When consciousness returned, there were no angels, nor any supreme god granting me three wishes. There was only my own loud crying and a rough yet gentle warmth enveloping me.
"Oh, my little boy... Look, dear, he opened his eyes!"
A gentle female voice, mixed with sobs, rang out. My blurry vision gradually focused on a woman's face—gaunt and smeared with mud, yet her eyes were filled with an extraordinarily pure love. Beside her was a man with calloused hands, wearing worn-out, coarse cloth garments.
"Welcome to our family, Zero," the man smiled, a gentle smile that deepened the wrinkles of hardship on his forehead. "Our family is poor..." He choked up, his voice trembling slightly. "But I promise, your mother and I will give you the very best."
That was how I was isekai'd. No glamour, no silk. Just the son of a farming family in a strange world.
Time flew by, and in the blink of an eye, I was a toddler. Growing up in a poor farming family in a strange world, there was nothing glamorous or luxurious. But through every meal they yielded to me, every sleepless night spent comforting me, I realized that my parents' pampering and unconditional love here was the warmest kind of magic.
It was a late afternoon; I was sitting on the rotting wooden steps, watching my mother prepare dinner.
"Zero, watch closely, Mom will start a fire for you to see!" My mother smiled, raising her calloused hand into the air toward the pile of dry firewood.
She closed her eyes, murmuring a few strange syllables. Suddenly, the air around her rippled. A spark of fire flared up from nothingness, clinging to the branches.
The fire blazed brightly, flickering in my tiny eyes. I instinctively leaned forward, my eyes wide open, staring fixedly at the empty space above my mother's hand. Thinking I was delighted by a magic trick, my mother gently patted my head and smiled. "Is it beautiful, dear?"
My eyes widened, not out of awe for some miraculous magic, but because my brain was frantically analyzing the phenomenon that had just occurred.
Wait a minute! The air around her hand distorted for a split second. It was the phenomenon of refraction caused by a temperature differential! Mother did not create fire out of nothing. It was obvious she had just pumped a massive amount of activation energy into a localized point in space to combust the surrounding oxygen.
I stared intently at the shape of my mother's mouth.
"That incantation... it wasn't a prayer. It is a signal sequence. If we assume the incantation is the input signal, and the magic circle and fire are the output signals... no, the magic circle can be considered a component of the system. In that case, is the magic activation cycle itself a system? Then what serves as the power source for that system?"
I shifted my gaze from the crackling fire to my mother. She had just retracted her hand, gently using her worn sleeve to wipe a bead of sweat from her forehead. Her breathing was also a beat faster than when she was chopping vegetables.
"Internal energy!" A flash of insight struck my brain. "The human body in this world acts as a biological power supply. It can provide power for that system. Then isn't this functioning almost like a capacitor?"
I looked down, blinking at my tiny, mud-stained hands, thinking to myself.
If everything operates according to the scientific logic of my previous life, then learning magic in this world has nothing to do with dreamy, spiritual elements. Its essence is exactly the same as learning how to wire an electrical circuit or write a mathematical equation! You must know how much charge your "battery" can hold, know how to recite the incantation to "close switch K" at the right moment, and most importantly, mentally calculate a precise "circuit path" so that energy doesn't leak out and cause an explosion.
"Well... it seems those agonizing years at UET were not in vain after all," I mused, my cheeks involuntarily lifting into a sly smile. "I don't care what kind of divine miracle you people call it. Just wait, I will use science to strip bare this magic system!"
"Zero, are you smiling to yourself again? What is making my little darling so happy?"
The gentle voice interrupted my train of thought. Mother was holding a chipped wooden bowl containing a hot, thin soup, carefully walking closer. Her eyes overflowed with the affection of a poor but unconditionally loving farmer mother.
I looked up at her, obediently reaching out my hands to receive the warmth from the soup bowl.
"No-fing's wong, Mama," I babbled in a lisping, babyish voice, trying my best to act as cute and childish as possible.
Mother laughed heartily and planted a loud kiss on my cheek, not suspecting in the slightest that her child had just deciphered the foundational magic of the entire world.
At that time, I thought I was an absolute GENIUS for deciphering the foundation of magic, but little did I know that such smugness was merely that of a "frog sitting at the bottom of a well."
Years passed, and when I turned five, my legs sturdy enough to run and jump around the garden, I decided to begin my "scientific experimentation."
One quiet afternoon, I sneaked behind the haystack to hide, intending to conduct a few small experiments without alarming my parents. Holding a dry twig, I painstakingly drew out heat transfer formulas and energy equations on the dirt ground, things I had memorized by heart in my previous life.
I took a deep breath, aiming my tiny hand at a few strands of straw in front of me. In my head, all calculations regarding oxygen levels and air friction temperature were flawless. I bit my lip tightly, concentrating until my head buzzed. The tension caused sweat to bead up and soak my temples, but my fingertips produced not a single spark.
One minute. Two minutes. The scene remained dead silent. The straw didn't even bother to twitch, let alone catch fire. A fly buzzed by and landed on my finger, as if mocking the incompetence of a man who used to be a Ph.D.
Reality slapped me in the face: merely clutching onto a bunch of physics theories in my head would accomplish absolutely nothing.
Realizing I was hitting a dead end, that evening, I trotted over and tugged at my mother's hem.
"Mom, teach me how to make fire like you do!"
My mother, who was wiping the table, burst into laughter at those words. She ruffled my messy hair. "Oh my, this little trick isn't real magic, sweetie. The talented folks in the city use one-star or two-star magic; it's very majestic. What I use is just a tiny trick of us farmers; if I called it a half-star, people would probably laugh at me."
Saying that, she pulled me onto her lap. Her warm, calloused hands enveloped my tiny ones.
"Close your eyes, Zero. Don't try to force it from the outside. Listen to your inside. Do you feel a flow, a tiny stream flowing around your chest?"
I obediently closed my eyes. Erasing the dry equations in my head, I calmed my mind. Sure enough, near my heart, there was a tingling, warm sensation, slowly flowing with every breath. That was my internal mana!
"Now, imagine you are guiding that warm stream to the tips of your fingers, and murmur after me..."
Mother began to slowly recite each syllable of the incantation. The moment her voice resonated in sync with the moving mana stream, a flash of insight lit up my brain.
I've got it!
The reason I failed this afternoon was due to a language barrier—not a spoken language, but the programming language of this world! My knowledge of mathematics and physics was like high-level language code, whereas this world operated on machine code—which were the incantations and magic runes. The mana flow within my body couldn't directly execute those analytical equations. For it to work, I needed a Compiler. I had to find a way to compile my formulas and variables into the corresponding incantation syllables!
Overjoyed by this discovery, I immediately tested it. Instead of repeating my mother's lengthy incantation verbatim, I distilled it. I mentally recited the energy optimization formula, then forced it to synchronize with the rhythm of the most core magic syllables.
Poof!
A soft sound echoed. From the tip of my index finger, a spark flared up. It wasn't as large as my mother's, but it was a pale blue—proof of an absolutely perfect combustion with zero excess energy wasted into the environment!
"Oh my heavens! My Zero did it!" Mother cheered joyfully, hugging me tightly.
But before the smug smile on my lips could fully bloom, a terrible dizziness struck. My vision darkened. A hollow sensation surged from my chest. The blue spark vanished; I staggered, my limbs going weak, and cold sweat broke out, drenching the back of my shirt.
Mother panicked and scooped me up, patting me with deep concern. In my exhausted haze, I bitterly realized another cruel limitation.
Even if I possessed a perfect "design engineer" mind, even if I knew how to "translate" mathematics into magic... this body was still the greatest constraint. My innate mana core was too small, its energy capacity pitifully low. Just a tiny, optimized spark was enough to drain the life force of a farmer's child like me.
With this tiny "battery," how could I ever deploy grand magic or defend myself against the vast world out there?
End of Chapter 1