As the mist drifted where 始寂 had vanished, I felt a chill crawl down my spine. The silence stretched around me, but my thoughts went somewhere else, back to that morning. Back to the moment I first felt something was fundamentally wrong with me.
I had woken up before my alarm, hours before school. The sky outside was still dark, with the ocean in the distance casting a strange glow under the moonlight. It had been happening all week, this sense of pressure in my chest, like something trapped was trying to move.
That morning, I couldn't ignore it anymore. I stepped outside onto the balcony. No one else was awake. The island felt quiet... but heavy. And then it hit me. A wave of energy, not physical, but inside felt like heat pushing through my veins, expanding outward from my core. I gasped, stumbled, and dropped to my knees. My hands hit the cold limestone, but what I saw in my palms made no sense. A soft blue glow.
I thought I was hallucinating. But as I exhaled and tried to calm down, the glow grew stronger. It didn't hurt. It responded. Moved when I focused. Shifted when I breathed. Almost like it was waiting for permission to awaken. Then I heard it, not a voice, exactly, but a vibration in my mind: "Shape defines power. Name defines purpose."
I don't know what made me say it, but I spoke the word anyway.
"Whip"
In an instant, the energy around my hand flared and solidified. A faint outline of a long blue whip formed, then shot out of my palm and dispersed. I didn't tell anyone. Not even R. It felt like it was a dream, and now, after everything I'd been through, it made sense. I had awakened early. Quietly. Maybe even accidentally. Or maybe... something had chosen me before the countdown ever appeared.
( Present Day)
The wind picked up across the broken field, snapping me out of the memory. My grip tightened around SoulWake. It all started before the end. And now that I understood what I was carrying, there was no going back.