The first thing I learned about this world was that toast tastes better when it's been blessed.
I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean my father, Saint Aldric Ashveil — a man who could mend broken bones with a prayer and once held a barrier against a beast tide for six hours straight — was currently using the power of the divine Goddess Aethera to keep breakfast warm.
A faint golden glow pulsed across the table. The bread stayed crisp. The butter didn't melt into a sad puddle. The eggs maintained that perfect just-set consistency that would've required precise temperature control back in —
Well. Back in another life.
"Lucien, you're staring at the toast again."
My mother's voice. Warm. Slightly amused. The tone of a woman who had accepted that her youngest child was a little strange and decided to find it endearing rather than concerning.
"I'm appreciating it," I said.
"You're seven. Eat it, don't appreciate it."
Fair point.
I picked up the toast and bit into it. Perfectly crisp. Slightly sweet from the winter wheat they grew in the southern fields outside Mireth. A warmth that wasn't just physical — there was something about sanctified food that settled in your chest, like drinking hot cocoa on a cold day, but the cocoa was also mildly divine.
Across the table, my older sister Celestine was shoveling eggs into her mouth with the grace and elegance of a starving wolf.
"Celes," Mother said without looking up from her tea. "You are the daughter of a Saint."
"And I have morning drills in twenty minutes," Celestine replied through a mouthful of eggs. She was fourteen, blonde like all of us — the Ashveil gold, people called it — with sharp blue eyes and the build of someone who'd been swinging a practice sword since she could walk. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone from yesterday's sparring. She wore it like a badge of honor.
"You could wake up earlier."
"I could also cut off my own arm. Neither is happening."
Mother sighed the sigh of a woman who had fought this battle a thousand times and lost every single one.
My older brother Edric sat beside me, eating quietly, reading a book propped against the salt cellar. He was seventeen, lean where Celestine was athletic, with the same blonde hair but softer features. His book was titled Principles of Regional Commerce: Third Edition. He'd covered it with a dust jacket from a scripture textbook.
I knew this because I'd seen him do the swap. He'd caught me watching and given me a look that said tell anyone and I'll put salt in your tea.
I respected the hustle, honestly.
Father sat at the head of the table, eyes closed, murmuring the morning benediction. He did this every day. A quiet prayer to the Goddess, thanking her for another dawn, asking for guidance, requesting strength to serve. His lips moved with the ease of long practice, and a faint halo of golden light — barely visible, like sunlight through dust — hovered around his clasped hands.
Saint Aldric Ashveil. Fourth Circle. Regional Saint of Mireth Province, Kingdom of Verath. A man who could perform genuine miracles.
Also a man who, last Tuesday, forgot where he put his reading glasses. They were on his head.
He finished the prayer and opened his eyes — blue, like all of ours, but deeper somehow, like staring into a clear lake and realizing it's much deeper than you thought.
"Lucien," he said, smiling. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yes, Father."
"Good dreams?"
I'd dreamed about convenience stores and fluorescent lighting and a life that ended on a bathroom floor because I'd slipped on a wet tile after a shower. In the dream, I'd had just enough time to think this is the stupidest way to die before everything went black and then gold and then I was crying in a strange woman's arms in a room that smelled like incense.
"I dreamed about bread," I said.
"Ah." Father nodded seriously. "The Goddess speaks to us all in different ways."
Celestine snorted. Edric turned a page. Mother poured me more juice.
This was morning in the Ashveil household.
And honestly? After twenty-six years of microwaved meals eaten alone in a studio apartment lit by a laptop screen, it was the best part of my day.
After breakfast, the household moved with practiced rhythm.
Father retreated to his study to review parish matters. A stack of papers that never seemed to shrink — miracle requests, blessing schedules, reports on ward integrity, correspondence from the diocese. The unglamorous reality of holy work. Sainthood, it turned out, was mostly administrative.
Mother began her rounds. The Ashveil household wasn't large by noble standards — we were clergy, not aristocracy — but it was big enough to require management. She checked the wards on the doors and windows first, a daily ritual. Her fingers traced the carved runes along each frame, and a soft pulse of light confirmed they were active.
I'd been watching her do this for seven years. Or rather, for about four years, since it took me until age three to gain enough motor control and cognitive clarity to actually observe things properly.
Reincarnation with intact memories sounds cool in theory. In practice, the first two years were a special kind of hell. Imagine being fully mentally aware — thoughts, reasoning, memories — but trapped in a body that couldn't hold its own head up. Couldn't speak. Couldn't do anything except eat, sleep, and cry.
I cried a lot.
Not because babies cry. Because I'd died, woken up in an impossible place, and couldn't even ask what was happening.
But that was years ago. I'd adjusted. More than adjusted — I'd grown to love this life with a ferocity that surprised me sometimes. Because this life had something my old one didn't.
Family.
Not that I didn't have family before. I had parents. They were fine. We were fine. The word "fine" doing a lot of heavy lifting there, covering a distance that grew wider every year until we were essentially polite strangers who shared a last name and showed up to the same holiday dinners.
Here, though...
"Lucien, come help me with the garden wards!"
Mother's voice from the back door. I slid off my chair, feet hitting the stone floor — still cool in the morning — and padded after her.
The garden behind the Ashveil house was modest. Herbs, mostly. Rosemary, sage, wintermint, and several plants that didn't exist on Earth — moonpetal, which glowed faintly at night, and silverroot, whose leaves could be brewed into a mild pain reliever. Mother grew them for the household and for the small clinic Father ran on temple rest days.
The garden ward was a simple barrier — a 1st Circle technique that kept pests and minor magical contamination out. Mother maintained it weekly, but it needed daily checks.
"Hold this," she said, handing me a small mana crystal. It was about the size of a marble, pale blue, warm to the touch. Mana crystals were this world's batteries, essentially. Crystallized ambient mana, mined from deposits near Rift sites. The church controlled most of the supply, which was one of the many ways they maintained power, but that was a thought for another day.
I held the crystal while Mother pressed her palms against the garden's ward anchor — a stone pillar about knee-high, carved with geometric patterns that I'd spent an embarrassing amount of time studying.
Because here's the thing.
Those patterns? The ones that channeled mana into a stable barrier frequency?
They looked a LOT like wave interference diagrams.
I'm not— look, I wasn't a physicist in my past life. I was a mid-level office worker at a logistics company. But I'd been a nerd. The kind of nerd who watched YouTube videos about quantum mechanics at 2 AM not because I understood them, but because they were cool. The kind of nerd who read pop-science books and thought huh, that's neat and then never used the information for anything.
Until now.
Because in a world where magic was real, all that useless trivia suddenly wasn't useless at all.
The ward patterns carved into the anchor stone created a standing wave of mana — I was almost sure of it. The geometry determined the frequency. The mana crystal provided the energy. And the barrier itself was the result of constructive interference at the boundary.
Which meant — theoretically — that you could make the ward more efficient by adjusting the geometry to reduce destructive interference. Less wasted mana. Same barrier strength. Lower crystal consumption.
I'd been thinking about this for months. I hadn't done anything about it because I was seven and if I started redesigning ward geometry, people would ask questions I couldn't answer.
But I watched. And I learned. And I waited.
Mother finished her check. The ward hummed, steady and strong.
"All good," she said, taking the crystal back. "You're always so patient when we do this, Lucien. Most children would be squirming."
"I like watching the light," I said. Which was true. The ward glow was genuinely beautiful — a soft lattice of golden threads that shimmered like a spiderweb made of sunlight.
Mother smiled and ruffled my hair. "My little observer."
If she knew what I was actually observing, she might not smile quite so warmly.
Or maybe she would. Mothers were hard to predict, in any world.
The rest of the morning followed the pattern I'd come to know intimately over seven years.
At nine, Father opened the parish study for appointments. Townspeople came with requests — blessings for newborns, wards for homes, minor healings. Most were simple enough that Father handled them between sips of tea.
I liked sitting in the corner of his study during these hours. He didn't mind. He probably thought I was being a clingy child, and I leaned into that. What I was actually doing was watching him cast.
Fourth Circle Sanctus Arts. Every time he healed someone or laid a blessing, I watched the mana flow through his hands, observed the prayer formations, noted the subtle gestures that shaped the energy.
Today, an old farmer came in with a swollen knee.
"Been like this for weeks, Saint Aldric," the man said, wincing as he sat. "Can't kneel to work the fields."
Father examined the knee with gentle hands, golden light pooling around his fingers.
"Inflammation of the joint," he said. "The cold season aggravates it. I can heal the immediate swelling, but it will return without addressing the underlying cause."
He placed both hands on the knee and prayed. The light intensified, sinking into the skin. The farmer sighed in relief as the swelling visibly reduced.
"Rest it for a few days," Father said. "And come back next week. We'll do another session."
After the farmer left, I asked: "Father, why does it come back?"
He looked at me, surprised. I did this sometimes — asked questions that were slightly too sharp for a seven-year-old. I'd learned to space them out so they seemed like childish curiosity rather than analytical inquiry.
"Because healing addresses the symptom, not the root," he said, settling back in his chair. "The inflammation is caused by years of wear on the joint. I can repair the damage, but the body remembers the pattern and returns to it. To truly fix it, I'd need to restructure the joint itself — that's Fifth Circle work, beyond me."
I nodded slowly.
But inside, I was thinking: Chronic inflammation. Wear-pattern memory. The joint cartilage is degraded and the body's healing response creates a feedback loop of swelling and damage.
In my old world, they treated this with anti-inflammatory medication and physical therapy. The medication broke the inflammation cycle. The therapy rebuilt the supporting muscles so less stress fell on the joint.
What if you didn't need Fifth Circle healing? What if you just needed to apply the healing differently — not to repair the joint, but to interrupt the inflammation cycle, and then prescribe exercises to strengthen the surrounding muscles?
Would that work with holy magic?
I didn't know. But I thought about it for the rest of the morning, and through lunch, and well into the afternoon, until Celestine came home from drills and put me in a headlock and I lost my train of thought entirely.
"Little Luce! Did you miss me?"
"You smell like sweat and iron."
"The smell of GLORY."
"It's definitely sweat."
She ground her knuckle into the top of my head, and I yelped, and Mother yelled at her from the kitchen, and Father poked his head out of his study to see what the noise was about, and Edric didn't look up from his definitely-not-a-scripture-book.
Normal.
Warm.
Mine.