Chapter 2: Zero-Mark Trash? No, Root Administrator

　　For three full seconds after my blood coated the ancient sphere, the main hall of the Ashbourne estate was quieter than a flooded crypt.

　　Standard imperial testing orbs were loud, flashy things. Give them a drop of noble blood, and they'd shoot pillars of crimson fire toward the ceiling, chime like cathedral bells, or project phantom crests of whatever magical beast your great-great-grandfather had merged with.

　　Specimen Zero-Nine did none of that.

　　My hot, crimson blood trickled down its dull gray curves, pooling on High Inquisitor Vist's immaculate velvet cushion. There was no orange flare like Lother's Flame Hound mark. No icy blue frost, no golden royal lightning. The stone just sat there like a wet cobblestone pulled from a ditch.

　　"Wait for it..." Lother whispered, leaning forward on the balls of his feet, his eyes practically bulging out of his skull with glee. "Wait for it..."

　　Five seconds. Ten seconds.

　　Nothing. Not even a static spark.

　　Then, a tiny, pathetic puff of gray dust—just old sediment shaken loose from the sphere's surface—drifted up and settled onto my cuff.

　　Lother didn't just laugh; he howled. He slapped his thigh, doubling over so hard his white mink cloak dragged in the mud tracked in by the guards.

　　"Zero!" Lother shrieked, pointing a trembling, jewel-encrusted finger right at my nose. "Not even a First-Tier peasant spark! Not even an Iron-Skin or a Weed-Grower mark! Look at it, Evelina! Look at the great second son of the Ashbourne Dukedom! A completely blank slate! A Zero-Mark atavism!"

　　Beside him, Lady Evelina let out a high, theatrical gasp behind her feathered fan, stepping back as if my lack of magic might be contagious. "Merciful heavens... a pure, unmarked human? I thought the last of those died out in the quarantine slums four centuries ago. Lother, darling, don't stand so close to him. The doctors in the capital say Markless blood carries congenital rot."

　　"Congenital rot?" Lother sneered, striding right up to me until his glowing orange chest-plate was six inches from my chin. The artificial heat of his Flame Hound mark radiated against my skin like an open oven door. "You hear that, carpenter? You aren't even a fallen noble. You're a biological fossil. An evolutionary dead end! And to think my father actually worried House Ashbourne might field another warrior like Julian!"

　　I stood perfectly still, my bleeding right palm still resting atop the gray sphere.

　　Internally, I wasn't even listening to Lother's monologue. I was too busy doing crisis management calculations at three hundred miles an hour.

　　Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the real danger in the room.

　　It wasn't the twelve heavily armored Inquest knights. It was my family.

　　By the fireplace, Father was no longer leaning on the mantelpiece—because the solid marble beneath his left hand had quietly turned into fine white powder, sifting between his pale fingers like flour. Behind his dark smoked-glass spectacles, two pinpricks of terrifying, abyssal crimson were burning bright enough to bleed through the tinted lenses.

　　On the stairs, Julian's jaw was clenched so hard a trickle of actual liquid fire dribbled from the corner of his mouth, sizzling as it hit his cravat. Grandma Irma had stopped pretending to breathe entirely; the air within three feet of her black lace shawl had frosted over, turning the potted fern beside her into solid, brittle ice. And Mother's fingers were resting on the silver pins of her silk veil, ready to rip the fabric off and turn every breathing thing in a fifty-foot cone into garden statues.

　　Hold it together, people! I screamed mentally, flashing my family a frantic, subtle hand-signal behind my back—two taps of my left pinky against my wrench, our household code for Stay in the parlor, the plumber is here. If you all have a simultaneous nervous breakdown because I failed a test, Vist will have you locked in an infirmary prison!

　　While I was busy signaling my parents not to die of high blood pressure, a tiny blur of pink frills darted across the floor.

　　"Milo isn't rot!" my twelve-year-old sister Mimi cried out, her voice trembling with Oscar-worthy tears.

　　She ran forward, tripped dramatically over her own hem, and pitched face-first toward Lother's feet.

　　"Ugh! Keep that filthy little brat off my—" Lother started, kicking his right leg back.

　　He wasn't fast enough. As Mimi "fell," she hugged Lother's calf with both arms to break her fall. Hidden entirely beneath the wide brim of her pink bonnet, her jaw unhinged with a silent, terrifyingly smooth mechanical click.

　　Crunch.

　　It sounded like someone stepping on a dry walnut. In less than a fifth of a second, Mimi's teeth sheared cleanly through the enchanted mythril setting on the side of Lother's dragon-hide boot, bit the priceless Fifth-Tier Flame-Ruby mana core straight out of the leather, and swallowed it whole.

　　Lother yanked his leg back, glaring down as Mimi sat on the floor, rubbing her knee and sniffing pitifully.

　　"Clumsy little beggar!" Lother barked, glancing down at his boot. He felt a sudden draft near his ankle where a three-inch chunk of mythril plating and a fifty-thousand-gold gemstone used to be. His father had bought that stone at auction precisely because a Third-Tier bloodline needed a Fifth-Tier boot. In the dim light, all Lother noticed was a wet smudge on the leather. "Did you just drool on my custom riding boots?!"

　　"I slipped," Mimi whimpered, looking up with huge, watery eyes while suppressing a tiny, metallic hiccup that smelled faintly of digested ruby dust. "The floor is very slippery when big, loud dogs bark in the house."

　　"Why, you little—" Lother raised his hand, orange flames licking around his knuckles.

　　I stepped sideways, sliding my boot squarely between Lother's shin and my sister, while casually flicking a smear of my own blood off my thumb—straight onto the spotless white collar of Lother's mink cloak.

　　"Careful, Lord Lother," I said smoothly, looking down at his flaming fist with deadpan calm. "That's congenital rot on your fur. Wouldn't want it soaking into your skin. I hear it makes your hair fall out."

　　Lother shrieked like a scalded cat, frantically clawing at his cloak and tossing the three-thousand-gold fur onto the muddy floorboards as if it were a live grenade.

　　"Enough," High Inquisitor Vist said.

　　He hadn't laughed once. Throughout Lother's entire tantrum, the fifty-year-old Inquisitor had been staring straight down at Specimen Zero-Nine.

　　His porcelain face was still smooth and polite, but his chest was rising and falling too fast—producing a faint, rhythmic whir-click, whir-click deep behind his ribs that only someone who spent his life fixing rusted clockwork could hear.

　　The silver manacles his guards had brought sat forgotten on the floor. He hadn't ordered the search of my family. He hadn't even blinked at the fact that I'd opened my own palm instead of letting his surgeon take my wrist. Whatever Vist had come here expecting to find, he had found something better.

　　"A Zero-Mark atavism," Vist whispered, and for the first time, his silky voice cracked with raw, undisguised greed. "Four hundred years we have combed the registries. Four hundred years of breeding dilutions, and not a single uncorrupted baseline specimen survived the purge... until tonight."

　　Wait. Uncorrupted baseline specimen?

　　I frowned slightly. Usually, when imperial officials found someone with a weak mark, they just taxed them double and threw them into the logistics corps. Why was the High Inquisitor looking at me like I was a walking gold mine?

　　I started to pull my hand back. The gray crystal beneath my palm went freezing cold.

　　No—it wasn't cold. It was absorbing heat.

　　Every single drop of my blood that had pooled on the velvet cushion suddenly defied gravity, snapping upward and flowing straight into the microscopic geometric grooves etched across the sphere's surface.

　　Clack.

　　A sound echoed through the hall. It wasn't magic. It was the unmistakable, precision-engineered sound of a four-hundred-year-old internal deadbolt sliding open.

　　High Inquisitor Vist gasped, stumbling half a step back, nearly dropping the cushion. "It's waking up! Guards! Lower your pikes!"

　　The dull gray stone coating the outside of the orb cracked down the middle and flaked away like dried mud. Beneath it was no rough mineral, but a breathtaking sphere of flawless, mirror-bright platinum glass, housing forty concentric rings of spinning brass gears and pure white light.

　　Four stubby, articulated legs made of brushed mythril popped out of the underside of the sphere with a sharp snick-snick-snick.

　　"A mechanical construct?!" Julian blurted out from the stairs, momentarily forgetting to breathe smoke.

　　"Step back from the relic, boy!" Vist commanded sharply, his porcelain hand reaching into his robes as his guards leveled their rune-spears at my chest. "That is Specimen Zero-Nine, property of the Sacred Court! It reacts violently to unindexed anomalies—!"

　　Vist didn't get to finish his sentence.

　　The awakened crystal sphere—Peb, according to the tiny builder's serial stamp I could suddenly read on its underside—spun its central optical lens toward Vist. A beam of clinical white light swept over the High Inquisitor from head to toe, then swept over Lother, Evelina, and the twelve armored knights.

　　The orb made a sound like someone clearing their throat in disgust. Bzzzt.

　　Then, the crystal sphere turned around on its four little metal legs, toddled across the velvet cushion, and dropped flat onto its belly directly in front of my bled-out palm—pressing its polished crown against my knuckles in what looked unmistakably like a dog begging its master for a pat on the head.

　　A second later, a crisp, resonant voice vibrated directly up the bones of my arm, bypassing the air entirely so that only the person whose blood was inside the core could hear it:

　　[Genetic Verification Complete: 0.00% Foreign Lineage Contamination.]

　　[Divine Shackle Status: NONE. Pure Human Baseline Confirmed.]

　　[Welcome back to the network, Root Administrator of the First Academy. Unit PEB-09 reporting for duty after 146,092 days of standby.]

　　I blinked, staring down at the trembling little crystal ball nuzzling my lacerated palm.

　　Root Administrator? Divine Shackle?

　　My eyes narrowed as a translucent, sapphire-blue blueprint projected itself directly across my retinas—visible only to me. Arrows and crisp, ancient craftsman's annotations popped up over every marked signature in the room.

　　Above Lother's glowing orange chest, a floating label read:

　　[Target: Sub-Species Chimera #8841. Equipped with: Standardized Tier-3 'Flame-Hound' Bio-Limiter (Colloquial Name: Godmark). Status: Leashed. Output capped at 12% to prevent rebellion against Human Creators.]

　　My jaw nearly dropped.

　　A bio-limiter?!

　　I whipped my head toward the twelve elite Inquest knights. Every single one of their gleaming "Godmarks"—the sacred blessings of the Radiant Empire that gave nobles the right to rule—was labeled on my blueprint as a [Mass-Produced Servitude Collar: Model IV].

　　The Godmarks weren't gifts from the gods.

　　Four hundred years ago, my pure-human ancestors at the First Academy hadn't gone extinct because they were weak. They were the ones who built the system! They had engineered the Godmarks as biological leashes to cap and control the magical species of the world—and somebody had hijacked their central server and rewritten history to call the leashes "divine blessings"!

　　I turned my head toward the fireplace.

　　The blueprint stuttered.

　　Over Father's chest, the neat white text dissolved into a smear of static, then resolved into three cold, flat words:

　　[Unindexed. Pre-Limiter Lineage. Access Denied.]

　　The same three words hung over Mother's veil, over Julian's shoulders, over Grandma's chair. Four hundred years of imperial registry, every noble bloodline in the empire catalogued down to the last diluted drop—and the system had no file on my family at all.

　　It's a glitch, I told myself, and my stomach tightened anyway. They're sick. That's all. The scanner's just confused by the anemia.

　　And right now, standing in my foyer, the little crystal orb vibrating against my fingers chimed with a cheerful, terrifyingly polite follow-up prompt in my skull:

　　[Warning: Multiple unauthorized leash-holders and one stolen First Academy prototype detected in your immediate vicinity, Administrator Milo.]

　　[Would you like me to unlock the First-Year 'Lawbreaker' Toolkit and dismantle their collars?]

　　Before I could even process that, High Inquisitor Vist's voice rang out across the hall—not with anger, but with chilling, fanatical triumph.

　　"Lock the doors!" Vist barked, his eyes fixed hungrily on the glowing white orb nestled against my hand. "Only a living Pure Human can open the biometric seals of the First Academy! We've found our live key!"

　　Vist flicked his wrist toward the twelve armored knights.

　　"Kill the rest of the Ashbourne family on the spot," the High Inquisitor ordered pleasantly, reaching into his white robes to pull out a pulsing, blood-red pillar of braided copper and bone—a portable Sub-Node of the Capital Mother-Engine. "And as for the boy... sever his arms and legs at the joints so he cannot run. A key doesn't need limbs to turn a lock!"

　　Behind me, the last thread of my family's eighteen-year masquerade snapped in absolute, dead silence.