Then mag-train hummed steadily, its sound constantly getting on Jonah's nerves. He paced the small, luxurious compartment, back and forth, door to window and back again. It should have felt comforting but it didn't. It all felt like a trap. The Awakened's Primer lay open on the desk, its holo screen glowing softly in the dim light.
Diagrams flickered across its surface – mystic circuits, energy flow paths, crystalline lattice formations for channeling inner power. All useless.
He had tried everything.
Every exercise. Every method.
He'd followed the Elementalist meditation exercises, trying to feel the flow of energy around him. Hours had passed with him sitting cross-legged, still as stone, trying to feel something – anything.
He'd tried the Manifestor's focusing techniques, attempting to will his inner power into a physical shape. To forge. To create.
His mental "Workshop" remained a dark and frustratingly empty space.
It was like owning a top of the line engine with no fuel, no chassis, and no key.
"Think, Jonah, think," he whispered to himself, running a hand through his messy hair. He stopped his pacing and stared out the armored window, at the blur of the landscape flying by. This wasn't an old world lock that could be picked, or a faulty circuit that could be bypassed. This was something new. Something different.
His scrapper's mind took over, falling back on the instincts that had kept him alive. When a machine didn't do its job, you didn't try the same thing over and over. You broke it open, checked its parts, and understood why it wasn't working.
His power was the machine.
The primer was the wrong manual.
He dropped onto the bed, The mattress sighed under his weight like it shared his frustration. "If the Workshop needs materials," he whispered to the empty room, "where would I even get them?" The Academy wasn't going to just hand over priceless magical artifacts to a defective kid from the ruins.
His mind, without him wanting it, left the clean train and went back to the dirty, familiar Undercroft. He smelled damp metal and rot. Heard the ever-present dripping of leaky pipes and the faint groan of old tunnels beneath too much weight. It was a miserable place, but it was a place he understood.
He had survived there.
By being resourceful. By being observant. By knowing what to fight, what to run from, and what to take.
He closed his eyes, breathing deep and letting the memories wash over him. He wasn't just searching for an answer; he was searching for an anomaly, a time when something had felt… off.
And then – something clicked.
From a week ago. Just before the Awakening.
He had been scavenging deeper than usual, in a collapsed subway tunnel that most other scrappers avoided. The old maps said it was a dead end, prone to collapse. But dead ends were where you found the best stuffs – hidden techs or lost relics. The things no one else had bothered to pick over.
He had been pulling a copper power line from a wall when he'd heard the scuttling. It wasn't the slow, grinding sound of a rusty golem or the slapping noise of a sludge beast. It was a sharp, insect-like clicking, fast and aggressive.
He had turned, his heart leaping into his throat.
Cornering him in the narrow tunnel was a creature he had never seen before. It was a large beetle, the size of a grown man's torso, but its shell wasn't the dull black or brown of the common tunnel roaches. Its shell was made of shifting, crystal plates that split his headlamp's light into many glittering dots. Each plate had edges as sharp as cut stone.
It was territorial, and he was in its space.
Jonah remembered everything. The jolt of fear. The split-second decision. The adrenaline.
The Crystalline Beetle was unbelievably fast. It simply charged him. its razor sharp shell designed to slice and shred. He dove sideways, the beetle slicing the air where his head had been, the edge of its hard shell catching his jacket and tearing it open.
He had scrambled backward, his back hitting the damp wall of the tunnel.
The beetle lunged again. There was no time to think, only to react. He had grabbed the heavy length of steel bar he'd been using as a lever and swung it with all his might.
There was a sickening crunch as the steel bar hit with the beetle's head.
The impact echoed like a hammer hitting stone.
The creature twitched violently, its crystalline plates grinding against each other with a high pitched shriek. It wasn't dead yet. It thrashed wildly, one of its bladed legs lashing out and slicing a deep cut across his forearm.
Blood sprayed. His vision blurred.
But that didn't stop him.
Jonah cried out, a mix of pain and adrenaline. He brought the steel bar down again, and again, until the creature finally lay still.
He remembered collapsing against the wall, his arm screaming in pain, his breath coming in ragged gasps. But he also remembered something else. A strange energy had seeped into his arm from the gash, a sensation that felt like ice water flooding his veins. It vanished after a moment, and he had dismissed it as the shock of a near death experience. He had bandaged his arm, grabbed the valuable crystalline shell fragments, and gotten out of there as fast as he could.
He hadn't thought about it again. Until now.
Jonah's eyes snapped open. He sat bolt upright on the bed, his heart hammering.
The memory. The cold feeling. The wound.
His power didn't come from some abstract "inner font."
What if it wasn't about what was inside him at all?
What if it was about what he had taken in?
It was a wild, desperate guess, a theory built on a half remembered feeling and a scrapper's hunch. But it was the only lead he had. He had to know.