The Dust Tower wasn't silent.
Even at midnight, it groaned — not like something alive, but like something forgotten. Wind pressed against half-broken shutters, and age-old wood creaked with every breath of the building's skeleton. Kael sat cross-legged on the cold floor of the attic, a candle flickering beside him, its light warped by soot-stained windows. Shadows stretched long, and somewhere beneath the tower, rats fought over crumbs left by servants who hadn't dared venture up here in days.
This place wasn't a prison anymore.
It was his lab.
Kael exhaled slowly and looked at the rows of scribbles crowding the floor around him — diagrams, numbers, equations, all drawn in coal and candle ash. Circles represented fields, dotted lines marked vectors, and a jagged curve at the center of it all was his own rough attempt to graph what he had started calling Gravitic Strain.
It wasn't magic.
It was force. Energy. Movement.
And now, finally, he had a framework to test it.
He held out his hand. A pebble, scavenged from the crumbling walls, sat in his palm. Last time, he'd made it heavier — just enough to feel the tension build in his wrist. Not enough to break bones, but enough to feel the difference in mass. Now, he focused again — not on the idea of "magic," but on force vectors.
"ΔE = W = F × d," he murmured under his breath. "Force is energy over distance. No free power."
He applied the magic again, this time pressing downward on the stone, increasing its apparent weight. Not in the sense of pulling more stone into it, but by altering the force acting on it — a vector rooted in his will, shaped by his understanding.
The floor cracked under the pebble.
He immediately let go. The pebble clattered onto the floor, normal again.
He grabbed the chalk and noted:
Experiment #17: Force Increase (Static) → Result: Cracked Wood Panel
Estimated Mass Increase = ~40kgf for 0.3s
He frowned. That wasn't efficient. Too much energy loss, no stability in control.
A knock rang below — not a request for entrance, but the sound of the wind slamming something loose in the stairwell. Kael ignored it. If anyone dared come up here, they'd have already braved the rats, the dust, and the stigma.
They hadn't. Not even once.
Not since he'd been labeled "The Black Hole Prince."
Kael's gaze shifted to the window. Outside, the night sky was vast, punctured by stars, glimmering like scattered fuses waiting to ignite the universe. He could feel something stirring behind those stars. Watching, maybe. Waiting.
But it didn't matter.
Not until he understood this world's laws.
He reached into the crude satchel beside him and pulled out the copper wire he'd stripped from an old chandelier. He wrapped it around a carved wooden sphere. Next to it, he placed two more objects: a thin plate of iron and a thick piece of sandstone. Equal volume, wildly different mass.
Experiment #18.
Kael closed his eyes. Focused.
He tried to pull — gently. Not on the objects themselves, but on the space around them. He didn't want to move them directly. He wanted to simulate an alteration in the field beneath them. Artificial gravity, localized and sloped. A gradient.
The copper sphere rolled. Slightly. Almost imperceptibly.
The iron stayed still.
He gritted his teeth. "Mass affects responsiveness," he whispered. "More inertia… harder to accelerate with same field strength."
He made another note:
Result: Lighter objects respond more readily to weak field changes.
Kael rubbed his eyes. Tired. Hungry. But alive in a way he hadn't felt in either life before.
He opened his notebook — Project Graviton, now ten pages deep. He'd filled it with crude derivations of Newton's Laws, gravitational potential equations, attempts to match magical expenditure to energy output. Most of it was speculative. But some of it… some of it worked.
His magic wasn't an undefined tool like fire or water. It obeyed relationships.
A law-based system.
And if it had laws… it had limits.
He needed to know them.
Hours Later
The candle had melted to a stub when Kael stared at the final diagram he'd drawn. It was just two lines crossing: one labeled "Magical Energy Input," the other "Resulting Gravitational Force."
The slope was not linear.
Not even close.
"Input scales exponentially with field size," he said aloud. "Which means—"
He paused. Blinked. Thought.
If the cost of producing a stronger gravitational field rose faster than the size of the field itself, that meant brute force wouldn't work. Trying to mimic the gravity of a mountain would drain him dry — probably kill him.
But…
"What about manipulation through curvature instead of strength?" he asked the darkness. "What if it's about field shape… not raw force?"
He drew a new diagram. Concentric ovals, warped like lenses.
"Focus. Collapse. Lens the force."
He stared at it.
A new hypothesis took root.
He didn't need more magic. He needed better control.
Morning
By the time dawn began to bleed through the cracked window, Kael was still awake.
The attic looked like a battlefield of ideas — pages scattered, cracked floorboards, warped bits of metal and wood littering the space. He looked down at his hands, which were trembling slightly from mana fatigue.
But his eyes were sharp. Clear.
He stood slowly, wincing at the stiffness in his legs, and stared at the iron plate once more. This time, he wouldn't try to crush it. He'd manipulate the space around it — gently slope the gravity, curve the vector, like folding a page.
He stretched out a hand.
Focused.
And bent.
The iron plate slid half an inch to the left. Smooth. Silent.
Not with force.
With shape.
He exhaled — half in awe, half in disbelief.
Gravitational lensing. Not just a term from his past life's textbooks. Now a technique.
He scribbled one last note in the margins of his book:
Magic is shaped, not spent. Physics is the key.
Kael sat down heavily against the wall and watched the early light push back the shadows of the attic.
Somewhere below, in the palace halls, his name was likely still a joke.
A forgotten prince with a useless magic.
But they hadn't seen this.
They hadn't seen this.
A whisper of gravity moved across the floor as the pebble rose from the ground and hovered in the air, caught in an invisible, curved lens of pressure Kael had shaped with precision.
It floated, perfectly still.
Balanced. Controlled.
Kael smiled, just a little.
And whispered, "Let them laugh."
To be continued…