The first time it happened, I thought I was going to die — again.
I was lying in my crib beneath the twilight glow of a half-shuttered window. Jasmine's humming had faded down the hall. Cassian's hammering had stopped for the night. Everything was still.
And yet… something moved inside me.
Not my stomach. Not my lungs. Something deeper.
A second heartbeat — but not a physical one.
Mana.
It stirred like embers in an ancient forge, pulsing faintly in rhythm with my breath. I felt it in my chest, but it wasn't just there. It was everywhere. Around me. Through me.
I instinctively reached for it — not with my body, but with my mind.
And the moment I did, something clicked.
Like two mismatched gears grinding together… and then locking into place.
A wave of pressure crashed into me — not painful, but overwhelming. Foreign. Familiar. My vision swam with color. Glyphs. Threads. Lights that weren't there. And then…
Silence.
Warm, golden silence.
I had touched mana again — truly touched it — for the first time in this life.
But what I felt wasn't just this world's mana.
I felt both.
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In my previous life, magic was disciplined. Controlled. Every spell carved from structure, equations, formulas. Like designing a machine — precise, powerful, but utterly dependent on perfection. We called it the "Runic Channeling System."
Here in Cairn, it was the opposite.
Wild. Emotional. Like dancing with fire or swimming in wind. Spells were cast through sheer will and feeling — like channeling emotion into the world. It had no glyphs, no formations, just flow.
So imagine the shock when, as an infant, I felt both systems clash in my soul — and then merge.
My body had instinctively started developing a mana core like those native to this world — a spiral of energy in the center of my being. It twisted and spun, drawing in ambient energy. But my soul, still tethered to my former life, tried to forge glyphic channels, locking the spiral in place with geometric structure.
The two systems weren't meant to coexist.
Yet… they did.
And what formed from that chaos was something entirely new.
A hybrid system.
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Not just a core. Not just a channel.
But a Fusion Spiral.
Where Cairn's mages could only cast using raw flow — uncontrolled but powerful — and my former peers relied on fixed formations — controlled but inflexible — I could do both.
I could cast by feel or structure. My spiral gathered mana instinctively like the locals, but once inside me, it passed through a network of internal glyphs — ones I didn't even have to draw.
They were etched into me.
Not on skin. Not in the air.
Etched into my soul.
This meant my casting was faster, using raw absorption like Cairn natives.
More stable, thanks to structured internal glyphs.
More adaptive, allowing me to blend magic types on instinct.
And more powerful, because I could compress, store, and regulate energy like no one else.
It was like having two weapons in a duel — a sword in one hand, and a spear in the other — while everyone else had only learned to fight with sticks.
Their system was a river, mine was a dam with turbines. I controlled the flow.
I didn't just cast magic.
I engineered it.
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Of course, there were risks.
If I lost control of the balance between the spiral and the glyphwork, the feedback could injure me — or worse. The spiral could collapse in on itself, or the glyphs could fracture from over-compression.
I was walking a razor's edge.
But I had walked worse before.
This was magic no one else in this world could even perceive, let alone comprehend. A system that didn't exist in any book. No teacher could explain it to me. No master could guide me.
I would have to shape it myself.
Like forging a new sword from unfamiliar metal.
⸻
It was the middle of the night. Outside, wind whispered through the grass. The fox-dog curled up at the door, twitching in its sleep.
And I — a six-month-old infant in a wooden cradle — stared at the ceiling, eyes glowing faintly green and gold, with a soft spiral of light slowly spinning within my chest.
Not just reincarnated.
Not just reborn.
Redefined.
This new world didn't know it yet. But something had awakened. Something impossible. Something… legendary.
And it began with me.