I couldn't say when it happened, but at some point, my surroundings shifted. My camp in Danatallion’s Halls—the claustrophobic nest of bookshelves and endless pursuit—was gone, replaced by the familiar absurdity of my uncle’s guest house. The dragon turtle motif loomed over me as always, its intricate carvings and paintings so meticulously detailed that I sometimes swore they moved when I wasn’t looking. Maybe they did. I wasn’t about to put it past my uncle to install some kind of artifice just for his own amusement. Still, I wasn’t going to complain. Anything was better than those proving grounds. Anything was better than constantly being hunted.

  And yet… something gnawed at me.

  It was too easy.

  I shook my head. No. No, I wasn’t going to fall into that mindset. Easy now didn’t mean easy forever. The Craven—those grotesque, chimera-like creatures—were small fry. Their tactics were basic, their movements predictable. They were fodder. Pawns. And pawns… pawns were meant to be sacrificed. At least, that’s what Marybelle always told me. She had a way of droning on about the philosophy of strategy, of how real battles were just a grand game played on shifting boards. She could sit for hours, poring over texts, dissecting past wars and famous games, endlessly analyzing why one side lost and the other won. I liked a good match of strategy, but I could never bring myself to study the game like she did. I couldn't stare at a board for hours and read theories on why a knight’s sacrifice on move forty-three was actually some brilliant, calculated maneuver. She loved the game. I tolerated it. But if I could worry about something as small as Marybelle’s exhausting lectures, then maybe... maybe I’d get through this. Maybe.

  Letting out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, I forced myself to move forward.

  I went through the motions of dressing, but my mind was still somewhere else, flickering between the weight of exhaustion and the fading remnants of Danatallion’s halls. A long robe today, deep blue, with copper and golden accents woven subtly into the fabric. A handful of golden and bronze rings, not overly lavish but enough to appease the ever-watchful noble class of Marr. My mother always said that less is more, and when it came to appearances, she was rarely wrong.

  In the washroom, I went about my routine, my fingers tracing along my newly grown horn as I scrubbed gently around it. The nerves were still raw, every touch sending faint shivers down my spine. A constant reminder of my bloodline, of what I was. What I had always been. Sliding a polished copper ring over it, I found myself staring in the mirror longer than I meant to. The weight of it suited me.

  The scent of fresh bread and fruit drifted through the air as I stepped into the dining area. Unlike yesterday’s grandiose feast, today’s spread was much more modest—eggs, a strawberry salad, sliced apples, and thick-cut bread with jam. No overflowing platters. No absurd excess. Just… food. Filling, simple, good. As I ate, I half-listened as my uncle addressed his staff, outlining his itinerary for the day. Llymarick’s Hospital for the Harmed.

  I paused mid-bite.

  Of all places, he was going there?

  The hospital was well-known, though not for anything good. Underfunded. Overcrowded. Barely held together by the charity of the city and the few healers too kind (or too desperate) to work elsewhere. Most capable doctors didn’t want to waste their time in a place that offered no pay, no prestige, and no future.

  Why my uncle—Rodrick, a man of invention, of machines and medicine both—chose to go there instead of any of the private healing wards… I didn’t know. But I did know Rodrick. And Rodrick never did anything without a reason.

  As soon as my uncle dismissed his staff, Cordelia turned to me. A single nod. A motion. Then—words, cold and precise.

  “You went there again.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  Her tone was as emotionless as always, but there was something behind it, buried deep beneath that icy control. I didn’t bother responding. Instead, I stabbed my fork into my eggs, giving her nothing but a silent nod.

  She shook her head, a barely perceptible movement, and exhaled slowly. “Every time you return, your emotions are rampant. Worried. Even now, you think places will betray you, that objects aren’t safe. You can’t just make jokes about this.”

  A pause.

  “You need help.”

  The words landed harder than I expected.

  Not because they were wrong—because they were right.

  And I hated that.

  I hated my weakness the moment I recognized it. Weakness itself wasn’t the enemy—acknowledging it didn’t mean I was weak, and seeking help didn’t mean I was incapable of solving my own problems. The real issue was… who could I tell?

  “Cordelia, I know you mean well. But I can’t control when I go there. It’s either nightly, or it isn’t. I don’t know why I keep getting pulled into that labyrinth at random intervals. All I know is that it’s—” I hesitated, my voice catching for a moment, “—a good experience for me. Probably, anyway. I’ve learned a great deal. I feel like I’m advancing faster. Getting stronger. Growing.”

  And yet, even as I spoke those words, something inside me rebelled against them.

  I barely had time to process the feeling before it struck. A deep, resonant thud—not in my ears, not in my chest, but in the core of my very being. My stomach clenched, my limbs locked up, and suddenly, breathing felt wrong, like my ribs were too tight around my lungs. My hands shot to my chest instinctively, fingers curling against my sternum, as if pressing down could ease the pressure. My vision swam, heat and cold crashing through my veins in chaotic waves.

  “Always hurts the first set.”

  Cordelia’s voice cut through the moment, smooth and unbothered, as though watching me writhe at the breakfast table was the most natural thing in the world. She even smiled, her head tilting slightly, analyzing my reaction like I was some specimen under examination.

  No one else reacted.

  Rodrick continued eating, completely unconcerned. The servants moved about as if nothing were happening, as if I weren’t clutching at the table, gasping for breath like I had just taken a spear to the ribs. That meant one thing—this was normal. I was fine. Everything was fine.

  I’m lying.

  Cordelia knows I’m lying.

  My veins were fire, my blood was ice, and the only thing keeping me upright was sheer, stubborn refusal to collapse onto the floor in front of them all. I turned my eyes to Cordelia and gave the smallest motion of my hand—a signal.

  Explain.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  She took the cue immediately, sighing as she set down her fork.

  “Once a skillcube enters the inner self, the magic within rushes through you, rewiring everything at a fundamental level.” She spoke casually, as if discussing the weather. “It activates muscles you’ve never used before, rearranges a few structures here and there. You could call it a forced evolution—but your body isn’t quite sure how to process the change yet, so it panics. Overloads your nerves, tells you something’s wrong even when everything is working perfectly.”

  I tried to focus on her words, even as my fingers tingled with an uncomfortable numbness. My body wasn’t mine right now, or at least, it didn’t feel like it.

  Cordelia tilted her head, watching me closely before continuing.

  “You’re simply reacting to becoming… hmm. ‘More real’ isn’t quite the right term, but it’s the closest I can think of. Think of it this way—every one of us is just a speck of cosmic dust, barely significant in the grand design of things. Right now, you’ve just grown. Maybe a millionth of a grain larger.”

  A bitter laugh almost escaped my throat. A millionth of a grain.

  And yet, that tiny shift felt like I was being torn apart from the inside.

  "You are," Cordelia confirmed, her voice calm, detached, as though my thoughts had been spoken aloud. "You are literally being torn apart inside and stitched back together. Our first skillcubes are incredibly destructive, but they’re also what forge the pathways for creation. You’ll recover soon."

  And just like that, she went back to eating, as if I weren’t currently dying at the breakfast table.

  "Could someone get the boy some LR3?" Rodrick finally interjected, sounding more annoyed than concerned, barely looking up from his plate. "It's obvious his hydra ability is NOT agreeing with him."

  No. We weren’t even there yet. I knew that.

  This wasn’t Gluttony of the Golden Hydra. This was something else.

  This was drowning in a sea of trees, the weight of nature pressing in on my lungs, a suffocating, all-consuming force that felt like I had been buried beneath an arctic tundra, the permafrost crushing, squeezing, suffocating. And yet, I was also on fire in the middle of a snowstorm, the heat licking at my skin, burning and freezing in a paradox of sensation. It was too much. I wasn’t processing it. I couldn’t.

  Then, just as suddenly, the pain changed.

  Hard.

  I am burning. I am frozen. I am collapsing in on myself like a dying star.

  No—I am numbers.

  There is no self, no breath, no flesh. Only mathematical truths, indisputable and absolute, being crammed into my skull at an ever-accelerating rate. Equations I don’t recognize—equations that shouldn’t exist—form, dissolve, and reform in cascading layers of logic that I both understand and don’t, that I shouldn’t be able to process, but somehow, I do.

  It begins simply.

  Prime numbers. The building blocks of computation. Their sequence flows through me, the patterns snapping into place with cold, mechanical precision. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29... faster, faster—growing larger, exponentially increasing until they reach magnitudes I cannot fathom. Numbers that stretch across entire dimensions, beyond what human minds have ever conceived.

  Then pi.

  Not the simplified, friendly 3.14159, not even the calculated trillions of digits.

  No. All of pi.

  Every single decimal place, every irrational, infinite digit, cascading through my neurons in a torrential flood. Seventeen septi-decillion places of pi, every number that ever was or will be flowing into me like an ocean crashing against a rotting ship. I see patterns in its chaos, spirals that stretch into dimensions unseen, fractals upon fractals folding into themselves, creating geometric structures not yet discovered.

  I see a theorem: The Euler-Dirichlet Entanglement Principle. A formula that binds prime numbers, quantum superposition, and non-Euclidean curvature into a single, unified proof. The implications hit me like a hammer—I see a world where the Riemann Hypothesis is not merely proven but is the guiding law of reality itself, where every zero along the critical line is a fixed coordinate in the fabric of time-space, dictating the structure of existence as we know it.

  I see a sequence that suggests Goldbach’s Conjecture was never conjecture—but a hidden theorem buried within the mechanics of the universe, one that was deliberately obscured by something far beyond human understanding.

  Then, the equations change.

  Coordinates. Every possible coordinate.

  I feel my consciousness stretch across all of them at once—every point in three-dimensional space, then four, then five, then eleven, then thirty-two, until I exist as a single point on an infinite manifold of hyperdimensional space.

  I can see the shape of the Calabi-Yau Manifold not as an abstract mathematical construct, but as a tangible, living thing, pulsating with untapped potential. I realize, in a moment of stark, unforgiving horror, that I am witnessing the full structure of...

  —not as equations on a page, but as a tactile, crushing reality, each vibrating string of existence resonating through my very bones.

  And then I see the impossible—

  A new equation. One never written, never spoken. One that should not be.

  ΔΨ = (i? ?Ψ) + Σ(?Ψ/?t) = ∫ e^(iπ + φ) dφ

  A formula that reconstructs the missing piece of quantum gravity, that binds general relativity and the Schr?dinger equation into a single, unbreakable law. A formula that—

  No.

  I don’t want to know this.

  I try to look away, but there is no away.

  Then come the geometric horrors.

  I see a square. That’s easy. A cube. That’s fine.

  A tesseract. A penteract. A hexeract. A seventeen-dimensional hypercube.

  Shapes that do not exist, that should not exist, folding in on themselves, intersecting with no point of reference. I understand the concept of a fourth-dimensional being casting a three-dimensional shadow, but now I see the fiftieth dimension casting a twentieth-dimensional reflection, and the concept alone almost shatters me.

  Then the physics begins.

  The Navier-Stokes Existence and Smoothness Problem? Trivial. The answer etches itself into my skull like a brand.

  The Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap Hypothesis? I see the missing proof, the one that quantum physicists have been groping for in the dark for centuries, laid bare before me like a newborn child.

  The equations for negative mass propulsion, for faster-than-light travel, for harnessing vacuum fluctuations to generate infinite energy—all there, laid out in flawless, unerring logic.

  And then.

  The Equation.

  The one that should never be written, that should never be thought.

  S = ∫ (?c / 2πG) R √(-g) d^4x

  The Grand Unifying Theorem. The one that binds all forces together, that explains everything.

  I am not meant to know this. No one is meant to know this.

  The sheer weight of knowledge is breaking me, pressing against me like an event horizon, stretching my mind into a singularity of thought.

  I try to breathe—try to scream—but my body is frozen, my lungs locked, my vision a pulsing white void filled with fractal light.

  I feel something pressing against me. Hands? A shove. A voice? It’s distant.

  Cordelia.

  She’s shaking me now, her voice urgent, her eyes wide with something I rarely see on her face—fear.

  My lips tremble, foam gathering at their edges. Somewhere, someone is screaming.

  Is it me?

  I try to speak, but the numbers—the numbers, the equations, the laws of the cosmos themselves—are still pouring into me, cramming themselves into every neuron like a virus rewriting my entire existence.

  Then—

  Silence.

  The numbers are gone.

  A void. A vacuum. The sudden absence of knowledge is like a limb ripped away—leaving only the afterimage of impossible equations burned into my skull.

  I blink.

  I feel the weight of my body again, the chair beneath me, the rough grain of the wooden table under my fingertips. The scent of bread, eggs, fruit. The sound of Rodrick rushing the staff to find me medicine. Cordelia is staring at me, her pupils tight, her breath measured.

  I try to laugh. It comes out as a broken, shaking breath.

  And then I feel it.

  The next wave.

  The true ability.

  Rodrick had called it before it even hit me. The Hydra ability.

  And if this was just the setup…I force my lips into a shaky, broken grin.

  "Now… now it’s the hydra ability," I croak out.