before settling into a low, resonant cadence. He turned away from the scarred wall and faced Caius directly. "Your mana density is already far beyond what a novice should control. Building simple weapons with that energy is like using a master-forged blade to dig in the dirt."

Caius stood still, meeting the elder's burning gaze.

"We are moving directly to the second pillar," Orven continued, lifting his left hand, his fingers trembling with suppressed excitement. "Spatial Distortion."

He held his palm upward, open and empty. "Most mages believe that speed is purely physical, a matter of muscle fiber, footwork, and internal mana acceleration. They are wrong. True speed is an illusion created by shortening the distance between two points."

Orven’s fingers flexed slightly.

The air directly above his palm suddenly warped. The torchlight behind his hand bent inward, creating a strange, lens-like distortion in midair. To Caius’s Fate Sight, the underlying mana pathways of the room did not merely stretch; they compressed. The space surrounding Orven’s hand was being squeezed like a folded piece of parchment.

"Shadow is not merely a lack of light," Orven explained, his tone laced with a manic edge. "Shadow is the spatial footprint left behind when an object blocks a source of light. By tying your intent to that footprint, you do not move through space. You pull space toward you."

Orven took a single step forward.

To an ordinary observer, it would have looked like a simple stride. But to Caius, the space between Orven’s boot and the stone floor collapsed entirely. In the span of a single frame, Orven vanished from five paces away and reappeared directly in front of Caius, his hand resting lightly against the boy’s sternum before Caius’s muscles could even twitch to react.

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The movement was completely silent. No displaced wind, no sound of boots scraping against granite.

"That is Umbral Compression," Orven whispered, stepping back into a normal stance, his breathing shallow as he searched Caius's face for any sign of comprehension. "It is the foundational technique of the second pillar. You do not push your body across the stone. You project your shadow onto a distant point, use your obsidian core to anchor to that shadow, and violently collapse the space in between."

Caius felt a surge of cold excitement flare within his chest.

His Vel'drin Step, the footwork technique he had perfected through physical martial arts, relied on explosive mana bursts through the legs to achieve near-instantaneous movement. It was effective, but it generated heavy friction, noise, and physical strain.

What Orven had just demonstrated was entirely different. It was effortless, silent, and instantaneous.

"To achieve this," Orven said, his voice tight with anticipation as he stepped back to give Caius room, "you must alter how you view your core. Stop treating your obsidian sphere as a battery that shoots energy outward. Treat it as a heavy gravitational anchor. Cast your shadow intent forward, lock onto it, and pull."

Orven leaned forward slightly, his chest tightening. He was fully invested now, desperately watching Caius's every movement, terrified that the magic might prove too complex, yet burning to be proven wrong.

Caius closed his eyes, sinking his awareness into his soul sea.

Deep within his Crown Core, the flawless obsidian sphere rotated silently, swallowing ambient light and radiating its razor-sharp pressure. Caius focused on its Singularity Pull, the passive gravitational drag the core exerted on the surrounding atmosphere.

Instead of pulling mana inward to feed the core, Caius reasoned, I shift the pull outward, using the core to drag my physical body along the thread of intent.

He opened his eyes. His gaze locked onto the shadow cast by the heavy iron cage twenty paces away.

He didn't tense his legs. He didn't channel mana down into his boots.

Instead, Caius extended a single, invisible thread of obsidian-dense intent from his core, sinking it into the dark shadow beside the cage. Then, he activated the core’s gravitational pull.

Snap.

The space in the training yard visibly warped around Caius’s silhouette. A strange, metallic pop echoed through the chamber as the atmosphere collapsed in on itself.

In a fraction of a millisecond, Caius’s figure blurred into a translucent smudge of dark energy. The next instant, he stood perfectly upright beside the iron cage, twenty paces away, without having taken a single physical step.

A harsh gust of displaced air rushed into the space he had just vacated, causing Orven’s dark robes to snap violently.

At the far end of the room, the Arachne warrior flinched, its head snapping toward Caius with all eight of its compound eyes wide in sudden alarm.

Caius looked down at his boots, then back at the spot where he had been standing a moment prior. His heart was beating calmly. There was no physical fatigue, no muscle strain in his legs, and no wasted energy.

Orven stood frozen in the center of the yard. His heart hammered violently against his ribs as a mix of profound awe, triumph, and sheer terror washed over him. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from the overwhelming realization that he was witnessing history unfold.

"You..." Orven swallowed hard, his voice shaking with a rare, raw emotion before he managed to speak. "You collapsed twenty paces on your very first attempt?"

"It felt stable," Caius said, turning back toward the mage. "Though the atmospheric displacement makes too much noise upon arrival. The collapse needs to be smoother."

Orven stared at the boy, a cold sweat breaking out at the back of his neck while a wild, exultant grin fought to breach his pale lips. He had never been more committed, nor more terrified, to see what this monster would learn next.