After a while, I solved nineteen problems and reached Level Two. How did I know? The voice simply congratulated me on advancing to the second level.
I snorted and kept going.
Twenty more problems—and there it was: Level Three.
At Level Three, the tasks already looked more respectable:
23 - 4 =
I stared at it with the most serious expression a one-year-old could possibly manage.
Seriously?
This was still very easy. So easy it almost offended me. After six hundred blackouts.
Twenty-three minus four.
A part of me almost hoped the difficulty would stay like this for the rest of my life.
Almost.
But I understood perfectly well—this was just the warm-up. If this world teaches math at six months, then sooner or later it would turn into something far less friendly.
Still, I made an important observation.
Each blackout lasts about twelve hours.
I matched the cycles—practice, exhaustion, waking up, a mild headache, recovery—and from the number of problems I'd managed to get through, I realized the intervals were fairly consistent.
That pleased me more than Level Three.
Now I had at least some way to measure time.
Six hundred and sixty blackouts comes out to roughly three hundred and thirty days.
Plus the normal periods when I wasn't pushing myself into overload.
So yes… about a year.
A year in this room.
A year of magic.
A year without people.
I looked at the blocks.
Level Three was done.
The year-and-a-half deadline wasn't pressing anymore.
I could… go back to my routine.
Mana.
Control.
Multitasking.
Another three hundred and sixty-two blackouts passed.
Until today, everything had been the same. The room didn't change. Equations appeared. The plate worked. I trained. Blacked out. Woke up.
Stability.
On one hand—great. No unexpected threats.
On the other—I was still inside four walls, where the peak of entertainment was turning mana into a neat dodecagon outline.
Today, the door finally opened.
I was in the middle of stretching my misty mana into a thin line. I'd decided to test range. From where I was to the door was about three meters. I slowly pulled the thread forward, keeping it as thin and stable as possible.
I almost reached the door.
And at that moment it swung open sharply.
The door passed straight through my mana.
Simply.
No resistance. No distortion. As if it didn't exist at all.
The nanny entered next—and she also walked right through my stretched line. Not the slightest reaction. Not a glance. Nothing.
I froze.
One second of analysis.
My mana… is immaterial? Or it doesn't interact with ordinary objects?
Or maybe it's invisible to others altogether.
That both surprised me and made me happy.
Meaning I could practice openly.
No hiding. No masking. No panicking every time the door creaked.
One less source of stress.
The nanny approached me. Same face—cold, flat, as if she weren't a person but an interface.
"Statistics: one-four-six," she said in an indifferent voice.
"Level Three. Forty-one correct answers. Zero errors," the device reported in its even metallic tone.
Everything inside me went cold.
Oh, hell.
I had not been counting on this thing tracking stats. I thought it was just a check, just level transitions. But this… was accounting. Analytics. Numbers.
Forty-one out of forty-one.
Brilliant.
In the worst possible sense.
Now I'd definitely be filed under "promising asset." They'd start investing, developing, using. I was literally perfect material.
I glanced at the nanny cautiously.
And for the first time, I saw an emotion on her face.
Surprise.
Barely visible. Almost microscopic. But it was there.
Not this.
I messed up.
"You did well, 997. They won't render you down for potions in the near future. Which is quite good. Or maybe not," she said in the same indifferent tone, as if she hadn't felt even a trace of emotion a second ago.
"In the near future."
A very reassuring phrase.
I was already bracing for the next phase. Transfer somewhere else. New tasks. Pressure. People. A system.
From this moment—
I gathered myself internally. Alright. Here we go. Now it starts.
"…nothing will change."
My expectations collapsed just as quickly as I usually blacked out from exhaustion.
Nothing.
Will.
Change.
"But you must reach Level Thirty before you turn twelve. Otherwise they'll render you down for potions," she added calmly.
A chill ran down my spine again.
Every time I hear that phrase, something unpleasant clenches inside me. "Render down for potions" sounds far too casual. Far too calm. Like we're talking about recycling trash, not a living person.
I still can't get used to it.
The nanny turned and left.
The door closed.
Silence.
Level Thirty by age twelve.
Great.
First it was, "Reach Level Three to survive." Now it's, "Reach Level Thirty to keep existing." A very motivating system.
I felt the gloom roll in again. So it's back to grinding. Alone again. Back to blackouts, calculations, experiments.
But then—
It hit me.
What if I approach this differently?
What if I don't just solve problems… but automate the process?
I went still.
A calculator.
If I manage to create liquid and solid mana, then theoretically I could build logic elements out of it. Switches. Minimal set—and you can assemble a primitive computing block.
And then levels stop being a threat.
They become an optimization problem.
For the first time in a long while, what I felt wasn't fear.
It was excitement.