The Grand Instructor was buried in scrolls when Dawn found him, hunched over a sea of parchment. He squinted down at the curling records beneath an amber light, muttering soft notes to himself and occasionally scribbling with a quill that seemed older than the academy itself.
Dawn waited patiently, only clearing his throat once.
The old man didn't look up. "Do you have a question, boy?"
"It's about the paradox," Dawn said simply.
The scratching of the quill stopped.
The Grand Instructor slowly raised his head, his clouded eyes narrowing. "Paradox?" he echoed, voice low. "You solved it?"
"I believe I did."
Disbelief painted the old man's face, followed by an expression that hovered somewhere between hope and incredulity. "Prove it."
He stood up with a surprising grace and rummaged through a cluttered shelf, producing a curious brass instrument—part orb, part lens array, part tuning fork. "Project your answer through this. It responds to thought, resonance, and truth."
Dawn took it and closed his eyes, letting the light from his Primal Origin flow into it. The device pulsed to life.
Three luminous stars appeared mid-air, orbiting one another in a perfectly symmetrical trinity. Their paths curved in harmony, radiating calm, mathematical perfection. The Grand Instructor leaned in, nodding slowly.
Then, one of the stars flickered—and vanished. It had not left the orbit, not strayed from its path. It was simply… unseen.
No light, no trace. As if it had become an echo of itself.
And instantly, the harmony shattered. The remaining two stars, still visible, spun into erratic spirals, colliding and careening off invisible forces. Chaos born of presence veiled in absence.
"This was the first truth I saw," Dawn said. "That to observe is to stabilize. When one became unseen, the others no longer knew how to exist around it. But…"
He wasn't done.
With deft hands, Dawn manipulated the brass tool, altering gravitational constants, mass values, energy curves—all while recalibrating the unseen star. Slowly, painfully, he shifted the unseeable thing into a new state—still unobservable, yet now self-aware in motion, like a shadow moving in rhythm to a song only it could hear.
The projection shifted. The chaos melted away.
Once more, the three stars orbited—perfectly. But now, their orbits bent around an invisible core. Harmony not from balance, but from understanding.
The Grand Instructor's quill clattered to the ground.
He looked at Dawn, not like a teacher to a student, but like a philosopher seeing fire for the first time.
"You…" he whispered. "You reshaped reality to accommodate the impossible."
Then he laughed. A deep, roaring, utterly unhinged laugh. And with that laugh, the atmosphere split open.
The old man reached upward—not metaphorically, not symbolically—but literally reached, as if his hunched figure had suddenly and incomprehensibly become taller than the sky, tearing open the firmament like a veil.
Behind it shimmered the Celestial Battlefield: clouds made of raw energy, winds that howled in equations, and titanic figures roaming the distant horizon.
From it, something stirred. A serpentine behemoth—colossal, glistening, hateful—turned its massive body with myriad blinking eyes toward the breach. From a distance, its coiled form resembled the image of a galaxy.
The same one whose avatar Dawn had rejected. It had been silently probing the land ever since, crawling unseen like a centipede beneath the surface of reality.
And now it had been caught.
"Sniffing around again?" the Grand Instructor muttered, then grinned. "That's a felony, and you will be duly punished for that!"
He jabbed two fingers into the air, seized a chunk of its domain like plucking a strand from a loom, and tore.
The behemoth shrieked—no sound, just pressure, an ancient wail that made the mountains weep—but it could do nothing as the Grand Instructor casually plucked a crystalline shard from the remains of its dominion and slammed the sky shut.
The parchment-strewn chamber was silent again. Almost normal. Except in his hand now rested a sealed domain fragment, pulsating with a strange rhythm. It hummed like truth unsaid.
He tossed it to Dawn. "There. That's your reward, boy. A domain shard ripped fresh from a beast that's too used to watching and not used to being seen."
Dawn caught it, but couldn't speak. He wasn't sure what stunned him more—the act itself or the fact that he had seen something as the Instructor reached through reality.
He had caught a glimpse of something hidden behind the veil… yet couldn't comprehend what it was. It was like seeing your own reflection blink while you did not.
"What kind of power was that?" Dawn asked.
The Grand Instructor raised an eyebrow, amused. "Power beyond mortal understanding, even for Madmen like you three!"
Then, almost absently, he added, "You've fulfilled two of the three requirements to ascend to the Cosmic Lattice."
Dawn straightened. "Only the forbidden realm remains."
"Aye," the Grand Instructor said, folding his arms. "And that realm is sealed. Far from reach for a mere student without name, title, or background. But…"
He tapped a scroll with a finger. "There is one beneath the Academy itself. Mor than one actually but only one is suitable for you. A forbidden realm too dangerous to be opened without oversight. I can grant you access—stabilize it from the outside."
Dawn frowned. "Why not come in with me?"
The Grand Instructor's smile was thin. "Because if I step foot inside, my presence will collapse the entire space. I am… too real for realms built on things best left unreal. It's like tossing a mountain into a dream and wondering why it ruptured."
A pause. Then he added, "But I'll make you a deal. Enter that realm and retrieve something I lost long ago. Something… important. Do that, and you'll have fulfilled all conditions for ascension."
Dawn nodded, understanding the weight of that promise.
But another question burned in him. "...If you're this strong… how strong were the other two Madmen?"
The Grand Instructor gave him a long, pointed look. Then he scoffed. "Strong? If I wanted to defeat them, it would be akin to an adult bullying children—easy, demeaning, and ultimately pointless."
His eyes darkened. "No, boy. I don't fear their power. I fear their thoughts. Their conduct.
I've seen tyrants born of brilliance. But those two…" He trailed off. "They weren't tyrants yet. Just children. But the way they looked at the world… it was like watching a child hold a blade and whisper to it. I was terrified not of them—but of what they would become."
The silence lingered.
Then, the Grand Instructor waved him away. "Now go. But don't go around solving paradoxes and showing off, you little madman. My old heart needs time to stabilize."
Dawn gave a respectful nod, stepping away with the sealed domain shard in hand.
The future loomed. And for the first time, it was a future he might grasp.