Chapter - 2

In this world, no child was ever asked what kind of power they wanted. Power chose. It always had, since the first mages walked the earth and the gods — if there had ever truly been gods — decided that magic would not be given freely, but revealed.

At fifteen, every person born beneath the sky underwent the Revelation. It did not matter if you were the son of a duke or the daughter of a fisherman, born inside the walls of a great clan estate or in the mud of some nameless village. On the night of your fifteenth birthday, the dormant seed of magic inside you cracked open, and whatever slept within your soul finally showed itself to the world.

Some children Revealed fire. Some Revealed the cold patience of ice, or the quiet violence of lightning, or the slow, growing strength of earth. Rarer gifts — healing, illusion, the manipulation of time itself — surfaced only once in a thousand Revelations, and clans like the Kims had built their entire reputations on bloodlines that reliably produced such rarities, generation after generation.

Until the Revelation, no one could practice magic. No one could even guess at what they might become. The years before fifteen were spent in preparation instead — endless study of magical theory, history, the etiquette of court mages, the proper handling of mana once it finally arrived.

Children were taught to understand power long before they were ever permitted to hold it.

This was the rule the entire world lived by. It was the rule Taehyung lived by too, even if the Kim Clan made certain he lived by it from the very bottom of the household rather than the top.

By the time he turned twelve, Taehyung had been formally enrolled — if "enrolled" was the right word for it — in the estate's preparatory classroom, where the clan's children studied magical theory under three rotating tutors.

He sat in the back corner, given the oldest textbooks, the ones with cracked spines and missing pages, while Joon-ho and the other cousins received fresh editions bound in calfskin with the clan crest stamped in gold.

It didn't matter to Taehyung. A missing page in a textbook was a puzzle, not a punishment. He filled in the gaps from memory, cross-referencing what he'd already devoured in Granny Mo's library, and more than once corrected a tutor's lecture without meaning to start a confrontation.

"The Threefold Law doesn't say mana always follows the path of least resistance,"

he said quietly one afternoon, when Tutor Baek explained the principle to the class for the second time that month.

"It says it follows the path of least resistance relative to the caster's intent. That's why untrained casters waste so much mana — their intent isn't focused enough to create a true path."

The classroom went silent. Tutor Baek, a narrow man with little patience for being corrected by anyone — let alone the clan's most unwanted child — narrowed his eyes.

"And where," he said coldly,

"did you read that?"

"Principles of the Threefold Law, by Lady Geon-mi. Third volume. It's in the library."

"The restricted section of the library."

It wasn't, not really — Granny Mo had simply never bothered to lock anything away from him — but the lie served its purpose. Tutor Baek assigned him an essay as punishment for "presumption," three thousand words on a topic Taehyung could have written in his sleep. He finished it in a single night and handed it in early, just to watch the tutor's jaw tighten.

Joon-ho, predictably, found new and inventive ways to make him pay for it later. A torn page here. A "lost" assignment there.

Once, an entire week's worth of notes mysteriously soaked through with ink. Taehyung stopped keeping anything valuable in the classroom after that.

He memorized instead — pages, theorems, entire historical timelines — until the inside of his skull held more of the Kim Clan's curriculum than the curriculum itself did.

It wasn't that he loved magic, exactly. Not yet. It was that magic was the one subject in his entire life that did not care who his mother had loved, or how she had died, or whether the clan considered his blood "clean."

A mana formula worked the same way whether a prodigy or a bastard wrote it down. A law of theory held just as true in the back corner of the classroom as it did at the head of the table.

For a boy who had spent his whole life being told he didn't belong anywhere, that kind of fairness felt like something close to belonging.

"You study harder than children with three times your prospects," Granny Mo told him once, watching him hunch over a borrowed theory text by lamplight long after the rest of the estate had gone dark.

"What else am I supposed to do," Taehyung murmured, not looking up, "wait around for my Revelation to fix everything?"

"And will it? Fix everything?"

He hesitated. Three more years. Three more years until his fifteenth birthday, until the night every person in the world eventually faced — the night that would finally tell him, and everyone else, exactly what kind of power had been sleeping inside him all along.

Some children dreaded the Revelation. Some counted down the days with excitement, certain greatness was coming for them.

Taehyung didn't know which he was. He only knew that whatever surfaced that night, it would be the first thing in his entire life that was undeniably, irrevocably his — not inherited, not stolen, not denied. His alone.

"I don't know if it'll fix anything," he admitted finally.

"But it'll at least be mine. No one can take credit for what I haven't even gotten yet."

Granny Mo studied him for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind her tired eyes.

"Three years is a long time to wait, child."

"I've waited twelve already," Taehyung said.

"What's three more?"

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