Chapter 76: Advancement Mechanics

Jorg released his hand. “How? He’s been unconscious for two days.”

Yime’s eyes narrowed. “That fight he had with the unknown third party, it probably activated something.”

Yime spoke guessing that the rage element of his Ashe had been touched upon after the fight against Zack York which she still had not seen to link him to the guy that wanted the book at the Night Market.

“You said he had been given a Sub-route by the deep, right?” She turned her head to look at Jorg who was still bewildered “Most practitioners spend months if not years searching. He didn’t have to search. It was forced on him”

Jorg stared at Makun’s bandaged face. “You are correct.”

Advancement through the Initiate grades followed a clear pattern. At first grade, information lodged itself in the practitioner’s mind, directing them to examine and understand the mechanics of their route.

Makun had received information on the mechanics of his body and how to use it effectively in combat.

To move from first grade to second grade, He had to comprehend the formula: Ashe + Will + Comprehension, which happened after Jorg display of power in the arena.

The leap from second to third grade required something deeper: an inclination toward one’s sub-route.

Most practitioners had no idea what their sub-route was at this stage; discovering it could take months or years of trial, failure, and insight.

Makun, however, was different. He had bottled up so much rage over twenty-three years that the Deep recognized it the moment he initiated.

He had been assigned the Berserk sub-route from the very beginning. While others searched, Makun’s path had already been carved.

But what bothered Jorg was not the fact that Makun moved from second to third grade. He had expected such a result, Not so fast but still fast.

From his Initiation they all knew his subroute, so defining a lens was easy for him.

What bothered him was the fact that Makun was close to being an Apprentice.

Moving from third-grade Initiate to Apprentice was not simply a matter of accumulating more Ashe or refining one’s Will. It was a fundamental transformation of the Ashe itself.

At the Initiate stage, a practitioner’s Ashe carried the generic imprint of their route but to become an Apprentice, a practitioner had to transform their Ashe to reflect their sub-route.

The generic foundation had to be rewritten, atom by atom, with the specific comprehension of their refined path.

This was not accumulation. This was conversion.

Jorg knew this better than most. When he had been a third-grade Initiate on the Warrior route, his Ashe had been straightforward: density, impact, reinforcement. But his sub-route was the Graviton Sovereign, and gravity operated on principles foreign to raw force.

He had to comprehend how to infuse his Ashe with gravitational properties, encoding attraction, repulsion, and mass distortion into the information his Ashe carried.

Every atom he imprinted had to pulse with the weight of his understanding. It was not enough to know gravity existed; he had to make his Ashe become gravity, reshaping reality not through brute strength but through the inevitable pull and push of mass and space.

This was why most practitioners stalled at third grade for years.

They knew their sub-route intellectually, but comprehension was not belief or theory.

It was internalization so deep that their Ashe itself transformed.

For Makun, the challenge would be even more dangerous. The Berserk sub-route demanded that his Ashe carry chaos, entropy, and destruction as fundamental properties.

He would have to encode madness into his energy and remain sane enough to control it. If he failed, his Ashe would devour him from the inside.

If he succeeded, he would become something few practitioners ever survived becoming.

Yime looked around, bathing in the madness that was exerted from Makun. “He’s already started,” she said quietly. “His Ashe is converting. He started the conversion during the fight.” She circulated her own energy, testing the air.

The chaotic residue wasn’t just raw anymore. It had intent. Destruction wasn’t a byproduct of his Ashe. It was becoming the Ashe itself.

“He’s encoding chaos into his energy while unconscious. His body is doing the work his mind can’t.”

Jorg felt it too. The pressure in the room wasn’t just oppressive; it was destructive. It wanted to break things down, to dissolve structure into formless ruin.

Makun wasn’t consciously guiding the transformation, but the Deep had already given him the blueprint.

His Route Core was processing the information from the Veil breach, from the entities he’d fought, from the rage he’d unleashed against Zack. His Ashe was learning. And if he woke up before he finished internalizing it, the madness might consume him.

Yime understood it, which is why she who planned to originally wake him up decided to come back later.

However they needed him up in at most two days.

“We are done here, Take me to the person he killed.” She walked out of the room waiting for Jorg to come out.

As such, Jorg and Yime departed from the mortuary.

The mortuary occupied the basement level of the VEB headquarters, accessible only through a steel door at the end of a narrow stairwell.

Jorg and Yime had reached to meet an old man, thin and pale, with skin like waxed paper stretched over bone. His name was Silas, and he had been with the VEB longer than anyone could remember.

He was the one in control of the Mortuary and being exposed to such Energy for a long while altered his constitution.

“This way,” Silas said, his voice dry and papery. He stopped in front of a sealed metal drawer near the back wall and placed a bony hand on the latch. “This body came in two days ago. No identification on him, but his Route Core was missing.” He glanced at Yime. “You’ll want to see what’s left.”

Silas slowly pulled the drawer, metal scraping against metal.

The body inside was cold and pale, the skin taking on a faint bluish tint under the preservation charms.

Wounds covered him from head to toe: bruised ribs, torn flesh along his forearms, deep lacerations across his abdomen.

One arm was missing, the other mangled, the skin discolored and swollen, black veins bulging beneath the surface as if his Ashe had turned against him. But it was his chest that told the real story.

A ragged hole gaped where his heart should have been, the edges of the wound rough and uneven, as if something had been ripped out by force.

When they reached his head, Yime’s eyes widened slightly.

“Zack York”

Jorg looked at her, surprised she knew him.

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