Dan wasn’t sure if it was an old age thing, or if it was just his poor luck that he had met the most stubborn and frustrating elders there could possibly be. No matter how cleverly he asked, no matter what tactic or route he had decided to take, elder Baba would tell him absolutely nothing about what was going on outside his cell. The only company Dan did have was in the form of Guan Po Daiyu, the daughter of Guan Po Shang.

He was also not entirely sure why he was being held in a Guan family prison cell designed for murderers. In the excitement - a word used very loosely - Dan had ended up under lock and key. While the politics of the situation had been lost on Dan, some truce created by both he and Po Daiyu being held in a Guan dungeon, the reality of it was not.

All sense of triumph had vanished. Dan had been surprised to see that he could have avoided Guan Po Shang’s attack this time, if he had chosen to. Instead, having just the slightest understanding of context and seeing the apologetic look in elder Baba’s eye, Dan let the blow land. The last thing he “saw”, though it was framed with his perceptive mana, was a surprised Xiaomei and an angry Hyun Soon.

He focused on the memory of them, while he waited. Meditation was no issue, and long bouts of time without moving or stimulation were one of the first things Dan had been trained to deal with. As he cycled his new mana flows, almost glad for the quiet alone time, Dan could almost hear the laughter the three of them had echoed through the Sasin forest. Like then, the sounds dispelled the dark shadows in Dan’s mind just as easily as they had in the trees.

His mana felt the same as it ever did, better than ever even. It was a cool jetstream of energy, flowing unaccosted through his channels like water down smooth piping. Four containers, slowly filled over the day, all feeling the same size as his core had at triangle stage. It was invigorating, the sense of power waiting in his core. The mana which had once felt empty now felt pregnant with promise. Dan wanted desperately to experiment with that potential, but the situation had moved ahead beyond Dan’s control of it. For now, he was happy to feel what amounted to four full cores of mana all whirling with power within himself.

“Enjoying yourself?” A sharp voice cut through the air. Sitting in the cell opposite Dan was Guan Po Daiyu herself. Her words caused Dan to shift slightly and he lost his comfortable position. Resigning himself to another round of verbal sparring, he opened his eyes lazily. It had come to light that Guan Po Daiyu had indeed structured the test in such a way that harm would likely come to Dan. What hadn’t been clear was the why, and Dan had gotten no closer to it over the week that they had been held captive.

“Obviously,” Dan retorted, speaking to her more like he would a bully than a teacher. Any respect Dan held for the authority she had wielded had been worn away over their time here. “If I weren’t enjoying myself, I’d just leave.”

She scoffed. “Oh, yes, that’s right. The little prodigy, ready to snap the hallowed bars and just saunter away.”

“You’re just bitter I survived, I think.” Dan was intentionally poking her back, but she was annoying and deserved it. Looking at her now, it was obvious that she was only a few years older than Dan himself. Probably around the same age as Guan Yo Shen, twenty or thereabouts. Not nearly enough of Dan’s elder to demand respect, Dan felt.

“Perhaps I was, but I’ve rather come around to the idea that I might get to wring your neck myself. It’s become appealing.” Vicious, violent and undeservedly proud, Guan Po Daiyu was pacing her own cell like a penned in tiger. Dan had not seen her sit still except to sleep. Perhaps that was how she channelled her mana. It felt so different to Dan’s from what little he had tried to see, that he could imagine needing an entirely different routine to cycle it.

“Does your mana make you more aggressive?” Certain types of mana were said to influence personality. Dan’s own thinking was that it was more likely the other way around, that your own identity and sense of self was obviously going to influence how you perceive yourself and others. Wouldn’t mana which lent itself more easily to destruction create a more destructive person?

“No, you’re making me more aggressive. These bars are making me more aggressive.” She only spoke to Dan to complain. Initially she would start with him, but then move onto the room, her stir craziness or some other issue. “I shouldn’t even be here.” There was a whimper in her voice that almost stirred Dan’s heart, until he reminded himself that her actions had put his friends and himself in lethal danger.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You left us in the forest to die.” Other students had been collected by Po Daiyu and her own staff. They had been told that a mistake had been made and that defeating a certain number of the skeletons had actually been the intended challenge. Of course, that message had somehow missed Dan’s group. The puppetmaster itself was a known entity, considered too strong for triangle stage combatants. The fact that they had survived it had mostly been down to an up-to-now unknown power and Guan Fa Lian’s incredible skills.

“But you didn’t. Wasn’t even my idea.” There was a noticeable silencing of herself, and Guan Po Daiyu said no more. Dan didn’t need her to explain to him that it had been the order of Guan Po Shang, her father, that had put him in danger. He would be grateful if she explained why she had done it, but Dan had no hope that she would answer such a question so he kept it to himself instead. He could ask questions more likely to get answers.

“What happens in a Quiet Combat? Your chance to kill me?” Dan had wondered what Guan Po Shang had been talking about at the time, but no confirmation had come his way from his daughter, or his mother. Elder Baba had come to see him, but she had said nothing. She had listened while he spoke, impassive and then simply walked out of the dark underground room. Po Daiyu had obviously refused to explain at the time.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” That was all Dan got, but it was more than he knew before. He hadn’t known for certain whether it was even something he was going to be involved in, or if it was some trial by combat for someone else to compete in. The conversation, such as it was, died to nothing and Dan let it.

He wanted to focus on his mana while he could. He so rarely got to just sit and be alone with himself. This was partially because his mana so easily spread around and informed him of the movements around him. It was hard to feel alone when you could “see” thirty people at once. Right now, he had decided to keep his mana within, much as he had when advancing from triangle stage to square.

Dan was trying to grasp that same feeling his mana had when he had absorbed part of Guan Fa Lian’s mana. He was hoping that it wasn’t only her painful mana that could be used, but before that would be answered he needed to find the technique within himself that had allowed him to take her ability in the first place. It wasn’t as easy to focus his mana into the heavy weight that it had been, now that there were four collections of it to choose from. He focused on the “top” side of his core and started to churn the mana within himself.

At the same time, he actively spun his perceptive mana outside of himself. The result was… non-existent. As Dan’s internal mana increased in speed, it wasn’t possible for the external mana to keep up. The difference in speed made his mana feel like it was colliding with itself, sparking with a jarring halt that caused him to gasp each time. It was like skidding off a hard floor at speed, giving himself skinned knees - except inside his core.

Still, “time is a fantastic teacher,” Park Man-Shik had been fond of saying that when Dan couldn’t understand why he was doing something. In truth, he didn’t know why he was so intent on condensing his mana again beyond the fact that it had been intoxicating to wield power like that. It was different to how the mana jumped through his body, strengthening his limbs, skin or senses. It was magic, and Dan wanted to do it again.

Ignoring the bloody scabs he could feel on his core, he kept forcing it. The “top” of his square core was also desperate, Dan imagined, to understand this next step. If nothing else, it would stop the ache. During one of his breaks, when he couldn’t force himself past the jagged feeling within himself any longer, he saw that Guan Po Daiyu was watching him quietly. Dan’s mana had been focused around himself, so he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings. It would have probably been more jarring to see the tiger of a woman sitting pensively than the stabbing of his mana had been.

“Enjoying the show?” Dan spat. His mood had soured hour over hour. At some point, food had been brought in by a quiet man with tired eyes. Dan had eaten the fried fish and rice in a grumpy mood. Not savouring the salty sauce it had been served with, he had eaten quickly and got right back to his attempts at mana control. Now that he saw Guan Po Daiyu staring at his failures, his frustration had boiled right into anger. “Sorry for not letting you be the one to torture me, I’m sure you’re jealous.”

The woman, and she was a woman - unlike Dan who could only be called a boy, not a man - stayed quiet for a while. Dan’s breathing was hard. They had been the first words he had said in hours and it felt now as though he had been holding his breath all that time, leaving him gulping for air now.

“You’re close.” That was all she said. After that, she turned around in her cell and stopped facing Dan. For the entirety of their time there, that remained true. Dan scratched his core with his repeated attempts at control, Guan Po Daiyu ignored him. In a room with no sun, Dan tracked their time through his meals. After thirty meals - ten days or fifteen, Dan didn’t know - things finally changed.

One was a breakthrough within himself, though he didn’t have time to explore that because the doors to their prison opened. A surprising amount of people flowed into the relatively small room, but Dan was most happy to see Hyun Soon and Guan Xiaomei as they filtered in. He didn’t know what he expected them to look like, but seeing his friends looking so well had brought strong emotion to himself. Subconsciously, he had worried they were being treated like he was.

In their eyes he saw the worry that he had expected to feel himself. He tried to smile but even Dan knew it came across wan. He hadn’t bathed in days, hadn’t slept once whilst under lock and key, and the effect must have been particularly pronounced at this point.

The congregation was hushed, however, and this was clearly not going to be a casual affair. Aside from Hyun Soon and Xiaomei, everyone who filtered in seemed, to Dan, to be carrying the weight of ceremony about them. They were walking in step with each other, uniform lines of two which split and circled the small room. Once the circle had almost closed, the true powerhouses entered.

Even to Dan’s slightly raw mana sense, the inferno of energy that was the Guan family elders was so blinding he had to close his core. Looking at them only with his eyes, Dan tried to prepare for what was to come. If he knew how impossible that would be, he might not have ever left the strange, runed bars of his cell.