Chapter 14 : Three Days and a Phone Call
The little heap of dust on his floorboards kept pulling his eye back.
A bolt, a minute ago. Now a stain the color of dried blood, waiting for a broom. Arthur turned his healed thumb over one more time, watching the pink line where the cut had been, and let his mind run where it wanted to go.
Because a power that mended a wound and a power that rotted metal to powder were not just tricks for a fight. He'd read enough to know that the cultivators who lasted were the ones who thought past the obvious swing of a fist.
Restoration. The word alone opened doors.
If Order returned a thing to what it was meant to be, then a rusted blade could be made whole. A cracked foundation stone could be told to forget it had ever cracked. A snapped bowstring, a warped gear, a shattered cup, all of it just matter that had wandered off from its proper shape, waiting for someone to point it home again.
And further out, past what he could test on a bedroom floor, the thought went somewhere that made his pulse tick faster. A sickness was a body drifting from its proper shape. A poison was order gone wrong in the blood. A scar was skin that had healed into the wrong pattern and given up on the right one. If he grew strong enough, careful enough, could Order coax a dying man back toward the design of a living one, cell by cell, the way it had smoothed the scratch off a steel ruler?
He didn't know. It was the kind of idea that could be a miracle or a cruel joke, and only time would tell him which. He knew better than to trust the version of himself that wanted it to be easy.
Then Chaos, the other hand.
Decay had uses that weren't only about ruining things, though ruining things had its place. Ore came out of the ground wrapped in worthless stone. Strip the stone away, coax it to crumble and leave only the pure metal behind, and he'd have done in a breath what a smelter did in a day. Cultivators purified their mana before they stored it. Alchemists purified their ingredients before they burned them. Two sides of one coin, his two hands, and both of them turned on the same simple truth: he could take a thing apart, or he could put it back.
He thought about the walls of a portal he'd never entered. About armor he might one day need to get through, about locks, about how a battlefield was mostly a problem of which things you wanted still standing at the end. A hand that aged steel to rust in seconds was a key to a great many doors, most of them the kind you weren't supposed to have a key for.
"A blacksmith and a wrecking crew," he thought, almost smiling at the shape of it. "Living in the same chest, refusing to shake hands."
And there were darker corners to it, ones he circled without stepping into. If Chaos unmade a plant by pulling the order out of its cells, it would do the same to flesh. He knew that much without needing to test it, the certainty of a cliff you don't have to walk off to trust. He set the knowledge down carefully, somewhere he could find it again, and chose not to look at it too long tonight.
That was the wall, of course. Everything he'd imagined assumed he could one day hold both at once, and for now he couldn't. One hand, one law, one job at a time. The grand applications would have to wait for a version of him that had solved the thing splitting him down the middle.
He filed the dreams away where he kept the rest of them, and got back to work.
Three days folded into each other after that.
He gave them to cultivation, and to little else. Wake, eat, sit on the floor, draw the mana in on that thin patient thread he'd learned to trust. The seam still flinched when Order met Chaos at the border, but he'd stopped fighting the pain and started listening to it, easing off whenever the burn climbed toward the old detonation, feeding the flow again once it settled.
Rose drifted in and out, sometimes leaning on his doorframe to narrate whatever the news had botched that hour, sometimes just checking he hadn't melted into the carpet. Once she sat cross-legged in his doorway for the better part of an hour, not saying much, just keeping him company while he worked, the way she used to sit outside his room when they were small and she couldn't sleep. He didn't ask her to leave. She didn't ask what he was doing. Some conversations ran fine without words.
Their mother left trays of food outside his door and took the empty ones away without a word, the same quiet care she'd once shown a husband who'd shut himself in the garage for hours at a stretch and asked to be left alone.
The work was slow. It was always going to be slow. But slow water still finds the sea, and by the third evening he felt it, that quiet settling in his flesh, a room at last fully furnished.
He said the word.
"System."
The window unfolded in the dark of his room, calm and blue.
[ SYSTEM ]
Species: Human (Primordial)
Name: Arthur Walker
Age: 18
Realm: None
Soul Strength: None
Cultivation: Flesh Awakening, Third Layer
Element: Chaos, Order
Talent: Chaos and Order Primordial Body
Cultivation Method: Chaos and Order Primordial Scripture
State: Indeterminable
Third layer.
Two layers gained in the span of a few days, where the scripture warned that the whole stage took most people half a year. Even hobbled, even bleeding a little at the seam with every cycle, he was climbing faster than the numbers said he should.
"Cripple's pace," he thought, letting the light dissolve. "And still faster than the whole race behind me. What does that make me, exactly."
He didn't have an answer. He was learning to sit with the ones he didn't have.
The phone buzzed against his desk before the thought could sour.
He almost let it ring out. Then he saw the name and picked up.
"Reyes."
"Walker." Daniel's voice came through warm and loose, the sound of someone who'd been talking to other people right before he dialed. "Okay, hear me out. You've been a hermit for what, three days? Four? Half the group's convinced you moved away without telling anyone."
"I've been busy."
"You're always busy. That's not a personality, it's a medical condition." A pause, laughter behind him, someone shushing someone else. "Look. A few of us are heading out tonight. Nothing serious, just some of the class, somewhere with cheap food and worse music. You're coming."
"Am I."
"You are. We both leave for that base in two days, and once we're in there it's all uniforms and drills and people watching us cultivate like it's a spectator sport. So tonight, before any of that, you come sit with actual humans while we're still just a bunch of kids from the same class." Daniel's tone shifted, just slightly, under the joke. "Come on, man. One normal night. Before everything gets weird for real."
Arthur looked at the dust still waiting on his floor, at the window where the system had glowed a moment ago, at the two days standing between him and a base full of strangers.
"Before everything gets weird for real."
Daniel had no idea how right he was.
"Fine," Arthur said. "Where."