[Date: 01.09.1652]
[Days Since Reincarnation: 728]
The air was thick and warm, saturated with the smell of the training ground's settled dust and his own sweat. Caelan stood, leaning on his wooden sword, trying to even his breathing. The sun was setting, painting the sky in soft shades of orange, and a light breeze, heralding the end of summer, did little to cool his flushed skin.
His heart was hammering in his chest. Not just from the grueling spar.
Ellard.
Kira's words still rang in his ears. And a strange, paradoxical reaction coursed through his body. A part of him—the logical, analytical part, the one that broke down Baldrim's runes into syntax—felt a wave of triumph. Finally. After two years of blind, solitary experiments, he would gain access to the continent's leading mind. Ellard, the author of "Trauma as a Catalyst," wouldn't teach him childish tricks. He would disassemble him, atom by atom. He would look under the hood. And perhaps, he would be the one to help Caelan finally understand what he was. His mind craved this examination. Craved it like a thirsty man craves water.
But his body betrayed him. He felt it—a faint, deep tremor in his muscles that had nothing to do with fatigue. A primal, irrational response to the unknown.
It was ridiculously familiar. He remembered the sensation from his past life. An MRI machine. His mind had understood perfectly well then that the loud, cramped tube was just a diagnostic tool. Safe. Necessary. But his body, obeying ancient instincts, had reacted to the confined space and roaring noise with panic.
His mind said: "Yes." His body screamed: "No."
He looked down at his palms, trying to still the trembling. This is good, he told himself. He will research me. Study me. I will become his main project. This assumption, based on cold logic and the books he had read, was the only anchor in this storm of conflicting sensations.
He exhaled, and the paradoxical tremor finally subsided, replaced by a cold, sharp, razor-like anticipation.
Kira turned and silently walked towards the manor. Her steps were quiet, almost inaudible on the dust-covered ground. No parting words, no glance over her shoulder. Simply the end of a lesson.
Silence descended upon the training grounds.
Caelan picked up his wooden sword. His palm settled onto the familiar, worn curves. This piece of wood was understandable. Honest. But the thought that one day it would be replaced by cold, sharp steel sent a strange chill under his skin. Would he flinch when a real blade, capable of killing, was in his hands?
With that thought, he started for the manor.
And Kira's voice, sharp and emotionless like a statement of fact, came to his mind. It had been said several months ago, after another magic lesson.
"Yes, you can make hot spheres. But the speed of their formation... Your casting speed, especially for defensive spells, barely reaches F-rank. That's the level of a peasant who accidentally sets a haystack on fire. You don't even qualify for E-rank, where the greenest adventurers begin their careers."
F-rank. Lower than a novice.
And yet... the blue flame. The flame of an S-rank.
This paradox existed within him, tearing his perception of himself into two incompatible pieces. He didn't doubt Kira's words. She was an instructor, and her assessment was valuable data. The question wasn't whether she was right.
The question was something else.
How do I make it faster?
He was ascending the grand staircase when his gaze swept over the enormous tapestries adorning the walls. Scenes of great battles and portraits of the ancestors of House Valerius. The Duke, during their chess games, had told him about them. That one, with the burning eyes, had been a magical genius. And he had lost his army and his own life in a pointless battle against a horde from the Chaos because he underestimated their wild, instinctual magic.
Chaos. Caelan had never once seen the monsters of this world. But the knowledge that they existed, and that even the great mages of this house had died at their hands, made his heart clench.
He reached the door to his room. Reached out his hand.
And froze.
His fingers hovered an inch from the cool brass of the doorknob. His first, strongest instinct was to hide. To show Ellard only the tip of the iceberg. To not let anyone—not him, not the Duke, and certainly not the Crown or the Church—turn him into a test subject. A weapon. A tool devoid of its own will.
He stood like that for several seconds, at war with himself.
Then, he let out a quiet sigh.
But right now...
He lowered his hand.
...the best option is to show him everything.
To show it all to understand his own potential.
And to see it through the eyes of another person. Perhaps the only person on the continent capable of understanding what he was looking at.
He opened the door and entered his sanctuary.
The room greeted him with its familiar creative chaos. Stacks of paper with sketched runes, scattered pencils, a collection of veined stones on the windowsill. The carpet was dusted with fine powder from the samples he had tried to crack open. The thought of perhaps tidying up crossed his mind for a moment, but it vanished instantly. This mess was his territory.
His gaze swept across the room. Baldrim's open book lay on the table, next to a faint, charred circle. And by the leg of the table, on the floor, stood the dark, matte cauldron.
He hadn't touched the Duke's gift in a long time. Several months, at least.
He bent down and instinctively, with one hand, picked up the cauldron. And froze in surprise.
It was... lighter.
Slightly, but noticeably. The weight he had previously struggled to manage with two hands now yielded to one. He had grown. Gotten stronger.
Caelan placed the cauldron on the table, looking at the word engraved inside.
HEAT.
He let out a quiet sigh.
The solution to his casting speed problem... It wasn't new.
"I found it a long time ago."
He formed a sphere of pure mana next to his palm, slightly larger than a fist. He brought it close to the cauldron, almost touching it. The sphere hung inert in the air, like a glass orb.
Then, with his other hand, he touched the metal and poured a minuscule drop of his energy into it.
The effect was instantaneous. He felt the will embedded in the artifact by its creator awaken and surge through the metal like a spark. That will found the nearest source of fuel—his sphere—and passed the instruction to it.
The mana didn't erupt in blue flames like it had with Kira. It simply began to execute the command.
Caelan saw the air above the sphere begin to distort, rising in an invisible, hot current, like over a bonfire.
He knew how this worked. Just as the will of the Duke's sword had turned his mana into flame. The artifact was an external processor, doing the work for him. It was a way to bypass his own slowness.
But this was someone else's artifact.
He remembered the words from Baldrim's book. Something poetic about how "before putting your will into a stone, you must make it an extension of your soul... breathe a part of yourself into it."
He had tried.
He had taken ordinary stones, pouring his mana into them for hours.
He had engraved runes on them, copying Baldrim's syntax.
Driven to desperation, he had even shouted at them.
He had carved words on them in languages that didn't exist in this world—fragments of his past life.
He had even gone to an extreme. Making a shallow cut on his finger, he had smeared a rune with a drop of blood, taking Baldrim's poetic metaphor literally.
But nothing ever happened.
The stone remained just a stone. Unresponsive. Empty.
He still didn't understand why.
Twilight was slowly swallowing the room, turning the stacks of paper and scattered stones into formless shadows. The silence was oppressive, filled only with his own frustration.
Just then, a soft knock came at the door.
The knock was calm, confident.
"Caelan? May I?"
The Duke's voice.
Caelan startled from the surprise.
"Yes," his voice came out a little hoarse. "You may."
The door opened, and Valerius appeared on the threshold. He stepped inside, and something had changed. Before, his figure had seemed like a mountain filling the entire space. But now… he was just a tall, tired man. Caelan suddenly realized that it wasn't just him who had grown over these two years. The world around him had also shrunk a little.
The Duke's gaze swept calmly across the room.
"I'll tell the servants to tidy up in here," he said quietly.
"No!" The response burst out of Caelan before he could think. He immediately softened his tone. "There's no need. Please. Everything... is in its place."
The Duke gave a barely perceptible nod, accepting his answer. He stepped closer.
"Kira just reported to me. She said your basic training in magic is complete."
He stopped in front of Caelan.
"She is proud of you. And so am I."
The words were simple. Quiet. But they struck Caelan in the chest with a force he hadn't expected. He looked down, not knowing what to say.
"That's why I've sent a messenger," the Duke continued. "Magister Ellard will arrive tomorrow morning."
He let out a weary sigh, an unusual complaint in his voice.
"He's been flooding me with letters for two years. Even Auriya, during her last visit, threatened to burn his beard off if he mentioned your name one more time. An incredibly impatient man."
The Duke placed his heavy, warm hand on Caelan's shoulder.
"Don't worry about him. He can seem... eccentric. But he will do his job. I know him."
He was about to leave but suddenly stopped. His hand moved from Caelan's shoulder to his head and awkwardly, almost hesitantly, ruffled his hair.
"Get some rest today," the Duke said softly. "Good night, Caelan."
And he left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Caelan remained standing in the middle of the room. The silence that returned was different. It rang with the words that had been spoken. With the warmth still lingering on his shoulder and in his hair.
And then, a thought pierced his consciousness.
Not a logical conclusion. Not an analytical hypothesis.
But a simple, terrifying, unavoidable realization.
He's becoming a father to me.
A father he never truly had.
He felt a lump forming in his throat.
Tomorrow. Ellard.
He wouldn't have been able to sleep tonight. His mind would have been torn apart by thoughts of the coming day.
And especially—by this one. The new one. The most terrifying one.
He sat on the edge of his bed, preparing for the familiar ritual. It was a good thing he had an off switch in this life. He held his hands out in front of him, and in the darkness of the room, one by one, large, glowing orbs of pure energy began to flare into existence. Five. Seven. Ten. They hung silently in the air, bathing his face in a soft, ethereal light.
Each one of these... is a hundred of the small spheres he made in the first days, was the last thought that drifted through his mind before his consciousness began to fade along with the light of the spheres.
I wouldn't have been able to sleep... especially with this haunting thought... that the Duke is becoming the father I never had.