I woke up to an intrusive humming in my ears. The skill was running in the background, trying to "stitch up" my damaged innards, but my body clearly lacked the resources.
I tried to sit up, and the world instantly tilted. Thick black spots floated before my eyes. The ribs Zeno had "stitched" with magic flared with a dull ache.
Right now, I feel like an old, breaking-down machine, I thought. Even Zeno looks infinitely better and sturdier compared to me.
"Biological wear: 35%. Temperature above normal. Critical glucose deficit," I ran the diagnostics in my head out of habit. Though maybe it wasn't me. I was already getting confused.
Zeno was busying himself at the table, grinding up some roots. His movements were precise, economical. He didn't turn around, but I could feel his gaze on my skin.
"Awake," he tossed out without interrupting his work. "Yesterday, while I was patching you up, you were raving with such enthusiasm."
I froze. A chill ran down my spine.
Damn... I hope I didn't let slip anything extra about my past. Though... who am I kidding. Everything there was too predictable. The exact same day, over and over again. The lab, calculations, experiments... Sometimes I even got confused—was this a new day or just a continuation of the previous one? Groundhog Day. What else is there to say. "A great scientist." Yeah, right, funny. People always need labels.
"About that 'Will to Live' of yours," he rasped.
"There are... actually some problems with that," I muttered.
Zeno turned to me, crossing his arms over his chest. The knife in his hand gleamed dully. "You call it a 'skill.' Strange word. 'Activation,' 'reaction,' 'overload.' If you keep 'optimizing' your life like this, one fine day your heart will stop—and you just won't wake up."
I silently accepted a bowl of some gray sludge from him. It smelled terrible, but I needed the calories.
"It's the only way to survive here," I said after the first spoonful. "Hunters, wolves, trolls... Without this skill, I would have died on the very first day."
"Maybe so," Zeno sat on the stool opposite me. "But yesterday you nearly fried your own brains. You were hiding from the hunters, suppressing your aura, but you blasted mana so hard that the vessels in your eyes popped. You're playing with fire, kid."
We spent the rest of the morning in silence. I ate, trying not to think about how much Zeno was now aware of my business. My internal calculations suggested that full recovery would take another three days, but Zeno had other plans.
"Enough lounging around," he said when I finished. "We're going to learn how to control your 'skill' without harming your health."
...A crazy teacher, what can I say, the thought flashed.
We went out to the back yard of the cabin. The air was damp, smelling of rotting leaves and rain. Zeno told me to sit on a flat stone and stretch my arms out in front of me.
"Your problem is that you release all the pressure at once," he explained, pacing back and forth. "You activate the skill, and it takes full control. You need to be the admin, not the user. Understand?"
I raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Admin"? The old man was quickly picking up my lexicon.
"Try directing mana into your fingertips. Just a tiny bit. Imagine it's not a flow of water, but a thin cobweb."
I closed my eyes. The skill responded with its familiar hum. I tried not to let it unfold at full power. It felt like holding a furious dog on a short leash. The mana surged forward, wanting to accelerate my heartbeat, to sharpen my senses.
"Quiet..." I commanded the system. "Minimum threshold. One percent power."
I felt warmth stir in my forearm. It slowly crept toward my hand. My muscles trembled faintly from the tension. I could feel every cell screaming: "Faster! Stronger! More efficient!"
"Even less," Zeno's voice came from somewhere far away. "Don't push. Just direct."
I focused on a single nerve ending in my index finger. Sweat poured down my forehead, flooding my eyes, but I didn't move. At some point, it felt like I was succeeding. I allowed the internal barrier to relax just a fraction more...
And at that moment, reality seemed to break.
One second I felt the cold wind on my cheek, and the next—everything vanished. Sounds, smells, the pain in my ribs—all of it was erased.
I found myself in a white room. No shadows, no light sources, no horizon. From an engineer's perspective, it looked like an empty graphical domain before textures are loaded.
System error? the thought flashed. Cognitive overload?
On the periphery of my virtual "vision," I noticed a figure. Humanoid, but devoid of details—just a silhouette filled with a soft, whitish light with a barely noticeable yellowish tint. It didn't move. It radiated neither threat nor warmth. But its very presence felt heavy.
I tried to take a step forward. No legs, no arms. I was simply a point of perception. The figure began to slowly fade, and the space around it started filling with black cracks and sparks.
Too early, flashed through my mind. Not a voice, but rather a shaped thought. The system is not ready.
And then—a violent jolt.
I opened my eyes and tumbled onto my side, hacking into a cough. Dark, thick blood dripped from my nose onto the grass. My head was splitting as if it were being struck by a sledgehammer.
Zeno was squatting beside me, holding me by the shoulder. His face was pale, and his hand was visibly trembling.
"You absolute... idiot," he breathed out. "I told you—don't push. You nearly crossed the Threshold. One more second..."
I wiped the blood away with my hands, trying to suppress the trembling.
"I... I saw a room. A white void. Someone was there."
Zeno slowly removed his hand and stood up heavily.
"I don't know who you saw. But most likely, it's your limit. Some call it the Mana Chamber, others—the threshold of death."
I looked at my hands. They were still trembling slightly.
Always so melodramatic with his words. But still, what I had seen didn't look like the hallucination of a dying brain. It was too... structured, somehow.
"Crawl inside. That's enough for today. Your 'processor,' or whatever you call it, needs a reboot."
I stood up with difficulty, leaning on the staff he extended. I felt like absolute crap.
"Tomorrow..." I rasped, crossing the threshold of the cabin. "Tomorrow we start making the armor from the troll plates."
"You learn how to bring a spoon to your mouth without spilling first," the old man grumbled, closing the door.
I collapsed onto the mattress without even taking off my boots. An incredibly mysterious world, just the thing for an engineer. But there was too much work ahead.
Then again...
In my past life, I didn't know how to stop either.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter