The sound of retching echoed off the stone walls.
Adam was on his hands and knees, his fingers digging into the loose gravel of the training yard. His stomach convulsed again, but nothing came out except a string of acidic bile. His arms shook so violently that the gravel rattled beneath his palms.
Ten meters away, Noah lay on his back, staring at the grey sky. His chest heaved in ragged, desperate gasps.
Beside them lay the training weights, massive, rough-hewn pillars of granite, each the size of a grown man, bound in iron chains.
"Stand," a voice said.
Lian Mei stood in the center of the yard. She hadn't moved in an hour.
"I... can't..." Noah wheezed, rolling onto his side. He tried to push himself up, but his elbow buckled.
"The Curse is a fire, the soul is the fuel. The mind is the spark."
She took a step forward.
"But the body?" She looked down at Adam. "The body is the furnace. If the furnace is made of cracked clay, what happens when you light the fire?"
Adam forced his head up. His vision swam with black spots. "It... breaks."
"It explodes," Lian Mei corrected. "You are Cursed Humans. Your muscles are denser than steel, your bones harder than iron. And yet, you are panting like dogs after dragging a mere two tons of stone."
She nudged Adam’s trembling shoulder with her foot.
"You wish to host a curse, Adam? Your current vessel would shatter before you cast a single spell."
"Is that... why...?" Adam coughed, wiping his mouth with a trembling forearm. "You are trying to kill us?"
"Breaking your body is a necessary step," she said coldly. "So it can be rebuilt harder."
She pointed a long, pale finger at the granite pillars. "Again. Lift them."
"Lian Mei," Noah rasped, managing to sit up. His eyes were bloodshot. "We need... technique. Theory. You said... resonance."
"I cannot teach you resonance, I am not a Cursed Human. My power comes from an Eldritch heart. I cannot teach a fish how to climb a tree."
She gestured vaguely to their chests.
"That part, you must do it yourselves. You must find the rhythm of your own curse. But I can ensure that when you find it, your vessel does not burst from the strain."
Adam grabbed the iron chain attached to the granite pillar. The metal was cold, biting into his raw palms. His muscles screamed. Every fiber of his being wanted to lie down and sleep for a week.
Move, he told his hands. Move.
He hauled the stone up. The weight was immense, enough to crush a carriage flat, but his cursed physiology responded. His tendons pulled taut like steel cables.
She clapped her hands. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet yard.
"Ten more lifts. If you drop it, we start from zero."
Noah groaned, a sound of pure misery, and grabbed his own chain. Adam closed his eyes. He didn't think about the pain. He visualized the face of the person he had lost. The one he has to save.
He turned that image into fuel. He lifted.
Five months passed since they arrived in Sutra.
Five months that had eroded the softness from their hands, replacing it with thick, yellowed calluses. The mornings were a blur of bruised ribs, dry throats. The nights were spent in the dark, shivering in the cold dampness of the nest, trying to grasp the phantom limbs of their Resonance.
Noah’s boots scraped the dry earth, kicking up a plume of gray dust. He held his guard high, chest heaving, sweat stinging his eyes.
"Hesitation," Lian Mei's voice snapped out, "is the ultimate and most tragic failure, Noah."
"Yeah. Right," Noah gasped, trying to read her shoulders, her hips. Angle of attack. Shift in weight. She didn't shift. She simply appeared closer.
"Visualize the cascade," she said, her voice echoing right beside his ear. "When you throw a strike, the kinetic sequence must already account for the counter. Do not look at the limb. Look at the empty space you will occupy next. Getting lost in the moment for a fraction of a second is where you lose, that is what the opponent will take advantage of, that moment where you are focusing on your own attack, throw it, then forget it. One mistake is all it takes to die."
Noah threw a jab, a calculated strike aiming for her centerline. Lian Mei's head ticked to the side with a sharp, mechanical crack of her neck, an insect avoiding a falling leaf.
One. She deflected his wrist with a touch like dry ice. Two. Noah pivoted, throwing a heavy cross. She was already inside his guard, without a sound. Three. A palm strike, feather-light but dense with terrifying kinetic force, tapped his sternum.
Before Noah could redirect his momentum, her foot hooked his ankle. The ground rushed up to meet him. Dust filled his mouth as the air left his lungs.
"And you are dead again," she stated, looking down at him without a shred of exertion.
"Ugh," Noah groaned, sitting up, rubbing his chest. His body was failing him.
Adam was already moving before Noah fully settled in the dirt. Unlike Noah's calculated geometry, Adam moved with raw, ragged intensity. His muscles burned, pulling tight across his ribs, his breath whistling through his teeth. He lunged, driving a wide hook aimed at her jaw.
Lian Mei didn't step back. She stepped in.
"Aggression is not momentum," she said. Adam felt her rigid fingers hook his bicep, redirecting his entire body weight with an elegant smooth pull. He stumbled, catching his balance just in time to whip a low kick toward her knee.
She lifted her leg a fraction of an inch. His shin connected with her calf, it felt like kicking a steel beam. A sharp, electric pain shot up Adam's leg.
She tapped the base of his skull with two freezing fingertips. "It makes your rhythm predictable. If I wanted to, your spine would be severed."
Adam dropped to one knee, rubbing the back of his neck.
He and Noah exchanged a single, wordless glance. They rushed her from opposite sides.
Lian Mei stood in the center of their pincer movement. "To survive," she spoke calmly, sidestepping Adam's wild grapple while simultaneously parrying Noah's elbow strike with the back of her hand, "you must decouple your intent from your flesh."
Adam swung; she ducked with a stiff, vertical drop. Noah swept low; she floated backward, her feet barely skimming the grass.
"A strike," she continued, batting away a synchronized double-punch that sent both boys stumbling into each other, "should be an afterthought of your positioning. You are fighting me. You should be fighting the space around me, because I could be anywhere and everywhere inside it."
She raised both hands. Two sharp, open-palm strikes hit their chests in unison. The impact echoed like a drum. Both boys hit the dirt, staring up at the blinding sky, chests heaving in the quiet afternoon.
"You are both dead," she said, her robes settling around her without a single wrinkle.
Lian Mei was well aware of how hard she was on them, as it was necessary to rush the training process. What she didn't expect, however, was the immense talent Adam and Noah had. Their learning rate over the last five months was nothing short of impressive. In one way or another, she felt proud, reassured, and sometimes, scared.
"Lian Mei, do you remember when you mentioned your Eldritch heart was classified as a DIAMOND-TIER?"
"Yes. What of it?"
"Who actually makes those classifications? And what are the criteria?"
"Utopia established the framework. To manage an inventory of Eldritch hearts that massive, they needed an absolute metric to categorize strength. They eventually shared their methodology with Sutra."
"What are the parameters?", Noah asked.
"Five primary factors," Lian Mei said without breaking her stride. "Destructive Yield, Utility, Adaptability, Survivability, and Dueling Capacity. A heart is evaluated across these axes to determine its overall quality."
She glanced over her shoulder. "For example, a heart with overwhelming Utility and Adaptability, but abysmal scores elsewhere, can often rank higher than a perfectly balanced one. In the right environment, situational supremacy is far more lethal than general competence."
Adam and Noah exchanged a look. The logic of it was brilliant. It treated abilities not just as raw power, but as tactical assets.
"And the full scale?" they asked in near unison.
"The recognized tiers are IRON, BRONZE, SILVER, GOLD, PLATINUM, EMERALD, DIAMOND," she listed effortlessly. "Above DIAMOND lies Apex, and finally, Primal." She paused, the silence of the woods pressing in around them. "However, you should know that the gap between Apex and Primal is not a mere step. It is a sheer cliff. The difference is far greater than the jump between any of the lower tiers."
Adam’s face lit up, a competitive spark cutting through his exhaustion. "Hey, Lian Mei. Where would you rank our current level?"
She was silent for a moment, her eyes sweeping over their battered frames. "You would both be about Gold-Tier right now."
She turned her back to them and continued walking into the gloom. "At best."
You really didn't need to add that, they both thought.
"Which means you are both ready," she announced while both still on the ground, her head tilting. "For a mission."
Adam’s head snapped up. A jolt of adrenaline flooded his veins. "A mission?"
"Correct. It is time to test your mechanics in a life-or-death environment."
"Huh?" Noah reacted, masking the sudden tremor in his fingers. "Life or death? I thought we were high-value assets."
"The nest is an incubator, you will not stay inside Mother’s domain forever. Outside, death is the baseline metric. If you cannot survive the objective you are about to be given, your value is zero. Your journey is better ended here."
"What is the objective?" Adam asked, his voice low, scraping against a suddenly dry throat.
"Walk, let’s get there" Lian Mei said. "You will see for yourselves."
The forest swallowed them. Pine needles muffled their footsteps, thick and spongy beneath their boots. Sunlight cut through the dense canopy in sharp, dusty beams.
Lian Mei walked in the lead, Adam and Noah followed.
"Your physical frames have adapted, but flesh is limited by physics. To surpass this, you must understand the architecture of your Resonance."
Noah stepped over a mossy root, adjusting his breathing. "The physical training... it’s just the foundation. Like setting the correct posture to hold a heavier weight."
"Correct," Lian Mei ticked her head.
"The Resonance," Adam started, furrowing his brow as he tried to articulate the phantom sensation. He looked at his own hand, flexing the callused fingers. "It feels like... a shadow. But a heavy one. A mirror body that floats just over my skin. When I move, it lags. Or it rushes ahead. It zigzags."
"Because we lack synchronization," Noah analyzed. "From what I've mapped out during our night sessions, reinforcing a strike isn't about pushing 'energy' into your fist. It’s an alignment issue."
Noah raised his hands, bringing his index fingers together until they lay flat against each other. "Imagine two pieces of tracing paper. One is your physical body. The other is the Resonance. To reinforce a punch, you have to overlap those two images perfectly for a split second upon impact. If they are parallel, the force multiplies."
"Yes I know, But it’s impossible to hold," Adam muttered, rubbing a knot in his shoulder. "You can only sync one part at a time. A fist, a forearm. Try to spread it out, and the image shatters."
"For now," Noah countered, the gears in his head turning. "But logically, a true master must be able to align the entire body at once. Full parallelism. If you could overlap the whole mirror image over your physical frame, and maintain it... your baseline strength and speed would skyrocket permanently."
Adam let out a short, breathy laugh, shaking his head. "Aligning just my arm takes everything I have. Trying to hold the entire body parallel? That’s like trying to balance a cup full to the brim with water on your head, while sprinting down a mountain road covered in potholes, juggling stones, and trying not to spill a single drop."
Lian Mei’s pace did not slow, but her voice drifted back. "Your analogy is clumsy, Adam. But accurate. The strongest Cursed humans of the previous epochs walked that mountain road."
The wind picked up, rattling the dead branches above them..
Adam shivered, pulling his collar tight. He looked at Noah. "So where does the unique power of the Curse fit into all of that? If the Resonance is the mirror body... what is the power? Where does a special ability sit in that architecture? I don’t have one yet so I can’t tell, Noah, is there a way to describe it?"
Noah fell silent. He stared at his own hands, his eyes narrowing behind his lenses. He stopped walking, the crunch of pine needles ceasing.
"It’s..." Noah hesitated, a rare look of profound discomfort crossing his face. He rubbed his temples. "It’s hard to explain logically."
"Try," Adam pressed.
Noah looked up, his expression deadpan, but his eyes wide. "It’s as if that imaginary mirror body... has a color. A color that I can somehow taste in the back of my throat.".
Adam and Lian Mei paused, then turned slowly. For a long, unnerving moment, they just looked at Noah as if he had just spoken in a freaky, terrifying tongue.
Noah shifted his weight, suddenly self-conscious. "What? Don’t give me this look as if I was a creep."
"We have arrived," Lian Mei stated, abruptly turning her back to them and shattering the tension.
Adam looked around. There was nothing but thick, suffocating woods. Tall, ancient oaks crowding together. No buildings. No ruins. No targets.
"Here?" Noah asked, squinting into the gloom. "Is it underground?"
Adam looked down at his boots. The damp earth beneath them felt strangely hollow.
"Yeah," Adam murmured, his heart rate spiking as the hair on his arms stood up. He instinctively curled his hands into fists. "I can feel it. Something is very wrong down there."