The next three weeks passed in a blur of focused, grueling effort. The initial, overwhelming flood of information from his tutors began to crystallize into a coherent, internalized understanding. Adam was no longer just memorizing facts; he was building a new reality inside his head, a perfect, interconnected model of the physical world.
His room in the old laboratory wing became his sanctuary and his proving ground. The scent of bleach and iron was now layered with the smell of old parchment (from Thorne's borrowed textbooks) and the faint, metallic tang of ozone that seemed to cling to him after a session with Kael. The single metal table was rarely clean. Sometimes it was covered in detailed anatomical diagrams, the muscles and nerves mapped out in Thorne's frantic, precise script. Other times, it was slick with the visceral evidence of Rorke's lessons—the dissected remains of jungle hares, scaled fowl, and once, a young, boar-like creature with tusks of crystalline bone.
His progress was not just mental. His body, fueled by regular meals and his new metabolism, was transforming. The wiry leanness remained, but it was now layered with defined, efficient muscle. He moved with a new economy, a predator's grace that was slowly overwriting the desperate, slum-rat scrambles of his past. The Perfectionism that gnawed at him was a brutal taskmaster, but it drove him to polish every movement, every thought, to a razor's edge.
The end of this intensive phase, he knew, would not be a quiet conclusion. His tutors were not the type for sentimental farewells. They would test him. And he was ready.
It began with Professor Thorne.
The old man bustled into the lab one morning, his eyes gleaming with a peculiar intensity. He carried not his satchel, but a single, sealed scroll of real vellum—a ludicrously expensive anachronism.
"Adam!" Thorne chirped, slapping the scroll onto a clean corner of the table. "The city is built. The walls are high, the streets are laid, the power plants hum. Now, the city must be stress-tested. It is time for the civil service examination!"
He unsealed the scroll with a flourish. It was not a list of multiple-choice questions. It was a single, intricate diagram of the human body, but with every label, every notation, meticulously scraped away. It was a ghost, a skeleton of knowledge.
"You have three hours," Thorne said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Using only this," he placed a fine-tipped ink pen beside the scroll, "you will restore this map. Label every major muscle group, trace the primary neural pathways from the motor cortex to the distal phalanges, diagram the coronary circulation, and detail the chemical process of adenosine triphosphate conversion in the mitochondria. Not just the 'what,' boy. The 'how' and the 'why.' Show me you are not a parrot, but an architect."
Adam looked at the blank diagram. A calm settled over him. This was not a test of memory; it was a test of integration. It was perfect.
He picked up the pen. The world narrowed to the tip of the instrument and the vast, empty landscape of the vellum. He started not with the heart or the brain, but with the foundation—the cell. In the margin, he sketched a detailed cross-section, labeling the phospholipid bilayer, the mitochondrial cristae, the nucleolus. This was the citizen. Then, he began to build the city.
His hand was steady, his lines precise. He drew the fibrous weave of the sarcomeres in the biceps brachii, noting the role of actin and myosin. He traced the corticospinal tract, the king's highway for voluntary movement, from the precentral gyrus down through the internal capsule, the cerebral peduncles, and across the medullary pyramids. He illustrated the elegant, life-sustaining loop of the coronary arteries, and in a small, boxed-off section, he wrote out the chemical equation for ATP hydrolysis, describing it not as a reaction, but as the city's fundamental currency of energy.
He did not rush. He was the sovereign, surveying his domain, and he would record it with the respect it deserved. He finished with five minutes to spare, placing the pen down with a soft click. The once-blank vellum was now a masterpiece of biological cartography, dense with information yet organized with brutal clarity.
Thorne leaned over, his wild white hair brushing the vellum. He was silent for a long time, his finger tracing the path of the brachial plexus.
"…The axillary nerve, innervating the deltoid and teres minor… a common point of failure in shoulder dislocations," the professor murmured, almost to himself. He looked up, his feverish eyes meeting Adam's calm amber ones. "You did not just redraw the map, Adam. You have annotated it with the whispers of its failures, its vulnerabilities. This is… this is the work of a master strategist, not a physician. It is beautiful. And it is terrifying." He carefully rerolled the scroll. "You have surpassed my instruction. There is nothing more I can teach you in the time we have."
The dismissal was clear, and laced with a strange regret. Adam simply nodded. "Thank you, Professor. The metaphor of the city… it was the key."
Thorne gave a sad, knowing smile. "Remember, even the most perfect city can burn. Or be conquered." With that cryptic warning, he left, taking the exam—a testament to Adam's new understanding—with him.
The next day, it was Rorke's turn.
The hunter arrived with two massive, fully-grown bovine creatures, their hides a deep, iridescent blue, their horns spiraling like polished obsidian. They were already dead, suspended from heavy hooks on a portable frame he wheeled in.
"Theory's over," Rorke grunted, slapping the flank of the first beast. The sound was like a drumbeat. "Now for practice. Two 'Shadow-Oxen.' Tougher than permacrete. You have one hour. Dismantle them. Not like a butcher. Like a surgeon on a battlefield. Fast. Clean. I want every major muscle group isolated. I want the skeleton clean. I want the offal sorted. Clock starts now."
It was an impossible task for one person. That was the point.
Adam didn't hesitate. He picked up the skinner, his mind already overlaying Thorne's anatomical map onto the massive, blue-hided form. He wasn't seeing an animal; he was seeing a complex structure of levers, pulleys, and hydraulic systems.
His first cut was not into the hide, but along a precise line defining the fascia between the trapezius and the deltoid. He worked with a chilling, silent efficiency. The [Origin Mimic] aspect wasn't just copying Rorke's moves anymore; it was extrapolating, optimizing. He understood the principles of tension and release, the way to use the weight of the beast's own limbs to help separate the joints.
The sharp, boning knife flashed, finding the ball-and-socket joint of the hip. A twist, a pull, and a crack echoed in the silent room. The leg came free. He laid it on the table and began the meticulous work of deboning, his movements a blur of precise angles and controlled force. He didn't waste a single motion. Fat was stripped and tossed into one bin, sinew into another, prime cuts laid out in a neat, growing array.
Sweat dripped into his eyes, but his focus never wavered. The Perfectionism drove him, critiquing every cut, demanding a cleaner line, a more complete separation. The first ox was reduced to its component parts in twenty-eight minutes.
He moved to the second without a word. He was faster now, his body a well-oiled machine executing a perfect, gruesome program. The skin came away in a single, nearly unbroken sheet. The ribs were cracked and separated from the spine with a series of sharp, economical blows from the cleaver. He finished with three minutes to spare, standing amidst the organized carnage, his grey tracksuit stained dark blue and crimson, his chest heaving, but his hands perfectly steady.
Rorke walked through the carnage, his boots sticking slightly to the fluid-slicked floor. He inspected the isolated cuts, ran a finger along the perfectly clean scapula, grunted.
"Took me two years to learn that," he said, his voice devoid of its usual gruffness, replaced by a tone of pure, professional assessment. "You did it in three weeks." He looked at Adam, a hard respect in his eyes. "You're not natural, kid. But you're ready. There's no beast in this world or the next whose body you can't take apart. Or put back together." He turned to leave, pausing at the door. "Just remember… some things aren't meant to be put back together the way you found them."
The final test came with Ascended Kael.
The kineticist met him not in the lab, but in a stark, circular dueling chamber deep within the Academy's combat wing. The walls were padded with sound-absorbent material, the floor a springy, non-slip surface. Kael stood in the center, holding a single, elegant practice rapier, its tip capped with leather.
"The body is a weapon," Kael stated, his whisper echoing in the dead space. "The mind is the strategist. Today, we see if they can talk to each other under pressure. You have learned the principles. Now, we apply them in real-time."
Adam had been waiting for this. He had not revealed his Memories, the Blades of the Nameless Master. To do so would raise too many questions. Instead, he had requested, and been provided, two standard-issue practice short swords. They were well-balanced but simple, a far cry from the legendary weapons sleeping in his soul.
"I am ready, Master Kael," Adam said, settling into the stance Kael had drilled into him—knees bent, center of gravity low, weight perfectly distributed.
Kael's eyes flickered over his form, noting the small, almost imperceptible improvements. "Good. The foundation is solid. Now, defend yourself."
There was no countdown. Kael simply moved.
It was like fighting a ghost. The rapier became a blur of silver, a needle-thin line of death seeking the gaps in his defense. Adam brought his swords up, his mind screaming with analysis. He wasn't trying to win; he was trying to see.
He parried a thrust aimed at his throat, the impact jarring up his arm. He used the force, redirecting it as Kael had taught him, flowing into a counter-attack. But Kael was already gone, his body having seemingly anticipated the move. The rapier flickered out again, tapping him painfully on the wrist.
"Too slow. You are thinking of the parry and the riposte as two actions. They are one," Kael's voice was a calm commentary amidst the storm. "The energy from the block is the energy for the strike. Do not waste it."
Adam adjusted. He stopped trying to match Kael's speed and started trying to predict his intent. He watched the subtle shift of weight in Kael's back foot, the almost invisible tension in his shoulder that preceded a lunge. He began to move with the attacks, deflecting rather than blocking, his dual swords creating a weaving, dynamic barrier.
He started using the space, forcing Kael to move, to expend energy. He incorporated feints, small, deceptive movements of his lead foot or a slight twitch of his off-hand sword, learned from the predatory dances of the night-walkers. For a fleeting second, he saw an opening—a tiny over-extension after a particularly aggressive lunge.
He exploded forward, his body coiling and uncoiling in the perfect kinetic chain Kael had taught him. His left sword batted the rapier aside while his right thrust forward in a move that was part Rorke's surgical precision and part his own forgotten, loop-forged instinct.
It was the closest he had come. The leather tip of his practice sword stopped a hair's breadth from Kael's ribs.
And then, the world turned upside down.
Kael's form seemed to dissolve. He didn't dodge or parry. He flowed. His body pivoted on an axis Adam couldn't comprehend, the rapier, seemingly out of position, looping around in a impossible curve to slap sharply against Adam's knuckles. A numbing shock ran up his arm, and his right-hand sword clattered to the floor. Before he could react, the rapier's tip was resting gently on his throat.
"Excellent," Kael whispered, his eyes wide with something that looked like shock. "That last move… it was not from our lessons. It was… raw. Refined, but born of desperation. You truly do learn from watching."
He lowered the rapier. "You did not land a single touch. But you forced me to use a technique I have not needed against a novice in a decade. Your progress is… unprecedented." He looked at Adam, a genuine, unguarded curiosity in his gaze. "With a decade of training, you could be a master. With the right Memories… you could be a legend."
The praise was cut short by the door to the dueling chamber hissing open. Administrator Kael stood there, his face an unreadable mask, a data-slate clutched in his hand.
"Ascended Kael. A word," the Administrator said, his voice tight.
The kineticist's friendly demeanor vanished, replaced by the neutral mask of a subordinate. He gave Adam a last, lingering look—a mix of apology and frustration—and strode out of the chamber. The door hissed shut, leaving Adam alone, panting in the center of the room, his right hand still throbbing.
He stood there for a long time, listening to the silence. The thrill of the fight, the satisfaction of having pushed a Master, even in defeat, began to curdle into something colder, sharper. This was not about his performance. This was about something else.
He thought of Thorne's cryptic warning about cities burning. He thought of Rorke's comment about things not being meant to be put back together. And now, Kael, pulled away just as he was on the cusp of a genuine breakthrough.
Pressure from above, Adam thought, his mind cold and clear. They're being told to back off. To stop investing so heavily in me.
He walked over and picked up his fallen practice sword. He looked at his reflection, distorted in the dull metal of the blade. The handsome, sharp-featured face with the sun-bleached and white hair and amber eyes stared back, a stranger who had fought his way out of hell.
His family. It had to be. He knew nothing about them nowadays, save for the fading memory of his mother's fearful eyes and the name she had given his sister—Alice. But if they were from a great clan, as he now suspected from his fractured memories, even a disgraced branch would have influence. Enough to make an Administrator nervous. Enough to stifle a rising, inconvenient star with a True Name before he could challenge the established order of the clan.
A slow, cold smile spread across Adam's face. It was not a pleasant expression. It was the smile of someone who had just identified a critical flaw in the system.
They thought they could control him by limiting his teachers. They were wrong.
He had the only teachers he needed now. The blueprint of the body was in his mind. The principles of motion were in his muscles. And the memory of Kael's final, impossible technique was now seared into his soul, waiting to be broken down, understood, and absorbed by his [Origin Mimic] aspect.
He had learned everything they could openly teach him. The rest, he would take.
"Thank you," he whispered to the empty dueling chamber, though this time their seemed to be a scene of malice in his voice.
This time, it was a declaration of war.
note the next few chapters will focus on the mc's family then the school arc will conclude with it volume one of MY fan fic. my volumes will be short about 30-50 chapters each it also depends on the existing content in the story and content that i add. Comment your thoughts i read all comments and will like your feedback to improve this story