"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark."
– Rabindranath Tagore
One message that I simply have to get through to all of you is believing in your own unique path, even when the world forces you to abandon your original dreams. There are numerous sad stories of individuals who gave up completely after a failure, only because they could not see another way forward. To drive home the message, let me share the story of a young boy named Elian, who had to let go of his dream of greatness to discover a quiet, hidden power.
In the bustling village of Oakhaven, a person's entire future was determined by their "Mana." Elian was a poor laborer. In his past life, before he was reborn here, he had been a thirty-one-year-old working professional who understood the brutal reality of hard work. He was used to carefully budgeting exactly 18,000 coins a month just to survive, slowly saving up for a peaceful, cottage-style house. He had hoped this magical world would offer him a grand destiny, an escape from the physical grind, and a chance to become a great, famous mage.
The true test came at the village's Awakening Ceremony. Kaelen, the wealthy merchant's son, touched the crystal and it erupted in blinding red light. He was graded a B-Rank. As Kaelen proudly summoned a fireball, the glowing, messy geometric layers of his spell were visible to everyone. In this world, every mage could see the glowing structure of magic as it was being built in the air. The slower you cast, the more exposed your magical blueprint was.
Then, it was Elian's turn. He pushed with all his might, but only a tiny, pathetic flicker appeared.
"F-Rank Mana Pool," the Assessor announced. "Completely useless."The crowd laughed. In that moment, Elian's grand dream shattered. But instead of crying, Elian accepted reality. He stopped dreaming about being a great, flashy mage. He decided he would just focus on his manual labor job, save his money, and build that quiet cottage for his mother.
That night, Elian sat alone, abandoning the idea of traditional magic entirely. Instead, he picked up a smooth, thin wooden stick. He didn't have an expensive wand or a heavy spellbook, but he had an understanding of standard 9 and 10 geometry.
He held the stick exactly like a pencil. Concentrating, he pushed his meager, ten-unit budget of mana entirely to the very tip of the wood. The mana acted just like the graphite lead of a pencil, glowing faintly in the dark.
Curious about how this world's energy interacted with physical math, he raised his stick and began to draw directly in the empty air. He whipped the stick through the air, drawing a perfect circle and intersecting tangents.Because wealthy mages stacked their magic in slow, flat layers, their glowing structures hung in the air for several seconds, giving their enemies plenty of time to see them. But Elian wasn't building a heavy block; he was sketching flawless mathematical lines. The moment his stick connected the final line, the spell completed itself in a fraction of a millisecond.
But as the glowing lines vanished, Elian felt a terrifying sensation. A normal mage used their massive mana pool to fuel the destruction of a spell. Because Elian's mana pool was completely empty after drawing the blueprint, the physical laws of the world demanded an equivalent exchange to power the attack.
The spell violently drew its fuel directly from Elian's physical stamina.
His muscles seized. A wave of intense, agonizing exhaustion crashed over him, as if he had just sprinted a mile without taking a single breath. Sweat instantly poured down his face, and his arms trembled violently. The kinetic force of the spell was tearing the energy straight out of his biological cells.
With a deafening crack, a highly compressed, invisible blade of wind shot forward. It hit a massive oak tree fifty feet away, carving a deep, jagged gash into the thick trunk. The tree splintered but did not fall.
Elian collapsed into the dirt, gasping for air, his muscles screaming in pain.
He stared at the damaged tree in the dark, the wooden stick still held loosely in his shaking hand. His spell was mathematically perfect, but the damage was incomplete. He realized the brutal truth: his magic strength was completely bound to his bodily stamina. If he was physically weak, his spells would be weak, no matter how perfect the math was.
He had given up the dream of standing at the top of a grand, visible staircase. But as he wiped the sweat from his eyes, he realized there was another staircase—one hidden in the shadows, built on speed, privacy, and absolute physical endurance. To hit harder, he couldn't just read books. He had to forge his human body into an unbreakable weapon.He did not know where this grueling new path would lead him, but he had faith in the process. He tightened his grip on the stick, pushed through the burning pain in his muscles, and forced himself to stand back up.
What is your faith quotient?
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