The Old Man didn't teach magic. He didn't have the patience for it. To him, most mages were just "leaky buckets."
"Most of these idiots treat mana like water," he'd growl, his voice like grinding gravel.
He'd spit into the forge, the sizzle punctuating his contempt. "They carve a little hole inside themselves—call it a circle, call it a 'vessel'—and they wait for the world to fill them up. They're just gourds, boy. Empty, mindless gourds."
It worked, sure. If you wanted to be a second-rate battery for the rest of your short life.
The Aura-heads were worse. They shoved all that power into their gut until they felt like gods, then flooded their veins with it. They ended up with arms like tree trunks and the lifespan of a mayfly. By forty, their own energy would start eating them alive, turning their insides to mush. Stagnation was a death sentence.
One night, the embers in the forge were nothing but glowing red eyes in the dark. Marduk didn't look up from his whetstone.
"Both systems are built on a lie," he said. The scritch-scrape of metal on stone stopped. "They think power is something you own. Something you hold onto."
He pointed a jagged, black-stained fingernail at my sternum. I felt the heat coming off him—the smell of old soot and cheap tobacco.
"They're wrong. You don't own it. You just borrow the momentum."
He kicked a piece of charcoal toward me. "Draw the flow."
I sketched what I'd seen in the old texts: a circle, the central point, the human shell.
Marduk ground his heel into the dirt, obliterating my work before I could finish. "A battery," he spat. "Dead the second it runs out of juice."
He grabbed the charcoal, his movements predatory. He stabbed three points into the dirt: the lower gut, the heart, the brow.
"Some call the center the Dantian. I call it a hub. The name's for poets and corpses. What matters is the connection."
He slashed lines between the points, deep and aggressive.
"If it doesn't move, it rots. You make it flow, or you die."
I looked out the window. In the distance, the monolith glowed with that sickly, pale blue light. The System.
"And the steles?" I asked. "The levels? Gaia says—"
The old mans's rictus was a jagged scar in the firelight. "Gaia is a pacifier for a world that's lost its teeth. It's the coward's way. It counts your steps so you don't have to feel the road. It makes you strong, yeah, but it makes your spirit soft as curdled milk."
The Arcane of the Soul didn't need a blue box to tell you it was working. It was a perpetual loop—gut, heart, brain. Repeat until your blood sang.
"Flowing water doesn't spoil," he muttered. "Keep it moving, or it'll kill you."
Then came the Alchemia Morphica. It wasn't "alchemy"—there were no bubbling vials. It was the brutal science of breaking the body and putting it back together. The old man made me dissect a mountain cat with a dull knife until my fingers were raw and trembling.
"Any moron can break a bone," he barked as I peeled back a layer of frozen muscle. "You want to change a man? You have to know where the god-stuff is glued to the meat."
When it came time to choose an affinity, I didn't hesitate. Three nights of staring at the ceiling, feeling the weight of the air on my chest, had given me the answer.
"Gravity," I said.
The old man paused, his hammer hanging mid-air. "Why that?"
"Because it doesn't care if you're a king or a peasant. It's the only law that never takes a day off. Weight, pressure, the way the world holds itself together... it's the ultimate leash."
"And what's more, it's the most ideal way to get started. "
He stared at me, his eyes two dark pits of exhaustion.
"Fine. At least you won't be able to lazy your way through it."
The third pillar hit me like a fever. The world started to... fragment. I wasn't seeing objects anymore; I was seeing vectors.
"You're thinking too loud," the old man noted one evening. "You've got that look in your eye. Like a dog trying to do math. You seeing things?"
I watched the invisible lines of force mapping the floorboards. "I see moves. Like the whole world is just a game of tiles."
The Old Man let out a long, slow breath. "An Irregular. Dammit."
"Is that bad?"
"It means you're a freak, boy. You've got a 'Skill' that didn't come from the System.
Come on. Let's go find a stone so we can see how good it is."
We walked in silence. The old man's limp was heavier tonight.
"How long have you been seeing the lines?" he asked.
"Since I started messing with the flow of mana on my own."
"Hmph. You forced the door open. Hope you like what's on the other side."
He pulled a scarred bronze ring from his pocket. Runes hummed against the metal, a low-frequency vibration that made my teeth ache.
"Get back. Don't want to have to scrape you off the walls."
I've already died once, I thought, the memory of cold steel and fading light flashing behind my eyes. I'm not going out to a piece of jewelry.
The ring tore a hole in the air—a jagged, screaming rift that smelled of ozone and wet stone. On the other side sat a monolith. The second my skin hit the cold surface of the stele, the blue interface burned into my retinas.
"Well?" The old man growled. "What's the box say?"
"Chessmaster," I whispered. My head felt like it was being split by a wedge.
I read the text, but the words felt like they were being etched into my brain:
[Skill: Chessmaster]
Rank: B (Evolvable)
Nature: Neurological Override.
[Active: Trajectory Mapping] > The world is a grid. You see the 'how' and the 'where' of every projectile before it leaves the hand.
[Passive: Grandmaster's Cold Logic]
Mental fortress. Lower-tier fear, charm, or psychic sludge slides right off. Combat processing speed x5.
[Passive: Notation Reading]
Time is a suggestion. In high-stress states, mana structures and spell logic are laid bare. You don't see magic; you see the blueprints.
The interface suddenly shrieked. A burst of static—actual, physical pain—ripped through my skull. Red 'Error' code bled across the blue window. An invisible hammer slammed into my chest, throwing me five feet back into the dirt.
"System's bugging out," I wheezed, tasting copper. "It didn't like that."
The old man looked at the stone, then at me. His face was unreadable. "Move. We're done here."
Back at the forge, my mind wouldn't shut up. I tried to test the gravity affinity on an iron sphere. I followed the 'flow' perfectly. Nothing. Just a cold lump of metal.
The old man watched me fail with a smirk that wasn't kind.
"Stop trying to muscle it, boy. You're not a porter. Use the Arcane. Move the heat from the Dantian to the heart, but don't just 'push.' Give it an order. Tell the world 'No.'"
He snapped his fingers.
The sphere didn't just get heavy—it became a black hole. The weight hit me like a falling building. My knees buckled, the bone-on-bone grinding in my shoulders sounding like a gunshot in the quiet forge.
"Gravity isn't a force," Marduk lectured, stepping around my trembling body. "It's a conversation. If you want to talk to the earth, you have to be the loudest thing in the room. Stand. Your. Ground."
I choked on a breath. My [Chessmaster] vision flickered on, and the world turned into a nightmare of red arrows pointing straight down.
Correction: Align the spine. Stop fighting the weight. Be the weight.
Instead of shoving back, I opened the siphon. I let the pressure roll through me, channeling the mana along my bones like lightning rods. The sphere started to hum. Dust bunnies on the floor didn't just move; they ignited as the friction of the gravity well tore them apart.
"Precision!" Marduk roared. "You're bleeding mana everywhere! Tighten the loop!"
I snarled, the salt of my own sweat burning my eyes. I narrowed my focus until the entire world was just the square inch beneath that sphere.
The weight vanished. The iron ball hovered, spinning with a lazy, murderous grace just above my palm.
"Hmph. Not bad," he muttered, waving a hand to kill the spell. The sphere slammed back into my hand, nearly breaking my wrist. "But lose your focus for a second and that 'law' of yours will flatten you like a bug."
My muscles were twitching, but my brain was on fire. I had the keys now.
Later that night, the forge was quiet. I was recalibrating a counterweight when I heard it.
A wet, heavy cough.
I turned. Marduk was hunched over the anvil. A splash of dark, nearly black fluid stained the stone floor. He wiped his chin with a sleeve, his shoulders trembling for a fraction of a second before he locked them back into place.
"Your flow is sloppy," he said, his voice a forced rasp. "Slow down."
"You're bleeding, Marduk."
For a heartbeat, the "Iron Master" looked old. Not just aged—dying. His eyes were filmed with a fatigue that went deeper than bone. Then, the mask slammed back down.
"Training's not over," he snapped, turning his back to me. "Mind your own business."
But I saw the stain on the floor. Something was rotting the man who taught me that power shouldn't rot. And he was running out of time.