Chapter 1: Ten Thousand Years

Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Ten Thousand Years

The letter had looked like a joke the first time Jason read it.

The kind of joke someone plays on you right before delivering genuinely terrible news, where you keep waiting for the punchline that makes the whole thing make sense again.

Congratulations. The Veryon Clan and Agnello Clan are pleased to announce your union.

Jason remembered reading that line four separate times, waiting for the part where some clan elder walked in and said gotcha and took the paper back.

Nobody had taken the paper back.

’Because it wasn’t a joke,’ he thought, watching the back of his new wife’s head as he pushed her wheelchair up the short stone path toward the front door of a house he’d been handed the keys to that same morning. ’It had the seal on it.’

That was the part that had actually convinced him, in the end, more than the words themselves.

Anyone with a grudge and a printer could stage a prank convincing enough to ruin someone’s week.

But the Veryon seal, pressed into red wax at the bottom of that letter in a pattern that had taken him years as a child to memorize just so he could recognize forgeries, was not something you faked.

Could you, technically? Sure. In the same sense that you could, technically, walk into a dragon’s den and ask politely if it minded sharing its hoard.

The seal of one of Mordania’s Three Great Clans wasn’t just a mark. It was a promise, backed by generations of people willing to make examples out of anyone stupid enough to test it.

So here he was. One week later. Married.

’To a princess, apparently,’ he thought, and had to fight down the small, involuntary twitch at the corner of his mouth, because even now, even with everything else going on in his head, some petty and reliably immature part of him found that funny.

Novaria Agnello wasn’t technically a princess. The Agnello clan didn’t have royal titles, not on paper.

But paper had never mattered much to reputation. Everyone in Mordania who’d spent even five minutes around Hunter society knew that the daughters and sons of the Three Great Clans were more or less royalty regardless of what the official records said, and Novaria had been treated like royalty long before her accident, back when she’d still had legs that worked and a saber that had made grown Hunters nervous.

The amount of strength she’d weilded with the saber in hand was enough to win her the position of heir to the Agnello clan, one of the three the most powerful forces in the nation even while being only at the 6th level of cultivation.

She’d awakened at eight years old.

Jason turned that fact over in his head the way he turned over most facts that interested him, slowly, from multiple angles, looking for the part that explained everything else.

Most people awakened around twelve. That was the number every schoolchild in Mordania learned before they learned much else, the age doctors and clan elders and everyone else circled on a calendar and waited for.

Eight was not just early, it put her in a category of talent that showed up maybe once a generation, if that, the kind of number that made entire clans reorganize their long-term plans around a single child.

’The only person I ever heard of with a comparable number,’ he thought, and the humor in his chest cooled by a few degrees, ’was me.’

Not current-him who could barely sense his own Soul Core, let alone anyone else’s. He was, by every medical record released by Mordania’s finest healers, a young man whose talent had been completely and permanently destroyed.

But sixteen years ago, at eight years old, before an explosion in a Gate he’d had no business entering had rewritten the entire trajectory of his life, he’d been something else entirely.

Something the newspapers and clan gossip and breathless tutors had all agreed on calling, without a hint of irony, a ten-thousand-year S-Rank talent.

His recorded mana affinity on the day he awakened had come in at the highest recorded in the kingdom’s history, a detail the clan had trumpeted so loudly at the time that he could probably still recite the exact figures if someone forced him to.

He’d hated the ten-thousand-year phrase. Even at eight, drunk on his own hype in the specific, embarrassing way only a child prodigy could be, some small stubborn part of him had thought it was a ridiculous thing to say about a kid who hadn’t finished growing into his own hands and feet yet.

Nobody actually knew what had happened ten thousand years ago. There were no receipts.

It was just a number people liked to say because it sounded appropriately enormous, the verbal equivalent of throwing your arms out as wide as they’d go.