The supper turned out to be as lavish as the dormitory was not.
Meat, red and white, in quantities that felt slightly obscene. Rice, bread, side dishes, sauces, fresh vegetables, fruit, beverages of various kinds. All of it laid out with the particular generosity of an institution that understood it was feeding people who had recently survived something terrible and might not survive what came next.
Lab grown, he thought, loading his plate. Almost certainly.
He had watched a video once on YouTube. MrBeast, of all people, documented a company that had produced hundreds of thousands of pounds of chicken meat without killing a single bird. The entire process started from a single extracted egg cell, scaled up into an operation that was both ethical and resource efficient. He had found it genuinely impressive at the time.
In the Shadow Slave world, which was the future of his own world by any reasonable interpretation of the novel's lore, wild animals were effectively extinct. It only made sense. Somewhere there was a facility cultivating all of this from cells in a controlled environment, and the end product was apparently indistinguishable from the real thing.
Personally, he thought, chewing, I would like actual chicken.
He swallowed.
But there is no actual chicken.
So.
He ate the rest of his meal without complaint.
After supper he checked his communicator and saw that his appointment with Academy personnel was almost due.
He set it down and stared at the wall for a moment.
Hmm.
The question had been circling since the induction ceremony and he had been putting off examining it directly. He couldn't put it off any longer.
Should he reveal that he had received a True Name in his first nightmare?
He turned it over from the unfavourable angle first.
If he revealed his True Name now, he would gain the attention of the true big players of this world. The people who were very specific and very powerful — he would gain the attention of the Supremes. Not just Anvil and Ki Song, but the mysterious figure on the moon as well. He was a cautious person by nature. He did not like leaving things to chance. The Supremes themselves couldn't act against him directly, not yet, not openly, but they could send people. Nephis had survived countless assassination attempts and she was the daughter of Broken Sword and Smile of Heaven, one of the main characters of the story, with a destiny and a lineage and a narrative purpose protecting her.
He was none of those things.
His Aspect ability and innate ability were not combat based. His attributes were doing the heavy lifting and even then only one of them contributed meaningfully to combat — Ars Scriptoria, which let him perform runic sorcery, except that anyone could learn runic sorcery. He was simply better at it than most, and faster, because his attributes fed into each other in ways that would fall apart if any single one was removed. That was not the same as being a fighter. He was not the same as other Sleepers whose aspects were specialised for killing and killing.
Could he survive assassination attempts?
He thought about it honestly.
No, he concluded. Probably not.
He turned it over from the favourable angle.
Revealing a True Name would earn him attention of a different kind too. Allies. Investment. The cohort would look at him differently, not as the boy who ran away from his trial but as something worth knowing, worth protecting, worth being close to. He needed allies. He had been glazing people all afternoon for exactly this reason and a True Name would do more in five minutes than an afternoon of strategic flattery.
He weighed both sides against each other.
The benefits were real but temporary. Short term gains that came with the very specific long term problem of two Supremes and a moon hermit deciding he was worth monitoring. The risks were harder to quantify but not hard to imagine.
Better safe than sorry, he decided. Don't reveal it. Not yet.
There was one more reason, and it was the one that genuinely unsettled him.
His attributes. Specifically Ars Homuncularis, the ability to create homunculi. In the world of Shadow Slave, only gods could create true life. The Daemon of Destiny had tried to replicate it and hadn't quite managed. Ars Homuncularis actually did it. The souls, at least. And his innate ability Azoth, transmutation of matter, could theoretically provide the physical body. Not as an Awakened. Master rank, maybe. Saint rank is more likely. That was a long way away.
But even now, as an Awakened, he could do something.
He had no Echoes yet but once he did, he could convert them into homunculi instead of leaving them as Echoes. The way Sunny turned his Echoes into shadows. Except his wouldn't be Echoes anymore. They would be alive.
Capable of awakening. Capable of receiving True Names, Aspects, Aspect Abilities, everything that came with being a proper Awakened.
It defied every known rule in this world's logic.
Completely and entirely.
That secret, he thought, could not be revealed until I am strong enough to protect it.
He got up and went to find the office.