The greatest deception does not require a lie. It merely requires letting your enemy believe what they already expect.
Six months had passed since Kaiser made the fateful decision to feed his own life force to the starving void behind his eyes. The physical toll on his six-year-old body was staggering. He had stopped growing. His skin, already deprived of sunlight, had taken on the translucent, delicate pallor of spun glass. His wrists were terribly thin, and his breathing was perpetually shallow.
To the outside world, the cursed heir of House Warborn was dying.
"His temperature is dropping again," a hushed, trembling voice whispered near the foot of his bed. It was the young maid who brought him his meals.
"Keep the hearth blazing," an older, gruffer voice replied—Martha, the head maid of the North Tower. "And double the furs. If the Duke finds him shivering, it'll be our heads on the chopping block."
Kaiser lay perfectly still under a mountain of thick, heavy wolf-pelt blankets. He didn't need the furs. He wasn't cold. He was manually lowering his own body temperature, suppressing his physical metabolic rate to save every ounce of caloric energy for the ravenous gravity in his skull.
He slowed his heart rate to a sluggish thirty beats per minute.
Thump... ... ... thump...
Through his expanded Absolute Senses, Kaiser mapped the room. The blazing fireplace crackled, sending chaotic thermal waves through the air. The two maids were bustling about, their ambient mana tinged with profound pity and deep-seated fear.
Suddenly, a new set of vibrations entered his domain.
They were coming up the spiral staircase. Two people. One was the heavy, thundering tread of Duke Warborn, his mana practically scorching the stone steps with its oppressive heat.
The other was new.
The second set of footsteps was soft, almost gliding. The mana signature accompanying it was entirely alien to Kaiser's catalog. It didn't hum rigidly like Earth, nor did it whistle like Wind. It possessed a fluid, rhythmic sloshing sound, like a deep, underground river. It felt cool, medicinal, and incredibly dense.
Water affinity, Kaiser deduced instantly, his mind sharpening even as his body played the part of a corpse. But modified. A healing variant.
The heavy oak door was shoved open. The maids instantly dropped to their knees, their heads bowed so low their foreheads touched the stone floor.
"Out," the Duke commanded. His voice carried the rumbling threat of an approaching avalanche.
The maids scrambled out of the room without a word, pulling the door shut behind them. The North Tower grew deathly quiet, save for the crackle of the hearth and the strange, flowing mana of the stranger.
"Well, Master Hemlock?" the Duke demanded, stepping toward the bed. "You are the finest physician in the capital. The Emperor himself trusts your arts. Look at him. For six months, he has been wasting away like a diseased stray."
"Patience, Your Grace," a smooth, elderly voice replied. Master Hemlock's tone was calm, completely unaffected by the Duke's crushing aura.
Kaiser felt the physician step up to the side of his bed. A slender, cool hand reached out and gently pulled the heavy wolf furs down to expose Kaiser's thin chest.
"The boy is fragile, indeed," Hemlock murmured. "I will need to perform a deep somatic weave to trace his meridians. I must warn you, Duke Warborn, diagnostic magic of this level may cause the child discomfort."
"Do it," the Duke said callously. "If he breaks from a simple healing weave, he is useless to me anyway."
Under the blindfold, Kaiser's eyes did not move, but his internal focus snapped to absolute attention.
A diagnostic weave, Kaiser thought. He is going to send his mana inside my body.
This was incredibly dangerous. If the physician's mana reached the empty chasms of Kaiser's meridians, or worse, brushed against the gravitational pull of the Void Eyes, the secret would be out. He would not just be seen as frail; he would be seen as an active, devouring anomaly.
Kaiser had a fraction of a second to build a defense.
He couldn't block the magic—he had no mana of his own to form a shield. Instead, he used his supreme physical control.
If he is looking for rivers, I will give him a desert, Kaiser decided.
He instantly seized control of his own nervous system, constricting the microscopic blood vessels around his vital organs and artificially collapsing the physical pathways surrounding his empty meridians. He played dead on a cellular level, creating a wall of dense, unyielding, dormant flesh to mask the terrifying emptiness within.
"Respirate," Master Hemlock whispered.
Kaiser heard the intricate, fluid click-click-click of a Spell Matrix forming directly above his chest. It sounded like ice crystals rapidly freezing together in a perfect, geometric pattern.
Then, the water mana descended.
It sank through his skin. To Kaiser, it felt like thousands of icy needles probing his flesh. The foreign mana flowed through his veins, searching for his Mana Core, searching for his magical pathways.
Kaiser held his breath, maintaining his internal blockade with iron-clad willpower. He didn't twitch. He didn't gasp. He let the icy needles hit the "dead" walls of his constricted muscles.
He listened to the physician's mana flow around the blockade, unable to penetrate the false physical barrier Kaiser had erected. The water magic sloshed blindly, finding only weak, sluggish vitality and a body that seemed entirely devoid of magical potential.
After a long, agonizing minute, the icy sensation withdrew. The Spell Matrix shattered into a soft mist that dissipated into the warm air of the room.
Hemlock let out a long, heavy sigh.
"Well?" the Duke barked.
Kaiser heard the physician take a step back, the rhythmic, sloshing sound of his mana settling down.
"Your Grace... the boy's condition is profound," Hemlock said, his voice laced with professional grimness. "His physical vessel is fundamentally failing to thrive. I traced his meridians. They are not merely underdeveloped; they are practically non-existent. They are shriveled, choked by a severe lack of vitality."
"Speak plainly, Hemlock."
"The curse, Your Grace. The Void Eyes," Hemlock explained quietly. "They are an anomaly of extreme magnitude. They require an ocean of mana to sustain themselves. Because the blindfold prevents them from drawing ambient mana from the atmosphere, they are slowly cannibalizing the boy's own life force just to remain dormant."
Kaiser mentally smiled. The physician had come to the exact logical conclusion Kaiser wanted him to. He had read the symptoms perfectly, but he misunderstood the cause. He thought the eyes were doing this against Kaiser's will, not because Kaiser was manually force-feeding them to stay hidden.
"Can it be cured?" the Duke asked, his voice tightening with suppressed rage. "Can you stabilize his physical growth?"
"I can prescribe deep-root elixirs and vitality tonics," Hemlock replied. "They will keep him alive. They will allow him to walk, perhaps even run for short distances. But he will never be strong, Your Grace. He will possess the constitution of glass. A harsh wind could make him bedridden. A physical blow from a trained knight would likely shatter his bones."
Silence fell over the room. It was thick, heavy, and toxic.
Kaiser listened to the chaotic, furious rhythm of his father's heartbeat. The Duke's grand plan—to torture Kaiser at age ten, to break him into an unstoppable, vanguard-leading executioner—was disintegrating before his very eyes. A weapon made of glass could not survive the front lines of a war.
"You are telling me," the Duke finally said, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly quiet whisper, "that the heir to the greatest martial house in the Empire is a cripple?"
"I am telling you that he is a survivor, Your Grace," Hemlock corrected gently. "The fact that his tiny body has endured the parasite in his skull for six years is a medical miracle. But you must abandon any hope of him holding a sword. If he exerts himself physically, his heart will simply stop."
The Duke stared down at the small, pale boy lying under the furs.
Kaiser did not flinch. He let his breathing remain shallow and weak. He was the perfect picture of pathetic fragility.
"Leave the tonics with the maids," the Duke sneered, turning his back on the bed. His heavy boots thudded against the stone as he walked toward the door. "Keep him alive. He still carries the bloodline. Perhaps, if he survives to adulthood, we can use him for a political marriage. A blind, crippled Duke to breed the next generation."
The door opened and slammed shut. The Duke was gone.
Master Hemlock lingered for a moment. He reached out and gently pulled the wolf furs back up, tucking them under Kaiser's chin.
"Rest, child," the elderly physician whispered, his mana radiating genuine sorrow. "You carry a heavy burden in the dark."
Hemlock quietly left the room, his soft footsteps fading down the spiral stairs.
Once Kaiser was absolutely certain he was alone, he slowly opened his eyes beneath the heavily warded black silk.
He didn't move his body. He didn't need to.
A cripple, Kaiser thought, a cold, predatory satisfaction washing over him. A weapon made of glass.
His father had just abandoned the idea of breaking him. The intense scrutiny, the impossible martial expectations, the looming threat of the age-ten conditioning—all of it had just vanished. They would give him medicine. They would leave him alone in the North Tower. They would ignore him.
It was the greatest tactical victory he could have asked for.
Kaiser let out a slow, silent breath. Underneath the heavy furs, his painfully thin hand slid down to his side, resting over the hidden wooden training sword he kept tucked against his mattress.
He was frail. He was malnourished. But his God's Ear was growing sharper every single day, and his understanding of the world's magic was expanding. They thought a knight could shatter his bones with a single blow.
They didn't realize that in four years, if a knight even attempted to swing a blade at him, Kaiser would hear the muscle contract, calculate the trajectory, and sever the knight's radial nerve with a wooden stick before the sword ever left its sheath.