Morning sunlight spilled through the cracks in the window shutters, casting soft bands of gold across the small room. The air smelled faintly of warm bread and lavender soap — Rebecca's doing, of course.
Lencar sat at the table, his grimoire open beside a scattering of half-torn spell pages. They fluttered faintly, animated by the gentle mana breeze he exhaled as he wrote. Each page contained remnants of aborted spells — failed sequences, broken rune alignments, dead ends. Normally, he'd burn them. But not today.
Because today, they vibrated.
He'd been observing them for days — scraps that refused to fade, resonating faintly with his own mana frequency. They weren't dead at all. They were… waiting.
Rebecca leaned in through the open doorway, drying her hands with a towel. "You're doing that staring thing again," she said.
Lencar didn't look up. "Observation."
"Of paper?"
He nodded. "They're misbehaving."
Rebecca raised an eyebrow. "I'll call the guards if they start walking."
"Too late," he murmured, almost to himself.
She groaned. "You're impossible. Anyway, I'm going to the bakery. Try to remember to eat before you accidentally invent starvation."
He looked up finally, and a small smile ghosted across his face. "You're remarkably consistent."
"Consistency keeps geniuses alive," she said, smirking.
He waited for her footsteps to fade before turning back to the pages.
Lencar flexed his fingers. "All right. Let's see if you're ready."
He summoned his mana slowly — a precise, whispering current that wound through the air like silk threads. His eyes flickered faintly with green runic light as he murmured the incantation.
"[Reverse Replication]."
The air shimmered, but instead of targeting an external object, he directed the flow inward — at the mana signature bound within the torn pages. The energy looped, reflected, and doubled back, forming a recursive pattern that bent around itself like folded glass.
"Not replication," he whispered, "reflection."
The torn pages trembled violently. Silver runes flared across their surfaces, interlocking and spiraling outward like gears in a clockwork machine. Then — with a sudden rush of wind — the fragments pulled together, forming a compact, glowing shape in the air.
A grimoire.
Not a full one, but a smaller, crystallized version — its cover made of the same blank material as his own book, shimmering faintly with translucent layers. Inside it, faint glyphs flickered, writing and rewriting themselves at incredible speed, like a living script searching for purpose.
Lencar watched, awed and analytical all at once.
He whispered, "Self-sustaining mana pattern achieved. Core imprint stabilized."
Then he smiled, and the scientist in him gave way to something like pride.
He had done it.
Reverse Replication wasn't just restoration — it was creation.
Rebecca's voice drifted faintly from outside. "Lencar! The stew's burning again!"
He jumped slightly, instinctively slamming his hand over the hovering grimoire. It shimmered, then collapsed into light, reabsorbing into his main book.
He cleared his throat. "Coming."
When she entered, hands on hips, she saw him calmly closing his grimoire and stirring the pot as if nothing happened.
"Didn't take you for a chef," she said suspiciously.
"Adaptability," he replied, with a straight face.
She sniffed the air. "Smells edible. Maybe you're not completely hopeless."
"That's the goal."
He smirked faintly — but his mind was still spinning, running a thousand calculations behind the calm surface.
Later, as the sun set, Rebecca and the kids gathered near the fire again. This had become ritual: she'd knit or read while Lencar tinkered with spell diagrams or explained science-like nonsense the kids couldn't understand but loved hearing anyway.
Arin tugged at his sleeve. "Mr. Lencar, how does magic know what to do?"
Lencar paused. "It doesn't."
The kid blinked. "It doesn't?"
"No," Lencar said. "We tell it. Magic is just… very obedient energy. It listens if you speak clearly."
Rebecca glanced up from her sewing. "So you're saying magic's like a toddler?"
"More or less," he said, lips twitching. "Unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous when unsupervised."
The kids laughed; Rebecca rolled her eyes. "You're describing yourself, not magic."
Lencar actually laughed — a short, genuine sound. "Fair point."
Later that night, long after everyone had gone to sleep, Lencar returned to the table. The house was quiet except for the rhythmic ticking of the old clock and the faint breathing of the children from the next room.
He reopened his grimoire and placed one of the new, smaller grimoires beside it. Its cover gleamed faintly, reflecting the light of the dying fire.
He flipped it open. Inside, the pages were blank — but responsive. When he pressed a finger against the surface, a ripple of mana spread outward, mirroring his own.
A mirror-book.
A grimoire that could copy any spell structure, learn from observation, and feed that data back into his primary one.
He whispered softly to himself, "Reverse Replication — Type II: Genesis."
It was dangerous. If anyone found out, it could be considered forbidden magic — not because it was destructive, but because it threatened the entire principle of the Wizard King's grimoire hierarchy.
He closed the smaller grimoire, binding it with a mana seal.
"I'll keep you quiet," he murmured.
Then, he leaned back, watching the fire's reflection in the seal's glow.
For the first time in a long while, he allowed himself to laugh softly — not the bitter or sarcastic kind, but a quiet, disbelieving one.
"I really did it," he whispered. "Rebecca would probably make me fix a bucket with it."
He chuckled again, shaking his head. "Maybe I'll make her a new broom instead."
The next morning, Rebecca walked in to find him half-asleep at the table, surrounded by notes, runes, and scraps of paper.
"You stayed up all night again, didn't you?" she said, crossing her arms.
He looked up groggily. "No. I just… forgot to stop calculating."
She sighed. "You need a hobby that isn't world domination."
"Already working on it," he muttered.
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
Rebecca smiled faintly. "Come on, breakfast before you collapse. I made coffee."
That woke him up faster than magic. "You're an angel."
"More like a tired mortal trying to keep you from dying."
"Same thing," he said, standing.
She laughed, shaking her head as she walked ahead of him. He followed, a faint smirk lingering — but his mind was elsewhere, replaying the image of the tiny grimoire forming in his hands.
Something was changing.
The Reverse Replication spell wasn't just his creation anymore — it was becoming something alive.
And Lencar, though he wouldn't admit it aloud, was starting to feel the same.