"The problem isn't the Golden Ratio itself."
I turned the steel ball over in my hand, watching as the campfires light hit it.
"The problem is everything around it. The foundation. You can't build a house starting from the roof."
"What are you talking about?"
"The spin." I gestured loosely with my free hand. "I learned it backwards. Most people start with the basics, normal rotation, ball retrieval, skin hardening, and work their way up. I went straight to the top without any of the groundwork and now I'm sitting here with the most powerful form of the technique and I can't throw a ball further than fifteen meters without the whole thing falling apart."
"I don't know what any of that means."
"I know. I'm thinking out loud." I crouched down to his eye level. He had one good eye. I was trying not to look directly at the other socket. "It's like knowing the answer to a problem but not being able to show your work. My father would have hated that."
"Listen to me very carefully." His voice was strained and desperate. "I have money."
"I'm not interested in your money right now, and I'd be an idiot to believe you do have money."
"Then what do you want?"
"I already told you. I'm working through a problem." I stood back up. "The retrieval for instance. As long as I stay planted it comes back clean every time. But the moment I move mid-throw, shift my weight, take even half a step, the math falls apart completely. The ball just keeps going and spinning until it gets screwed over by something." I turned it over in my palm. "In a real fight nobody stays still. Gyro moves constantly when he throws and it doesn't matter, they always come back to him. I haven't figured out how he accounts for that yet."
"Who is Gyro?"
"My brother."
"Is he going to come looking for you?"
I considered that genuinely for a moment. "No, He doesn't know I'm here."
The man's breathing changed, The kind of change that happens when a particular door closes.
"You're going to kill me aren't you."
I looked down at the steel ball in my palm.
"I hadn't finished talking yet," I said.
He started shouting. A bunch of words, loud and repeated, the same phrase cycling upward in pitch with each pass like he was hoping volume would accomplish what the conversation hadn't.
I waited a moment to see if he'd stop on his own.
He didn't.
I sighed.
"I still can't get it to come back if I move," I said quietly, mostly to myself.
I threw the ball, and it caved into his skull drilling through I before it hit the tree.
The shouting stopped, the same guy who tried to rob me an hour ago was dead now.
I retrieved it from where it landed in the dirt, wiped it clean, and stood there in the quiet for a moment.
Fifteen meters, Straight line, Clean impact, and Feet planted the entire time, yet it didn't return.
I placed it back on my holster and started pissing on the fire to kill it, it wasn't a good Idea to stay in a camp with a dead guy.
"Come on...still haven't gotten a name for you yet." I said patting my horses neck as I got on.
[The Golden Ratio]
Right now Julius' spin is basically the equivalent of a guy putting everything to strength and agility, he's fast and can use the Golden Ratio I'm gonna explain it further in future chapters :)
[The Golden Ratio]
I was running out of aluminum foil, I had one more roll of it and it was gone. I've been using it to cook my meals for the past 4 days, my meals consisted of meat I hunted covered in salt, pepper, and chili's before wrapping it in aluminum foil and placcing it on a fire.
It worked wonders but now iw as regretting not buying more before I died if I knew that it was one of the only ways I could prepare a meal in this world since my dumbass didn't think buying a cooking pot back in the village was a good idea.
But something weird happened today...
"This is so good!"
I met with an elf, specifically Keyleth the future druid of the group Vox Machina. I wasn't too familiar with the show or the campaign back on my first life, but I knew that she wasn't supposed to be here near Emon alone.
"So do you mind if I ask why you were passed out in the middle of the woods?" Hearing my question Keyleth choked slightly on the rabbit I roasted, I assumed she was vegan being a druid and all that but I was surprised when she was looking at it hungrily a few moments ago.
"Well uh, I was practicing a few spells before I look for work and I guess I over did it hehe..."
"Over doing it is an understatement, you couldn't move for an hour."
Keyleth laughed sheepishly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "Yeah that's... that's fair. I was trying a new variation of a wind spell and it kind of took more out of me than I expected."
"Kind of."
"Okay a lot more than I expected." She pulled another piece of rabbit off the bone. "I'm usually better at gauging my limits I promise."
I believed her. Partially. She had the energy of someone who was genuinely competent but had a consistent blind spot for knowing when to stop, which from what little I remembered of Vox Machina was accurate.
"You're heading to Emon?" I asked.
"Looking for work." She glanced at me sideways. "You?"
"Same direction."
We sat with that for a moment. The fire was low, the woods were quiet, and the horse I still hadn't named was making her opinion of the silence known by occasionally huffing at nothing.
"I feel really bad just eating your food and leaving," Keyleth said eventually. "Is there anything I can do? To repay you I mean. I have some coin if-"
"I don't need coin."
"Then what do you need?"
I turned the steel ball over in my fingers. Thought about it genuinely.
"Teach me a spell."
Keyleth blinked. "You want to learn magic?"
"One spell. Something small. Something a beginner could actually learn without their head caving in."
She studied me for a long moment with those sharp green eyes, the way people do when they're trying to figure out if you're serious. Then she set the rabbit down and straightened up slightly, slipping into what I could only describe as her teaching posture without seeming to notice she was doing it.
"Okay. I can work with that." She held up a finger. "But I should warn you, most people who haven't studied magic at all find even basic spells take weeks to-"
"I'm a fast learner."
"...Right." She didn't look entirely convinced. "The one that comes to mind for someone starting completely fresh is Guidance. It's a druid cantrip, so it's natural magic, drawn from the world around you rather than from studied formulas." She paused, choosing her words carefully. "Basically you channel a touch of divine focus into someone, or yourself, and for a brief moment their concentration sharpens. Whatever they're attempting, their mind and body align just a little more cleanly with what they're trying to do. It adds a small but real measure of precision to any task."
I stopped turning the steel ball.
"Precision," I said.
"Yeah. It's subtle, most people use it for climbing a difficult wall or picking a lock or steadying their hands before surgery. Nothing dramatic."
I wasn't listening to the last part anymore.
Precision. A moment where the mind and body aligned more cleanly with what they were trying to do.
My problem with the spin wasn't power. I had the Golden Ratio, I had more rotational force available to me than I knew what to do with. My problem was the calculation. The moment I moved from my planted position the math between my body and the ball's trajectory fractured. The variables shifted faster than I could consciously account for them.
But what if the calculation didn't have to be fully conscious.
What if there was a way to close that gap, even briefly, between what I understood in theory and what my body could execute in motion. Not more practice. Not more repetition. Just a single moment of clarity exactly when I needed it, when the ball left my hand and the variables were at their most volatile.
"Julius?"
I looked up. Keyleth was watching me with a slightly uncertain expression.
"Sorry." I looked back down at the steel ball. "Show me."
She showed me.
I did not learn it that night.
[The Golden Ratio]
We reached Emon's gates the following afternoon, my horse walked at an easy pace and Keyleth walked beside her, having politely declined my offer to ride.
"You almost had it this morning," she said.
"Almost isn't the same as having it."
"No but the fact that you could feel the current at all on your second attempt is genuinely impressive. Most beginners can't even sense it for the first week."
I had felt something for a moment, Like finding the edge of a frequency I didn't know existed, a low hum at the base of my fingers that wasn't the spin and wasn't nothing either. It slipped away the moment I noticed it.
"Keep reaching for that feeling," she said. "Don't grab for it, just let it sit at the edge of your attention. It gets easier."
I thought about my father telling me I thought too much for the spin.
I thought about the fact that Guidance and the spin might share more in common than either tradition knew. Both were about alignment. Both were about closing the distance between intention and execution. The spin did it through perfect rotation, through mathematics made physical. Guidance did it through something older and less precise but pointed in the same direction.
I wondered if they could be used simultaneously. I wondered what the Golden Ratio looked like with that extra sliver of clarity behind it.
"Well..." Keyleth said, stopping where the main road split three ways. She turned to face me properly, that genuine openness in her expression that I remembered now as being distinctly her. "Thank you. Really."
"You would have woken up eventually."
"Maybe." She grinned. "But I wouldn't have had the tastiest rabbit I've ever had!"
I almost smiled at that.
"Guidance," she said, pointing at me before she turned to go. "Keep practicing."
"I will."
She disappeared into the crowd, it got me wondering if I'll ever meet her some day.
I sat on my unnamed horse at the crossroads of a city in a world I barely knew, one steel ball returning to me reliably and one that didn't, a half learned cantrip sitting just out of reach at the edge of my fingers, and the beginning of an idea I hadn't fully thought through yet.
It was fine.
I'd worked with less, but now I had another problem to solve.
Money to buy stuff at Gilmore's.
"Damn it, should've asked her where I could get a job..."