The Grimoire Tower was a place of ghosts—not the spectral kind, but the lingering echoes of thousands of destinies that had passed through its stone walls. Lencar sat in the highest alcove, a space so cramped and dusty that even Tower Master Drouot rarely ventured there. The air was thick with the scent of decaying paper and the dry, metallic tang of dormant mana.
For three days, Lencar had been obsessing over The Geometry of the Arcane. His right arm, though knitting together, still throbbed with a dull reminder of his limitations. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the "Static Ceiling" of 25.4 units. He saw the bottleneck that threatened to turn his 15-year plan into a mediocre footnote.
He turned a page so fragile it felt like a dried leaf. His eyes, sharpened by a month of intense observation, scanned a passage written in a script so ancient it was almost pictographic. It was a commentary on the nature of "Mirror" and "Echo" magic—attributes similar to his own.
"If a mage exists who can mirror the soul of another," the text whispered through the centuries, "then there must surely exist an Absolute. To mirror is to catch a reflection; it is a passive theft of light. But the Absolute does not reflect. The Absolute consumes. It is the transition from the Image to the Essence."
Lencar froze. His analytical mind, usually a whirlwind of numbers, went completely still.
"Absolute," he whispered.
He leaned closer to the book, the tallow candle guttering in the draft. The text continued, theorizing that Replication magic, in its standard form, was a "Lossy Compression." It copied the appearance and the basic function, but it couldn't capture the "Source Code"—the mana pool and the soul-link that made spells flexible.
If there exists such magic, Lencar reasoned, his heart beginning to hammer against his ribs, then there must be a way to override the 'Replacement' rule. I'm not looking for a copy. I'm looking for a migration.
He began to think like the data analyst he once was. In his previous life, if he wanted to move data from one server to another without losing integrity, he didn't "copy" it. He performed a full System Migration. He moved the files, the permissions, and the storage capacity in one unified block.
"The grimoire is the key," Lencar realized. "The reason my spells are inflexible is because they aren't 'installed' in my soul. They're just shortcuts pointing to a file I don't own."
As the realization took hold, something shifted in the atmosphere of the alcove. The blank grimoire, resting on the table, began to vibrate. It wasn't the violent, rejection-based shaking he had felt before. It was a resonance.
Lencar's "Mana-Forged" nerves, already overclocked, began to tingle. He felt a bridge forming between his logical mind—the Kenji Tanaka who refused to accept a ceiling—and the blank vessel that had been born from this world's mystery.
"I don't want the reflection," Lencar said, his voice gaining a sudden, terrifying weight. "I want the Absolute."
The grimoire exploded with light.
It wasn't the emerald wind of Yuno or the iron-grey of the chains. It was a brilliant, blinding Golden Radiance that filled the tiny alcove, bleaching the world of color. Lencar shielded his eyes as the blank pages of his book began to flip with a speed that blurred the parchment.
He felt a surge of heat in his chest, a sensation of ancient gears finally clicking into place. The "Code" was rewriting itself. The vessel was expanding, not by adding more water, but by changing its very molecular structure.
The light subsided as quickly as it had come.
Lencar panted, sweat dripping from his chin onto the ancient book. He looked down at his grimoire. It looked the same—plain, brown, and unadorned. But when he opened it to the very first page, past the "Toggle," he saw a new entry written in a script that looked like molten gold.
[ABSOLUTE REPLICATION]
He reached out, his finger trembling as he touched the ink. Information flooded his mind, not as data, but as instinct.
The Mechanism: Unlike standard Replication, which merely mirrored the "read-only" data of a mage, Absolute Replication allowed Lencar to perform a total system takeover.
Attribute & Spells: He would acquire the target's magic attribute and every spell they had ever recorded.
The Mana Pool: The target's entire mana capacity would be permanently added to Lencar's own. The bottleneck was shattered; he could now grow his reservoir by consuming others.
Flexibility: Because he was taking the "Source Code," the spells would no longer be rigid scripts. He could shape them, modify them, and even create new spells within that attribute, just like a natural-born mage.
The Drawback (The Heresy): The cost was absolute.
When Lencar used this spell, the target's grimoire would be physically destroyed. It wouldn't just be "blank"—it would disintegrate into ash. The mage would lose their connection to their recorded destiny. They would be left with only their basic, raw magic—the "pre-grimoire" flickers that children used. They could never again cast a complex spell or grow as a mage. It was a magical lobotomy.
Lencar sat in the silence of the tower, the magnitude of the power settled in his gut like a stone.
"Joy," he whispered, a sharp, manic laugh escaping his throat. "I broke it. I actually broke the system."
He could see the path now. He could go to the Capital, find a high-ranking noble or a disgraced knight, and take everything they were. He could build a mana pool that rivaled the Wizard King's simply by deleting those who didn't deserve their power.
But then, the joy began to curdle.
He looked out the high window toward the village of Hage. He saw the smoke rising from the chimneys. He thought of Old Man Goro. He thought of the midwife. He thought of his mother, Marta.
"I can't use this here," he realized, the manic light in his eyes fading into a somber, analytical gray. "If I use this on a villager, I don't just take their magic. I take their life. A commoner without their grimoire is a ghost. They'd be outcasts. They'd starve."
He looked at his hands. "I have the ultimate weapon, and I have no suitable target."
He couldn't use it on Yuno—he wasn't a monster, and Yuno was his only real metric for growth. He couldn't use it on the people who had treated him with kindness for fifteen years. He was a data analyst, not a butcher.
"A breakthrough with no immediate application," he grunted, closing the book. "The most frustrating kind of data."