Three months was plenty of time to either adapt to the strain or burn out completely. My body ripped out the first option, though sometimes it felt like it did so out of sheer stubbornness.
Zeno's cabin now resembled a repair shop more than a dwelling... and I was something like the central node. Every morning began with a damage assessment. I lay on the straw without opening my eyes, running a checklist of my internal systems.
"Ribs—intact, mobility normal. Vessels of the left arm—slight burning, likely a micro-tear from yesterday's resonance. Pulse—fifty-eight beats per minute, within acceptable limits."
"Will to Live" no longer wailed in my head like a siren. It hummed quietly somewhere in the back of my mind.
Zeno had become my external controller. He had almost stopped lecturing me, but his presence felt like the supervision of an experienced safety inspector. Sometimes, when I practiced fine impulse control, he would silently walk up and place a hand on my shoulder. In those moments, I felt his calm, dense mana gently dampening my chaotic surges, showing me exactly where I was creating unnecessary friction.
"Your flow is still too unstable," he remarked one day when I was trying to hold a handful of small stones in the air by changing the density of the medium beneath them. "You waste too much energy fighting your own tremors. Relax. If you overheat steel, it becomes brittle."
I exhaled, and the stones tumbled to the ground with a dry clatter.
"If I relax, I'll lose control of the gradient."
"No," Zeno shook his head. "You'll lose the fear. And fear is exactly what forces your system to operate at maximum wear."
My body had changed over these three months. I hadn't turned into a mountain of muscle—it's physically impossible to become a bodybuilder in such a short time. But I had become lean and wiry. My skin had toughened, my palms calloused from working with the bone plates and constant magical burns. And most importantly—the vessels. They had thickened and expanded. Now I could pass currents through myself that would have simply incinerated my veins on the first day.
The armor was ready too. The composite of troll hide and wolf bone plates turned out surprisingly light. I configured it to work like a passive exoskeleton. Upon skill activation, the mana passing through the plates created a surface tension effect—any piercing blow would simply slide off, finding no purchase.
But not all tests went smoothly. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon a local anomaly in the forest—a small mana vortex twisting the air into a tight spiral. I decided to use it as a testbed: to try and enter resonance with it and neutralize it via interference.
At first, everything went according to plan. I caught the frequency of the vortex, matching its rhythm. But the moment I tried to scale up the power, the system errored out. The vortex jerked—and instead of collapsing, it sucked my mana back into itself.
I was thrown against the rocks with such force that my vision went black. I lay on the ground, spitting blood, until my consciousness finally drifted away. I woke up in the cabin. Zeno was pressing a cold compress to my forehead.
"One more experiment like that, and I'll bury you under that pine tree over there," he grumbled. "You tried to calculate what needs to be felt. Mana isn't an equation, kid. It's a force of nature."
"Math works everywhere," I rasped, trying to sit up. "Ever heard of Max Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble theory? It states that all reality is a mathematical structure. And if magic exists in this world and obeys any rules at all, it means it can be calculated and written down in formulas."
Zeno only sighed. He didn't understand that for me, this was the only way to keep from going insane in this world. If you break magic down into formulas, it stops being a frightening chaos and becomes a tool.
I set the knife aside and sat in silence, listening as the echo of "Will to Live" gradually quieted down inside me. It felt like a racing engine cooling down: the metal still ticks, radiating heat, but the RPMs have already dropped.
"Frozen again?" Zeno approached from behind, leaning heavily on his staff. "When you freeze like that, it looks like you're not even breathing. Counting all the gears in your head?"
"Running a defragmentation," I grunted without turning around.
He didn't understand the word, but he caught the gist. The old man sat down on the log where I chopped wood and tapped his pipe against the heel of his boot.
"You need to get some proper sleep, kid. Like a normal human being."
I said nothing. Honestly, he was right, but in my past life, just like now, that was a trivial matter to me.
"Every hour of downtime is a missed opportunity to strengthen the body or tweak equipment," I said, standing up and heading over to my armor. The troll hide cuirass looked slightly better after being treated with wax, though it still resembled a piece of boiled rubber. I checked the tension of the internal sinews. The bone wolf plates, layered like scales, fit tightly. I had calculated their placement so that when leaning forward, they would overlap each other, creating a double layer of protection over the liver and heart.
"You know, Zeno," I ran a finger along the sharp edge of a bone plate, "in my... coordinate system, protection isn't just the thickness of the material. It's how you distribute the force."
"And how do you distribute it?" the old man narrowed his eyes with interest.
"With vectors. The hide dampens part of the energy through viscosity. The bone redirects the rest along a tangent. The key is never to meet force head-on. Always at an angle."
Zeno grunted, got up, and headed toward the cabin.
"Vectors... angles... Just make sure they don't play a cruel trick on you. Go inside. It'll be dark soon."
The evening followed the usual scenario. We each ate a bowl of thick lentil stew that Zeno boiled in a huge cast-iron pot. The food was bland but hot. I felt the warmth spread through my body, melting the remnants of the day's tension.
I lay down on the straw, tucking a rolled-up jacket under my head. The cabin smelled of dried herbs, smoke, and wood. "Will to Live" was running at minimum power: a barely noticeable vibration in my chest stabilized my breathing and accelerated muscle recovery.
"Daily biological wear: eight percent. Regeneration initiated. System stable," ran through my thoughts automatically as my consciousness began to blur.
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