Chương 1

Out of all the missing people on earth, my sister was possibly the most missing. Even magic struggled to find her. I circled my ritual ring on the forest floor, double-checking its patterns for the umpteenth time. The scale of this ring almost guaranteed something would go wrong. I'd drawn more than fifty different runic patterns on the dirt. Every pattern was the result of months of trial and error, designed to exponentially extend my Tracker spell's range. If there were errors in it, I could not see them.

As safety precautions, I activated both Mana Shield and Mind Protection to shield myself from mental and physical attacks. Then, I drew mana from my core, and pushed it into the ritual ring. Crimson mana flowed into the patterns and runes, all working in unison like code instructing a machine what functions to perform. Ever so slowly, the patterns began filling up. I sat back and waited. I miss you, Trina. If I finally find you, the least you owe is a spar with me. Magic wasn't supposed to exist on earth at all.

Without spellbooks or mentors to teach us, Trina and I had spent years twisting mana into random combinations until we found spells that worked. We were the only two mages on earth, after all. To this day, I still could not explain why two thirteen-year-old nerds had woken up with mana cores. Trina had been convinced that we'd been chosen as earth's magical protectors to save everyone from some calamity.

That didn't happen though, and ten years later, I was starting to think that our existence was just a mistake of the universe. America didn't even have magical beasts for us to fight. The world around us continued as normal, completely unaware of the two mages casting fireballs in secret. My mana enveloped the halfway point. I kept pushing more into the patterns. We're not nearly powerful enough to fight any calamities anyway. Earth already has nukes to deal with that. The thought made me smile.

I couldn't wait to argue about our purpose with Trina again. The final pattern filled with mana. The crimson glow amplified, and the spell went through. A string of invisible mana connected the ritual ring straight to my mana core, like a mental connection for me to follow the spell's effects. The spell read Trina's belongings, her strand of hair, and trailed her like a dog sniffing her scent.

Its range spanned through every inch of ambient mana on earth and probably beyond; the real reason why the spell had been so painstakingly hard to put together. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Then came the signal, like a rope of mana pulling my mana core in the direction where Trina's magical presence was the strongest. The spell found her. It pulled directly upward.

"The fuck?" I said. The signal grew in intensity, violently tugging at my mana core to tell me that Trina was up in the sky. Well past it, in fact, up in space. Another failure, I thought, biting my lip. I tried to sever my connection to the spell, but cutting the signal came with resistance. The spell refused to end, and its signals on my mana core grew unbearably strong. I gritted my teeth.

This wouldn't be the first time I'd accidentally cast harmful effects on myself, but the sensation of my own spell attacking my mana core was never fun. The signal kept increasing still, stubbornly arguing that Trina was up there, light years away. To protect my core, I drew mana and shaped it into a spell pattern inside my core directly, casting a more powerful version of Mind Protection.

That formed a shield around my mind, protecting me from anything related to mental attacks, and it saved my core from the pressure of being ripped apart. I cursed under my breath and tried to see what had gone wrong. Every individual function seemed to work perfectly. By all accounts, the spell seemed to work exactly as I'd created it to. Was there an error in the tracking process? Surely, Trina wasn't actually up in fucking space. The ring ran out of mana, and with that, the tugging finally stopped.

I sighed, partly in relief that I hadn't harmed myself, and partly in annoyance that I'd need to get back to work. At least the range doesn't seem to be an issue, I thought. It literally pointed into space. Why isn't the signal disappearing, though? A connection remained in my mana core. Normally, when a spell ran out of mana, all traces of it disappeared, including any string-like signals that the spell created. My spell had stopped tugging, but the string of mana remained.

Connected to the other end of it, I felt a presence in the far distance, like a star staring down at me from the sky. My first thought was to study and observe. This had never happened before. Observing it could offer new information. As always with magic, I simply couldn't explain everything that magic resulted in. I'd need to do more tests and try to replicate what I felt. Then the presence got closer. I paused on the spot. The string of my mana in outer space began retracting, and with it, pulled something else.

Something else had latched onto my mental presence. My instincts flared a warning. The presence grew and grew, very clearly pointed at me like a meteor of magic about to crush me from outer space. Desperately, I added more mana into my Mind Protection spell. Until it landed right in my mental space. An overwhelming presence of mana washed over me, freezing me on the spot. No pain came, however. Glancing up, the sky was as blue as ever, entirely normal.

The mana existed only in my imagination, in the same realm as my mana core. My tracking spell had landed somewhere. That something had tracked me back." Found you," a voice said in my head. The overwhelming surge of foreign mana wrapped around my mana core. Mind Protection was crushed under the pressure instantly. My mana reserves simply weren't large enough to fight against this astral, god-like threat. Inconceivable pain ripped my mana core from my body before all went black.