Jacob Hemlock was not born in this world.
He remembered another life beneath another sky, streets were without magic, machines that moved without mana, games that turned impossible worlds into numbers and systems, and a version of himself that would have never believed that he would one day wake up in a world of magic as a farm boy in a frontier kingdom.
Then it happened.
He had been ten years old in this life, playing with the chickens, feed in his hands, and no real worries to deal with. The day had been ordinary for the child.
The air smelled of dirt and feathers with a bit of a waft coming from the coop, signaling the need to clean it out. But the hens clucked around his boots, happily.
The farm operated around him as it usually did.
Then his old memories tore through him. Like a tide from a dammed-off river surging through the barrier.
They did not return gently. Nor did they rise and bubble up like dreams.
They slammed into his little head with the burden of another life, and the pain dropped him where he stood.
When he woke in bed, his father was beside him.
Arthur Hemlock sat near the cot with a damp cloth in one hand and a face full of care that tried very hard not to show fear. To the confused boy coming out of a fever dream, he looked like a stalwart pillar in a flood.
Jacob remembered that part more clearly than the headache. He remembered opening his eyes and seeing a man who had spent the night watching over his son.
That was the first thing his old mind understood about his new life.
He had a family here.
A real one.
People who seemed to genuinely love him.
He could have spent years mourning the world he left behind. Maybe another person would have.
Perhaps another reincarnated soul would have clawed after the past, bitter over everything lost and furious at whatever had brought him here.
Jacob did not.
The memories from his old life were broken in places. Faces were blurry, and some of the names slipped away. His old family remained more like a dream than a memory, which was probably for the best.
The old man who helped him get to this world as well. He seemed like a dream, but the fact that his memories returned like the old man said they would was a fact that counted. Something about the old man having a name that strengthened the spirit and helped the soul grow.
It made his head hurt. He just knew he should never repeat that old man's name out loud.
He also knew his family had not loved him the way a family should, and they had kept him around because social pressures and faux obligation forced them to. He also knew that loneliness had followed him for a long time.
This life, though, was different. And the past did not have to saddle him down with its baggage. Since the memories were just out of reach and easy to forget like a dream slipping through his fingers, he did the only sensible thing he could. He decided to let them slip.
So when the pain passed, Jacob did the most reasonable thing he could think to do.
He went and fed the chickens.
He realized that some of the memories from his first 10 years on Meldra were a bit fuzzy as well, but he figured a bad memory for a kid his age might still be considered acceptable, at least for a peasant farmer.
The Hemlock farm sat on the edge of Ruvka, a small frontier village in the Sinclair Kingdom. The kingdom mostly remembered Ruvka when grain taxes came due or when monsters wandered too close to the road.
Beyond that, the village survived because its people knew how to work and because the land rewarded those who would not quit.
But it punished those who did.
Arthur Hemlock was exactly the kind of man a place like that required. He thought more than he spoke, and preferred to spend his days working hard in the fields instead of complaining.
He knew how important good soil was for a farm, and did his best to keep things in order. Though he still ended up with a couple of useless fields over the years.
He also knew magic, though not in the way academy-trained mages knew it.
The Hemlock family had passed down journals for generations. Their magic had always been applied practically, with little real experimentation.
A rune of strength went on a hammer. An enchantment of relative lightness went to a plough.
Their knowledge was written down because they knew that they could not trust that every lesson would be taught in time.
That caution saved them.
Years before Jacob was born, sickness swept through Ruvka and killed many of the adults.
Children inherited farms before they inherited the needed wisdom to run them. The kingdom sent some help, but not enough to make Ruvka particularly productive.
Arthur's apprenticeship under his father ended too soon, but the journals remained.
And Arthur used them.
He kept the Hemlock farm alive. Then he bought nearby farms from people who had inherited land they did not know how to manage.
He did not throw those families away, though. He took the former owners on as farmhands, gave them work, and folded their survival into his own. He had plenty of room on his expanded farmlands to house his workers, which kept them out of the forests.
That was Arthur. A quiet man, both practical and loyal, past the point most people considered reasonable for someone in his situation.
And he taught Jacob the family magics early.
That turned out to be both wise and dangerous. For both of them.
Jacob learned the basics from his father, then started doing things Arthur had never seen and could not explain.
Where Arthur saw patterns, Jacob saw purpose. Where Arthur saw runes as strict tools, Jacob saw a sort of conversation with the ethereal.
The old journals had given Arthur enough to preserve the family craft. Jacob took those lessons and bent them toward something stranger but also more versatile.
His magic could seemingly grant wishes and bend reality to his whim. The only thing seemingly stopping him was the amount of power he could push into a spell.
And that was going to change soon, hopefully.
May Hemlock ran the house the way Arthur ran the farm.
Nothing escaped her. She knew when a child was hungry before the child said so, and she knew when Arthur was worried by how long he stood at the door.
She also knew when Jacob had pushed too hard by the way he tried to act normal.
May fed people like feeding them was a sacred duty. She put love into stews, bread, tea, and every full bowl she set down.
She did not need speeches. Her pride was expressed in her warm meals, clean clothes, and the loving way she kissed her children's heads, whether they had asked for affection or not.
She kept the house together and was there when someone needed support. Whether that was a word of encouragement or a shoulder to cry on. She was there, and everyone knew they could depend on her.
Caleb was Jacob's older brother. Arthur had named him after his late father. Caleb did not say much, but he watched everything. Over the last year, he had grown into a kind of strict competence that made Jacob wonder about him.
His dedication to the farm was commendable, and Jacob knew he could leave the farmwork to his brother if he decided that he would fully pursue magic.
Caleb had started learning magic as well after seeing enough impossible things happen in the barn. He had more talent in the craft than anyone expected.
His mana pool was small, and that held him back, but Jacob already had plans for that. Just as he had plans for most things, although most of those plans currently lived in his head.
Lila was the youngest. She was five and still tried to tell three stories at the same time at dinner. No one on the farm had managed to stop her. And no one really wanted to. She brought plenty of joy with her disjointed stories, and no one wanted to end that.
Then there was Sera.
Sera entered Jacob's life the way important things often did, through trouble no one had planned for. Her family situation fell apart, and the Hemlocks took her in.
She sang with a voice that carried something more than sound, and no one fully understood the magic woven through it, but everyone who heard her knew it was there.
Then her grandmother died.
Grief changed her. It quieted her songs and pulled her inward. She still smiled sometimes, especially when Lila dragged her into childish nonsense at the dinner table, but the loss had been there for the past few months.
Jacob did not try to fix it with clever words. He stayed close enough that she knew she had not been abandoned and gave her enough space to breathe as she mourned.
People in Ruvka sometimes misunderstood what Sera was to him.
Jacob understood it less neatly than he wanted to admit.
She was not his girlfriend, and she was not his sister. She was not simply a friend either. She was Sera, and that had to be what it was for now. They could figure things out when they were old enough to actually think about it.
Mira came into his life from the edge of the woods.
She was the daughter of a trapper and a leather worker, a quiet girl who knew the forest paths better than most adults and moved through brush like the trees had conspired to keep her hidden.
Her father spent long stretches away checking snares and hunting. While her mother taught her practical work with cloth and gear. The forest taught her everything else.
During Jacob's Trial Year, he wandered farther than he should have and got turned around before dusk.
Mira found him before the woods could become a real problem. She did not make a speech about it. She simply guided him back in silence, as if rescuing strange farm boys from their own curiosity was something she had decided was a part of her duties.
Later, she admitted she had seen him enchanting a bow and had been curious.
Jacob repaid her by enchanting her boots to reduce fatigue on long walks. That was fair in his mind, as she was not really expecting anything in return.
She had saved him from spending the night lost in the trees, and he had made sure the trees would have a harder time wearing her down.
Mira was not very easy to read. She watched more than she spoke, with curiosity behind her hazel eyes. But Jacob noticed her sharp senses and steady nerves. The way she always seemed to be a few steps ahead of trouble.
Oren was a fighter, and Jacob met him during a goblin surge. They rushed the farm, but he was able to fend them off with one of the farm hands, thanks to Oren holding them by himself in the woods.
Even once Oren joined them, Elis and Jacob were uncertain that they would be able to make it without more reinforcements.
That was until Oren unlocked aura.
With a burst of red energy, the teen rushed forward and slaughtered the goblins.
That was how he saved the farm, and why he had a bed in Jacobs room.
He was not homeless, but he did enjoy sleeping on the farm with its close proximity to the goblin nests in the forest.
Jacob's magic made simple situations much more complex.
Old Thom was the first person with enough power and age to properly scare him.
The old sorcerer lived near Ruvka in a crooked little house that was not really a house. From the road, it looked rundown. The porch creaked wrong, and the fence warped in ways fences should not.
Even the trees were bent in the wrong directions.
The whole place seemed one hard rain away from collapse. Yet it stood longer than anyone in the village could remember.
Inside, it opened into something much larger.
Old Thom's home was a dimensional gateway hidden behind bad boards and a creepy atmosphere.
The old man was a centuries-old sorcerer with power no villager could measure, and he had the personality of someone who had long ago stopped caring whether anyone found him pleasant to be around.
He did not praise Jacob often, and he really did not praise anyone often if Arthur can be trusted with his personal observations.
Instead, the old man handed Jacob a dagger made from a strange, dark material and told him to enchant it when he was ready.
It took Jacob the better part of a year.
When he finally brought the dagger back, it carried five enchantments. Jacob had poured so much of himself into the work that he barely made it to bed afterward. He passed out face-first before he could take off his boots.
Old Thom called the dagger a unique artifact. He also hinted that Jacob should try spending himself in work like that as often as possible to help his magic grow.
That was significant for Jacob because he knew that Old Thom did not waste words on flattery. He paid Jacob in C-rank cores, gold, and a selection of nature, light, and darkness cores that Jacob had not seen before.
He said he wanted to see what Jacob could cook up with his special magic and unique problem-solving skills.
He also told Jacob something more dangerous.
No one currently alive on Meldra could do what Jacob did with magical equipment. That was a revelation that shook Jacob a bit.
Old Thom said it like a warning, more than encouragement.
That was usually how he delivered his advice or warnings. It was so cryptic at times that it was hard to tell which he was hinting toward. Or if it was just the ramblings of a madman.
Jacob's enchantments were not normal by any stretch of the imagination.
He did not force magic into metal through rigid formulas or command the material to obey. He built a complete picture in his mind and then shaped a purpose until it felt right, then asked his magic to bridge the distance between the object as it was and the object as it should become.
Sometimes his magic felt like it listened, and sometimes it felt like it helped. It was kinda like a curious cat in that regard.
His enchantments seemed to carry a sort of intelligence, not enough to speak or think like people, but enough to understand their own work. They partnered with an instinctual purpose instead of merely holding a rigid function. At least, that was how Jacob viewed it.
And that made his magic powerful in his hands.
But that power also made it dangerous. For him, and also those he cared about. But only if he was not careful.
Gerald Viscerent understood that better than almost anyone else Jacob knew.
Gerald was a young academy mage, a noble, and one of the few people Jacob trusted with the stranger edges of his work.
Their relationship began as a business contact and ended up becoming something closer to a friendship. He met Jacob monthly, traded knowledge for enchantments, and reacted to Jacob's breakthroughs with equal parts delight and horror.
At first, it was just small single-type enchantments with no core on basic clothing. Something Gerald could give to his servants or trade for contribution points at the academy.
But, eventually, Jacob started showing Gerald more. And that resulted in Geralds support, but also some sort of mixture between fear and delight at the revelations.
Sometimes, even he was confused about how to feel about Jacob's magic.
Sometimes he secretly felt a little terror. But that was the thing he loved about magic. And that was what kept him coming back to Thornhold when he had already finished his studies for the semester.
Gerald once asked Jacob to create a distortion band using a C-rank water core.
Jacob made it work.
Gerald laughed for nearly a full minute. Then he stopped laughing and told Jacob that the band should have been impossible. He told Jacob not to show work like that to anyone until he had the power to fight off an army.
Gerald was not being dramatic.
He was being careful. And he was being serious.
Jacob took the advice with all seriousness and put it to the back of his mind for later, which was where he put most warnings that were probably important. Not because he was careless, but because he had some magic to focus on at the present moment.
Those warnings would come back to him when he needed them. Hopefully.