The silence that followed Instructor Borin's declaration was heavier and more profound than any before it. The students stared, their minds unable to process the reality of what they had witnessed. The academy's number one genius, a prodigy of immense power and flawless technique, had been defeated by the academy's number one dud, who hadn't used a single recognizable skill. He hadn't even thrown a punch. He had simply... won.
Anya Volkov slowly pushed herself up from the dust, her face pale. She was not angry. The public humiliation was a bitter pill, but her analytical mind had already moved past it, consumed by the sheer impossibility of her defeat. The backlash from her own failed spell had been real—a painful, disorienting surge. But how had he triggered it? It was a flawless technique. She had checked the theory a hundred times. It shouldn't have been possible. She looked at Ren, her eyes burning with a question that had now become an all-consuming obsession.
Ren ignored the crowd. He ignored Lin Fei, whose face was a mask of disbelief and impotent rage. He looked only at Anya, and then at Instructor Borin. "The wager," Ren said, his voice quiet but firm.
Borin, shaking his head as if to clear it, grunted. "The wager will be honored. House Volkov does not renege on its debts." He shot a look at Anya, who gave a stiff, formal nod of confirmation.
The dismissal was a mercy. Ren walked away from the training grounds, the whispers and stares following him like a physical wake. He didn't go to the archives or the garden. He went directly to his spartan room in the Western Barracks and sat on his cot. And he waited.
An hour later, a knock came at his door. It was not a student, but a formal Volkov house servant in a crisp, grey uniform. He held a velvet-lined box. He did not speak. He simply bowed, presented the box to Ren, and retreated, his duty fulfilled with cold efficiency.
Ren closed the door, the silence of his room a welcome shield. He sat on his bed and opened the box.
Inside, resting on the velvet, was the Storm-Worn Bracer. It was exactly as the auction records had described it: a simple band of dull, storm-grey metal, about two inches wide. A fine, hairline crack ran across its surface, and it felt cold and lifeless to the touch. It radiated no Aether, held no enchantment. It was, by all accounts, a worthless piece of scrap metal, a relic whose history and purpose had been lost to time.
He ran his fingers over the cool, smooth surface. He tried to feel for an internal mechanism, a hidden switch. Nothing. He tried to push his will into it, to sense its nature. The bracer was inert, as responsive as a common stone.
For a moment, a sliver of doubt entered his mind. Had his research been wrong? Was this truly just a piece of trash he had won through a bizarre public spectacle?
He remembered the feeling of his own power, the chaotic hum of his Primordial Heavenly Lightning soul, a power that the texts claimed belonged to the Raijin. This bracer was supposedly a Raijin relic. Perhaps it was not waiting for a key, but for a familiar echo.
He slid the bracer onto his wrist. It was cool against his skin. He took a deep breath, and for the first time since Elder Tian had given the command, he deliberately, carefully, opened the floodgates of his will just a crack, allowing a minuscule, controlled thread of his true Aether—the raw, volatile power of his Spirit Soul—to leak from his body and into the metal.
The reaction was not a glow. It was a scream.
A soundless, Aetheric scream erupted from the bracer, a shockwave of immense, ancient power that slammed into Ren's senses. The dull, grey metal flared with an inner light, veins of brilliant azure lightning racing across its surface, tracing patterns of forgotten runes. The air in the room grew heavy, crackling with static electricity. The bracer, which had been dormant for millennia, was awake.
A voice, ancient and powerful, echoed not in the room, but directly inside Ren's mind. It was a voice filled with the arrogance of immense power and the weariness of ages.
"Three thousand years... Three thousand years I have slept in this worthless trinket, and this is what wakes me? A child, reeking of mortal weakness, who possesses a mere drop of the true blood."
A spectral image began to form in the air above the bracer. It was a tall, imposing figure, hazy and translucent, clad in archaic armour that seemed forged from thunderclouds. His eyes, two points of brilliant, piercing lightning, fixed on Ren, dissecting him, judging him, and finding him wanting.
"Tell me, little descendant," the ancient voice boomed in his mind, dripping with condescension. "In what pathetic, faded age has the blood of the Raijin thinned to this miserable degree? And what fool taught you to suppress your own soul and fight by slapping your enemies with gusts of wind?"