The night had taken hold of the forests of Arcadia, enveloping the millennial trees in a cloak of black velvet. At the top of a rocky promontory overlooking the village of the Pack, Sulyvhan was sitting alone, legs crossed, his hands resting flat on his knees. The night wind made his long silver hair dance.

Since the ceremony of passage to adulthood, where he had stunned the Lycans by slicing sacred trees with a simple beam of energy, a question had haunted him. The members of the pack spoke of a "blessing of the Moon," a divine gift granted to their human brother. Sulyvhan, however, could not settle for this mystical explanation. His mind refused to believe that the power came from a star located thousands of kilometers away.

He concentrated on the circulation of his internal energy. Thanks to meditation, he began to perceive his body no longer as a flesh envelope, but as a complex network of channels. He felt the heat of his blood beating against his temples, the constant murmur of his arteries.

The sound of heavy, clawed steps on the stone abruptly pulled him out of his trance. He did not need to open his eyes to recognize the massive aura that was approaching.

"You are still spending your nights training, Sulyvhan?" asked Patriarch Van.

The young man opened his eyes. His silver pupils shone. He watched the colossus with gray fur settle down beside him, the crescent moon on Van’s forehead seeming to pulse in the darkness.

"I am trying to understand how I was able to do... that," replied Sulyvhan, pointing to his sword placed near him.

Van let out a laugh that made his broad ribcage vibrate then stared at him for a long time, his eyes scrutinizing Sulyvhan’s serious face. "Humans are truly strange creatures. You always want to possess what is beyond you. But so be it..." Then Van stood up to leave. "I will leave you then, try not to overdo it."

Sulyvhan nodded his head, then his gaze turned toward the silver star that reigned at the zenith. "I realized something. During the ceremony, it was not the moon that injected energy into me. It was rather from inside me that the energy came out." He raised his right hand and closed his fist, feeling the tension of his tendons. "The power does not reside in the moon but in the blood. The moon allows me to feel this surge..." he thought.

Then he stood up and seized his sword. He immediately plunged back into this state of absolute calm, ignoring the cold and the sounds of the forest. He began to meditate while remaining standing. He sought to voluntarily provoke this surge of energy that he had felt by accident.

Then, reproducing the same movement, he brought down his blade. The steel split the air, but nothing happened. No glow, no beam. Just the ordinary whistle of the metal. Sulyvhan frowned. He tried a second time, then a third, injecting more force, more will. His aura shimmered intermittently, but it refused to stabilize on the edge.

However, the following attempts were just as frustrating. Each sword strike consumed part of his endurance, and after an hour of unsuccessful efforts, his arms began to tremble. Frustration rose in him, threatening to break his concentration.

"Calm down," he scolded himself.

He closed his eyes again, ignoring everything around him. This time, he did not seek to strike. He simply felt. He listened to the flow of his pure physical energy, this dense silver aura that he had felt during the ceremony, he wanted to reproduce the same effect.

Suddenly, he felt a peak of heat at the level of the solar plexus. This sensation did not resemble a diffuse heat at all, it was a real localized explosion. The surge of energy arrived with unexpected brutality, perfectly synchronized with a particularly powerful heartbeat that resonated in his chest. His eyes opened abruptly. His silver pupils widened.

With no apparent effort, with a gesture of disarming fluidity, he swept the air in front of him. His right hand, still numb from the efforts he had gone through a few moments earlier, executed the movement with surgical precision.

This time, the result was instantaneous and of a formidable effectiveness. A silver blade of energy, finer and brighter than the one he had involuntarily projected during the initiation ceremony, burst from the steel of his sword with a blinding flash. It crossed the space in absolute silence, producing not the slightest whistle, not the slightest crack.

Twenty meters away, a massive granite boulder was cleanly sectioned. The upper part of this block of stone, which nevertheless weighed several tons, slid without the slightest resistance along the cutting plane, as if it had been sliced by a divine hand. It tilted slowly, almost elegantly, before collapsing to the ground in a deathly silence that preceded by a few seconds the deafening crash of the impact. The cut was of surgical perfection.

Sulyvhan calmly sheathed his sword, although his hand still trembled slightly under the aftermath of the martial ecstasy that had overwhelmed him. He still felt vibrating in his fingers the echo of this devastating power. His breathing, which had accelerated despite himself during the energy explosion, had become regular again in a few seconds, proof of his rigorous training and his ability to control himself.

Silence fell again on the plateau of the Rock, this place where he came to meditate and train every day. The silver glow that bathed the rocks seemed to have gained in intensity.

Sulyvhan resumed his place, sitting in lotus position on a slightly raised rocky outcrop, and closed his eyes, beginning a new session of deep meditation. He knew, with an absolute certainty that left no room for doubt, that he had just crossed a crucial step in his learning. He no longer contented himself with using a technique inherited from his masters; he was now going to begin forging his own understanding of the art of the sword, to develop a style that would be his own, a martial path that, he was convinced, would one day shake the foundations of this world.