CHAPTER ONE: THE TREE AND THE VOID

CHAPTER ONE: THE TREE AND THE VOID

They called it the Awakening — the moment your Tree lit up.

Most kids saw their first branch glow before their tenth birthday, the golden etchings of their Arcana tree shimmering into visibility on the inside of their forearms. Each glowing line represented a skill — tiny sparks of potential leading upward into paths of fire, shadow, ice, blood, metal, storm... you name it. The more nodes you unlocked, the more powerful you became. The best of the best had Trees that stretched all the way up their shoulders and wrapped around their backs like divine tattoos.

Then there was me.

Name's Ashren Vale.

Seventeen years old. No Tree. No skills. No glow.

Just a single, pitch-black node.

No branches. No spark. Just a void, pulsing faintly in the center of my palm — like a hole the universe forgot to fill in.

I was what people politely called a Mono. The freaks who got one upgrade, one skill, and no more. The rest of the Tree never grew. No one knew why. Maybe the root rotted. Maybe the gods just didn't care.

Before I keep going, you should probably know a few things.

First: the Trees aren't just metaphors. They're real. Everyone has one, growing not from soil or sun, but from soul. It's a kind of magic, sure, but older than spells or scrolls. The Trees are the divine inheritance of humankind — the gifts left behind after the Fall, when the gods vanished and left us scrambling for power, structure, meaning.

Second: the world we live in runs on Arcana. Cities are built and defended by elite Arcani, schools like mine rank students based on how many nodes they've unlocked, and entire economies are driven by magically enhanced labor. The military, the nobility, even the lowliest courier — if you've got a strong Tree, doors open. If you're a Mono? Good luck even getting through the first one.

And third: I didn't come from some obscure family of nobodies, scraping by in the gutters of the inner districts. My parents were renowned Arcani — both with Trees branching past their clavicles, etched with radiant sigils of Flame and Iron. My older sister, Kael, was a prodigy. Had her first branch before age six. Blood Arcana. She could clot wounds with a look, boil an enemy alive with a flick of her wrist.

Me? I couldn't even get my Tree to start.

They tried everything. Prayer circles, soul-diviners, essence infusions. My father spent an entire year researching archaic Tree grafts from the Old Kingdoms. Nothing worked. Eventually, they stopped talking about it altogether. Like silence might erase the truth.

The day it activated, I thought I was dying.

It happened during the Trials — our school's coming-of-age gauntlet. Everyone had to show their Arcana and what they'd unlocked so far. Some could summon fireballs, teleport short distances, control gravity, even bend metal. I walked into the arena with nothing but a blank palm and a heart pounding out of rhythm.

The others jeered. Of course they did. A Mono with no branch? A joke. A warm-up round. I didn't blame them.

But when my name was called, and I stepped into the circle...

The void pulsed.

Everything went silent.

And I mean silent. No wind. No breathing. Not even the buzz of the lights overhead. I blinked, and suddenly I could see the whole arena — not just from where I stood, but from every angle. Above, below, behind.

The ground cracked beneath my feet, not from force — but from absence. Space bent. The ground curled upward like a paper sheet. My opponent screamed, and in less than a second, he was five meters away — without ever moving.

I didn't push him.

I moved space.

And that's when the node finally spoke to me. Not in words. In understanding.

NODE UNLOCKED: ABSOLUTE SPATIAL CONTROL.

No branches. No limitations.

You are the root.

It took me three days to stop shaking.

They tried to scan me afterward — teachers, Arcana judges, even an emissary from the Academy of Divine Sciences. None of their tools could read my Tree. They poked at my node, tried to measure its resonance, but it just... absorbedeverything. Like the Void didn't care to be understood.

And maybe it didn't.

See, Trees usually grow upward, outward — toward power, mastery, legacy.

Mine didn't.

Mine grew inward.

And I think, deep down, I knew what that meant.

The root isn't where things begin.

It's where they end.