Three weeks into his magical training, Alexander decided he was ready to attempt his first actual spell.
He was wrong.
The spell he'd chosen was among the simplest documented in his parents' collection: a basic kinetic force projection. The theory was straightforward enough—gather internal energy, visualize the desired effect, channel it through a focusing gesture (in this case, a pointed finger), and release it to push a small object.
His father's notes described it as "the magical equivalent of learning to throw a ball. Clumsy at first, but foundational to understanding energy projection."
Alexander sat at his desk with a small wooden block positioned three feet in front of him. He'd spent the morning in meditation, ensuring his energy was circulating properly. He'd reviewed the theory twice. He'd even practiced the visualization without attempting actual energy manipulation, walking through each step mentally.
Now came the real test.
He centered himself, feeling for that now-familiar warmth in his solar plexus. It came easier than it had weeks ago—not effortless, but no longer requiring ten minutes of meditation to access. He gathered the energy, visualizing it as a ball of golden light condensing in his core.
So far, so good.
Next, he needed to move it. His father's notes recommended visualizing it flowing up through the arm like water through a pipe, accumulating at the fingertip. Alexander tried, focusing on the sensation of warmth traveling from his center, up through his chest, down his shoulder, along his arm...
And it dispersed.
The energy scattered the moment it left his core, dissipating into general circulation rather than following the path he'd intended. It felt like trying to push water through a sieve—theoretically possible, practically useless.
Alexander frowned, released the attempt, and started over.
Second attempt: same result. The energy simply wouldn't stay coherent when he tried to direct it through his arm.
Third attempt: he managed to get a trickle of energy to his palm, but when he tried to project it outward, nothing happened. The wooden block sat there, unmoved, mocking him.
Fourth attempt: he pushed harder, forcing more energy into the projection.
Pain lanced through his arm like he'd stuck his finger in an electrical socket. Alexander yelped, yanking his hand back. His entire right arm tingled unpleasantly, the sensation similar to when a limb fell asleep but sharper, more immediate.
"Damn it," he muttered, shaking his arm to dispel the sensation.
He consulted his father's notes again, finding a section he'd initially skimmed:
"Common beginner mistake: forcing energy through channels that aren't properly developed. The body's natural energy pathways are like small streams—functional for basic circulation, but attempting to push too much through them causes 'spiritual strain.' This manifests as physical discomfort and can, in extreme cases, damage the channels themselves.
Solution: Patience. Regular circulation exercises gradually widen and strengthen the channels. Attempting advanced techniques before the foundation is properly established is like trying to run before learning to walk—possible in theory, usually disastrous in practice."
Alexander leaned back in his chair, frustration warring with pragmatism. His father was right, of course. He'd gotten excited by his progress in meditation and energy sensing, thinking that meant he was ready for practical application.
But sensing energy and manipulating it were entirely different skills.
He spent the rest of the day on circulation exercises, focusing on the basic Middle Pillar technique rather than attempting anything more ambitious. It was tedious, repetitive work—the magical equivalent of doing scales on a musical instrument when you wanted to play actual songs.
But it was necessary.
Over the next two weeks, Alexander maintained a strict training regimen:
Morning - One hour of meditation and energy circulation Midday - Physical exercise (his new body was woefully out of shape) Afternoon - Study of magical theory Evening - Another hour of meditation and circulation Night - Reading and note-taking before bed
He made no further attempts at practical spellwork. Instead, he focused entirely on building his foundation, following his father's documented progression path for beginners.
The progress was incremental but noticeable. By the end of week four, he could maintain energy circulation for nearly twenty minutes without losing focus. The sensation of warmth that had initially been faint and flickering now felt more substantial, more real.
His father's notes described the next milestone: "When circulation becomes natural enough to maintain during daily activities, the foundation is approaching sufficiency for basic practical work."
Alexander tested this by attempting to maintain light circulation while performing mundane tasks—making breakfast, organizing books, even during his physical exercise routine. It was difficult, requiring a split focus that left him mentally exhausted, but it became gradually easier.
By week five, he could maintain basic circulation almost unconsciously, like background music he was aware of but didn't need to actively concentrate on.
Time to try again, he decided.
Alexander's second attempt at kinetic projection went better than his first, which wasn't saying much.
He managed to successfully channel energy down his arm without it dispersing or causing pain. That was progress. The energy reached his fingertip, accumulated there, and he could feel it pressing against the boundary of his skin, ready to be released.
He visualized the projection—energy leaving his finger as a concentrated pulse, striking the wooden block and pushing it backward.
He released.
The wooden block shifted. Barely. Maybe a millimeter, possibly just a wobble from air currents in the room.
But it had moved.
Alexander stared at the block, then at his finger, then back at the block. A grin spread across his face that probably looked ridiculous, but he didn't care.
It had moved.
"Pathetic," he said aloud, still grinning. "Absolutely pathetic. Five weeks of training to make a wooden block wobble."
But it was success. Proof of concept. Confirmation that he could, in fact, manipulate external reality through conscious energy manipulation.
He tried again. This time the block shifted perhaps half a centimeter. Third attempt: a full centimeter. By the tenth attempt, he managed to push it nearly an inch, though the effort left him with a pounding headache and his energy reserves completely depleted.
His father's notes described this phenomenon:
"Energy capacity increases through use and depletion, similar to muscle development through exercise. Push to exhaustion, rest and recover, repeat. Over time, reserves expand and efficiency improves."
Alexander added a new section to his training routine: practical exercises to the point of exhaustion, followed by meditation to aid recovery.
The progress remained slow but steady. Within two weeks, he could push the wooden block across his entire desk. Within three, he could knock it off the edge with a focused pulse.
It wasn't impressive by supernatural standards—a low-level devil could probably accomplish the same thing with a casual thought—but for Alexander, it represented a fundamental threshold crossed.
He could affect reality through magic.
It was during week eight, while organizing his father's workshop, that Alexander found the box.
The workshop occupied the estate's eastern wing, a large space his father had converted into a combination laboratory and crafting area. Alexander had avoided it initially, focusing on the library, but his systematic inventory of the estate's resources eventually brought him here.
The workshop was organized chaos. Workbenches covered in half-finished projects. Shelves stacked with materials: crystals, metals both mundane and exotic, preserved reagents in jars, tools whose purposes weren't immediately obvious. A forge in one corner, currently cold. A circle inscribed on the floor in silver for enchantment work.
And in a locked drawer of his father's main workbench, hidden beneath false bottom: a small wooden box, maybe six inches on each side, covered in dense protective scripts.
Alexander recognized his father's handwriting in the wards—complex layering of protections and concealments. Whatever was in this box, his father had wanted it very well hidden.
The wards were keyed to Meridian bloodline, which meant Alexander could access them, but doing so required channeling energy into specific points on the box's surface in the correct sequence. His father's notebook—the one Alexander had been using as primary reference—contained the key sequence almost as an afterthought, tucked into a margin note about keying security measures to bloodline resonance.
Alexander placed his fingers on the first activation point, a small rune near the corner, and channeled energy into it. The rune flickered, glowing faint blue. Second point. Third. Fourth.
With the final activation, the wards dissolved and the box clicked open.
Inside, nestled in velvet, was a ring.
It was beautiful in an understated way—silver band inscribed with flowing script in a language Alexander didn't immediately recognize, setting a dark blue stone that seemed to contain depths far greater than its physical size suggested. Looking into the stone was like looking into deep water at night, darkness that implied vast space beneath.
But more than its appearance, Alexander could feel something from it. A presence, almost. A sense of potential that made his newly awakened magical senses tingle.
Beneath the ring was a folded letter in his father's handwriting:
Alexander,
If you're reading this, your mother and I are dead. I'm sorry. We knew our research was dangerous, but the potential breakthroughs were too significant to ignore. I hope our death at least yielded useful data—check the primary research journal for our final experiment's notes.
The ring you're holding is the culmination of fifteen years of research into a question that has plagued magical theory for millennia: why do some humans manifest Sacred Gears while others don't?
The prevailing theory is that Sacred Gears are bestowed by the Biblical God before his death, implanted in human souls and passed down through reincarnation. But this never satisfied us. Why those specific abilities? Why that distribution? The pattern seemed almost... evolutionary. As if the Sacred Gears were adaptations, solutions to problems.
Our hypothesis: Sacred Gears aren't just divine gifts. They're interfaces—consciousness-reality bridges crystallized into stable forms. The Biblical God didn't create them from nothing. He formalized something that humans were beginning to develop naturally, giving structure to emergent phenomena.
If that's true, then theoretically, new Sacred Gears could be created. Not by divine mandate, but through understanding the underlying principles and replicating the mechanism.
This ring is our attempt. We call it Architect's Prism.
It won't give you power, Alexander. That's not how true Sacred Gears work—they're tools and interfaces, not power sources. But if our theories are correct, it will do something potentially more valuable: it will help you understand and manipulate the architecture of magic itself.
Use it wisely. And more importantly, use it safely. We pushed too far, too fast. Learn from our mistakes.
With love,Marcus Meridian
P.S. - The activation key is Meridian bloodline resonance plus conscious intent to awaken. Simply channel energy into the ring while clearly visualizing its purpose. If it works, you'll know immediately.
Alexander read the letter three times, his mind racing with implications.
His parents had tried to create a Sacred Gear. An actual, functional Sacred Gear from scratch, based purely on magical theory and research.
The audacity of it was staggering. Sacred Gears were divine artifacts, creations of the Biblical God himself. Attempting to replicate them was like... like trying to build a star in your basement. Theoretically possible according to physics, practically absurd.
But his parents had been brilliant. And if there was even a chance this worked...
Alexander picked up the ring, feeling its weight in his palm. The stone seemed to pulse faintly, or maybe that was his imagination.
Architect's Prism, his father had called it. A tool for understanding and manipulating the architecture of magic.
If it worked—if his parents had actually succeeded—this could be exactly what he needed. A way to accelerate his learning, to understand magical principles at a deeper level than normal study would allow.
But there was risk. His parents' final experiment had killed them. This ring, this artificial Sacred Gear, was connected to that research. What if it was unstable? What if activation caused some catastrophic feedback?
Alexander stood there for a long moment, weighing options.
Then he slipped the ring onto his right index finger.
The moment the metal touched his skin, he felt it—a click of connection, like a plug finding its socket. The ring adjusted, shrinking slightly to fit perfectly, and the stone began to glow with soft internal light.
Alexander channeled energy into it, following his father's instructions, while visualizing its stated purpose: understanding and manipulating the architecture of magic.
The effect was immediate and overwhelming.
His vision fractured.
Suddenly Alexander could see layers he'd never perceived before. The physical world was still there, but overlaid on it were patterns—geometric structures, flowing lines of energy, nodes where those lines intersected, larger frameworks that connected everything in subtle ways.
It was like someone had given him the ability to see the source code of reality.
The walls of the workshop weren't just walls—they were matter held in specific configurations by fundamental forces, those forces visible as intricate weaves of energy. The air itself had structure, currents and eddies of magical energy flowing through it like wind patterns in atmosphere.
And when Alexander looked at his own hand, he saw himself in terrifying detail: the biological systems, the energy channels his training had been developing, his own aura as a luminous shell around his body, and deeper still, something that might have been his soul—a core of light that everything else radiated from.
The sheer amount of information was crushing. Alexander's mind couldn't process it all, couldn't even begin to categorize what he was seeing. It was like trying to drink from a fire hose, like staring at the sun, like—
He cut off the energy flow to the ring with panicked haste.
The extra layers of vision vanished instantly, leaving only mundane sight. Alexander gasped, realizing he'd been holding his breath. His heart hammered in his chest and sweat beaded on his forehead.
"Holy hell," he managed, voice shaky.
The ring had worked. It had absolutely worked. His parents had succeeded in creating a functional Sacred Gear—or at least something so close to one that the difference was academic.
But the activation had also demonstrated something critical: he wasn't ready for it yet. The amount of information the Architect's Prism provided was far beyond his current ability to process. Using it at full strength would be like a child trying to read a university quantum physics textbook—technically the information was accessible, practically useless without the framework to understand it.
He would need to develop gradually, learning to use the ring in measured doses, building up tolerance and comprehension over time.
But the potential...
Alexander looked at the ring on his finger, now appearing as just an ornate piece of jewelry, and felt something shift in his understanding of what was possible.
His parents had achieved something that shouldn't have been possible. They'd created a tool that could help him see the deepest structures of magical reality.
With this, with time and careful study, he could understand magic at a level few beings in this world ever reached.
He could master not just specific techniques, but the fundamental principles underlying all magic.
Alexander returned to his room and added a new entry to his journal:
Day 57: Everything changes.
The Architect's Prism is real and functional. Initial activation was overwhelming—too much information too quickly. Will need to develop usage protocols: short activations with specific focuses, gradually building tolerance.
The implications are staggering. If I can learn to properly utilize this tool, I can analyze any magical technique I encounter, understanding not just what it does but how and why it works at the deepest level.
This is the key to synthesis I've been looking for. The ability to see past surface traditions to underlying principles.
New training priorities:1. Continue foundation building—basic competence remains essential2. Develop controlled usage of Architect's Prism3. Begin systematic analysis of different magical traditions through the Prism's lens4. Start experimenting with technique synthesis
Father said the ring would help me understand and manipulate the architecture of magic itself.
Time to prove him right.