Elias led him from the Duke's study without a word. The path back was a blur of sunlit corridors and silent, ancestral portraits. They stopped at the familiar door to the room where he had woken that morning. "Rest until you are summoned," the butler said, his voice a neutral baritone. It wasn't a suggestion.
The door closed with a soft, heavy click, leaving Caelan to the silence. The room was exactly as he'd left it. The enormous, high-post bed with its dark blue hangings. The writing desk by the tall, arched window that overlooked the perfectly manicured garden, now bathed in the deepening gold of late afternoon. His gaze was drawn again to the one small imperfection in the room's quiet elegance: the hairline fracture in the stone of the hearth.
He moved to the center of the room, his mind already working. He had to understand the tools at his disposal. He started with the classics, the ones he'd seen in a hundred isekai stories, the spells that every reincarnated hero seemed to know instinctively.
"Fireball."
Silence.
"Shield."
Nothing.
"Water Jet. Stone Wall. Heal. Light Beam..."
He listed them methodically, picturing each effect with the clarity of a programmer visualizing code. But the room remained indifferent. His voice grew strained. The analytical process, his one constant comfort, was failing. And with that failure came a familiar, bitter taste. Powerlessness. The same hollow ache that had frozen him in the kitchen as the white light bloomed. He had dreamed of magic, of a power that could have saved them. And now, in a world where magic was real, he was just as helpless.
The dam inside him broke.
His small body trembled, and he collapsed to his knees on the plush carpet. Hot, silent tears streamed down his face, washing away the fragile hope he'd felt in the Duke's study and leaving only the bitter taste of his own failure. He was a child again, not just in body, but in spirit—scared, alone, and utterly defeated.
"Why?" he whispered, his voice cracking, the sound swallowed by the vast room. He looked at his hands, at the faint, ghostly white aura that bled from his skin. "I have this... this light! Why can't I cast a single thing? Why couldn't I make a shield when that damn collar ordered me to?"
The question hung in the air, unanswered. He was empty. The engineer had failed. The programmer had given up. All that was left was a grieving boy.
He stared at the pale wisps of light drifting from his fingertips, useless and faint. He had tried to command them with words, with logic. What if he just… told them what to do?
He raised his hands in front of him, palms facing each other but not touching, mimicking a stance he'd seen in his brother's favorite anime. He closed his eyes, the tears still wet on his cheeks, and focused all his remaining will, all his desperation, into a single, silent command. Not a spell. Not a word. Just a primal urge.
Gather.
At first, nothing happened. Then, he felt it. The faint wisps of light that leaked from his body hesitated. They stopped drifting away into the air. Slowly, reluctantly, the pale wisps of light stopped drifting away. They began to flow not to his hands, but into the empty space between them.
He opened his eyes. There, suspended in the air between his palms, was a shimmering ball of light. It was tiny, no bigger than a coin, and its glow was weak, pathetic even. It didn't radiate heat or power. It just was.
A sound escaped his throat. It wasn't a sob. It was a laugh. A sharp, ironic, tear-stained laugh that bordered on hysteria. The sheer absurdity of it all—of losing everything, of being sold as a defective product, of breaking down completely—only to succeed with a gesture borrowed from a cartoon.
Knock, knock.
The sound was gentle, precise, and utterly jarring. Elias.
The little ball of light flickered and dissolved into nothing. Caelan wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and pushed himself to his feet.
"Master Caelan," the butler's voice called from the hall. "The young lady is in the west garden. His Grace requests your presence."
He looked at his empty hands, then slowly clenched them into fists. It was a beginning.
"I am ready," he said, and his voice was steady.
The path Elias led him on diverged from the ones he had seen. The gilded frames and stoic portraits gave way to corridors lined with heavy, woven tapestries. It was here Caelan saw the first sign. A large tapestry, depicting a grand scene of fellowship, was marred. It showed five figures standing together against a dark forest background: a central, knight-like human; a slender figure with the same pointed ears as his own; a short, broad man with a magnificent beard that reached his belt; a woman with familiar orange, feline ears; and a tall, stern-faced man with ears of silver wolf's fur. Near the bottom corner, a section of the thick fabric was blackened and brittle, as if splashed with a powerful acid that had eaten away the vibrant colors, leaving a scar of dark gray and charred threads. Caelan's eyes registered the damage, the clean edges of the burn, and then flicked to Elias. The butler's pace didn't change; his gaze didn't even flicker towards the tapestry. His silence was an answer in itself: this is normal.
They passed through a stone archway laced with ivy and stepped into the west garden. Caelan stopped, his breath catching for a moment. He saw her immediately. Near a small, serene pond shaded by a weeping willow sat a girl who looked to be five or six years old, noticeably taller than him. Dressed in a simple white dress, she was completely absorbed, sitting on a small wooden stool with a large book open on her lap, sketching with a piece of charcoal. For a moment, she was just a child, an island of perfect peace in the quiet garden.
A small, brightly colored bird landed on a low-hanging willow branch above the pond, letting out a series of sharp, melodic chirps. The girl flinched, her concentration broken.
"Hush," she whispered, not looking up from her drawing.
The bird, of course, paid no mind, and its song grew louder.
The girl's head snapped up. "I said, be quiet!" Her voice was no longer a whisper; it was sharp with irritation.
That's when Caelan felt it. The air around her seemed to shimmer, like heat rising from asphalt on a summer day. Her blue aura, which had been a calm, gentle light, suddenly flared. It didn't change color, but its texture warped. For an instant, it burned with the sharp intensity of a blue gas flame.
A small sphere of raw fire, wrapped in a shimmering shell of her intense blue aura, shot from her direction without a sound. It wasn't a spell. It was a tantrum made manifest. It struck the willow branch where the bird had been perched a second before it fluttered away in panic. The wood instantly ignited, small, hungry flames licking at the dry leaves.
The girl gasped, her anger vanishing as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by wide-eyed horror. "No! No, no, no…"
She scrambled to her feet, her gaze fixed on the growing fire. She stretched her hands toward the pond. Caelan watched, fascinated, as a clumsy stream of water lifted from the surface. It wavered, fought against her control, looking more like a writhing serpent than a jet, but it finally arced through the air and doused the flames with a hiss, leaving the branch sodden and blackened.
A sudden chill swept through the garden, raising goosebumps on Caelan's arms. It wasn't a breeze; it was a palpable drop in temperature, a coldness that emanated directly from her. She stood trembling, staring at the damage she'd caused. Her aura had changed again. The fiery, sharp edges were gone, replaced by a slow, heavy swirl, the blue light looking dense and cold as deep ocean water.
Caelan stared, his mind racing. He wasn't afraid. He was utterly fascinated. He had just witnessed a direct, unfiltered connection between emotion and physical reality. A power that didn't need words or complex gestures, only feeling. It wasn't a flaw in a system. It was a language he didn't understand… yet.
Elias remained perfectly still by the archway, his expression unreadable. He was giving Caelan a choice. To retreat, or to engage.
Caelan took a breath and walked forward.
The soft crunch of gravel under his small shoes cut through the silence. The girl spun around as if struck, her face pale, her eyes wide with the familiar, dreadful expectation of seeing fear or disgust. She watched him approach, ready for him to recoil.
But Caelan's steps faltered as he walked past her. The air itself felt different here, thick with something invisible. His eyes, now accustomed to seeing the world's hidden light, caught it: tiny, shimmering motes of blue energy, identical to the light of her own aura, were slowly fading like sparks from a firework. A magical residue. Her signature, left on the very fabric of the world. He stopped, his gaze darting from the fading motes to the girl, who was now frozen, watching his every move. A wide, incredulous grin spread across his face, wiping away any trace of the detached observer. He spun to face her, his eyes alight with a mixture of childlike wonder and the intense curiosity of an engineer who had just witnessed the impossible.
"How did you do that?!" he exclaimed, his voice a half-laugh, half-shout of pure, unadulterated fascination.
Caelan's reaction—curiosity instead of fear—left Lianna utterly bewildered. She was used to being an anomaly, a monster in her own home. But this boy, this quiet elf, was looking at her like she was the most fascinating puzzle in the world.
"You're strange," she said. It wasn't an insult, just a cool statement of fact. Then, her lips quirked into something that might have been a smile. "And warm."
"I can't do what you did," Caelan answered honestly, picturing her effortless ball of fire.
"Oh?" A flicker of childish interest sparked in her eyes. "And what can you do?"
"Not much," he admitted. "I… I only just learned today. So don't expect anything special."
It was at that moment he felt a heavy gaze fall upon him. Duke Valerius was standing by the ivy-laced archway, his butler a silent shadow behind him. The Duke's presence instantly charged the air, turning the garden from a playground into an examination hall.
Caelan took a deep breath. This was a test.
He repeated the gesture he had discovered in his room. He held his hands out, closed his eyes, and focused on recreating that same quiet, stable state he had found just moments before.
The Duke watched. He saw a sphere begin to form between the elf's palms. It possessed no qualities. No heat. No cold. No elemental flavor. It wasn't the magic of light, or fire, or ice. It was the very architecture of magic itself, the raw material of creation, stripped bare of all intent and impurity. Pure mana. A concept philosophers debated, a myth from ancient treatises, made manifest before his eyes.
Forgetting all decorum, the Duke strode forward. He reached out and slowly passed his fingers through the sphere. As he had suspected, he felt nothing. No trace of heat or cold. No echo of joy or sorrow. A perfect, absolute void.
He drew his hand back, his face pale. For a moment, he swayed on his feet. Then, he began to laugh.
It wasn't a laugh of joy. It was a quiet, rusty, almost unhinged sound from a man whose entire worldview had just been shattered.
"Decades," he breathed, his voice raw with disbelief. "The greatest mages spend lifetimes learning not just to tame their power, but to extract it. To draw mana from their own body in its raw form requires decades of meditation, of absolute discipline. And even then…" He shook his head, looking at the perfect sphere as if it were a heresy. "Even for a true master, the result would be flawed. The sphere would carry the color of their soul, the tint of their affinity. It would flicker with the faint echo of their emotions. But this…"
He cut himself off abruptly. The laughter vanished, replaced by an icy, steel-like resolve. He locked eyes with Elias, his gaze a command that permitted no argument.
"Double the guard. Seal the west wing. From this moment, access is granted by my personal authority alone. What we have just seen… no one is to know."
Finally, he turned back to Caelan, who still held the small, impossible sphere. The Duke's eyes burned with a dangerous mixture of awe, fear, and an absolute, all-consuming curiosity.
"You have no idea," he whispered, his voice trembling slightly, "what you have just done, child."