I woke up because a rat was chewing on my boot. Or rather, the scraps of leather Zeno stubbornly referred to as footwear. I cracked one eye open and, with a precise flick of my other foot, kicked the rodent. A sharp squeak, a tumble through the dust, and the rat vanished.
I tried to sit up, a groan escaping through my teeth. Dammit... The burn on my right palm had scabbed over during the night, leaving a nasty yellow-red crust. It cracked with every movement, oozing plasma. My fingers were swollen and useless.
Lesson one, idiot, I thought, staring at the ruin of my hand. Your new body is a conductor with terrible resistance. Insulation? Forget it. Run too many amperes through the system, and the wiring melts.
Zeno sat by the door with his back to me, sharpening a hunting knife against a gray whetstone. Shhh-shhh. Shhh-shhh.
"Alive?" the old man rasped without turning around. "I've seen failures. I've seen geniuses. But madness like that? Never. Don't do that again. Understand?"
I croaked out a response as I hauled myself up, bracing against the freezing wall. It helped a little.
"What difference does it make if it worked? Goal achieved."
"The difference, boy..." Zeno set the stone aside, ran his thumb along the blade, and finally turned around. "Mana isn't firewood for a stove. It's your blood, just outside the vessels. Today, the task is harder. Two sparks. Right and left. Separately."
I inhaled the stale air of the shack—a mixture of herbs, ash, and mouse droppings. Two points. Excellent.
I closed my eyes. A coordinate grid immediately surfaced in my mind, mapping out a three-dimensional space. Left was point (-1,0,0). Right was point (1,0,0). If I created two independent sources of mana oscillation, what would happen? The waves would travel toward each other. Interference. If the phases aligned, the energy would double. If they didn't—annihilation, or a resonance so violent it would smear me across the floor.
"And don't you dare try what you did yesterday," Zeno interrupted my calculations. "Listen to the mana. Don't force it with brute strength. Just guide it."
I nodded.
"The Will to Live..." I whispered mentally.
A low hum vibrated in my mind. My brain, overclocked by the skill, began to scan my surroundings. My perception sharpened to a razor's edge: I could hear my own heartbeat, the creak of the ceiling joist, the pulsing of blood in my burned hand.
I started slow. Right hand. I knew this pathway, but this time I did everything differently. I didn't compress the particles; I didn't artificially accelerate them. I listened to Zeno. I imagined a reservoir in my chest and opened the mental floodgate, letting the energy flow on its own terms.
My skin prickled. A bluish haze materialized almost instantly. The pain from the burn dulled slightly beneath the layer of energy.
Now, the left...
And then, absolute hell broke loose. It was utterly impossible. It felt like trying to write poetry with one hand while solving differential equations with the other. My focus fractured. The processor in this fragile body began to overheat.
I could physically feel the energy splitting inside me into two heavy torrents. The millisecond I pushed it into my left hand, the spark in my right began to die. If I switched my focus back to the right, my left palm went dead.
"Hold it! Separate the streams!" Zeno was already standing over me. "Don't compress it, boy! Loosen your grip! Just let them flow!"
Easy for him to say. I gritted my teeth. Sweat poured into my eyes, stinging with salt. I felt an intense pressure in my forearms—a viscous, pulsing weight. It felt as though my veins were about to burst. My mind frantically calculated the balance, searching for the equilibrium point, but my biology was failing me. The muscles in my back locked up in a spasm. My breathing devolved into ragged chaos.
Finally, a faint, pathetic glint appeared in my left hand. Two sparks. Blue on the right, pale blue on the left. There. I had split the stream.
But maintaining it was another story. The energy began to shudder, causing violent spasms in my channels. Control was slipping away. My brain was sending the correct commands, but the body simply refused to execute them.
"I can't..." I rasped. The capillaries in my eyes snapped.
The sparks flared with a blinding light, hissed violently, and with a sharp snap, both died at once.
The backlash slammed into my arms. I hissed through my teeth, my concentration utterly shattered. The Will to Live collapsed, leaving behind nothing but severe nausea and a deafening ringing in my ears. My hands dropped limply to my knees.
Zeno let out a heavy sigh.
"Just as I thought. You've got willpower to spare, boy. Too much, even. But you don't know how to divide your mind. You try to squeeze everything into a single, dead fist. Mana requires flexibility. You're empty for today."
He turned and walked back to his spot by the door.
"Go to the creek. Cool your hands. And be glad you didn't blow them off."
I didn't even have the energy for sarcasm. My knees were shaking, and my vision was still blurry. Mentally, I was thirty, but biologically, I was fifteen—maybe younger. I stumbled out of the shack and into the woods.
A damp, piercing cold hung in the air. The morning mist clung to the pine roots, settling as heavy moisture on my face. Every step across the thick moss was an agonizing effort; gravity felt twice as heavy today.
I limped down to the rocky bank and collapsed to my knees in the mud, shoving my aching, trembling hands into the freezing water.
The water hissed. Steam rose from my right palm. The pain slowly receded, replaced by a dull, welcome numbness. I splashed the icy water onto my face, washing away the sticky sweat.
Looking down, I caught my reflection in the pool. Pale. Scrawny. Dark circles under my eyes. A bitter, angry stare.
Splitting consciousness turned out to be harder than calculating a ballistic missile's trajectory, I thought. Can I even survive in a place like this?
I pulled my hands out, wiped them on the hem of my shirt, and turned back toward the path. It was time to head back. Zeno would probably make me scrub the cauldron or gather firewood despite how spent I was.
I turned toward the trail, and then, deep within the forest, something snapped.
I froze. My heart hammered violently against my ribs. The forest went instantly dead silent. The birds fell mute. Even the rush of the creek seemed to recede into the far distance.
Something massive was out there. Enormous.
The air grew suffocatingly heavy. I heard a ragged, low breath, each exhalation rustling the thick undergrowth.
The giant ferns fifteen paces away began to part—slowly, very slowly.
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