Chap 179: Rooted In Wisdom

Tee was relieved Aven and Engel would help her in her cause to find a cure. For the first time in weeks, she allowed herself to believe she wasn’t alone. She clung to that hope like a lifeline, even if the road ahead looked endless and shrouded in questions. Whatever it took, she was determined. She was going to be a great student. A worthy one.

Aven began to educate her about many things, and his lessons came with a mixture of stern patience and the occasional sharp correction. Tee realized quickly that in Vergant society, ignorance wasn’t excusable. Knowledge itself was survival, and those who remained ignorant were forever bound by their limits.

On Sorcery and Knowledge

“Sorcery is part knowledge,” Aven explained one evening as the pale glow of his conjured symbols floated in the air. His voice was low, steady, the kind that made words settle in her bones. “That’s why the average cannot manipulate that which you have not a clue about. One should know or understand at least something about what they want to manipulate, if not all.”

He gave her a practical example. “Take turning water into ice. You drain the energy out of the freely moving molecules, therefore its temperature drops, so it becomes a solid. Frozen ice.” His hand closed, and the floating drop of water he had conjured hardened instantly into a shard, glittering under the lamplight.

Tee leaned closer, marveling. She thought it was almost too simple when he explained it, but when she tried, the water barely stiffened before splashing down her fingers.

However, Aven was quick to remind her of the boundaries. “You can’t use that same technique on a rock and expect it to turn into pure ice. That will require a swap-type chant, or a level of manipulation that demands higher knowledge. Neither Engel nor I know how to do that, so it is impossible… for now.”

Tee absorbed every word, feeling as though a door to an enormous, daunting library had just been cracked open. The deeper she listened, the more she realized how much she didn’t know.

That, Aven said, was also why it was impossible to find a cure for the Xenogene. No one knew enough about what the idiopathic condition truly was to be able to manipulate or counteract it successfully. It wasn’t like freezing water or reshaping a stone. It was something alien, a mystery tangled in the very fabric of living beings.

“Not to mention,” Aven added gravely, “curing every living Xeno-victim on the planet and preventing future ones. The Xenogene is not genetic, and not transmittable. It simply bonds randomly with hosts. We still don’t know where it came from. Just like the Alpha Seal.”

The words lingered, heavy in Tee’s chest.

And, of course, there was the greatest obstacle—life. To manipulate life required an immense amount of Ether energy. Living things were notoriously more difficult, resistant, and volatile compared to inert matter.

Tee thought about her own situation, her body, her fractured Verge. No wonder no one had saved her yet.

Aven’s lessons pulled apart misconceptions Tee didn’t even realize she carried.

Those were some reasons why Vergants didn’t just poof things into being, as portrayed on modern-world media. No matter how powerful Tee thought she was, no matter how much she wanted to believe her strange strength made her unique, she had to face reality. She needed to learn.

And so, she started studying.

The Energy Spectrum

They began with the basics—the energy spectrum:

• Dark mana

• Ether

• Ultramana

Aven conjured each word in the air, not with English letters but with curling, luminous glyphs that shimmered like starlight. Even though he spoke with the cadence of modern men and pronounced words almost the same, the symbols or letters he spelled with were nothing Tee had ever seen before.

She furrowed her brow, trying to pair sound with symbol. Each line was an enigma, a language far older than anything on Earth. She learned to assign their pronunciations with the symbols, to build bridges between spoken sound and written glyph.

But there wasn’t just one set. Vergants had several alphabets, and some weren’t alphabets at all but syllabaries—blocks of meaning that stacked together like puzzles. The volume of it was staggering, overwhelming, like trying to drink an ocean with a straw.

At night Tee’s head throbbed with symbols. She began dreaming in them, waking with strange strings of glyphs still dancing in her mind’s eye.

Verge Training

Seeing her struggle, Aven guided her into her Verge. He showed her how to store her information there, how to shape the fragments into organized shelves of memory. It made everything easier to remember and analyze.

The more time she spent inside her Verge, the less shattered the pieces became. Slowly, painfully, it was beginning to look whole again. The once-broken glass had new seams of light.

At the center, the bright radiance of her Balance Seal shone brighter than before, no longer dull or fractured but pulsing like a steady heartbeat.

The sight filled her with fragile hope.

Language and Humor

Tee tried to lighten the mood during their lessons, fumbling with Vergant phrases.

“Thank thee, Aven, very much,” she said one day in her best imitation of ancient formality.

Aven’s face flickered with a smirk. He was quick to correct her. “I think you mean—Verily, I thank thee, Aven.”

Tee rolled her eyes, but the exchange made her laugh, really laugh, for the first time in what felt like forever.

Vergant knowledge was vast, far wider than anything in the modern world, which was why they could create vortexes, teleport, manipulate energy fields, and even touch the edges of time itself. Their obsession wasn’t power for power’s sake. It was knowledge.

Why Knowledge Is Endless

Vergants studied topics—time, teleportation, matter, elements—with a depth that dwarfed modern science. Sorcery with Ether energy wasn’t about saying the right words or waving a hand dramatically. It was grounded in what you knew about what you wanted to manipulate.

But the more they learned, the more words failed. Vergants often ran out of names to call new things, so they kept creating symbols. Some looked similar across different syllabaries, and some were even identical but meant completely different things depending on context.

When new knowledge emerged that couldn’t yet be explained, it was passed through the Verge directly. Ideas, sensations, and discoveries shared raw, mind to mind, until language caught up.

It was beautiful and terrifying to Tee—that much wisdom flowing between people like rivers of thought.

Etherlites

The lessons shifted toward the modern world.

Etherlites—modern worlders with more Ether energy than the average—living proof that sorcery existed even after its abolition.

“Verging allowed you to store Ether in the body for later use,” Aven explained. “After generations of storing Ether inside, even after sorcery was outlawed in the modern world, some people still carried traces. Passed down, generation after generation.”

That was why Etherlites existed. They were people with above-average Ether, heirs to a long legacy, even if they didn’t know it.

Tee found it fascinating. She knew that Priman, the law enforcement, had a super-soldier enhancement program—fusing Ether energy into their soldiers. Crooks had their own illegal ways of achieving the same effect. Yet some people were born differently, naturally carrying far more Ether than was considered normal.

But did Aven mean every genetic Etherlite had an ancestor who was once a Vergant? Perhaps even an elder? Or maybe some were descendants of Xeno-victims whose Balance Seals demanded immense Ether to survive.

The thought gave her a strange kinship with people she had once dismissed as lucky anomalies.

The Placebo Study

Aven moved next to the infamous placebo study. Patients had been told they were receiving some magic pill to heal them, when in truth it was nothing at all. Yet many improved.

Most modern scientists called it proof of the mind’s power. But Aven revealed otherwise.

“It wasn’t only belief. Those people possessed Ether, and their Verges were less dead. Sorcery is using energy from the Source to manipulate reality. When applied inwardly, upon the self, it becomes even easier.”

So what moderns had dismissed as placebo was, in fact, hidden sorcery at work. Tee couldn’t stop thinking about that, the secret magic hidden in plain sight.

Chants, Seals, and Bonds

She learned chants were short-lived, temporary manipulations. Seals, by contrast, were long-term states, anchors that demanded far more Ether.

Sealed Bonds fascinated Tee most—non-living vessels allowed to perform sorcery, though they always required a Vergant’s initiation. It was like giving an object its own artificial Verge.

Meanwhile, the Others

While Tee buried herself in studies, her old teammates went out into the modern world again. All four of them, without her.

It felt wrong.

Kie remembered the places they had gone together, chasing the foolish list Tee had claimed was her “death list.” He smiled faintly at the memory—how she had tricked him with something that had never existed in the first place. Clever, yes. Clever in a bad way.

At a café, he saw iced coffee but didn’t buy any for her.

Saeda caught him staring and raised a brow. “I don’t understand how people eat that stuff.”

People? Was she referring to Tee?

Annoyed, he glared at her. “That ‘people’ you’re referring to has a name.”

Saeda blinked, shocked by his harshness. She hadn’t meant Tee specifically, but the damage was done. He turned away before she could explain.

The Relic and Subset Energies

Back in lessons, Tee learned of the relic.

The weapon from Apocalypse-Prime had been corrupted, leaking a subset of Ether known as Dark mana—connections with the Xenogene itself, bounded in ways scholars still struggled to untangle.

Dark sorcery, born from that dark energy, was easier to wield but came with devastating side effects.

Ultramana was different, another subset discovered when the “planet”—as Vergants phrased it—repurposed the leftover byproduct from Severin or Drevarus’s attempt to annihilate life. Tee hated how they spoke of the planet as if it were a living thing with intent, but she held her tongue.

According to Aven, the planet had chosen to create Sentinels, forces opposite to Severin’s destruction. Thus Ultramana energy was given form. But Dark mana and Ultramana were not pure opposites. They shared unsettling similarities.

Generations after Eon, the first Sentinel, Vergants had identified Ultramana through lingering legacies. But when Sentinels were no longer needed, research waned, knowledge faded, and Ultramana nearly vanished into obscurity.

Aven’s Fascinations

One day Tee’s telecom finally lost its Ether charge. She groaned, fearing she’d have to go back to Primus HQ, but Aven surprised her.

He compacted her Ether into an Ultraman crystal, slipped it into the battery port, and the device flickered to life. Tee stared, jaw open.

Aven merely shrugged, amused.

In return, Tee told Aven and Engel about modern places, shows, and trivial things. To her surprise, Aven lit up with fascination. He confessed that one elder had to specialize in modern-world matters, and he believed it would be him.

Sometimes he even paused their lessons for “cultural breaks,” as he called them. Once, they dusted off an old television and watched comedies together.

The Xeno-victims in the movies were always portrayed as idiots, bumbling for cheap laughs. Tee sat fuming, her arms crossed, while Aven chuckled at her muttering.

She was salty—but deep down, she cherished those rare moments of levity.