It had taken several minutes of placative shrugging (or at least the most professional approximation thereof that she could give) before Commander Lance finally conceded that Sir Volkova had, in fact, simply ceased to be on the premises. As soon as he was sufficiently assured that any tomfoolery that may be afoot didn't involve her, Aria was promptly dismissed.

With almost the entire base either confined to quarters or getting cycled through an endless gauntlet of interrogations, there was no one present to scrutinize her on her way back to her residence. Of course, she knew she was being surveilled the whole time; no one was spared a watchful eye in times like this. Still, she wasn't harassed or waylaid on her way home, and though it took every last bit of restraint she had, she did manage to bowl through her front door in a manner that didn't resemble breaking and entering.

Ostensibly, surveillance inside of personal quarters was strictly forbidden. In practice, it was generally known that those rules got bent and broken with stunning frequency. While Aria shouldn't have warranted anything more than a cursory watch, she nonetheless took the time to thoroughly scrub every nook and cranny of her temporary residence, just as her parents had taught her when she was a little girl.

To her surprise, there really weren't any cameras or microphones in her room. She breathed a sigh of relief. Given that she'd not yet been dragged in for an interrogation by one of the investigators, she'd assumed she was cleared of suspicion, and this was as close to confirmation as she was likely to get.

Satisfied that she had as much privacy as she could get given the circumstances, Aria finally sat down at her desk and inserted one of the data plates into the reader built into her computer. She had wondered, briefly, why such a large, dense storage medium was used for a cultivation manual. Even massive libraries of text could fit comfortably on a single flash storage chip. Consisting of simple photonics on a diamond substrate, they were fairly cheap, compared to the rather costly three-dimensionally laser-etched crystals used for archival storage.

Opening the archive and glancing at the index, Aria audibly gasped as she understood the reason why.

Nascent Tides had been twenty pages. Sparse ones, at that. What spread before her now defied easy comprehension: thousands of pages on energy gathering alone, thousands more on circulation, on philosophy, on history she had no framework to contextualize. Interactive visualizations of soul topology rotated slowly in their preview windows. Schematics, notated in some arcane script she didn't know, serving a purpose she couldn't begin to fathom. The index alone was massive.

Most of it was locked. Encrypted behind challenges calibrated, she suspected, for minds far further along the path than hers—trivial barriers for a sufficiently advanced cultivator, impenetrable walls for her. She catalogued what she could access and set the rest aside without resentment. Even that small fraction was staggering. And at the center of it all lay the greatest treasure she'd ever beheld. Everything else in the manual ultimately centered around or branched out from one core text, one glimmering diamond at the heart of it all that made the vast wealth of knowledge surrounding it look like dross in contrast.

With bated breath, hanging on every word, Aria began to read:

Sovereign Guard

Fractals, collapsing inwards, spiraling ever downwards, infinite whirlpools of energy getting smaller, tighter, denser, ever more pure.

Vapour condenses, drop by drop, and a vessel is filled from the slightest trickle.

Over aeons, stardust accumulates.

Accumulation. Potential. Condensation. Purification. Refinement.

With the will of the natural world, the tide rises, and helplessly, the terrestrial world succumbs.

In a moment of perfect opportunity, dust converges, and a star is born, lifegiving, voracious destroyer, and makes its mark on the celestial spheres.

Accumulation to a moment of perfect release.

Your opponent's strength, your boon.

Their fall, ordained by nature.

Triumph against all adversity.

Remake the world in the image of your victory.

Reign Sovereign over all things.

Rise, in stillness. Descend, as lightning.

We begin.

Aria leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and let out a sharp exhale. The introductory portion of the text was relatively brief, but dense, and she'd had to read through it several times before she'd gleaned enough to be useful.

The core exercise of the cultivation art was simple – deceptively so. It involved drawing energy in through one's "Apertures", into the "Channels", and then simply holding it there. Drawing it into looping spiral patterns, with each run through refining the Radiance, making it denser, purer, polarizing it into alignment with the user's "Constellation" — the innermost core of their soul. The terminology still struck Aria as a tad overly spiritual, but if the author felt it appropriate she wasn't going to argue.

Getting the spiral pattern started was trivial. The problems began with trying to hold it. As it turned out, Radiance had a sort of…magnetism to it. Proximity was disruptive, but that disruption was exactly what allowed the refinement function of the technique.

Every time the spirals would collapse in on themselves, it felt like steel nails gently scraping against the nape of Aria's neck. She'd go back and re-check the holograms, see some slight difference in the way they'd warp and warble before snapping into order, and think this time she must have the hang of it.

By the end of the hour, her patience was worn gossamer-thin, and she had to admit to herself that she wasn't getting anywhere like this. She was rushing herself, trying to brute force her way through, and it was only hurting her more.

While the manual recommended practicing under a variety of adverse conditions so as to build robust foundations that would hold firm under duress, it also mentioned that the technique required no special preparation or positioning, so despite some trepidation, she decided to go lay down as she continued her practice.

Aria closed her eyes, breathing deeply, and slowing her mind and her body to a crawl. Slowly, she let every sensation around her fall away, leaving only the rhythmic influx of the thin, diffuse Radiance into her soul.

Slowly, she wound the threads of light into spirals. Each time a loop completed, the Radiance closed together, tighter, closer. For once, she let them. Predictably, they collapsed in on themselves, but this time, she watched just how the collapse happened, and finally saw it.

This whole time, she'd been aiming for symmetry. She thought if she could just keep the gaps between the spirals perfectly uniform, that the forces would cancel each other out. And certainly, that was what the end result looked like.

But as she went back and looked at the holograms again, something became clear. The Radiance had a natural inclination towards asymmetry, in this arrangement. It would draw itself into an oval sort of shape, and no amount of brute force of will could make it stay in perfect circular spirals.

Instead, she noticed the recordings showed the spirals being pulled into a deliberately asymmetrical pattern. The precise movements being performed were hard to perceive and harder still to define, and it took Aria half an hour of frame-by-frame study before she could finally see the basic structure of it.

Another hour of grating experimentation followed. She imagined the "intended" way for this to be learned, insofar as there was one, was to simply keep going until you could intuitively feel it out. Aria had less than no interest in that. Each time, she would go as far as she could before the spirals collapsed, then note down the exact intensity and angle of the pull in her own made-up system of units.

She wasn't what she'd regard as a gifted mathematician, not by a long shot, but she had a fantastic intuition for visual calculus – it was no small part of her meteoric rise through the ranks of the Admiralty – and it served her well here. She could see or feel the adjustments needed and tune until it was stable, rather than blindly groping until something worked.

Most times she got it right in three tries or so, meaning she only had to feel like she was being electrocuted once or twice for each step.

By the end of the hour, Aria was panting, her nerves raw. Physically, she was unharmed. There wasn't even so much as lingering pain, but doing the equivalent of slamming her hand down on a hot stove, over and over, for an hour, took a definite psychological toll.

Still, she knew she had it. This time, without a doubt, she had it. And if she didn't, well, she would cry, and then try again tomorrow. She could be patient. She wasn't unreasonable, just driven.

Slowly, she drew the Radiance in, twisting it in a wide circuit, then slowly narrowing it. She didn't need to look at the numbers, not anymore. It wasn't intuitive by any means, but her visual estimation was accurate enough now that her adjustments no longer slipped.

Just when she thought she had it, the whole arrangement warbled violently, like a plucked string. For a brief moment, she panicked, trying to find where she'd gone wrong, trying to find the correction angle, but the whole pattern was in such a full-throated panic that she couldn't even begin to understand what had gone wrong.

Yet as instants turned to seconds, seconds to minutes, it didn't collapse. Aria watched, mesmerized, a bell-like tone ringing in her ears. The Radiance had found a stable shape, and as she watched, the various shades of orange and white streaked through the threads of light slowly shook apart into distinct quanta, all swirling neat and orderly down into the void at the center of her soul, gathering into a diffuse cloud.

Aria opened her eyes, tentatively. She was careful not to let her breath hitch or her focus break. She could feel the technique running, still. Even as she got up and walked around her room, the spiral didn't break.

Aria jumped for joy. She was giddy. Utterly euphoric, and no longer able to contain it. As her emotions spiked, the flow of Radiance wavered, but it held. Losing her composure had a disruptive effect, but once the loop was stable, the whole thing seemed to mostly correct itself.

Her whole life, she'd tried and failed to grasp this power that flowed out of her like sand between her fingers. She clung to it greedily, but it had always been so sparse, so thin, almost unreal. She'd seen her soul before, in the passing, ephemeral glow of half a breath.

Now, for the first time, she truly saw it. Seeing it annotated in holograms was instructive, certainly, but to behold it in the wan light of her own fledgling inner light was resonant, revealing something that went beyond mere words.

She couldn't fully understand what it was she'd seen, but she knew its importance. The feeling of resonance had imprinted itself onto her, and somehow she knew she couldn't simply forget what she'd seen.

Turning her inner eye back towards the center of her soul – the Constellation – Aria could tell something was subtly different about the Radiance held there. It was denser, purer, more solid…more real, almost, compared to that still held within her Channels. But it went beyond that. It felt as though it was part of her, as much as her own fingers, or Tenet.

Timidly, she reached out, and pulled on it, and immediately recoiled so hard it broke her cycling. It wasn't that it had rejected her, of course. Quite the opposite. It had answered so readily that she'd accidentally slammed it straight into the walls of her soul.

The walls drank in the starlight hungrily, like parched ground in the first rains after a drought. It didn't seem to do anything to her corporeal body, not as far as Aria could see at least, but it certainly had an effect. Even from what little she could feed it, the walls of her soul felt firmer than they had before. When her internal senses pushed against them, they felt thicker, like a sheet of paper instead of the gossamer veil they'd been before.

Aria started cycling again. No false starts this time. It was slow going, of course; she still had to think through every move. But it only took her a minute or so, and already it felt like she was holding her breath every second she wasn't drawing Radiance into her soul.

She returned to the text of Sovereign's Guard, specifically to the sections on soul topology. They'd been mostly gobbledygook to her before, but she understood now, in a way she never could've an hour ago.

While there was a mountain of philosophy, and high-minded concepts that could not be grasped through mere words, the text also contained a significant amount of immediately useful technical information. The "walls" she'd touched were known as Facets. A soul had four, and two open ends, though it apparently pained the author quite greatly to reduce these concepts down to a paltry three dimensions.

The four Facets were defined as Body, which affected the cultivator's flesh, blood, bones, sinew, skin, and organs; Mind, which affected one's senses, perceptions, speed of thought, and ability to resist "foreign malign influences"; Presence, supposedly of no use to someone who hadn't yet even reached the first Realm; and Externality, the ability to produce external effects using Radiance. Supposedly, Body, Mind, and Externality could be effectively utilized even before Awakening, and while Aria did not particularly need the repeated warnings emphasizing that Externalities designed for cultivators could destroy a mortal's soul, it was nice to know that her past missteps hadn't simply been a flaw in her technique or foundations.

Aria proceeded to spend the rest of the day locked in her room, immersed in study. Something of a blessing and a curse—she would immerse herself even to the point of damaging her own health into a subject she found to be of sufficient interest. It made her a formidable gunsmith, marksman, and technician, and it had gotten her far and fast in her career, but the toll on her health was something she was uncomfortably familiar with.

Still, she cycled as she studied, and readily pumped her gains into her Facets. It would supposedly take a good bit to saturate them, even at this early level, and the amount would increase exponentially at the higher ranks, but there were undeniably benefits to the early start. Reinforcing her Mind Facet seemed to make the words flow smoother from the screen into her eyes, made them easier to comprehend, to internalize, to store away in her memories. More importantly though, even after well over twelve hours of study, she didn't feel the need for even a lick of sleep. The manual made it clear that being overly reliant on this effect could drive one to insanity, but it was undeniably a useful trick for her present crunch.

At the fifteen hour mark, well into the twilight hours, she finally began to feel a strange sort of resistance from her Facets. Saturation, she guessed. They'd absorbed as much energy as they could, with the present size of her soul, reaching equilibrium with the energy density of her Constellation. Supposedly at the higher levels, such a thing was often paired with a dramatic physical transformation, but as it stood Aria mostly just felt significantly more limber.

Having completed her Facets, Aria sat up and stretched. The investigators would likely keep the whole base locked down for a day or two longer, and since she wasn't critical operational personnel, she was under no obligation to do anything except be easy to find, should anyone want to question her. She could easily sleep in and most likely not be bothered.

She hadn't even gotten into bed yet when someone knocked at her door. Aria froze in place, her blood running cold. She didn't rate particularly highly in her neighbours' social circles, certainly not enough to justify such a late night visit. Which left precisely zero good possibilities, especially during a lockdown.

Steeling her nerves, Aria opened the door.

On the other side stood a mysterious figure. Nondescript clothing covered their entire body, which cut a lithe but imposing figure. An armoured cuirass guarded their torso, and their legs were caged in a Ranger-style exoskeleton, designed for speedy traversal over long stretches of hostile terrain.

In their hands, they held something that made Aria's heart damn near stop.

A metal case, small enough to be smuggled comfortably inside most work bags. She recognized the construction, albeit only secondhand; it was, as far as she knew, the hardest lockbox money could even consider buying.

A multi-step biometric lock was the only way to get it open, and any attempts to force it would be met with summary destruction of all contents, and a very solid attempt of doing the same to the wannabe thief.

None of that was what concerned her, however. Certainly, it was strange to have something like that being delivered to her of all people; nothing good ever came of receiving something expensive enough to be worth guarding like this. What was far stranger was receiving it while the entire base was in a complete non-essential communications blackout. That included postage.

Of course, there were exceptions to every rule.

For example, if the postage had been labeled as Urgent Diplomatic Mail of a Great Ducal House.

She was, technically, a distant semi-bastard scion of House Rostov. It seldom came up, but her father had once been quite their rising star, before one too many not-fully-reputable escapades had thrown him into disfavour. His decision to marry her mother, and thus squander his desirability for a marriage of political alliance, had sealed the deal.

Of course, they hadn't disowned their once-prince. Which meant he could still call the occasional favour like this.

Which meant her father had sent this.

Which meant he couldn't give it to her in person.

And he'd bothered to label it as Diplomatic Mail.

Which meant whatever this was, he couldn't have let it be seen by any eyes except hers.

Which, all put together, meant there was a very good chance her father was dead.

Numbly, Aria accepted the package from the diplomatic courier, and did her best to put the thought out of her mind. He wasn't dead. He couldn't be. He was too skilled, too careful, too Goddamn smart to end up shot or jettisoned.

With slow breaths and steady cycling, Aria calmed herself. Her father wasn't dead. She knew, at least academically, just how fast those couriers were. He'd sent this for her long after he stopped responding to her messages, meaning the most likely possibility was that he wasn't dead, simply in hiding.

Aria's heart seemed to be very determined to batter its way clean through her ribs as she took the strongbox to her bed. She put a finger inside the biometric lock. It would inspect a slew of biometric parameters: fingerprints, DNA, blood, age, and several more things she couldn't specifically recall.

After several seconds and more than a few pinpricks, the lock seemed to finally have verified her authenticity to its satisfaction. With a weighty, electromagnetic CLUNK, the locks on the strongbox sprung open.

Aria briefly considered being ceremonious about it, doing a dramatically slow opening of the lid to reveal the contents inside, before deciding that was stupid and simply throwing the lid open.

The contents nearly made her faint.

It seemed like a dream. Or more likely, a hallucination. That would honestly be the most preferable outcome. If this was real, if what she was seeing wasn't a ploy or a trick of the eyes or a mirage…the implications were disastrous.

Contained within the strongbox, lovingly nestled into laser-cut shock-resistant packing foam, lay a small metal-and-glass autoinjector. She'd used them before, they were quite useful for doling out precise dosages of drugs over long, slow, timed releases.

This one, somewhat unusually, in Aria's opinion, was full of liquid starlight.

A column of viscous fluid filled the barrel, dark purple in colour, bordering almost on black, a corona of violet glowing faintly at its edges. Electric blue veins of lightning shot sporadically through the liquid substrate, and as Aria ran her hands along the reinforced quartz glass, she marveled at the warmth it gave off.

Next to it sat a small paper card, with a message printed inside. From her father.

Hey Kiddo,

Sorry I couldn't make it home in time for your birthday. I got all tied up in the gift shopping. Hope this makes up for it. I'll be home soon. Talk more then. And sorry again for being gone so long. Love you lots, Kiddo.

Tears rolled down Aria's cheeks. This was stupid. It was dangerous. It could've gotten him killed.

But he'd pulled it off. For her. He'd gone against the Great Ducal Houses, and he'd won. And the old fart didn't even have the decency to cash out on it. He gave it to her.

Aria had never particularly doubted where she got her audacious nature from, but it was beyond any shadow of a doubt with this.

Naturally, she had to do her old man proud. He'd gone through all that trouble for her. What was she supposed to do? Say no?

With practiced ease, Aria turned the dial on the autoinjector to its lowest setting, as gradual of a release as she could possibly muster. The Radiance in an elixir, as she understood it, was already highly refined. She wondered as she walked into the bathroom — grabbing an alcohol swab, and gently wiping down her throat — how much more benefit she'd be able to squeeze out of it, using Sovereign Guard.

There was, she concluded, only one way to find out.

Aria uncapped the syringe, and with a steady hand that refused to entertain a second thought, plunged it straight into her jugular.