Chapter 10
The Siphon's Toll
Forty-eight hours until the Reclamation Protocol erased his name from the Academy rolls. Less than ten minutes until the audit team breached the maintenance tunnel bulkhead. Kaelen braced one palm against the humming conduit casing, the other clutching the brass-bound ledger whose pages now bled violet light. His core felt like cracked porcelain—every pulse of the Vein-Siphon technique ground bone against bone. The experimental catalyst had bought him D-Rank; it was now collecting the interest in blood.
He forced his circulation to match the conduit’s rhythm and pulled. Not the thin ambient trickle most students begged for, but the high-pressure reserve feed itself. The ledger confirmed the signature: High-Value Reserve Alpha. Private. Shielded. Elder Sola’s personal vault.
The same vault that had bankrolled Vane’s stabilizers, his ranked duels, his false meteoric climb.
Kaelen’s lips peeled back. He had exposed the Academy’s student-harvesting grid to every hall and sector screen. He had broken Vane in front of witnesses. Yet the true parasite still sat above the board, untouched—until now.
The bulkhead rang like a struck bell. Kinetic dampeners chewed metal. Kaelen reversed the ledger’s bypass, not to hide the drain but to spike demand on Sola’s reserve. He fed Vane’s old authority signature into the loop—forged, amplified, ravenous. The conduit shrieked. Pressure surged backward through hidden piping.
Somewhere above, in private chambers lined with jade and black iron, Elder Sola’s vault would begin to hemorrhage.
Footsteps scraped behind him.
Vane staggered into the flickering emergency light. No pristine robes, no manicured poise. Just torn fabric, bloodshot eyes, and the raw tremor of withdrawal. The man who had once bought every advantage now looked like something the system had already discarded.
“You think you’ve won,” Vane rasped. “You’ve only sped up the axe. They’ll burn us both to keep the ledger quiet.”
Kaelen kept his eyes on the diagnostic stream. “They were already going to burn me. You were just the kindling they fed me.”
Vane laughed once, bitter and cracked. “You still don’t see it. Every drop I took came from his table. I was the display piece. You’re the new toy he wants broken before the audit finishes its report.”
The tunnel shuddered. Conduit lights strobed. Kaelen felt the feedback hit his own channels—a white-hot nail driven through his sternum—but he held the connection. The ledger’s violet deepened to near-black. Sola’s reserve signature flickered: Integrity compromised. 73% → 41%.
Alarms wailed sector-wide. Power gutters dimmed in distant halls. Students would feel it first—the sudden starvation of essence in their cultivation chambers, the faltering arrays, the panic in auction pits.
Vane lunged, clumsy, desperate. Kaelen sidestepped, let momentum carry the taller man into the conduit wall. Metal hissed where Vane’s palm struck live current. He jerked back, cursing, fingers smoking.
“Stay down,” Kaelen said. “Or the next surge takes your heart instead of your pride.”
Vane slid to one knee, chest heaving. “You’ll kill us all.”
“No,” Kaelen answered. “I’ll make them choose.”
He slammed the ledger shut. The conduit screamed one final note, then fell silent as emergency breakers snapped. Darkness swallowed the tunnel except for the ledger’s dying glow.
Above them the Academy grid buckled. A sector-wide energy shortage rolled outward—lights failing, arrays collapsing, bids freezing mid-auction. The hierarchy built on harvested vitality began to starve.
Kaelen pushed off the wall and moved deeper into the service maze, pulse thundering. Behind him Vane stayed on his knees, staring at nothing.
Elder Sola would come for the ledger now. Not to punish a student, but to save his own vault before the entire market realized how much had already been stolen.
Kaelen tightened his grip on the brass. Forty-seven hours, fifty-eight minutes. The ladder hadn’t just shifted. It was falling—and he intended to ride the collapse all the way to the top.