I sat by the floor-to-ceiling window, the cold glass pressing against my forehead as I watched the silver veins of the Transportation Grid pulse against the black velvet of the sky.
In my past life, I was a man of the chalkboard, a Nobel laureate who had mastered the language of the universe but failed to speak the language of my own home.
I looked down at my small, soft hands. They were five years old, yet they held the weight of thirty-two years of high-level theoretical physics and a crushing amount of regret.
"The math here..." I whispered, my voice sounding thin and high-pitched in the quiet room.
I had spent the last few hours skimming through the digital archives my father left unlocked. I expected a primitive understanding of the cosmos, but I was wrong.
These people—these Fabricators—had moved beyond simple calculus. They had papers on N-dimensional manifolds and non-Euclidean fluid dynamics that made my previous life's work look like basic arithmetic.
They had insights from "Sovereigns" that hinted at a reality where an equation isn't just a description of a thing, but the thing itself.
Yet, as I scrolled through the data, I felt that familiar, nagging itch in the back of my brain—the one that had won me the Nobel.
I could feel the "Unified Field of Abstraction" vibrating just out of reach. In my past life, it was a cold, immovable stone. Here, in this body, it felt alive.
"The 4th Dimension," I murmured, tracing a circle on the fogged glass. "Time. It's just another coordinate. It's not a wall; it's a system of differential equations no one has had the processing power to solve."
I looked at the thick, red thread pulsing around my wrist. My "hardware" was different now.
But I had to be careful. I remember the hospital room. I remember the scent of antiseptic and the sound of my heart stopping because I treated my body like a disposable battery.
Mathematics is a ghost, I realized, and the body is the only house it has.
If I wanted to solve the 701 ceiling—the "Time Wall"—I couldn't just be a brain in a jar. I needed to optimize the vessel.
I looked at the door as it hissed open. My mother, Lyra, stepped in, her pink hair glowing softly in the dim light.
"Kaelen? Why are you still up, my little architect?"
I looked at her, and for a moment, the mathematician almost spoke, but I pulled him back. I had to play the part.
"Mommy," I said, my voice sweet and practiced. "Can you teach me how the body works? Like the machines?"
She blinked, her medical intuition clearly piqued. "You want to learn biology? Most boys your age are asking Arin about the mecha lasers."
"The lasers are just light," I said, sliding off the chair and walking to her. "But the body is the house for the light. If the house breaks, the light goes out."
I saw her eyes soften, a flicker of pride and perhaps a bit of shock crossing her face. She knelt and pulled me into a hug.
"Then we start tomorrow," she promised, her voice thick with emotion. "I'll show you the blueprints of life, Kaelen."
As she tucked me into the covers, I felt the heavy, stable rhythm of my Red Threads.
I closed my eyes and visualized the universe. It wasn't a dark, scary void anymore.
It was a beautiful, messy, unsolved matrix.
And this time, I wasn't going to die before I found the solution.
Next day the training room on the 80th floor was bathed in the soft, clinical glow of holographic projectors.
Outside the massive windows, the silver rings of Earth shimmered, but my focus was entirely on the translucent human figure floating in the center of the room.
"Pay attention, Kaelen," my mother said, her voice echoing slightly in the vast space.
With a flick of her wrist, she zoomed into the hologram.Getty ImagesExplore
A complex network of golden lines illuminated within the figure, branching out like a circuit board made of light.
"These are the Meridians," she explained.
"Think of them as the high-speed data cables of the human body. They don't just carry blood or nerves; they carry the fundamental resonance of your soul."
I watched as she overlaid my own data onto the map.
My red threads appeared—short, thick, and pulsating with a heavy rhythm—clinging to the central golden lines like stubborn barnacles.
"The Lung Meridian controls your respiratory rhythm," she said, pointing to a line running from the chest to the thumb.
"The Heart Meridian governs your core stability. The Liver, the Spleen, the Kidney—each one is a terminal."
I tilted my head, my adult mind already mapping these "terminals" to specific variables.
"Mommy, why are my threads only sticking to these lines? Are there no threads in the rest of me?"
She smiled, kneeling down to my level.
"The body is full of threads, Kaelen. But the ones connected to the Meridians are the easiest to sense and the most important to anchor."
"They are the 'Master Switches.' If you control the Meridian threads, the rest of the body's energy will fall into line automatically."
I looked at my wrist, visualizing the crimson strands beneath my skin.
"To reach Level 100," she continued, her expression turning serious, "you have a singular goal: Expansion."
"You must take the strawberry supplements Suzen prepared to soften your meridian walls, then work on stretching your threads."
"When every red ribbon reaches the exact length of the Meridian it is attached to, you will have completed the Thread Phase."
I looked back at the hologram. It was a geometry problem.
My threads were currently vectors with insufficient magnitude.
To finish the phase, I needed to extend those vectors until they perfectly mapped onto the biological coordinates of the golden lines.
"Length equals Level," I whispered.
"Exactly," she replied. "Once the lengths match, the resonance stabilizes. That is when the next stage becomes possible."
I closed my eyes, reaching inward.
With the "heavy fuel" of the nutrients already humming in my stomach, I tried to "push" the end of a thread near my lung.
It felt like trying to stretch a cold rubber band—it resisted, pulling back with a tension that made my chest ache.
I need to calculate the elasticity constant, I thought, my mathematician's brain whirring.
If I increase the vibration frequency of the thread, the friction against the meridian wall should decrease.
I wasn't just going to "work hard" as she suggested. I was going to optimize the stretch.
"I'll do it, Mommy," I said, opening my eyes. "I'll make them fit perfectly."
I stood there in the center of the 80th floor, a five-year-old boy staring at a map of his own soul, already plotting the most efficient path to Level 100.
The journey was no longer a mystery; it was an equation waiting to be balanced.