The dining hall of the Ashborn estate was suffocatingly warm.

  To anyone else, the crackling hearth and the spread of roasted pheasant and root vegetables would be a comfort. To Arthur, it was a sensory nightmare. He sat rigidly in his chair, staring at the silver spoon resting perfectly parallel to his porcelain plate.

  Beneath the dining table, hidden by the dark wool of his trousers, his right leg was completely immobilized.

  He had spent the agonizing hour before dinner stripping the oak slats from the inside of a washbasin cabinet. Using three thick leather belts and strips of dense linen, he had crafted a rigid splint. It wrapped from his mid-thigh down to his calf, locking the joint at a permanent five-degree angle. By pulling the belts tight enough to bruise, he had created a mechanical bypass. Now, whenever he shifted his weight, the force bypassed the shattered micro-fractures of his knee entirely.

  It was a crude piece of architectural bracing applied to a biological hinge. And it hurt like hell.

  Arthur slowly raised his glass of water. His hand was steady, but a cold sheen of sweat clung to his pale forehead. To fight the blinding agony of the torn ligaments, he had brewed a concentrated cup of white willow-bark extract when the kitchen wasn’t used by the servants. The chemical substance suppressed his pain receptors, dulling the agony to a distant, throbbing ache, but the sheer dosage made his stomach churn.

  "You are quiet tonight, Arthur,” his mother said gently, her voice cutting through the clinking of silverware.

  Arthur carefully set the glass down. “I’m just a bit tired, Mother. I remember the physician warning that the muscle-tearing pain from the beast’s claws would radiate down to my flank. Being bedridden has caused my right leg to cramp fiercely, I suppose.”

  It was a perfect, logical lie.

  “You shouldn’t have left your bed,” his father muttered from the head of the table.

  Lord Roderick looked like a man standing on the edge of a cliff. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face stained with a fine layer of gray soot that no amount of washing could fully remove. Down in the valley, the massive blast furnaces were roaring day and night, a desperate, fiery sprint to meet the King’s deadline.

  From the far end of the table, Aria paused her meal. Her crimson eyes flicked over Arthur’s pale face. She said nothing, but the slight tilt of her head indicated she was confused, as Arthur had been walking just fine in the morning.

  But Aria wasn’t the danger. The real danger sat to his father’s left.

  Marcus had barely touched his food. The older man was swirling a goblet of dark wine, his ember-colored eyes glancing unnervingly at the young heir.

  Arthur held the High Mage’s gaze for a fraction of a second before looking back down at his plate.

  I am a fool, he thought, staring at the roasted meat.

  The memory of the freezing undercity mud flashed behind his eyes. He remembered the absolute predatory dominance the syndicates held over the slums. He had gone into the city and played the vigilante, relying on his knowledge to give him the edge in a physical fight.

  He looked at his frail, thirteen-year-old hands. A sword won’t fix this, he realized, the truth settling over him. Magic won’t fix this. If I try to fight them, I will end up dead in a ditch, and this family will fall.

  You don’t defeat a syndicate by punching its enforcers. That was terrible risk management.

  A syndicate wasn't a monster to be slain.

  It was a market.

  Kill one enforcer, and another takes his place.

  Change the structure, and they all become yours.

  Arthur would have to choke the underworld first, slowly turning those cutthroat smugglers into his own shadow army.

  But to ensure all of that, he first had to survive the week.

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? ? ? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  The next four days blurred into a grueling, isolated nightmare, anchored only by the rhythmic, distant booming of the blast furnaces down in the valley.

  Boom. Hiss. Every heavy strike of the forge hammers echoed up the mountainside and rattled the glass in Arthur’s bedroom window. It was a relentless ticking clock. As long as the furnaces burned, his father was occupied. But the moment the iron was finished and the quota was met, the estate’s physician would be summoned to check on Arthur’s chest wounds. And a physician would instantly spot the mechanical splint and the ruptured knee.

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  Arthur stayed locked in his quarters. He had theorized that the unhuman speed at which his chest wounds healed was due to a side effect of forcefully unsealing his core, though he couldn’t prove it.

  But the isolation didn’t mean he was safe. The paranoia crept in through the cracks beneath his door.

  On the first day, a maid asked him casually if he had taken a walk in the gardens, noting that the hem of his dark cloak smelled faintly of stagnant water and rot.

  On the second day, Arthur opened his closet to find his heavy leather boots. He had meticulously scrubbed the undercity mud from them before collapsing into bed on the night of the fight. But as he looked at them now, he noticed they were angled slightly outward. He always placed them perfectly parallel.

  Someone had been in his room. Someone had definitely inspected the soles of his boots.

  On the third day, something strange happened. Every time a servant brought a tray of food, Arthur devoured it with a ravenous intensity, consuming three times his usual meal size. And after that, he would sleep for the rest of the time until a new meal was brought up. He woke up completely bewildered in the middle of the night, feeling as though he had slept for two entire days. His mind held only fragmented, hazy memories of the day, leaving him completely disoriented as to how much time had actually passed.

  Down the hall, in the quiet solitude of the estate's grand library, High Mage Marcus stood by the window, staring out at the smoke rising from the valley.

  His ember-colored eyes were narrowed in deep, analytical thought. Nothing about the young heir added up. The stiff, dragging gait. The heavy leather boots that were meticulously scrubbed, yet still harbored a single, fleck of black slum mud deep in the treads—a detail easily missed in the dark by an exhausted boy rushing to hide his tracks.

  Marcus turned to the shadows of the room, where Elias stood in polite silence.

  "Elias," the High Mage murmured, his voice like grinding stone. "The boy is hiding something. Send word to our eyes in the lower rings. I want to know if anything unusual happened in the past few days."

  "As you command, Master Marcus," the elderly servant bowed.

  A few hours later, deep within the freezing, rain-slicked alleys of Ashford City’s slums, two cloaked figures met beneath the dripping awning of a collapsed tavern. One figure extended a hand, dropping a heavy silver coin into the greased palm of the other.

  "A boy," the informant whispered, teeth chattering in the cold. "A whelp's kid, by the look of his cloak. Moved like a little demon. He was chasing a Viper's enforcer in the mud veins and vanished after."

  The cloaked servant nodded once, pulling his hood tighter, and vanished back into the shadows to deliver the final puzzle piece to the High Mage.

  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ? ? ? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  On the morning of the fourth day, Arthur woke to a terrifying sound.

  Silence.

  He sat up in bed, his heart pounding. He turned his head toward the window. The sky was pale gray, dusted with morning frost. The distant valley was entirely still. No smoke plumed into the air. No hammers struck. The blast furnaces had gone cold.

  Huh, how much time had passed? Arthur threw off the blankets and sat up bewildered. It felt like he had been sleeping for days, his mind struggling to piece together his own timeline.

  Eventually he washed up, pushing the unsettling thoughts to the back of his mind. Slowly and methodically, he unbuckled the three thick leather belts. He peeled away the dense linen strips and tossed the oak slats onto the floor.

  He stared at his right knee. His jaw dropped. The swelling was completely gone.

  He placed his right foot flat on the hardwood floor and shifted his weight forward. There was no blinding pain, not even a dull ache.

  Once again, his body had healed in a way he couldn’t piece together with his logical mind.

  Arthur let out a long, ragged exhale, a genuine smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. Whatever the case, he had beaten the clock. His body was ready to operate again, and he could finally pass the physician’s che—

  Knock. Knock. Knock. The sharp, sudden rapping at his bedroom door made Arthur freeze.

  He quickly pulled his trouser leg down and kicked the oak slats under his bed. Could it be the physician? Arthur thought to himself before answering. “Enter.”

  The door creaked open. It wasn’t the physician. It wasn’t his mother or father. It was Elias, one of the oldest and most trusted servants of the Ashborn estate. The elderly man bowed deeply, his face a mask of polite urgency.

  “Apologies for the early intrusion, Young Master,” Elias said, his voice quiet in the still morning air.

  “Has my father finished the iron production?” Arthur asked, keeping his voice perfectly even.

  “He has, My Lord. He is currently washing. However, that is not why I am here.” Elias straightened up, his eyes briefly flicking down to Arthur’s legs before returning to his face. “Master Marcus has requested your presence.”

  Arthur felt a chill run down his spine. “Where?”

  “In the library, Young Master,” the servant replied. “Immediately. He instructed me to tell you that he has found an... inconsistency in the estate’s ledgers that requires your unique insight.”

  Arthur stared at the servant.

  An inconsistency in the ledgers.

  Marcus wasn't asking for help.

  He was asking for answers.

  And now he was waiting in the library.

  “Tell the High Mage,” Arthur said quietly.

  “I will be right there.”

  (To be continued …)

  Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the chapter!

  Question for you guys: What do you think is the real reason for Arthur's abnormal healing? Let me know your theories down below!