"Patrol route drift," Jace said, remembering the briefing. *Corrupted patrol routines.* "They follow pre-programmed paths but the dungeon warps them over time. It probably just drifted into our sector."

  The clicking grew louder. Closer.

  "We leave," Jace said. "Now. Torrin, take point. Back the way we came. Don't engage unless-"

  Then two things happened simultaneously.

  The Broken Attendant lurched into the junction from the northeast corridor - a humanoid shape of corroded metal and sparking mana-conduit, its limbs jerking in the stuttering rhythm of a machine running on damaged instructions. Its eyes - sensor clusters behind cracked glass - swept the platform with the mindless efficiency of something that would pursue until destroyed or until they left its patrol zone.

  And Mara said, very quietly: "Jace. There's something on the bench."

  He looked. The token was in his hand. But beneath where it had been sitting, half-buried in decades of accumulated dust and subway debris, something else glowed. Faintly. Pulsing with a light that wasn't bioluminescent - it was too structured, too deliberate. The light of mana that had been shaped on purpose and held that shape for a very long time.

  The Attendant oriented on them. The clicking accelerated.

  "Twenty seconds before it enters engagement range," Elara said, her voice rigid with controlled fear. "Its patrol zone boundary is approximately where we're standing."

  Jace looked at the Attendant. Looked at the glowing object. Made a calculation that wasn't really a calculation - it was the same instinct that had sent him to the library at midnight, the bone-deep refusal to leave something unknown behind when unknown things were the only currency he had.

  He grabbed it.

  His fingers closed around a small, flat object - smooth, rectangular, warm. Not a book in the traditional sense - a tablet of compressed mana-crystal, the size of a playing card, with inscriptions on its surface that writhed and rearranged themselves as his fingers made contact. He felt the dungeon's ambient mana *pulse* around him - a single, sharp throb, like a heartbeat - and then:

  Nothing.

  The Attendant stopped. Its sensor clusters dimmed. It stood in the corridor entrance, motionless, clicking softly - the sound of a machine returning to idle. After three seconds, it turned and lurched back the way it had come, patrol routine resuming, their presence apparently dismissed.

  Silence.

  "What," Mara breathed, "was that?"

  Jace looked at the object in his hand. The inscriptions had settled into a pattern he couldn't read but that his mana channels recognized - a resonance, a harmonic alignment between the crystal's structured energy and his own internal architecture. It felt like finding a key that fit a lock he didn't know he had.

  "It's a Power Book," Elara said.

  She was staring at the object through her mana-lens, her hand white-knuckled on the lens housing. Her voice had the quality of someone who was processing something extraordinary and trying very hard to route the reaction through analysis rather than emotion.

  "A *what*?"

  "Power Book. Skill tome. Ability crystal. They have several names in the academic literature. They're dungeon-generated items that contain a single encoded power - a structured mana pattern stored in crystalline matrix. When a compatible user makes physical contact, the pattern... transfers." She swallowed. "They're Rare drops at minimum. Some classifications put them at Epic. Finding one on Level One of a training dungeon is - I don't have a probability framework for it. It shouldn't be here."

  "But it is here," Torrin said.

  "It is here."

  Jace turned the crystal over. The inscriptions continued to shift - but slowly now, settling, aligning with something internal. He could feel it - a warmth spreading from his palm up through his wrist, into the channels Salis had described in Mana Theory. Ambient to channeled. The crystal's energy was crossing the boundary between the object and his body, moving along pathways that [Wayfaring] kept open because [Wayfaring] kept *everything* open.

  "What power?" he asked.

  Elara adjusted the lens. Squinted. Read.

  "[Mana Sense]. Perception-class utility power. It allows the user to perceive ambient and structured mana flows within a radius determined by the user's Mystical attribute. Concentrations, signatures, patterns, disruptions - it's essentially enhanced magical sight. Non-combat classification." She lowered the lens. "Most combat-class students would consider it worthless. It doesn't do damage. It doesn't heal. It doesn't control the battlefield."

  "But for someone who needs to *see* how other people use mana-"

  "For someone whose class revolves around observing and replicating mana structures," Elara said, and her voice was very careful, very precise, and carried beneath its clinical surface something that sounded almost like wonder, "it would be foundational."

  Jace looked at the crystal. Felt the warmth. Felt the structure waiting behind it - patient, precise, ready to unfold into his channels like water finding a riverbed. All he had to do was let it in.

  He let it in.

  The sensation was unlike anything the System had given him before. When he'd Awakened, the [Nomad] class had settled over him like a fog - diffuse, uncertain, a framework without content. When he'd learned [Footwork: Evasion], it had been a gradual accretion - hours of practice crystallizing into a skill the System recognized and taxed.

  This was neither.

  The Power Book's structure poured into his open channels and *fit*. Not the way a specialist's power fit - clicking into a pre-built socket, clean and efficient. This was rawer. The mana pattern entered his system and his channels rearranged around it, [Wayfaring]'s open architecture accommodating a structure it had never been designed for by the simple virtue of never having been designed for anything specific. It hurt - a bright, sharp ache behind his eyes and in the bridge of his nose, the sensation of new pathways being carved through tissue that wasn't ready for them. His MP dropped - he felt the drain, the hollowness, the cold rushing in to fill the space where energy had been.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Then it settled.

  And the world *changed*.

  Not visually - his eyes still saw the same collapsed platform, the same blue-cap glow, the same three faces staring at him. But layered beneath the visual, threaded through it like a second image printed on the same page, he could see *mana*. Ambient energy drifting through the tunnel in slow, invisible currents. The brighter concentrations around the blue-cap fungi. The residual signature of the Broken Attendant's corrupted mana core fading in the northeast corridor. Torrin's energy - dense, heavy, concentrated in his core and limbs like molten metal. Elara's - sharp, precise, clustered around her head and hands. Mara's - warm, diffuse, flickering with the quick nervous rhythm of her heartbeat.

  His own mana was a mess. Thin, spread wide, flowing through channels that branched in every direction without the focused throughput of a specialist's architecture. Open ground. He could see it now - literally see it - and for the first time, he understood what Venn had meant. His channels weren't weak. They were *broad*. Every direction. Every possibility.

  And now he could see the structures that other people used. The templates. The patterns. The specific configurations of channeled mana that became spells, became powers, became the defined capabilities that the System sorted into classes and roles. He couldn't replicate them yet - [Mana Sense] was perception, not execution - but he could *see* them. Study them. Understand their architecture the way an engineer understood a building by examining its blueprints.

  A notification settled into his awareness - not text, not sound, but the bone-deep certainty of the System acknowledging a change:

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  [SYSTEM]

  Power Acquired: [Mana Sense]

  Classification: Perception / Utility

  Resource Cost: 5 MP/minute (Base) → 15 MP/minute ([Wayfaring] Modified)

  Scaling Attribute: Mystical

  Note: This power was acquired through external absorption, not class progression. No level requirement applied. Compatibility confirmed via [Wayfaring] trait.

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  Fifteen MP per minute. With his current pool, he could sustain it for barely a minute before going empty. A specialist with a Perception class could run it passively for hours.

  But he *had* it. Not from leveling - his class gave him almost nothing through leveling. Not from a trainer, a class ability, or a skill tree. From the dungeon. From the world itself.

  The insight hit him with the force of something he'd been circling for weeks without being able to name.

  *This is how I grow.*

  Not through the System's standard progression. Not through level-ups that gave other classes attribute points and power slots and passive abilities. His class gave him open channels and a tax that made everything expensive. The System's *normal* growth path was a dead end for a [Nomad].

  But Power Books didn't care about class progression. They cared about compatibility. And [Wayfaring] was compatible with *everything*.

  Dungeons. Loot drops. Skill tomes. Power crystals. Absorbed abilities from defeated enemies. Every source of power that existed *outside* the level-up framework was a source that Jace could access, because his class had no restrictions - only costs. The ceiling was gone. It had never been there. He'd just been looking at the wrong ceiling.

  He was breathing hard. The ache behind his eyes was fading to a dull throb. His MP was scraped low - the acquisition plus the initial activation of [Mana Sense] had cost him nearly everything. The hollowness spread through his chest, the familiar cold of an empty pool.

  "Jace?" Mara's hand on his arm. "Your nose is bleeding."

  He touched his upper lip. His fingers came away red. "I'm okay."

  "You're not okay. Your mana channels just absorbed an external power structure. That's-" She stopped herself. Breathed. Put her clinical voice on like armor. "Sit down. Tilt your head forward. Pinch the bridge of your nose. How's your MP?"

  "Low."

  "How low?"

  "The kind of low where I probably shouldn't sneeze."

  "Sit *down*."

  He sat. Torrin was watching him with an expression that was complicated and unreadable. Elara was scribbling in her notebook with a speed that suggested she was transcribing observations before they degraded.

  "This changes things," Elara said, not looking up. "If [Wayfaring] provides universal power compatibility through external acquisition sources-"

  "Elara."

  She stopped writing. Met his eyes.

  "Later," Jace said. "Right now, we have a token and a route back and my MP pool is empty. Let's go home."

  She nodded. Closed the notebook. "We should discuss this extensively at the shed."

  "We will."

  They formed up. Torrin on point, Jace behind - moving slower now, the SP drain and MP emptiness combining into a leaden exhaustion that made every step a negotiation with his body. Mara walked beside him, not touching, but close enough that her presence was a physical fact. Elara brought up the rear, mana-lens active, notebook clutched against her chest.

  The return trip was uneventful. The tunnel had been cleared of rats on the way in, and the Attendant had drifted back to whatever sector it was supposed to be patrolling. Blue-cap light guided them through the flooded section. The ward-pillars at the access point hummed as they passed through.

  Thresh was waiting at the staging area. He took their token without ceremony, checked it, logged the return time. His eyes moved across the group - assessing injuries, reading body language, doing the math that experienced veterans did instinctively.

  "Zero injuries?"

  "Nosebleed," Mara reported. "Resolved."

  Thresh looked at Jace. At the faint residual bloodstain on his upper lip, at the hollow-eyed exhaustion of someone running on fumes, at whatever else he could see that Jace didn't know was visible.

  "What happened down there?"

  "Rats. Five total, two encounters. One Attendant sighting - it wandered into our sector, didn't engage. We retrieved the token and returned."

  Thresh held his gaze for a beat. Two. Then he nodded and marked something on the grading tablet.

  "Clean run. Go rest."

  They left. Behind them, Jace heard the next team being called forward - Kael's team, ranked third, headed for the deep sections where the Attendants actively patrolled and the Rust Crawlers nested in numbers.

  In the corridor outside, walking toward the surface and the grey light of the afternoon, Jace pressed his palm against the wall and let the cool stone anchor him. The [Mana Sense] had faded when his MP ran dry, but the memory of it lingered - the overlay of energy beneath the visible world, the architecture of power made visible, the open ground of his channels spreading in every direction.

  He closed his eyes. Felt the slow trickle of MP regeneration beginning - glacial, insufficient, but present. The pool refilling one drop at a time.

  *This is how I grow.*

  The thought was warm. The thought was dangerous. The thought tasted like the beginning of something that didn't have a name yet.

  He opened his eyes.

  "Shed," he said. "Tonight. We need to talk."

  Torrin nodded. Mara shouldered her satchel. Elara was already writing.

  They climbed toward the light.