Wonderful Insane World

Dylan opened his eyes, gasping. The physical pain remained, but the hollow ache within was filled. Not fully — but enough. His new arm no longer burned; it pulsed with a living warmth that was his own.

He looked up at Julius. The master stood over him, still, silent. There was no approval or disapproval in his gaze — only a deep, attentive watchfulness.

"The first one's the hardest," Julius said at last, his voice cutting through the still air. "Your soul remembers the poison. Next time… it'll hurt a little less."

——-

The next day, the world was no longer the same.

The first sensation was the granite under his fingers. Not just the simple hardness of the stone, but a mineral coldness, a spiritual inertia that seemed to absorb the light. Dylan opened his eyes. The rudimentary cave had become a topographical map of subtle energies. The rock wall behind him wasn't just a wall; it was a dark, silent mass, an immobile backdrop against which everything else danced. The hanging roots were no longer dead wood; they pulsed with a slow, greenish, dull fluid, like a residual sap of life refusing to die out completely.

Then he perceived the gems.

He didn't even need to turn his head. They were there, to his left, like three small, malevolent suns. Their pulsation wasn't a sound, but a vibration in the air, a pressure against his inner skin. The deep violet of the raw essence was wrapped in a greyish, bristling aura – the Negativity – and dotted with tiny, flickering points of light, the Soul Fragments. It was nauseating. Fascinating. Like looking at a beautiful corpse and understanding, with visceral certainty, the rot festering within.

His gaze, despite himself, turned to the silhouette sitting at the cave's entrance.

Julius.

There, the sensation was entirely different. It wasn't a gem. It was a contained sun. A forge of energy so dense, so pure, and so fiercely controlled that it was almost invisible. Dylan didn't perceive the details, only the immensity. An oceanic presence, calm on the surface, but whose abyssal depths of power he could sense. It wasn't a latent danger; it was a *reality*. A mountain that could, with a simple gesture, crush you or shelter you from the storm. At this moment, it was an anchor. The only stable thing in this new world of chaotic fluxes and radiations.

He closed his eyes, overwhelmed. The effort of the previous day – the sorting, the purification – had opened a door within him that he could never close again. He perceived the world through a sixth sense, a spiritual filter that tinted everything. The river wasn't just cold water; it was a ribbon of pale blue energy, vivid and turbulent. The forest beyond wasn't a wall of darkness, but a field of spiritual will-o'-the-wisps, some dull (the small animals, the insects), others more aggressive, points of rust and violet that had to be distant demonic creatures. It was terrifying. It was as if his skin had been ripped off and every particle of the universe was scraping his raw nerves.

"Up."

Julius's voice cut through his perceptions like a blade. It wasn't loud, but it carried, sharp and incontestable.

Dylan groaned. His body protested, a symphony of dull pains. His new arm was a streak of extreme sensitivity, and his spiritual core, though strengthened by the stolen essence, was still tender, like a bruise on the scale of the soul.

"I know you're in pain. Get up anyway."

It wasn't a suggestion. It was an order. Dylan pushed himself up on his elbows, muscles trembling. Every movement was an ordeal, but a new awareness inhabited him. He could *feel* the anima circulating within him, no longer as an indistinct torrent, but as a system of channels and currents. The pain itself had an energetic signature, a sharp, disordered vibration.

He stood up, swaying, leaning against the cold wall. The sensory world nearly made him vomit. The daylight filtering through the roots was too bright, the sounds of the forest too distinct, and the energetic background of everything formed a deafening fog.

Julius stood and positioned himself facing him, two meters away. He didn't have his sword.

"Your body remembers the pain. Your mind remembers the fear. But your core has tasted power. It knows what it's like to forge order from chaos. Today, you're going to remind it."

The training that followed was one of silent brutality. No words were exchanged. Julius made him adopt simple stances, basic martial arts positions, and hold them. It wasn't a test of physical strength, but of spiritual stability.

"Hold the Horse Stance. Lower your center of gravity."

Dylan complied, legs bent. Immediately, fatigue washed over him. But Julius wasn't watching his trembling muscles. He was observing his *aura*.

"You're leaking. Your anima is retreating into your torso, it's afraid of the load. Force it down. Into your thighs. Into the soles of your feet."

Dylan closed his eyes, concentrating. He tried to direct the energy flow. It was like twisting a muscle he had never been conscious of before. He felt resistance, a heaviness, then a tremor. Part of the heat beating in his chest slowly descended, rooting itself in his legs. The muscular burn lessened, replaced by a sensation of connection to the ground. The stone under his feet was no longer inert; it became a support, a receptacle for his energy.

"Better," murmured Julius, and that single word was a greater reward than any praise.

They spent hours like this. Static postures, slow displacements, where every step had to be a demonstration of control, the anima having to precede and follow the physical movement, like a perfectly synchronized tide. Dylan learned to feel the leaks, the points where his energy dissipated into the air from a lack of focus. He learned that pain was information, not an obstacle. A disordered vibration that he could, by concentrating, soothe, channel, or use as a spur.

And through it all, one thought burned in the back of his mind: the Breath.

That dry *Crack* that had changed everything.

Between stances, as he drank from the river, he tried to remember it. Not the act of desperation, but the *sensation* that had preceded it. It wasn't an accumulation of power, like with his punch. It was the opposite. An absolute focus. A letting go.

He remembered the world distorting, the unbearable clarity of details. He had abandoned control to impose his will in a more fundamental way. How?

He looked at his hand, the one that had held the gem. It was steady now. He took a deep breath, and instead of just filling his lungs, he felt the anima within him respond, condensing slightly in his chest.

Julius, on the other side of the river, watched him do it. He didn't intervene.

Evening fell, tinting the clearing a deep blue. The pulsations of the gems in the cave seemed stronger in the darkness, insistent calls. Dylan was exhausted, but with a new kind of fatigue. It wasn't the exhaustion of emptiness, like after the battle. It was the weariness of productive effort. His body was sore, but his spiritual core, though less dense, burned with a more stable, more obedient flame.

He was sitting at the cave entrance, watching the stars pierce the forest canopy. He held out his right hand, palm open. He didn't try to gather strength. He didn't seek to reproduce the fury of the fight.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the memory of *necessity*. The instant he had known that moving was useless, that parrying was impossible. The instant when there had been only one possible action, pure, definitive.

He felt the filament. It wasn't a muscle, not a nerve. It was a link between his will and the fabric of reality. Tenuous, almost invisible, but undeniably there.

He inhaled. His anima, instead of spreading out, converged on a single point, just in front of his palm. It wasn't an accumulation, but a compression. A putting of space itself under tension.

He didn't need to expel it. He only had to *release* the tension.

*Crack.*

The sound was weaker than in battle, less deafening. But it was clean, sharp. A dead leaf, three meters away, was sliced cleanly in two, as if by an invisible blade. The air vibrated for an instant, then became still again.

Dylan lowered his hand, panting. The energy expended had been minuscule compared to regenerating the arm or the punch, but the effort of concentration had been immense.

He looked up. Julius was standing beside him, his profile etched in the twilight.

"You've named the tool," said Julius, without looking at him. "Now you must learn to sharpen it. To wield it. Not like a hammer, but like a scalpel."

Dylan nodded, looking at his hand. The world around him was still a chaos of sensations, an energetic kaleidoscope. The fear was still there, lurking in the shadows of the trees, in the unhealthy pulsation of the gems.

But for the first time, he felt he had a grip on this chaos. He was no longer prey tossed by the storm. He was learning to navigate its eye. The mutation was not an end. It was the beginning of a new apprenticeship, far deeper, far more dangerous than anything he could have imagined. He had become a Sieve, and his own breath was his first blade.