I woke up to the sound of Arjun cursing at a blanket.
"Fold it like this, you absolute disaster," Taara's voice drifted across the dorm room, followed by the soft thud of a pillow hitting something wooden.
"Your 'this' is clearly wrong," Arjun shot back. "The corners don't align. This is obviously a design flaw in the blanket itself."
"That's not how blankets work, Arjun."
"Then blankets are broken."
I groaned, rolling over and immediately regretting it as every muscle in my body protested. My entire frame ached like I'd been used as a training dummy for three weeks straight, which, honestly, wasn't far from the truth. The mattress beneath me felt like the most comfortable thing in the universe, and I considered just living in it permanently.
"Good," Arjun said, noticing my expression as I finally dragged myself upright. "Means you're alive."
I threw a pillow at his head. It missed. Taara caught it mid-air without looking and tossed it back at me with perfect accuracy.
"Show-offs," I muttered, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
Breakfast was the usual beautiful chaos. The dining hall was packed with students yelling across tables, the clatter of plates and cutlery creating this warm, constant hum that I'd started to recognize as the sound of mornings in Meruzhen. Someone at the far end was arguing loudly about extra parathas like it was a matter of national security, their voice carrying over the entire room.
"Three is a reasonable number!" they were insisting. "I'm growing!"
"You're seventeen, not seven," the dining hall staff yelled back. "Two parathas. Final offer."
The entire hall erupted into laughter. The first-year just stared, mouth open, as if witnessing a crime they weren't sure they were allowed to report.
Meruzhen felt alive, loud, and completely unbothered by the fact that I'd literally set the training arena on fire a few days ago. Nobody treated me like a celebrity. But people looked. Not in awe, just in that quiet, curious way you look at someone you've heard stories about. Whispers followed me to the food counter, soft and fleeting. That's him. I pretended not to notice, loading my plate with way too much food.
Taara slid into the seat across from us, immediately pointing at Arjun's hair. "You look like you lost a fight with a wind demon."
Arjun retaliated by stealing her toast before she could even react. "It's called volume. You wouldn't understand."
"It's called a crime against mirrors." She said, setting his hair to one side neatly
I just sat there eating peacefully while the two of them went to war over breakfast foods, which was honestly the healthiest start to a morning I could ask for.
The morning assembly was mercifully short. Devavratha stood at the front of the hall, his expression calm, and announced the upcoming Foundational Combat Assessment without mentioning me, the awakening, or anything that would make me want to disappear into the floor.
"The assessment will take place in two weeks," he said, his voice carrying easily across the silent hall. "All first-year students are required to participate. This is not optional, and no, you cannot fake an injury to get out of it. We've tried that before."
A few students in the back actually had the decency to look embarrassed. Everyone else groaned in unison. The professors laughed.
Classes over the next few days blurred together in the best way, each one carving out its own little corner of my brain.
In Arcane Physics, Professor Menon was explaining resonance harmonics using a complicated series of equations that made my head swim. I raised my hand with a question that came out slightly garbled because I was still trying to work through the logic in real time. The question was weird—something about whether the harmonic decay could be modeled as a fractal pattern rather than a linear progression.
Professor Menon stopped mid-sentence. The entire class held their breath, waiting for his reaction. He stared at me for a long moment, then slowly smiled.
"...Interesting," he said, and pivoted the entire lecture in a direction none of us expected. We spent the rest of the hour exploring something that wasn't even in the syllabus, and by the end of it, I had three new notebook pages filled with ideas I wanted to test later.
Life Sciences was a monster anatomy practical, and we were examining some kind of ancient serpent creature preserved in a stasis field. The holographic cross-section floated above the specimen table, glowing faintly blue, and everyone immediately identified the obvious venom sac near the jaw. I noticed a secondary structure near the base of the skull that nobody else had clocked, a small cluster of tissue that didn't match any known glandular pattern.
"That's not a secondary venom gland," I said, pointing at the holographic cross-section. "Look at the vascular pattern. It's a heat-regulation node. The creature was probably warm-blooded in specific regions to hunt in cold environments."
The professor grinned. "Exactly."
A classmate two tables over muttered, "Of course he saw that."
Sanskrit was brutal. We were translating an ancient verse that kept tripping everyone up, the grammar twisting in ways that made my brain hurt. The text was ceremonial, dense with layers of meaning that shifted depending on how you parsed the verb endings. I stared at it for a long time, then noticed a pattern that matched an inscription we'd studied weeks ago, a grammatical structure that only appeared in texts related to fire rituals.
I got it right on the first try, and the professor nodded at me with this quiet, proud smile that made the whole thing worth it.
Mythology turned into a full-blown debate about whether a specific legend should be interpreted literally or symbolically. The class was split right down the middle, and I respectfully argued the opposite side from most of the room, pointing out textual evidence that suggested the story was meant to be read as both simultaneously. The lecture became a discussion, voices overlapping, people actually engaged. Devavratha happened to be passing by the open doorway, paused for a moment to listen, and walked on with a faint smile on his face.
The library became my second home. I was constantly surrounded by stacks of books, connecting ideas across subjects like my brain couldn't stop building bridges between them. Taara found me one afternoon, literally buried behind a fortress of texts, and sighed dramatically.
"You're building a fortress."
I didn't even look up. "Knowledge requires infrastructure."
She threw a bookmark at my head.
Sigil training was where the real glow-up happened. No giant explosions, no dramatic infernos. Just precision. I learned to balance a flame above each fingertip, keeping them steady even when I moved my hands. I learned to weave multiple flames into one another without them merging, creating these intricate little dances of fire that looked simple but took hours of practice to get right. I learned to ignite distant torches with a thought, to extinguish a single flame without affecting the others around it, to wrap fire around a wooden practice sword without burning the wood.
I failed constantly. Laughed about it. Tried again.
One day I accidentally burned the edge of my own sleeve, and Arjun started clapping like I'd just performed a magic trick. Taara nearly fell over laughing, clutching her sides. I sighed and muttered, "...That was intentional."
Nobody believed me.
Weapon rotation was brutal but rewarding. Every day, a different weapon. Sword, spear, staff, mace, shield, bow. I was finally starting to understand rhythm, footwork, distance, timing. The instructors noticed something strange about me—every correction they gave, I never repeated the same mistake twice. It wasn't that I was naturally gifted. It was that I paid attention, and my body remembered things my brain was still trying to catch up with.
One afternoon during private training with Devavratha, I finally produced a perfectly stable flame in my palm, clean and unwavering. I smiled proudly and looked at him, waiting for approval.
He nodded. "Good."
Then casually tossed six unlit candles at my face.
I barely caught them, fumbling against my chest, and stared at the candles in my hands, then back at him. My smile slowly disappeared.
I stared at him for a long second. Shook my head.
"...I'll deal with you later."
The nearby students burst into laughter. Even Devavratha chuckled.
"After you light them."
Combat was where people really started noticing the change. Reaction drills, moving targets, weapon transitions—I was still getting hit, still making mistakes, but my recovery was something else. I learned immediately. Every single day, I improved.
During one session, an instructor demonstrated a difficult sword movement that had everyone struggling, a complex sequence that required perfect timing and weight distribution. I failed twice, my form sloppy, my timing off. On the third attempt, it was perfect. The instructor simply nodded and moved on. No applause. Just quiet satisfaction.
Then the snow came.
It started falling one evening, soft and heavy, covering the Citadel in a blanket of white that made everything look like a painting. Students gathered outside almost immediately, bundled up in every layer they owned, their breath puffing in clouds as they marveled at the transformation. Within seconds someone had started a snowball fight, and within minutes, the entire common green had descended into chaos.
I was hit in the back of the head within thirty seconds.
"Truce!" I yelled, spinning around to find the culprit. "Truce, I just got here—"
Arjun threw another one at my face. "There are no truces in war, Krish."
"You absolute—"
Taara was already building a fort behind a stone pillar, completely ignoring both of us. I dove in beside her, and we spent the next twenty minutes constructing what we confidently called an "impenetrable stronghold," which lasted approximately four minutes before Arjun and a group of seniors overran it.
Then someone threw a snowball that hit Devavratha square in the chest.
Everyone froze. The entire common green went silent, students staring in horror at the Master of the Ninth Citadel as he slowly looked down at the snow on his robes.
He picked up a handful. Smiled.
Five seconds later, absolute chaos.
Devavratha was a terrifyingly accurate shot. He took down three seniors in rapid succession, his expression serene and almost peaceful as he waged war on his own students. Professors were dragged into it, some reluctantly, some with alarming enthusiasm. Someone threw a snowball at Professor Menon, who caught it mid-air and immediately retaliated with mathematical precision.
Arjun, Taara, and I spent the entire evening laughing until we were exhausted, dodging snowballs behind pillars, building terrible forts that collapsed immediately, and generally being teenagers in a place that somehow made being a teenager feel like the most important thing in the world.
That night, the three of us sat on the balcony overlooking the Himalayas, wrapped in blankets, hot chocolate warming our hands. The mountains were silver under the moonlight, impossibly vast and impossibly quiet after the chaos of the evening. No huge conversation. Just life.
Arjun talked about training, complaining about his spear form and how his instructor kept correcting his grip. Taara talked about a ridiculous assignment in Celestial Mechanics that required her to calculate orbital resonance patterns by hand. I absentmindedly created tiny flames that danced between my fingers while listening, weaving them into small shapes that flickered and died.
Nobody reacted anymore. It was becoming normal. That was beautiful.
Later, a senior asked me for a friendly spar. Word had spread, and a small crowd of curious students gathered—not a mob, just people who wanted to see. The duel was clean, fast, technical. We circled each other for a moment, testing, then engaged. I won. Not easily, but decisively.
No celebration. The senior smiled and shook my hand.
"Again tomorrow."
I nodded. "Definitely."
Afterward, I overheard a nervous first-year quietly asking Arjun, "Is Krish really that good?"
Arjun finished cleaning his practice sword and slid it into its sheath without looking up.
"If it's an exam... don't sit beside him."
He started walking away. Paused.
"...If it's training... don't stand in front of him."
He left. Nobody spoke. That line spread around the Citadel for weeks.
Late that night, the Citadel was quiet. I stood alone on a training terrace, the cold mountain air sharp in my lungs. I drew a wooden practice sword, took a breath, and let a tiny ribbon of fire curl around the blade. Not wild. Not overwhelming. Controlled. Elegant.
I performed the same form I'd struggled with weeks ago. This time, every movement flowed naturally, the fire responding to me like it had always been part of the dance.
I finished. Lowered the sword. Looked toward the snow-covered Himalayan peaks glowing silver under the stars.
I smiled.
Not because I'd become the strongest. Not because I'd mastered anything.
Because for the first time since arriving...
I genuinely felt like Meruzhen was home.
ns216.73.216.163da2
and then Add to home screen.