Vespera did not ask twice.
She gathered him from the floor with the efficiency of someone who had already assessed the situation, made several decisions, and was now executing them in order. One arm under his shoulders, one under his knees, he was five, he was small, and she carried him the way she did everything, like it was simply the next thing that needed doing.
He let her.
He was, if he was being honest, not entirely confident his legs would cooperate right now.
The new room was three doors down, a guest chamber, clean and warm, a proper bed with actual sheets instead of cold floorboards and ruined fabric. She set him down on it with a gentleness that didn't match the expression on her face, which was the careful, precise expression of someone doing controlled things while feeling uncontrolled ones.
Eclipse arrived in the doorway twelve seconds later, slightly out of breath.
Alessio stepped in behind her, silent, and positioned himself against the wall in the way he always did, present, observing, not intruding. Waiting.
The room settled into something that wasn't quite quiet and wasn't quite tense. Something in between.
Vespera sat on the edge of the bed.
"I'm going to check your body," she said. Not a question.
Alex nodded.
Her hands moved to his sternum first, a practitioner's examination, methodical, mana extending from her fingertips in thin precise threads the way a doctor used instruments. He could feel it. That was new. He could feel the shape of her mana, could track it as it moved through him the way you tracked something visible, and he filed this away as something to examine properly later.
She checked his core formation sites, navel, solar plexus, the standard accumulation points that most practitioners developed after awakening.
Her hands slowed.
She moved them to his chest.
Stopped.
The expression on her face, Alex watched it carefully, the way he watched all important things, went through several stages in approximately two seconds. Disbelief. Assessment. Reassessment. The particular stillness of someone who has found something that does not fit any existing category in their considerable experience and is taking a moment to be certain of what they are seeing.
"Mom?" he said.
She didn't answer immediately.
"Mom," Eclipse said from the doorway, voice going sharp. "What is it. What's wrong with him."
"Nothing is wrong with him." Vespera's voice was measured. She hadn't moved her hands. "He has formed a Mana Core."
The silence lasted exactly one second.
"He's five," Eclipse said.
"Most children can't form one until eighteen," Eclipse said, and her voice had changed, the sharp edge of it had gone somewhere else, replaced by something flatter and more frightened. She came fully into the room now, moving to the bed, standing over Alex with an expression he didn't have a comfortable name for. "Eighteen. Talented people manage fifteen. A genuine genius—" she stopped.
"Eclipse," Vespera said, quietly.
"Twelve," Eclipse said. "The absolute lowest anyone has ever done it is ten. The youngest recorded awakening in the entire history of the Eldoria." She looked at Alex. "I awakened at twelve."
He looked back at her.
"I passed out," she said. "From twelve. The strain it puts on the body, the brain, when mana floods into pathways that aren't fully developed, when a core forms in a body that isn't ready for it—" She stopped again. Her jaw was tight. "The reason people don't try early isn't tradition, Alex. It's because your body can't keep up. You don't just fail. You don't just hurt yourself. You—"
She stopped for the third time.
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Her eyes were bright.
He had seen Eclipse emotional before, she was not a person who concealed things the way he did, she felt everything at the surface and made no particular effort to push it down. He had seen her frustrated and delighted and furious and amused.
He had not seen her close to crying.
Not because of him.
"What if you had died," she said.
It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't loud. It was quiet in the specific way of a question that had been sitting behind teeth for the past fifteen minutes and had finally run out of room.
Vespera stood from the bed and crossed to her daughter in three steps. Her arms went around Eclipse's shoulders, pulling her in, and Eclipse, who was thirty years old and Peak Ascension rank and could level a stone wall with her bare hands, let herself be held the way she'd been held at twelve and eight and younger, head tucking against her mother's shoulder.
"He's alright," Vespera said, quietly. "Look at him — he's awake, he's coherent, his colour is good. Whatever happened in that room tonight, he came through it intact. He's here and he's in good condition, and that's what matters right now."
But Alex could see her eyes over Eclipse's shoulder.
Troubled.
Not the performance of trouble, the real kind. The kind that lived behind the composed expression of someone who had already processed the worst possible outcome and was still processing the fact that it hadn't happened.
He looked at his sister's shoulders.
Felt something pull in his chest that had nothing to do with the Mana Heart.
He did it again, he thought.
He always did it again.
He had this habit, he'd had it in his previous life too, he could see it clearly now with the particular clarity of someone looking at a pattern from far enough away to recognise its shape, of reviewing everything carefully, weighing the variables, assessing the risks, conducting himself like a person who made considered decisions.
And then something he wanted came into view.
Power. Money. Position. An advantage that was right there, that he could see and reach and take, and the careful reviewing stopped being careful, it became a justification engine, working backwards from the conclusion he'd already reached, finding reasons rather than evaluating them.
His greed had killed him once.
Not metaphorically. Literally. A substance he should not have touched, handled anyway because the opportunity was too significant to pass up, and now he was five years old with no shirt and his sister was almost crying and his mother's eyes were troubled and his father was standing against the wall not saying anything because there was nothing to say.
He'd made his family afraid again.
The thought sat in him, uncomfortable and exact.
He didn't know if he could change it. That was the honest answer, not the self-flagellating one, not the resolution-to-be-better one, just the honest one. He was what he was. The hunger in him for the next thing, the better position, the larger advantage, it wasn't a flaw he could excise. It was structural. It was the same quality that had built an empire in his previous life and it was the same quality that had ended it.
Maybe in a year he'd still be the same. Maybe in five.
Maybe, if he was honest with himself and worked at it with the same patience he'd brought to the meditation posture and the mana particles—
Maybe eventually...
He didn't know.
He knew he was still watching his sister's shoulders and feeling the ache of it, and that the ache was real, and that real aches were at least a start.
"Vespera."
Alessio spoke from the wall. His voice was quiet, the way it always was, not soft, just contained, a voice that didn't need volume.
Both women looked at him.
"Did you notice the rest of it?"
Vespera's eyes moved back to Alex. A pause. "Yes. I noticed."
Eclipse straightened, pulling back from her mother slightly, the emotional moment folding back into the practical one with the adaptability of someone who'd grown up in a palace and learned early that feelings and situations could coexist. "What? Notice what?"
Vespera sat back down on the edge of the bed. Her hands returned to Alex's chest, professional again, precise, but Eclipse could watch the examination now and she did, leaning in with her own senses extending.
"The core should have formed here," Vespera said, and her finger indicated the navel, the standard formation site. "It didn't."
Eclipse frowned. She reached out, placed one hand flat on Alex's lower abdomen.
Nothing.
She moved her hand to his chest. Over his heart.
Her frown deepened.
She pressed her senses in, carefully, the focused attention of an Ascension rank practitioner doing a proper examination, and Alex watched the moment she found it. Her eyes went still. The frown changed shape, from searching to found to that cannot be right.
She pressed again.
Pulled back.
Pressed again.
"That's..." She turned to look at her parents. "That's not a standard core. It's in completely the wrong location, it's integrated differently, the structure of it doesn't match anything I've ever felt during an examination, and the density—" She stopped. "That's not a standard core."
"No," Vespera agreed.
"It's in his heart."
"Yes."
"And the amount of mana already stored in it—" Eclipse's voice had lost its fear entirely now, replaced by something closer to the expression people got when they encountered a theorem that shouldn't work and was working anyway. "He's level zero. He just awakened. Why does he have that much mana stored, that's not possible for a fresh core, that's not possible for a standard core at all, the capacity alone shouldn't allow for—"
She stopped.
Looked at Alex.
Looked at her parents.
"What are we going to do?"
The question landed in the room and stayed there.
Alessio and Vespera looked at each other, one of those long, wordless exchanges between two people who had been navigating complicated situations together for long enough that whole conversations could happen without sound.
Then Eclipse and Alessio both turned to Vespera.
Because when the situation was complicated and the stakes were the children and something unprecedented had just happened in the chest of their five year old—
They both turned to Vespera.
She was quiet for a moment.
Her eyes moved to Alex. Steady. Measuring something.
Then she said—