The silent dismissal of his vacuum technique hung in the air for a moment before Sylvaine let out a soft sigh, the tension dissipating. "Alright, Elias. That's enough for today. You should rest. Pushing a new concept that far is draining, even for you."
Joshey let his hands fall to his sides, a wry smirk on his face. "You don't have to tell me. I already surrendered. My channels feel... thin." He could feel a faint, hollow ache in his core, a sensation Elias was all too familiar with, though for different reasons.
Sylvaine studied him, her head tilted. "You know," she began, changing the subject with a thoughtful tone. "You focus so much on the mana. But the vessel is just as important. Why don't you train physically? A strong body can channel more power, recover faster. With your... intuitive grasp of energy, if you paired it with a physically powerful vessel?" She let the implication hang in the air, a faint, almost wary look in her eyes. "You might become very powerful. Too powerful, perhaps."
The comment sent a lightning-fast cascade of thought through Joshey's mind. He remembered his old body with a pang of possessive pride. It wasn't just trained; it was perfected. Every muscle group fine-tuned, reflexes honed to a razor's edge, capable of moving faster and hitting harder than any normal human should. It had acted on its own in tight situations, a seamless extension of his will.
«Oh, here we go, » Elias's voice grumbled, a mix of annoyance and insecurity. «The great Joshey, here to show off his flawless past form. Go on, then. Tell me how weak this body is compared to your glorious old one. »
*Maybe,* Joshey shot back, the entire internal exchange taking less than a millisecond. *But even if we factor in our current mana, my old self's speed and precision might still have given this version of us a run for its money. He just built different.*
The smirk didn't leave Joshey's face as he turned his attention back to Sylvaine. "Well," he said, his tone deliberately casual. "I am training that too. Just in a more... refined way. I'm perfecting how to breathe. Controlling my sleep patterns for optimal recovery. It's all part of the system."
Sylvaine stared at him for a beat, her composed features dissolving into pure, unadulterated amusement. She threw her head back and laughed, a loud, ringing "HAHAHAHAHA!" that echoed across the training field. It wasn't a cruel laugh, but one of genuine, mocking delight.
"You're sleeping!" she managed between gasps, wiping a tear from her eye. "You dare call sleeping training? Oh, by the Moonlight Mother, you're something else, Elias!" She shook her head, her laughter subsiding into a wide, disbelieving grin. "Fine, fine. You 'train' your sleep patterns. I'll be over here, you know, actually lifting heavy things and moving quickly. Let's see which method gets you further."
She turned to walk back towards the hut, her shoulders still shaking with occasional chuckles, leaving Joshey standing in the field, his smirk now a touch more defensive.
***
Joshey watched Sylvaine's retreating back, the echo of her laughter about his "sleep training" still hanging in the air. But his mind was already racing past the jest, locking onto a far more profound concept. If there was one thing he needed to train, one area with truly infinite potential, it was the refinement of his Mana Field. It was the interface, the canvas, the very foundation of everything. He could feel Elias within, a constant, diligent presence, polishing that foundation grain by grain.
"Sylvaine, wait," he called out, his voice cutting through the morning quiet.
She paused, her hand on the rough-hewn wood of the hut's front door, and glanced back over her shoulder.
"How powerful are you, really?" Joshey asked, his tone devoid of its usual wit, replaced by pure, unvarnished curiosity. "Are you the strongest in the world?"
This time, her laugh was different. It was a gentle, almost melancholic chuckle that didn't quite reach her eyes. She turned fully to face him, leaning against the doorframe.
"Nah," she said, the word simple and final. "I'm strong. Don't get me wrong. But the number of people in this world who could fold me in half without breaking a sweat... you wouldn't believe it if I told you." She was trying to be humble, but the statement itself was a testament to her stature. To be as powerful as she was, and to still speak of others with such stark respect, was terrifying.
She looked up at the sky, her silver eyes seeing something far beyond the clouds. "Five hundred and thirty years ago," she began, her voice soft with the weight of memory. "A beam of light was forged in the heavens. It wasn't a spell. It was... a statement. Everyone in the world felt it. Saw it. It was a power so immense, so utterly beyond comprehension, that it could have unstitched the continents and boiled the oceans if its wielder had so desired."
A shadow passed over her face. "In that moment, I felt like a fish who had spent its whole life in a deep lake, only to be suddenly flung onto the shore to witness a mountain range for the first time. I understood scale. The more I progress, the more I learn, the more I truly understand how vast the ocean of power is... and how small my own pond is in comparison."
She turned her gaze back to him, and for a fleeting instant, before she masked it with a faint, encouraging smile, Joshey saw it—a deep, ancient weariness, a depressive understanding of her own limits in an infinite universe.
"Elias," she said, her voice firming up, "you have a hundred times more potential than most mages I've ever met. Your grasp of the fundamentals is... unnatural. Don't waste it. Grow. Grow to be a strong, fine young man."
The words were kind, but they landed on Joshey with the force of a revelation. This world wasn't just about magic and markets. It contained entities—people—on a scale he had only ever associated with deities in his old world. A planet-buster. And Sylvaine implied there were many who operated on that level. The key difference was, here, it wasn't divine; it was just power. A terrifying, mundane fact of existence that the powerful lived with and the weak prayed to avoid.
As Sylvaine disappeared into the hut, leaving him alone in the field, Joshey clenched his fist. The familiar drive to master his environment, to climb to the top of the hierarchy, ignited within him with a new, ferocious intensity. It wasn't just about survival or business anymore. It wasn't even just about atonement.
He looked at his pale hand, the mana field around it humming with nascent potential.
*I will,* he vowed silently, the promise etching itself into his soul. *I will become stronger than you, Sylvaine. Stronger than the ones who made you feel small. I will see that mountain range for myself, and then I will climb it.*
The comfortable pond of his previous ambitions had just evaporated, revealing the terrifying, exhilarating ocean ahead.
The encounter with Sylvaine left Joshey standing alone in the field, but his mind was a roaring coliseum of existential dread and frantic calculation. The casual revelation of planet-busting entities had detonated the last stable foundations of his understanding.
*What in the ever-loving fuck is this universe?*
The question wasn't rhetorical. It was a desperate, analytical scream into the void. His physics-trained mind, the very tool that had allowed him to grasp mana engineering with such ease, was now turning against him, tearing apart the fabric of his new reality.
He wrestled with the fundamental paradox. Had he simply switched his location in space? A one-in-a-trillion quantum fluke that transported him to a distant exoplanet in a galaxy far, far away? But that didn't hold up. The laws of physics here weren't just different; they were expanded. Mana wasn't a new element on the periodic table; it was a fundamental force he'd never accounted for, like suddenly discovering a fifth fundamental interaction that governed reality. This wasn't a different location; it was a different set of rules.
The alternative was even more mind-rending: had he switched his location in time? Was this some hyper-advanced, post-human future of Earth where evolution or technology had unlocked these capabilities? But the biology was all wrong, the stellar constellations unfamiliar, the very history Elias remembered was one of elves and ancient empires, not of silicon and steel.
The core of the problem was the "how." How does one even change universes? Not just travel, but transition from a cosmos governed by one strict, unforgiving set of physical laws to one where consciousness could directly influence energy, where will could warp pressure gradients and create fire from intent? It implied a multiverse of such profoundly different base states that the very concept of "physics" became relative. It meant his old textbooks weren't universal truths; they were just the local bylaws of a very quiet, very limited corner of existence.
He had tried, over the past few weeks, to simply accept his fate. To focus on the business, the magic, the day-to-day survival. But Sylvaine's words had ripped that bandage off. This wasn't a strange country; this was a strange creation.
And that led him to the most terrifying evidence of all: the soul.
He had been a staunch materialist. Consciousness was an emergent property of a complex brain, a beautiful, tragic illusion of self that flickered out when the hardware failed. But then... how was he here? How did the unique, intricate pattern of memories, desires, and flaws that was "Joshey" persist after the violent deletion of his brain? How was he now inhabiting the neural pathways of Elias, another complex system that should have had its own emergent consciousness? The memories he'd received weren't just data; they were imbued with the emotional weight, the shame, the quiet hopes—the qualia—of another person. And the Dual Core Fusion... that wasn't just a merging of data. It was the harmonious intertwining of two distinct streams of consciousness, two selves, into a new, greater whole. That wasn't biology. That was metaphysics. That was a soul.