They found the first mana scar two days out.

  No signs marked the place. No fences. No warnings. Just a low depression in the earth, maybe thirty feet across, where the grass gave up trying to grow and the air got heavy enough to notice.

  The crater was shallow — like the land had exhaled hard once and never breathed back in. Around its edge, trees leaned unnaturally inward, their trunks twisted in slow spirals. The leaves hung motionless. Even the wind seemed reluctant to pass through.

  Caelum stepped closer, drawn by something he didn’t have a word for. His fingers tightened around his staff as his boots crunched dead soil. It felt... wrong. But not dangerous. More like walking into a room where someone had just left — and the silence hadn't figured out how to settle yet.

  Jonas stood a few paces back, arms crossed. “You ever think maybe things go quiet out here because we’re not supposed to be in it?”

  “You’re not supposed to be in a lot of places,” Caelum muttered, crouching near the edge of the crater.

  The earth there was gray and brittle. Beneath the surface, faint veins of light flickered—dim threads pulsing softly, like something half-asleep under his feet.

  Orrin didn’t speak. He simply stood still, head tilted slightly, as though listening to something beneath the surface.

  Caelum reached out, brushing his hand against the soil.

  And the world breathed.

  Not air. Not wind. Just pressure — soft and massive, like the weight of deep water or a heartbeat too large to belong to anything living. It passed through his fingers, then into his wrist, up his arm, into his chest. For one moment, he felt everything around him shift, as if the distance between his skin and the ground had shortened. The space inside him stretched.

  There was no sound. No voice. But something had noticed him.

  And something inside him had noticed it back.

  He drew his hand away fast, heart racing. His breath came shorter than before, not out of panic — but adjustment. Like his body was rewriting the idea of how it was supposed to feel.

  He looked at the crater again. The lights had dimmed. Or maybe he just saw them differently now.

  Jonas was watching him. “You alright?”

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  “I think so,” Caelum said. “I... heard something. Or felt it.”

  “You touched dirt and got poetic. Good to know your training’s holding up.”

  But Jonas didn’t say it with his usual bite. There was something quieter in it. Maybe concern. Maybe confusion. Maybe a little fear.

  They moved on without fanfare. Orrin lingered at the edge for a few extra seconds before whispering something Caelum couldn’t catch. It didn’t sound like a spell.

  It sounded like thanks.

  You have touched a Leyscar.

  Passive awakened: Mana Sensory (Dormant).

  Trait forming: Ley-Touched I.

  → You are beginning to perceive ambient mana through instinct rather than training. Your body is adjusting to leyline resonance.

  That night, they made camp near a stream overgrown with reeds. Caelum gathered wood, Jonas dug a shallow fire pit, and Orrin watched the clouds like they were spelling out riddles.

  The firelight danced low and steady. Caelum sat closer than usual, his fingers tracing idle lines in the dirt.

  Something in his senses had changed. He could feel things now — tiny shifts in heat, faint buzzing in the air when the wind passed through a tree the wrong way. His breath felt deeper, but not his own. Like he was sharing it with the land around him.

  He wasn’t sure if it was good. Only that it was real.

  “Still brooding?” Jonas asked, breaking the silence.

  “I’m not brooding.”

  “Then you’re smoldering. Quiet version of brooding.”

  Caelum sighed. “I felt something today. In that place. Like the land saw me back.”

  Jonas poked the fire with a stick. “That’s not comforting.”

  “I don’t think it was meant to be.”

  Orrin finally spoke from the other side of the fire, voice soft. “Ley-scars don’t forget easily. They’re not wounds. They’re memories that haven’t finished echoing.”

  Caelum looked up. “I didn’t cast anything. I didn’t do anything.”

  “You don’t have to,” Orrin replied. “The world already knows what you are.”

  Passive evolving: Mana Sensory → Active Sensory Thread (Unstable).

  Emotional anchor established.

  Ley-Touched I: Confirmed.

  → You are now sensitive to fluctuations in local mana currents and natural leyline drift. Strong surges may cause physical reactions.

  He didn’t sleep that night. Not fully. His dreams were full of light threading through cracked stone, of wind that spoke in patterns, of pressure behind his eyes like something waiting for permission to enter.

  He woke just before dawn. The campfire had burned down. Orrin was already awake, of course — sitting with his eyes half-closed, whispering to his staff like it was scolding him for something.

  “Your pulse changed,” Orrin said without opening his eyes.

  Caelum sat up. “You could tell?”

  “I didn’t need to,” Orrin said. “The ground told me.”

  He tossed something to Caelum — a small charm, copper bound in dry root. “Carry it. It won’t protect you, but it might teach you how to listen faster.”

  Caelum nodded, slipping it into the inside of his cloak. He didn’t ask what it did.

  He already felt it warming against his chest.

  Minor Resonance established.

  Progression unlocked: Path of Breath (Attuned).

  → Your affinity with natural mana has slightly deepened. Sensory intuition, breathing patterns, and thought rhythm are now subtly influenced by nearby leyline energy.

  By midday, the road was gone, replaced by broken stone and creeping moss. The trees had grown taller, stranger. The air tasted sharp — not bitter, not sweet, just unfamiliar.

  And the world was watching.

  Caelum didn’t know how he knew that. But he did.