I woke up to a rat gnawing at my boot. Or rather, the tattered scraps of leather that Zeno, for some reason, stubbornly called shoes. I didn’t move. I just cracked one eye open and lazily, but precisely, nudged the rodent with the toe of my other boot. The rat squeaked, rolled in the dust, and vanished into the dense shadows of the hut’s corner.

  I tried to push myself up with my hand, and a muffled groan slipped through clenched teeth. Damn… my hand hurt like I’d shoved it elbow-deep into a running industrial blender and then doused the wounds in battery acid. The burn on my right palm had formed a nasty, tightening crust overnight. It was hard, yellowish-red, and cracked with every small movement, oozing droplets of plasma. My fingers had swollen and barely moved, like overcooked sausages.

  “Lesson one, idiot,” I thought gloomily, staring at my mangled limb. “Your new biological body is a conductor with insanely high resistance. Insulation? Forget it. Push too many amps through this system at once—and the wiring melts. Physics works even where magic rules. Especially where magic rules.”

  Zeno sat in the doorway, back to me. The gray morning light outlined his hunched yet still solid frame. He methodically sharpened his hunting knife on a flat gray stone. Shhhh-shhhh. Metal sliding over stone. Shhhh-shhhh. The monotone, rhythmic sound resonated in my buzzing head like someone was filing my bare nerves.

  “Still breathing?” the old man asked without turning, continuing his work. His voice creaked like an old tree in the wind. “Your little ‘spark’ yesterday… you know, I’ve been teaching kids magic for half a century. I’ve seen incompetents, geniuses, and idiots who cut off their fingers. But I’ve never seen this kind of madness. You dumped a whole bucket of water just to water a single seedling.”

  I wheezed, seating myself on the floor, back pressed against the uneven, icy stone wall. The cold stone dulled the heat along my back slightly.

  “What does it matter how it looks, or how much water I poured, if it works in the end?” My voice came out hoarse from sleep; my throat was parched. “The goal was achieved.”

  “The difference, brat,” Zeno finally put the stone aside, brushed the metallic dust from the blade with his thumb, and turned. His faded eyes looked at me with heavy reproach. “Mana isn’t firewood you shove into a stove until it bursts from heat. It’s your blood, just outside the vessels. Today’s task is harder. Create two sparks. One in your right hand, one in your left. And keep them separate.”

  I inhaled the stagnant air of the hut, smelling of dried herbs, ash, and mouse droppings. Two points. Fine. Sounds logical. I closed my eyes, trying to block out the pain. Habit from my past life immediately produced a precise coordinate grid in my mind. Three-dimensional space. Left hand—point at (-1,0,0). Right hand—point at (1,0,0). If I create two independent sources of mana oscillation, what will happen? Waves will spread and interfere. If phases align—the energy doubles, maybe even grows exponentially. If not—they cancel each other or create destructive resonance.

  “And don’t even think about doing what you did yesterday,” Zeno’s voice broke into my calculations, shattering my mental graphs. “Listen to the mana, don’t try to squeeze it by force or shove it into your weird little boxes. Don’t push. Feel how the flow divides in your chest and flows naturally, like two quiet streams, toward your palms. Just guide them.”

  I opened my eyes and nodded. The old man was right. If I start playing with frequencies and resonance again, trying to cheat the system with math, with my current ‘hardware’ I’d just tear both arms off at the shoulders. I needed to follow the rules of this world. I needed to be flexible.

  “Will to live… activate, piece of trash,” I whispered under my breath.

  A familiar low hum started at the base of my skull. My brain, forcibly accelerated by this strange, built-in skill, began to rapidly ‘scan’ space. My perception sharpened to the extreme: I could hear my own heartbeat, the wooden beam in the ceiling creak under a light draft, my blood pulse in my burned hand.

  I started slowly. Right hand first. I already knew this process, but now I tried to do everything differently. I didn’t squeeze the particles with mental force or artificially increase their frequency. I followed Zeno’s advice. I pictured a reservoir in my chest, opened a mental sluice, and let the energy flow naturally into my palm.

  My skin tingled. It wasn’t the burning flame from yesterday, but a soft, growing warmth. A faint haze appeared almost immediately—weak, unstable, but there it was. Bluish light wrapped around my mangled fingers. The burn’s pain dulled, veiled by a layer of magical energy.

  Now the left…

  And here the hell began. It was excruciatingly difficult. Like trying to write calligraphic poetry with one hand while solving complex differential equations with the other. Attention split. My “processor” in this fragile eleven-year-old body began overheating rapidly.

  I physically felt the energy inside me split. Two tight, heavy streams of dense liquid, rushing in opposite directions through narrow, underdeveloped channels. As soon as I focused on the left hand, trying to push even a drop of mana there, the spark in the right hand began to dim and fade. Panicked, I switched focus back to the right—and the left palm went numb, a dead piece of flesh.

  “Hold them! Separate the flows!” Zeno’s voice was tense. He was already above me, leaning on his staff. “Don’t push, brat! You’re trying to clamp them again! Let go of the grip—just let them flow!”

  Easy to say, “just let them flow.” I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached. Sweat streamed down my forehead, stinging my eyes with its salty bite, even though the hut barely held ten degrees of warmth. I could physically feel the internal pressure—a viscous, pulsating weight in my forearms, threatening to burst the veins.

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  My accelerated mind calculated balance frantically, searching for the perfect equilibrium point, but the biological component failed. My back muscles cramped painfully. Breathing became shallow and jagged.

  Finally, a faint, pathetic flicker appeared in my left hand.

  Two sparks. One stable blue on the right, one faint pale-blue on the left. I did it. I split the flow.

  But keeping that balance was beyond me. My nervous system simply couldn’t process two independent mana streams simultaneously without mathematical crutches. As soon as I tried to hold both in focus, the flows wavered.

  Instead of flowing steadily, the energy inside the channels began to jerk, pulse in spasms like water in pipes with airlocks. I tried to level them, tried to calm the mana, make it “streams” as the old man requested, but control slipped mercilessly through my fingers. My brain gave correct commands, but the body refused to execute them.

  “I can’t…” I rasped, feeling capillaries burst in my eyes from the strain.

  The sparks in both hands flared with an unhealthy, blinding light, hissed like water droplets on a hot skillet, and with a sharp, dry pop, both died at once.

  The recoil was immediate and merciless. It hit my arms as if someone had swung iron rebar against my wrists. I hissed through clenched teeth, dropping the invisible load. Concentration shattered into pieces. The “Will to Live” skill collapsed, leaving nausea and ringing in my ears.

  My hands fell limply onto my knees, heavy as lead weights. Fingers trembled uncontrollably. I slumped forward, gulping air, feeling as if I’d just run a marathon with a sack of bricks on my back.

  Zeno sighed heavily, leaning on his staff. Silence hung in the hut, broken only by my ragged breathing.

  “As I thought,” the old man shook his head slowly. There was no gloating, only a weary statement of fact. “Your will is strong, kid. Perhaps too strong for your own good. But you have no idea how to split your mind. You try to control everything with a single, dead grip. Mana demands flexibility. It requires that you be both river and banks at the same time. Today, you’ve reached your limit. You’re empty.”

  He turned and walked back to his spot by the door.

  “Go to the creek. Cool your hands. And be glad, praying to every god you know, that you didn’t tear them off.”

  I didn’t argue. I had nothing left—even sarcasm was beyond me. Leaning on the healthy part of my left hand, I struggled to my feet. My knees shook treacherously. Vision was still slightly blurred at the edges. Mentally I was thirty, but biologically still eleven. My “hardware” desperately needed an upgrade, or my own brain would kill me faster than any monster in this world.

  I staggered out of the hut’s half-light into the forest.

  The woods greeted me with damp, penetrating cold. Morning mist still clung to the roots of the giant pines, like columns of a ruined temple. The air felt thick, heavy, settling on my face in moisture. Every step along the mossy path was a struggle. Gravity seemed twice as strong today.

  Reaching the rocky creek bank, I sank to my knees in the wet dirt and plunged my buzzing, trembling hands into the icy water.

  A faint steam hissed from my burned right palm immediately. The contrast between the internal heat of the overloaded channels and the freezing water was excruciating but sobering. Pain slowly receded, replaced by a dull, merciful numbness. I scooped a handful of water and splashed it on my face, washing away the sticky sweat.

  I stared at my reflection in the dark, fast-moving water. A pale, emaciated child’s face, with dark, non-childlike circles under the eyes. The gaze was sharp, angry. Resentment at my own weakness burned stronger than the burn itself.

  Math hadn’t helped here. I had tried to follow Zeno’s rules, tried to be “flexible,” but splitting consciousness into two independent streams proved far harder than calculating the trajectory of a ballistic missile. My past experience told me everything could be systematized, but this world demanded instincts I didn’t yet have.

  “Will to live,” I thought grimly, staring at the trembling ripples. “I will survive. I just need time for this body to catch up to my mind. And then I’ll make this world work by my rules. Even if I have to rewrite every law of this damn magic.”

  I pulled my hands from the water and wiped them on the hem of my shirt. Time to return. Zeno would surely make me scrub the cauldron or gather kindling, despite exhaustion.

  I had already turned toward the path when, deep in the forest, about forty meters away, something cracked loudly with a wet, splintering snap.

  It wasn’t the sound of a falling branch. It was the sound of a thick, living tree being snapped in half.

  I froze instantly. My heart, only just beginning to calm, slammed against my ribs again. The forest suddenly seemed unnaturally silent. Birds hushed. Even the creek’s noise seemed to recede. My senses, still paradoxically heightened from recent mana work, detected a presence.

  Something large. Very large.

  The air grew heavy, smelling of musk, wet fur, and old blood. I heard heavy, hoarse breathing, each exhale rustling the underbrush.

  The bushes of giant ferns fifteen paces away slowly, ominously parted.