Hollow Core

by Gage Lee

  She found me wanting almost immediately.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. Her eyes burrowed into me from scarcely a foot away while I demonstrated my breath cycling technique for her. “Who taught you to breathe like that? And why is your core still empty?”

  “My mother, and I do not know,” I gasped. After the hours of cycling I’d done last night to purify the rat spirit’s seemingly endless supply of tainted jinsei, my core was a throbbing knot of pain.

  “Did I give you permission to speak?” Kara barked. “I should’ve known a camper wouldn’t have any self-control. If you expect to advance here, you’ll need to learn to hold the jinsei inside your core instead of just letting it leak out of your nose with every breath.”

  The warden turned her back on me and stalked off to harass another student. Her harsh words had triggered titters and whispers from the other initiates. I’d be the laughingstock of the entire student body by the end of the day.

  What made it worse was that she wasn’t even wrong. If I couldn’t heal my hollow core and learn to harness jinsei, my life at the academy would be very difficult. I spent the rest of that class contemplating my future and struggling to control the jinsei that swept through me in the tides of my circular breathing.

  Unfortunately, all that earned me was even more pain from my core and the start of an ugly headache.

  Just in time to hustle off to my first academic class, The First Age of Empyreal History, taught by Professor Vaughn.

  The academic wing was as stark and white as the pages in our textbooks. The floors had no seams at all, as if they’d been carved from a single enormous slab of white stone. The walls had a smooth texture, almost like plastic, and perfectly matched the floor’s color. The high ceilings were polished to a mirror sheen and pierced by narrow slits that admitted beams of colorless light into the otherwise shadowy interior.

  “What do you think we’ll talk about first?” Eric asked. “The Empyrean Flame’s dragons, or the Hungry War?”

  “Definitely the dragons,” Clem said. “It’s not nearly as controversial as the war.”

  “True,” Abi said. “If he talks about the Hungry War, he’ll have to talk about the Lost Empyreals. I don’t think they’ll allow that.”

  I didn’t understand any of what they were talking about. There was so much more to Empyrean society than I knew about. I felt like they were speaking a different language. Rather than ask any questions, I decided to see what I learned in class.

  Turned out that Clem was right. Our professor spent most of an hour talking about the Empyrean Flame that burned at the heart of the universe, and how it guided and protected the first life in the universe until the Five Dragons emerged from its shadow to protect against the first dark spirits from the void. While the rest of my class stared at the clock on the wall with open boredom, I soaked up all this new information. If I wanted to fit in here I needed to know the history of the people that surrounded me.

  Not that I thought it would make any difference to them. Half of them ignored me with pointed disinterest, while the other half whispered behind my back if I even looked like I might open my mouth in class.

  “Why does everyone here hate me?” My friends cleared their throats and looked away from me as we made our way to our first jinsei class of the day, Alchemy Fundamentals.

  “I wouldn’t say everyone.” Eric clapped me on the shoulder. “Some people are just—”

  “You are a camper,” Abi said and clamped his hand over his mouth immediately. “I am sorry, that sounds terrible.”

  And it did. Empyreals threw the slur around with abandon, never realizing how much it hurt to hear it. No one wanted to be born into the labor camps. It was a miserable existence.

  “The camps keep the world running,” Clem snapped. “And you know that’s not the real reason people are being dicks. The clan meetings this morning—”

  “Clem!” Abi practically shouted at Clem, and every eye in the passage turned toward us.

  We walked in silence for a few more seconds, before Clem turned on Abi.

  “He has a right to know,” she said.

  “Our clan elders entrusted us with that information. I will not allow that trust to be betrayed.” Abi’s dark face twisted with conflicting emotions. “If they wanted him to know, they would have told him.”

  “I’m standing right here, you guys,” I said. “Forget it. I don’t need to hear any more.”

  I had enough pieces of the puzzle to put it together. Grayson had made no secret of the fact that he hated me. The clan elders had told their students something terrible about me. Now I was fair game for whatever horrible mistreatment the other initiates could dream up.

  My second day at the academy and I was tired, achy, and the headmaster had stapled a “Kick Me” sign to my back.

  If I hadn’t fought so hard to get there, I would have left the School right then and there.

  But that would have let the Empyreals beat me. And I hadn’t come this far just to give up.

  We made the rest of the trip to our jinsei class in silence. There wasn’t anything left for us to say.

  Because it was Monday, our first jinsei class was Alchemical Basics, taught by Professor Xarla. She was a tall, imposing woman with thick-framed glasses with swirling ovals of jinsei where the lenses should have been. Her attention fixed on me when I entered the room and stayed there until I found a seat. Xarla’s scrutiny was powerful and pressed down on my aura; by the time I’d found a seat I felt like I’d walked a mile with a heavy pack strapped to my back.

  “Welcome to your first day of classes.” The professor took her position behind the lectern at the head of the class and rapped her knuckles on its wooden edge. “Please open your Alchemy Fundamentals books to Chapter One. It is time to begin your training in the alchemical arts.”

  While my time in Tycho’s laboratory had left me exhausted and my core battered and aching, it had also prepared me for Professor Xarla’s alchemy class. She explained the basics of aspect corruption and guided us all through a breathing exercise for cleansing the taint from polluted jinsei.

  “Are you bored by my instruction, Mr. Warin?” I jerked awake at her words, and the rest of the class laughed. “Perhaps you’ll have better luck staying awake during your demonstration. Come here.”

  She crooked a finger in my direction and I shot upright behind my desk and marched stiff-legged down to the front of the classroom. I felt like a puppet with tangled strings, and had to catch myself on one desk after another as I descended the steps to the front of the room with a chorus of jeers behind me.

  Xarla didn’t release her compulsion until I was standing next to her and faced the rest of the class. Clem and Eric looked pained at the ordeal, while Abi focused so intently on the book in front of him that the rest of the world might as well not have existed for him.

  “Mr. Warin, this is a vial of polluted jinsei.” Professor Xarla handed me a black glass vial with a stopper firmly wedged in its neck and a smaller wide-mouthed container. “Please remove the stopper, remove the corruption, and place the purified jinsei in the empty vessel.”

  A frown pulled the corners of my mouth down, and my brow furrowed with concentration as if this was the most challenging problem I’d ever faced. Inwardly, I was grinning from ear to ear. If the professor thought she could embarrass me in front of the rest of the class with this challenge, she was sorely mistaken.

  I plucked the stopper out of the tainted vial with my teeth and dropped the cork onto the lectern. Then I lifted the jinsei container to my mouth and inhaled deeply to draw the tainted spiritual energy deep into my core. The spiritual essence tasted foul, like a mouthful of garbage scooped out of the bottom of a restaurant’s dumpster. It took me a moment to stabilize my circular breathing, but I wasn’t about to let myself fail this task in front of a bunch of initiates who already hated me. They needed to see that I wasn’t a pushover.

  The corrupted garbage aspects drained ou
t of my hollow core, oozed through my aching channels, and dripped off my fingertips in greasy black droplets while a thin thread of pure jinsei left my nostrils and flowed into the empty container. It was an exhausting challenge after the battering I’d taken in the laboratory and during the core strengthening exercises. Though it only took me a few seconds to complete the task and hand both containers back to the professor, it felt like hours had passed.

  Xarla grimaced as the tainted aspects transferred themselves from my fingertips to her hands. “Most students would have retained these impurities in their aura and cleansed them at their convenience later.”

  “Why would I keep garbage in my aura any longer than necessary, honored Professor?” I smiled around the words, but my eyes were cold and hard as Xarla peered at my core. She knew there was something odd about me, but she couldn’t see what. Maybe one day she’d figure it out, but today wasn’t that day.

  “Class dismissed,” the professor snapped.

  “Nice work!” Clem whispered as I returned to my desk and picked up my books. “You’ll have to show me how you did that.”

  “Ancient laborer secret,” I said with a rueful grin. It had taken me years to master the circular breathing technique, but I would have traded all that for the effortless ability of a true Empyreal to draw and use jinsei. My demonstration had looked impressive, but it wasn’t much more than a party trick compared to the techniques the other initiates would master soon.

  “Funny guy,” Clem shot back. She pestered me about how I’d purified the jinsei as we walked to lunch.

  “Let it go already,” Eric complained. “He’s not going to tell you!”

  “He will,” Clem said. “Eventually.”

  Fortunately, I was able to avoid any further questions at lunch because the wardens kept us all segregated by clan. The other Phoenixes ignored me, and I spent the time shoveling enough meat and carbs into my belly to fuel me for the rest of the day. I still had to get through a jinsei scrivening class, our basic martial arts exercises, and another round of core strengthening before I had to get back into the alchemy lab. I needed all the energy I could get.

  The Scrivening Basics class, taught by Professor Ishigara, was better than the Alchemy Fundamentals class, but only barely. There’d been no reason for me to master my handwriting in the labor camps, and the professor took every opportunity to point out how sloppy my sigils and bridges were. The only good thing about that hour of my life was that the professor didn’t haul me up in front of the class to show off my horrible scrivening skills.

  The martial arts exercise period wasn’t much better. The fighting skills I’d learned on the street and at my mother’s knee were effective, but they didn’t use jinsei and were no match for the Stomping Dragon, Crashing Heavens, or Darting Mist styles practiced by Eric, Abi, and Clem. The wardens mocked my friends for holding back on me, but they took it in stride.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” Clem assured me as we left the class. “It might take you a little longer, but if you can incorporate jinsei channeling into your natural fighting ability, you’ll be a terror.”

  “This is true,” Abi agreed. “Your skills are unorthodox and difficult to defend against with a more traditional style. If you back that up with jinsei to harden your hands and feet and lash impact aspects to your blows...”

  “I wonder if you could lace your aura with elemental aspects,” Eric mused.

  “He won’t be doing any of that.” Bishop Grayson stepped into the hall ahead of us. “I’ll need you three to excuse Mr. Warin and I.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Clem set her jaw and flicked her braids over her shoulder.

  “You would defy your elder to defend a camper?” Grayson snorted at Clem. “That would be quite a stain on your family’s honor, Clementine.”

  “He’s not a camper.” Clem straightened her spine and tucked her thumbs into her gi’s belt. “He is now an Empyreal and deserves to be treated as such.”

  Grayson’s eyebrows gathered together like storm clouds.

  “Let’s go.” Eric grabbed Clem’s shoulder and pulled her back. “We’ll see you at Core Strengthening, Jace.”

  Clem started to protest, but Abi joined Eric in hustling her away from the headmaster. I didn’t blame them. Grayson was terrifying.

  “What was it?” It wasn’t the smartest question, but it was the one I needed to have answered. “What could my father have possibly done to make you hate my family so much?”

  “You have no idea.” The headmaster eyed me with a mixture of pity and disgust. “What your father did was terrible, Mr. Warin, but even if he had been a model Empyreal citizen I wouldn’t want you anywhere near this institution.”

  “Because I’m weak?” I hated to say the word, but if I didn’t put my cards on the table Grayson would just run me in circles before he dropped whatever punishment he had in store for me. At least this way I might get some answers before he crushed me underfoot.

  “Because you are tainted.” Grayson stroked the thin wedge of his beard and his piercing eyes tried to bore their way into my core. “Your core is veiled from even my sight, somehow, but I will discover the truth, soon enough. And when I do, no one will be able to keep you in my institution.”

  “I’ll figure this out,” I vowed. “Whatever’s wrong with my core, I’ll fix it. I won’t leave the School.”

  “We shall see,” Grayson snorted. “But I suspect you will want to leave of your own accord long before you’ve repaired whatever damage your parents did to your malformed core. The professors have been warned to watch you, very closely, and I’m afraid your fellow initiates have been made well aware of your unsavory past and uncertain future.”

  There it was, right out in the open. He’d turned the other students against me. No matter what I did, or how hard I worked, the deck was already stacked against me. But what Grayson clearly didn’t know was that giving up wasn’t an option for me. I was in this until I’d healed my wounded core and restored my family’s honor. There was no other option for me.

  “I am sure the reasons for your displeasure with me are sound, honored Headmaster.” I bowed deeply and forced the words out. The veneration in them burned my tongue like acid. “But I will not leave this place of my own volition. I could not bear the stain upon my honor if I squandered the gift that has been given to me.”

  “If you stay, I cannot be responsible for your safety.” Grayson’s lips wrinkled in disgust when he tried, and failed, to pierce my core with his gaze once again. “Best of luck to you, Mr. Warin. You will need it.”

  The Sword

  DESPITE GRAYSON’S BLATANT threat, no one tried to murder me, at least not immediately.

  My days at the academy passed in a blur. Every morning was spent doing basic core-strengthening exercises that left me exhausted and gained me nothing. While most of my classmates had come to class with Initiate cores and were well on their way to achieving the coveted rank of Adept, my hollow core was stuck at the foundation level. Without the ability to store jinsei, my soul would never be stretched to new heights of power. It was a difficult problem that even the dozen or so jinsei serums I’d stolen from under Hahen’s nose couldn’t solve.

  The basic fitness courses were followed by the first of two jinsei-focused periods. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I had Alchemy Fundamentals before lunch, with Scrivening Basics in the afternoon. Tuesday and Thursday mornings the alchemy course was replaced with Channel Endurance, which was a brutal exercise in frustration for me. Even the boosters didn’t give me enough natural jinsei to push my channels to new levels.

  The Tuesday and Thursday afternoon jinsei course was Aura Cleansing, which was another class that didn’t have much to teach me. My evenings in the alchemy laboratory taught me more about cleansing my aura of aspect contamination than I’d ever learn in a classroom.

  Unfortunately, the same hard work that taught me so much left me physically exhausted and spiritually battered. It was hard enough to ke
ep my eyes open when the coursework was interesting, but so much of it was boring and pointless given my experience and my hollow core that I found myself sipping jinsei potions in class to stay awake.

  On top of that I had to pretend I hadn’t already surpassed everything in Alchemy Fundamentals while also struggling to improve my scrivening before Professor Ishigara skinned me alive for my incompetence.

  “You’ll get there,” Clem told me as we left the scriptorium on our way to the exercise yard for our basic martial arts training period.

  “I hope so. If I had more time to practice, that would be a big help.” That was the understatement of the year. I barely had enough time to sleep, much less the hours I needed to get my handwriting up to snuff.

  “I’d be willing to help you after dinner,” Clem said. “We could meet in the courtyard. It’s nice and quiet there.”

  “I wish,” I said as we wormed our way through a knot of upperclassmen headed in the opposite direction. I caught more than a few elbows to my ribs as we moved through the group, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of my reputation or because I was a Shadow Phoenix. “I have work to do.”

  “You keep saying that, but you’ll never tell me what it is you are working so hard at.” Clem frowned at me. “You know, Eric, Abi, and I could help you with whatever it is. That would give you more free time.”

  “Wish I could, but I can’t,” I sighed. “It’s sort of a work-study thing. I have to do it myself.”

  “That mystery man routine of yours is going to bite you in the butt,” Clem warned me as we exited the cramped hallway and spilled outside with the rest of our class.

  The exercise yard was an enormous open space at the heart of the School. Statues of former students and professors lined the perimeter in watchful silence. The lifelike stone likenesses were separated from one another by decorative topiaries and burbling fountains that hosted songbirds and strange, lizard-like spirits that unfurled lacey wings to flit from one perch to the next.