The streets were dark by the ti he finally made it back. He'd stuck to the alleys, moving slow, keeping to the shadows. Even in the middle ring, this late, there were still pockets of life—drunks, night-shift workers, the occasional patrol. But nobody stopped him.
Nobody even looked twice. He knew what they saw. A short person, perhaps alien, helt and clothes caked in drying blood, walking alone at night? On Lothal, that wasn't a victim. That looked like the type of person who created victims.
He slipped through their side door, the familiar sll of the workshop greeting him. He didn't turn on the lights. Didn't need to. He knew the path to the fresher by heart.
The Gauss pistol landed on the workbench with a heavy thud. The helt and oversized coat followed, hitting the floor in a heap. He left them there.
The fresher light was harsh, unforgiving. He cranked the tap and stuck his hands under the stream. The water ran pink, then clear, swirling around the drain. He cupped his hands and splashed his face, again and again, the cold shock helping to scrape the fuzz from his head. He grabbed a towel, scrubbed roughly at his skin, and finally looked up.
The mirror showed a ss. A kid, yeah, but not a cute one. Not anymore. His eyes were bloodshot, the left one still streaked with a faint, rusty trickle from the corner. A cut on his lip had reopened. His hair was a disaster. He looked exactly like what he was: soone who'd just lost hours of his life and pulverized a man in a back alley.
He leaned on the sink, the cool ceramic a relief against his raw knuckles. What was the point of it all? The months of prep, the hidden weapons, the paranoid fortifications. What good was a Gauss rifle if he was unconscious on a warehouse floor when it mattered? What good was any of it if he couldn't even stop a couple of local garrison thugs?
If he'd been stronger. If his connection to the Force wasn't such a pathetic, sputtering joke. If he could actually do sothing with it besides just feel broken machines and have psychic nosebleeds.
But that was the problem, wasn't it? He'd been grinding for years. The improvents were microscopic. A pebble today, a spoon tomorrow. It was never enough.
He was never enough.
If he was, he wouldn't be here. He'd be tearing through the Planetary Garrison right now. He'd be peeling the place apart until he found her. He wouldn't be waiting for morning like so common thief, hoping a pair of low-level troopers would be dumb enough to give up a secret.
His reflection stared back, hollow and tired. The vision of the twin stars flashed in his mind. That massive, stable sun—Alex. And the small, fractured, bleeding one—what was left of Ezra. A soul not whole, just… pieces. Was that the reason? Did the isekai was not done correct?
For a second, he wanted to curse the idiot who'd stuffed him into this broken body. A lousy, half-finished transmigration job. But what was the point? Cursing doesn't fix a faulty circuit. It doesn't put a soul back together.
He t his own eyes in the glass. The panic was gone. The rage from the alley had burned itself out, leaving sothing colder and harder behind. As much as he hoped to feel regret for what he did, he was far more worried for Vasha to care for what he did to so dipshit drunkard who couldn't control his fucking mouth.
Waiting hadn't worked. Hoping for a sudden breakthrough in Force hadn't worked. Gentle practice and theory were useless.
The thought was cold and clear. If the Force wouldn't give him its secrets, he'd just have to take them. Tear the whole damn thing down to its components. Reverse-engineer the universe.
He pushed away from the sink.
Ti to dissect the Force.
---
He sat down on the floor, not bothering with a cushion. The cold seeped through his pants, but he ignored it. He reopened the gates of Hyper-Perception, pointing the full force of it inward.
The view was familiar. His body, from this perspective, was a galaxy in miniature. A river of Living Force, a radiant energy, flowed through every nook and cranny. And scattered throughout it, a festival of tiny, glowing sprinkles he guessed were the infamous midichlorians.
He'd seen it all two months ago. Nothing new here. He pushed past it, diving deeper, toward the singularity in his head.
There they were. The twin stars of his ego. The solid, unwavering white sun that was Alex, and the chaotic, dispersing blue one that was Ezra. He noticed it imdiately—the blue star was worse than before. More diffuse. Its edges were bleeding taphorical mories out into the void of his mind, fading like smoke.
Is Ezra fading away?
He couldn't be sure. It wasn't like he felt any different. He pushed the thought aside. A problem for later. Right now, he needed to figure out how the Force ticked, and why his own was so out of sync.
He pulled his consciousness back, but not fully. This was the tricky part. He needed to keep one eye on the cosmic lightshow in his mind and the other on the physical reality of his body. Focusing on just one wasn't going to work.
It took him twenty-one tries.
The mind-eye was fickle. The slightest distraction—the creak of the building, the thud of his own heart—and the cosmic vision would snap shut, leaving him with nothing but the familiar hum of his own biology. It made sense. He'd spent years honing Hyper-Perception; this mind-eye thing was a tool he'd barely used. The imbalance in mastery was like asking an ant to arm-wrestle an elephant.
But he had no ti. He couldn't afford to spend years practicing.
So he kept at it, driven by nothing but sheer, stubborn tenacity.
On the twenty-second try, he got it. He held both views at once: the twin stars burning in the void of his mind, and the visionless, radiant color of the Force flowing through his body. It was a fragile, exhausting balance, but he had it.
That was one step. Next ca the harder part.
He fixed his gaze on a cup of water on a nearby crate. He willed it to move, calling on the Force, but this ti he was watching. He tried to track the entire process—the intent forming in his mind, the signal traveling through his body, and the effect on the world outside.
He was overestimating himself. Badly.
Trying to split his focus three ways was a stupidly ambitious idea. The mont he tried to encompass the cup, he felt a violent backlash. The mind-eye was yanked shut, and a spike of pain shot through his head. It was eerily similar to a pinched nerve, only it wasn't in a muscle. It was deep inside his brain.
He tried again. And again.
Each attempt ended the sa way: a spike of pain behind his eyes and the jarring ntal whiplash of his focus collapsing.
He was hitting a wall. Splitting his attention between the cosmic view in his mind and the biological reality of his body was already pushing him to a limit he didn't know he had—a limit that had only been expanded by years of practicing psychotry and Hyper-Perception.
Trying to add a third, external target to the mix wasn't just difficult; it was like trying to cram a third arm onto his body. The system just wasn't built for it.
He finally slumped back, the dull throb in his skull a frustrating reminder of his failure. This wasn't a problem he could solve by hitting it with a bigger hamr. He couldn't always work harder; sotis, he had to work smarter.
He let his gaze drift around the dim workshop, searching for an answer that wasn't inside his own head. His eyes caught on the datapad lying on a nearby table. The screen was still on from the night before, displaying lines of dense code for the mini-droid he'd been working on.
He rembered the headache that project had given him. The tiny fra had so little space for computational hardware, especially after he'd cramd in all the chanical parts. It had thrown him right back into the software developer's personal hell: optimization.
He'd burned brain cells and probably a few ass hairs trying to streamline the code, to make it do more with less. And as he stared at the screen, a thought clicked into place.
Sub-routines. Pre-rendering.
Instead of forcing the droid's tiny processor to render every variable in real-ti, he'd written scripts—pre-programd actions it could execute without thinking.
That could work.
The idea was so simple it was brilliant. Instead of trying to expand his focus to actively sense the cup while moving it, what if he just... ran a script? What if he could pre-program the action based on his own experience?
It was ti to test it out.
He shut down the mind-eye and the internal body scan, the sudden quiet in his head a massive relief. He focused only on the cup. He raised his hand, and the cup lifted, hovering in the air for a mont before he set it back down. Easy.
Next, he grabbed a marker from a shelf and drew a crude circle on the table around the cup's base, outlining its exact position. He repeated the action, lifting the cup and setting it back down perfectly within the circle.
But this ti, he wasn't watching the cup. He was watching himself. He felt for the exact sequence of internal commands, the precise pressure he applied to the Force, the subtle shift in his own energy. The cup wasn't the focus anymore; his own actions were.
It only took a couple of tries. He wasn't reacting to the cup's presence anymore. He was just replaying a specific series of ntal instructions, a program designed to influence the Force in a very specific way, independent of what was actually sitting in that circle.
He ran the program one last ti, his eyes closed.
The cup rose into the air. It was just a byproduct.
A slow smile spread across his face. He was one step closer and the components were in place.
Ti to see the whole, ugly process.
He took a deep breath, nudged the cup squarely into its marker-drawn boundary, and closed his eyes. He split his focus, one part of his awareness sinking into the star-dusted void of his mind, the other diving into the glowing river of the Living Force that was his body. It was a fragile balance, a state he could barely hold. Then, he ran the script.
-----
-----
The pulse of Living Force surged upward, a clean, bright river of raw potential heading straight for my brain. I braced myself, ready to see where the whole damn circuit blew a fuse.
The mont it hit my head, the endless, silent void behind my eyes lit up.
Holy shit.
It wasn't just a flicker. The entire space was flooded with a soft, golden light, like a sunrise happening inside my own skull.
The light wasn't coming from the stars; it was the pulse itself, illuminating everything as it flowed in. I watched, completely awestruck, as the stream of energy—pure, concentrated intent—poured directly into the massive white star. My star. Alex.
The white sun drank it in, and for a heartbeat, it seed to glow even brighter, its surface humming with a power that felt ancient and absolute.
Then, it pulsed. A single, perfect beat. The energy it released wasn't the sa raw flood that had co in. It was refined. Sharpened. A laser-focused beam of pure will, aid directly at the smaller, chaotic blue star.
Ezra's star.
And that's when I saw the failure. In hideous, slow-motion detail.
The concentrated beam hit the blue star, and the whole thing just... bled. The energy didn't flow through it; it tore through it. Light and power leaked out from a thousand different points, fizzling into the void like steam from a busted pipe.
The stream that finally erged from the other side was a ss. It was a jumbled, sputtering, static-filled trickle of what it was supposed to be. The clean signal had been run through a cosmic paper shredder.
I didn't even bother tracking it as it left my body. I knew the cup on the table was probably wobbling an inch into the air. The action was so minor, so pathetic, that even this broken, mangled signal had enough juice to get it done.
But that wasn't the point.
I let the vision fade, the golden light winking out, leaving back in the quiet dark of the workshop. I just sat there on the floor, the reality of it hitting like a physical blow.
I finally knew.
I knew why my Force abilities were so fundantally, hopelessly fucked.
It wasn't his body. It wasn't a low midichlorian count. It wasn't a weak connection to the universe.
It was the faulty link in the chain. The broken piece of a soul he was carrying around. The Ezra part of him was a faulty transforr, burning out and scrambling any real power he tried to push through it.
I stared at his hands, then back at the cup on the ground. I'd solved the puzzle. And the answer was a problem far, far worse than I could have ever imagined.
Because how the fuck do you nd a soul long gone?
---
A/N:
hohoho
I heard people getting frustated at how slow the story seed to be going? Not being an author who listens not to my audience's desires, I took the feedback to heard. The third person POV was my attempt to fasten up the pace instead of going into each nook and crack.
Planted the seed for robber of midichloreans origin in this chapter, and in next, we would move to see where is our dear Vasha, and hopefully make people pay for daring to touch her.
Took quite long to update as life is one busy bitch, so if any of readers had any ailings while waiting, I apologize and hope you get better, and if not, I hope you guys get ailings while waiting jajajaja
Today's update was late but for future updates, I would stick to the previous timing.
And don't forget to vote with stick and stones, because the author likes so pain.
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