Chapter 135: Source Code

“I know how to do it,” Vanessa said, her voice cutting through the quiet of the workshop.

Jonah looked up from the rack of empty vials, his thoughts still tangled in the fear of being copied. “Do what?”

“Find the nature of your power,” she said, her eyes bright and focused. It was the same look she’d had when she was solving the puzzle of the surveillance runes in the Dragon’s Tooth. “To track the Bureau’s work, we need a unique signature in your power that we can scan for. A magical fingerprint.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay. That makes sense.”

“But it can’t be a fingerprint of you now,” she continued, already pacing. “Your power has evolved, you’ve absorbed other essences. It’s too complicated. The Bureau is working with a raw sample. To find what they’re looking for, we need to look at the same thing they are.”

She stopped and turned to him, her expression dead serious. “We need the original data from your Awakening.”

Jonah’s heart gave a sudden, hard thump. This was the data from the day his life had been shattered and remade. The Academy officially called it a catastrophic event, meaning no one was ever supposed to see it.

“That file is sealed, Vanessa,” he said. “It’s one of the most classified records in the Academy. They said the energy overload was… unstable.”

“Exactly!” she exclaimed, a triumphant grin spreading across her face. “Unstable is unique! Unstable is a fingerprint nobody else has. We need it.”

Getting access was easier than Jonah expected. An encrypted message to the Headmaster, explaining Vanessa’s theory, was all it took. The reply came less than five minutes later. There were no questions, no arguments. Just a string of clearance codes and a simple, two-word message: Find them.

The Headmaster was all in. He was betting everything on them. The weight of that trust was both a comfort and a crushing burden.

A moment later, a secure data port on Vanessa’s main console chimed. Ping.

The file was theirs.

“Okay,” Vanessa said, taking a deep breath and rolling her shoulders like a duelist preparing for a match. “Here we go.”

She accepted the data transfer.

The massive screen on the workshop wall, which had been displaying a rotating map of the city, suddenly became a nightmare. It was a swirling, violent storm of data, with jagged lines, screaming numbers, and flashing errors. It was absolute chaos.

“Whoa,” Jonah breathed, taking a step back without meaning to. That… that was him? That was the energy that had burst from him when he touched the Pillar? It looked less like an Awakening and more like the end of the world.

“This is… a mess,” The chaos didn’t bother her at all; instead, her face showed intense curiosity. “Okay, let’s clean this up.”

Her fingers moved fast over her console. Click-tap-swoosh.

One by one, she placed glowing, hexagonal runes onto the storm. They acted like filters, each one calming a layer of the static, organizing the raw numbers into something that could be read. The violent, screaming static on the screen slowly calmed, the visual noise dialed down until they could see the patterns hidden beneath.

After a full hour of working with the data, Vanessa had turned the chaos into two clear, separate energy signatures.

“Okay, got it,” she said, her voice tight with focus. She pointed to the first pattern on the left side of the screen. It was a complex web of interlocking energy, looking like a spider’s web made of lightning. Yet, Jonah could spot tiny flickers, small instabilities where the energy lines seemed to weaken.

“This,” Vanessa said, tapping the screen, “is the signature of the Divine Serum. It’s from a sample held in the Pillar’s reserve chamber. It’s exactly what the Headmaster described: powerful, but imperfect. A flawed copy.”

Then, she pointed to the right side of the screen.

The second signature was different.

This was neither a web nor a storm. It was a pure, blindingly powerful core of light. Perfectly smooth and stable. it burned with the clean intensity of a newborn star. It was a simpler signature than the serum’s, yet a thousand times more powerful.

Jonah stared at it, feeling a strange sense of recognition. It felt… familiar. Like looking at a true reflection of himself for the first time.

Vanessa was silent. She just stared at the two patterns side-by-side on the screen, her mouth slightly opened. She zoomed in, then zoomed out. She ran the diagnostic again. And again. The results were always the same.

The pattern of the serum. The pattern of the energy that had flowed into Jonah.

The patterns were nothing alike.

“No…” she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. “That can’t be right. The logs must be corrupted.” She ran the filter sequence again, her movements frantic now.

The result was the same.

She leaned back in her chair, her eyes wide with a disbelief so profound it looked like shock. She stared at the screen, then slowly, mechanically, turned her head to look at Jonah.

“The Headmaster was wrong,” she said. Her voice was a soft whisper. Almost too quiet to hear.

Jonah’s heart beat hard. “What are you talking about?”

“Everyone was wrong,” she continued, her eyes locked on his, seeing him in a way she never had before.

She took a shaky breath. The solution to a year-long puzzle suddenly became clear in her mind, completely changing her understanding.

“The injection system,” she said, her voice shaking with the weight of the discovery. “It never fired. The Pillar never gave you the serum.”

She pointed a trembling finger at the glowing, stellar signature on the right side of the screen.

“It scanned you, and your own power resonated back, causing a feedback loop that shattered it.”

She stood up, her eyes wide with a mixture of awe and terror. She was starting to grasp a truth that changed everything.

“It was all you, Jonah,” she whispered.

“It was all you from the very beginning.”

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