The wormhole tasted like lightning and old copper.

Alex felt it before he understood it that electric wrongness on his tongue, the metallic pull at the back of his throat, as the old man carried him through the tear in

space.

Ragnar was there too, limp and silent, the old man bearing both of them through the fold in reality as though he'd done it a thousand times.

Alex had no idea where they were taking him. He knew only one thing with terrible certainty: he would not survive the journey's end.

Whatever mercy had kept him breathing until now would end the moment they stepped through the other side.

Move.

His nascent soul power surged from that buried place, and Alex threw every fragment of it against his own chains.

His muscles screamed.

His vision strobed white.

And then the invisible lock cracked.

He didn't think. He twisted, drove his elbow back, and slammed it into the old man's chest with everything he had left.

The attack caught the old man off guard. He let out a moan — a short, wet expulsion of breath — and his grip failed.

Alex dropped to the tunnel floor.

And in those ancient, cold eyes, something new ignited. Something that had never been there before.

Disbelief.

"You" He spit blood, chest heaving.

But Alex was already falling. Already tumbling out of the tunnel's current, the dimensional tide no longer carrying him but spitting him sideways, out and away.

The old man's arm shot forward.

The thunder came with no warning.

It struck Alex mid-fall, a lance of white-gold electricity that hit him square in the spine and detonated through every nerve ending simultaneously.

His body locked — every muscle seizing at once, joints fused, limbs rigid - as though someone had poured concrete into his veins and let it set.

He couldn't fly. Couldn't steer. Couldn't even scream.

He hit the tunnel wall like a stone thrown against glass.

The wormhole rejected him.

And then he was through, and everything turned upside down, and there was nothing at all.

He hit the street.

Not a landing. A collision. Cobblestone met the length of his body, and the impact punched the remaining air from his lungs, his palms skidding across the stone, the world spinning and refusing to stop.

He lay there for a moment, cheek pressed to the ground, blinking at a sky the color of a bruised peach.

Then the pain arrived, and it was thorough.

He pushed himself upright.

He was in a narrow alley wedged between two buildings.

Five men stood in a loose arc, staring at him.

He became aware, distantly, that he was naked. What remained of his clothes was scorched carbon clinging to the edges of nothing - the thunder strike had taken care of the rest.

He didn't have the energy to feel embarrassed. He barely had the energy to breathe.

At the far end of the alley, half-pressed into shadow, was a woman. She wasn't standing with the men. She was standing away from them, her body angled toward the wall, toward escape.

Alex understood the situation in the space between two heartbeats.

He looked at the five men.

"Whatever you were about to do to her," he said, voice stripped of everything except the quiet at the center of a storm. "Forget it."

The closest man tilted his head, and something almost like amusement crossed his face - the particular amusement of a person who has never once been told no and found the novelty of it quaint.

He held a tile-shaped object loosely in his left hand. His right hand came up with the casual authority of someone turning a doorknob.

Fire bloomed from his palm.

It came fast — a tight lance of it, orange-white and focused — and Alex's body responded before his mind fully caught up, pulling on his power, shaping a barrier, trying to shield him.

But something was wrong.

He felt it immediately. His cultivation, usually a steady current beneath his skin, moved like broken water.

Turbulent. Fragmented. The old man's thunder strike hadn't just paralyzed him. It had destabilized something fundamental — cracked his core like a hairline fracture running through the foundation of a building.

The energy he reached for frayed and scattered at the edges, and the barrier he'd managed to form was thin.

He let the fire hit it and felt the impact shudder through him like a bell being struck.

The core was damaged. Deeply. It would take time — real time, measured in months or years.

He exhaled slowly.

Alex rolled his neck once, felt something crack.

Fine, he thought. Then we do this the hard way.

He rushed to the nearest man and drove his fist straight into the man's face.

The impact was clean. Economical. The man's head snapped back and he crumpled before his body even understood what had happened.

"Get him," one of the others snapped.

They came all at once. Electric bolts. Streams of pressurized water. A lash of

plasma that smelled like burning ozone.

The attacks converged on Alex from three directions, and he stood in the center of it and let them come.

Each strike hit him like a firm shove.

He moved through the barrage without hurrying, without wasted motion, one man at

a time.

A palm to a throat. An elbow to a temple. A grab, a twist, a body folding to the cobblestones with a sound like laundry dropped from height.

Four strikes. Four men down.

He looked down at himself, naked.

He considered the five men.

Anyone who cornered a woman in a dark alley in a city they apparently owned

wasn't going to miss one suit.

His gaze moved across them and settled on the best-dressed - a deep charcoal jacket with clean lapels, trousers that nearly fit.

He dressed without ceremony, ignoring the ache in his ribs, and began to go through their pockets with the quiet efficiency of someone performing a necessary task.

Tile-shaped objects. One from each of them — flat, humming faintly with stored energy, clearly significant in ways he didn't yet understand.

He pocketed all five. Then the rings, slid from unresisting fingers. The necklaces. Everything small enough to carry and unusual enough to be worth examining later. He didn't know what any of it was worth here.

He didn't know anything about here.

Even their language was strange — close enough that he could parse the surface of it, the way a man might recognize a cousin's dialect, but shot through with cadences that felt ancient and bent, like speech heard underwater.

Words he knew were shaped wrong. Syllables that didn't land where he expected them to.

The woman already long gone.

He walked to the mouth of the alley and stopped.

A tram hissed past on a rail that emitted a steady amber pulse, its wheels running smooth and silent, the windows glowing warmly from within.

The passengers visible through the glass looked ordinary — coats, conversation, one man reading something that scrolled across a thin luminescent sheet.

The city beyond the tram was loud with life. Street vendors. Foot traffic. Lanterns

that floated at the height of second-floor windows, tethered to nothing, their light the color of poured honey.

Not Estoria. Not Prussia. Not Xia.

This place had magic the way other places had electricity — not as a phenomenon

but as infrastructure. Woven into the transport, the signage, the mortar between the bricks. The bones of the city ran on it.

Above the storefront directly across the street, a sign floated in letters that rearranged themselves as he read, cycling through languages before settling:

WELCOME TO NEW AVALON - ARCANUM STATE'S PROUDEST CITY.

Alex read it twice. Filed it. Moved on.

A street vendor called something in that bent, underwater dialect from behind a cart

of objects that resembled fruit but glowed faintly at their centers.

Alex walked through all of it.

He had managed to piece together the basics in twenty minutes of careful observation. This was a modern city - the technology level was comparable to what he knew, perhaps slightly ahead in some respects.

But instead of electricity as its foundational infrastructure, magic was. Mana lines ran through the buildings the way power cables ran through walls back home.

Citizens carried small identification tiles that they tapped against readers at tram stops and shop entrances.

A faint shimmer surrounded most adults - barely visible, just a breath of color around the shoulders and hands - which Alex identified as their natural mana signature.

A man in a grey uniform jogged past the alley mouth. He wore a short cape with a shield emblem and carried a baton that glowed at one end.

"Hey." A man in the grey cape uniform stepped in front of him. The baton at his hip

was active — the glow was steady, not aggressive, but present. "Citizen. Stop a moment."

Alex stopped.

"Signature tile, please."

"I don't have one."

The knight's eyes flicked down to Alex, then back up. He was perhaps twenty-two,

with the careful posture of someone recently trained.

"No tile," he repeated. "And no mana signature visible. Name?"

"Alexander."

"Surname?"

"Leonhart."

The knight's partner had drifted around behind Alex during this exchange — a

standard flanking position, not threateningly executed but clearly deliberate. Alex noted it with the same interest he might give a mild weather change.

"Alexander Leonhart. Arcanum resident?"

"No."

"Visiting from another state?"

"Not exactly."

The knight's expression tightened by

one precise notch. "Sir, in the United States of Magic, all citizens and

registered visitors are required toet

carry an active signature tile at all times Failure to produce oneon request is a Class Three infraction. I'm going to need you to come with us to the nearest Knight Station for identity verification."

Alex looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded.

"All right," he said, and put his hands in his pockets and waited for them to lead.

The knight who had spoken exchanged a glance with his partner. People who had just been informed they were being detained didn't usually agree this easily.

It made them uncomfortable in the way that an unlocked door makes a lock-picker uncomfortable.

"This way," the first one said, less certainly than before.

The Knight Station was four blocks east. It was a ground-floor office with a glowing shield above the door and a front desk staffed by a young woman who looked up when they entered and back down immediately when she saw the knights' expressions.

They sat Alex in a chair.

They filled out forms.

They took his name and physical description. They asked about his mana affinity —

the category of magic he used — and he told them honestly that he wasn't sure how

it applied to their classification system. They wrote down: affinity unknown.

For two hours, they kept him- questioning, watching, waiting for something in his

answers to crack.

The verification process for unregistered individuals, Alex was informed by a bored sergeant

named Walsh, involved

Ovel

cross-referencing against the USM's national identity archive, the inter-state visitor database, the restricted persons registry, and, if

none of those produced a match submitting a report to the Arcanum

State Bureau of Mana Compliance,

which had a standard processing window of three to five business

days.

FindNovel.net

"Three to five business days?" Alex asked.

"Standard processing," Walsh confirmed, without looking up from his terminal. "During which I remain here."

"During which you may remain here voluntarily or be transferred to the temporary

holding facility at Fourth Street, which has better coffee."

Alex sat with this information.

Two hours later, a knight named Dax - younger than Walsh, sharper-eyed, with the kind of focused hostility that usually belonged to people who had decided they didn't like. someone before meeting them

came to deliver the preliminary finding: no match in any database. Alexander Leonhart did not exist in the USM's records.

"That's unusual," Dax said, leaning against the wall across from Alex's chair.

"I imagine it is."

"Most unusual cases are criminals who've had their records scrubbed. Occasionally

it's someone from an unaffiliated territory. Sometimes it's a spy."

"Which category do you think applies?"

Dax's eyes narrowed. "You're very calm for someone with no identity."

"I've had a long day."

Whatever Dax was about to say next didn't happen, because at that moment the station's front door was thrown open with a force that suggested the person throwing it had very little patience for doors, and a woman's voice cut across the

room:

"Let go of me. I said let go. I can walk into a Knight Station by myself, I am not a — where is he? The man they brought in on Third Street. Where is he?"

Alex turned.

She was perhaps twenty-four, dressed in clothes that had once been expensive and

still carried the memory of it — the lines were good, the fabric was quality, but both

were stressed at the edges in the particular way of someone who used to have things laundered and pressed and no longer did.

Her hair was dark and half-undone. There was a bruise forming along her left jaw.

She saw Alex and pointed at him. "That one."

She had been one of the people Alex had not actually met yet, which made her pointing at him surprising.