Chương 21: Chapter 20: The First Law

The fish were still there. Every morning I pulled the trap from the eddy behind the fallen bridge stone, and every morning there were fish. Not many — two, sometimes three, once four that I had to freeze because I couldn't eat that many before they spoiled. But enough. The relief of a problem solved had dulled into something quieter over the past ten days. I no longer felt relief when I checked the trap. I felt routine. This morning, I gutted them on the riverbank instead of carrying them home.

The cold made my fingers clumsy, but the workshop knife handled it well enough. Scales scattered across the stone. That's why I had decided to do it outside. At home there still was the roomba and it was unsettling for me to see it move every time I'd get something dirty. When I reached home Yato demanded his share immediately.

He'd learned the sound of the bucket hitting the counter and arrived accordingly — tail high, eyes patient, the quiet expectation of a creature who had decided the fish trap existed entirely for his benefit.

"You're welcome," I said. He didn't look up from the flesh I'd set aside. I ate standing at the counter. The beast meat in the freezer was still holding, but fish had become the staple. Once cooked, my fish ended up on his dish alone today. I would soon run out of rice and pasta after all. Something else I already had ran out of was vegetables. The frozen bags from the freezer had emptied two days ago.

I'd opened the last one — a small bag of green beans I'd bought months ago and never gotten around to cooking — and stood there in the cold garage holding the empty bag like a receipt. Three months of food, I'd told myself back in the forest. That math had been wrong. Or right, but incomplete. Calories kept me standing. Calories didn't keep my gums from going soft or my skin from feeling strange or whatever it was that vegetables did that I'd never bothered to understand.

All I knew was that my body missed them, especially when sitting on the toilet. The village had a furnace, an empty cold room, a silo full of dried grass that the golems had gathered. It had no gardens. No fruit trees that I'd found. There weren't any trees after all. Of course, there also wasn't a full pantry of jarred vegetables preserved for winter. I finished the fish, put the spines in the trash and the dish in the dishwasher, then walked to the window.

The car was still sitting somewhere outside with its battery that was draining. Less than a third last time I'd checked. That was almost two weeks ago. I had to stop checking the road every morning. Not because I'd stopped caring about it, but because there was nothing I could do. There was no walking to the car. Not during winter. Not alone. If the weather turned, the road wouldn't save me. The car would have to wait. Outside, a sweeper crossed the main street. Its broom scraped stone.

Lately I had spent every evening in the study. The chair by the window had become as familiar as my own desk. The three volumes of the dictionary had been joined by notebooks — four of them, now, spiral-bound, each one filled with question marks. Thirty-five letters. That was my count so far. Thankfully the dictionary was alphabetically sorted in the local script.

I'd worked through the early entries letter by letter, matching each angular symbol in my mother's language to its blockier counterpart in the village script. By the end of the third day, I could recognize enough characters to read the short name on the terminal. The name was short. Five characters. The dictionary said the first two meant Village. The next: Beside. Then: Stream. They hadn't given it a name you'd carve into stone for history.

They'd called it what it was: a village beside a stream, because the river was right there, and everyone who needed to know already did. Efficient. There was something almost embarrassing about how long it had taken me to understand. I couldn't pronounce it. The dictionary gave no sounds — just meaning, character by character. If someone walked through the door and asked me where I was living, I'd have to point. The third notebook had the queen in it.

The book with her portrait — the calm, painted expression of a beautiful woman, had turned out not to be a story. It was an history book. The woman had founded the country that built the floating island. The one beneath the clouds, the one I stood at the edge of right now. She'd disappeared during a magical experiment. No one knew what she had been experimenting with.

At least the book didn't explain it — just noted her disappearance, noted she had no heir, and moved on, reaching where the nobles had run elections and installed a successor. The rest of the book was about him. There was a portrait at the end. Not particularly handsome but I didn't need him to be, he looked confident. The kind of confidence that came with an army and a very large mandate.

I'd thought he might be the princess's husband at first — the portrait ended the book, and my brain had filled in the usual story. But no. He wasn't. He had simply succeeded her, and the only thing he seemed interested in was being remembered. You're remembered, I thought. But so was the quiet queen who'd walked into history and vanished during one of her own experiments. A little unfair if you asked me, she had created this land out of nothing and yet...

Her name took only three small pages in a book about someone else. I snapped the page from my notebook and pinned it to the wall beside the others reached with a strip of tape I'd found back at home. The study was starting to look like someone was running a criminal investigation in here — walls covered in notes, maps, and fragments of a world I was slowly learning to read. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Honestly, at this point the desk drawer was what I kept coming back for. I'd opened it seven days ago. It was the first desk drawer — the one beneath the writing surface, the kind you'd store papers in, heavier than the others, stiff enough that I'd had to pull twice. Inside: no papers, nothing relating to the financial records I had grown tired of. A book. Leather. Real leather. Dark brown softening at the corners the way old bindings always do.

Gold ornaments on the spine and cover — not painted, not just stamped on, just — worked into the binding somehow, thin threads of it woven through the grain. Every other book in the library had been bound in that smooth pale material — thin enough to feel like paper and no other material I could quite name. This one was leather, and leather meant something. I'd thought at first it was just a reading copy. A nicer edition, maybe a subsequent volume, kept separately because it mattered to whoever was here.

Then I opened it. The format was different. Numbered headings, each one underscored by a thicker line. Bulleted statements, and short paragraphs built cleanly around them. Not a story. Not a list of transactions, like the records I'd found before. Instruction. I'd read the first line of the title three times, not because I thought maybe I was wrong, but because... it had made sense. The Fundamental Laws of Magic and how to use it. That was this title. And inside it: Law I: Mana is a natural phenomenon.

After the barrier and the monster core I was expecting it. Yet I couldn't believe it. A grimoire. The next seven days were the same. Fish in the morning. The dictionary and the grimoire by day. Reading my translated work by night. I didn't sleep much. But this was different from the usual insomnia — not a fight against silence, just my inner weeb that was calling for more and rejected sleep. The book laid out rules. It read like a textbook stretched with a philosophy class and hoping nobody noticed.

Short laws, brief explanations: Law I laid the groundwork. Mana was everywhere. It varied in density — higher near ruins, monster territories, certain formations — but it was never absent.

"Mana is neither created nor destroyed by mages. It is merely gathered, manipulated, and eventually released back into the environment." That sentence stuck. It sounded like the first law of thermodynamics hadn't gone anywhere — just because I was in another world didn't mean I'd escaped the physics of common sense. Mana was closer to a resource than a miracle. Something you could measure. Something you could run out of. Law II was shorter. More honest. Humans possessed no natural mana organ.

When exposed to mana, our bodies could not retain it; the energy simply leaked away, leaving us no different from before. Humanity was not born to wield mana. Thus, becoming a mage was never a matter of talent alone. Those who sought to command the arcane arts had to undergo a permanent transformation of the self. The first mages did not merely learn magic—they remade themselves to contain it. Law III followed directly.

Monster cores, crystalline organs that gathered mana naturally, circulating it through internal pathways formed with the creature from birth. Every monster was born with what a human had to build. And humans, eventually, built. They found out they could carve these pathways. Alter them. Store patterns. The core on my shelf, the one I'd taken from the beast months ago... I finally understood what I had been looking at. It wasn't just a shiny rock. It was a natural magic circle.

A circulation pattern grown inside the beast from the moment it was born — pathways that gathered mana, moved it, and kept it stable without thought or effort. The difference between a monster and a human wasn't that one possessed magic and the other didn't. The monster had just been born with the system already installed while humans had to build theirs from scratch. A magic circle was just a set of instructions. A shape that told mana where to go, how to move, and what state to maintain.

The circle did not create anything. It only guided what was already there. The simplest circles were passive — gathering mana, circulating it, stabilizing it. More complicated ones could force mana into temporary arrangements, creating effects that the natural world would never produce on its own. The difference between a novice and a master was not the number of circles they knew. It was their understanding of how those circles were built. The book compared it to writing. Anyone could copy a sentence.

Understanding why each word was placed there was something else entirely. A spell was not a command. It was a language. Like any language, it had dialects. Two mages could create the same spell and produce the same result while using completely different circles. One might be elegant, compact, and efficient. Another might be crude, wasteful, requiring twice the mana for the same effect. The circle was not the magic itself. It was the mage's understanding of how to make mana behave.

I couldn't help comparing it to programming. The same program could be written in different ways. Some would be simple. Some would be unnecessarily complicated. Some would work but consume far more resources than they needed. Magic was no different. Every mage eventually developed their own methods, their own symbols, their own shortcuts. A master did not simply know more spells. They understood the language well enough to write their own.

At the bottom of the drawer, beneath the book, there'd been something else: a metal card. Silver. About the length of my palm, thin and flat. A small beautifully carved red core sat at its center, embedded in the metal so cleanly it might have been grown there. I picked it up. The metal felt cool. The core didn't respond to my touch: no water, no light, nothing like the village cores. For an evening, I'd wondered exactly whether it was broken unfinished or dead. Then I found the instructions. A catalyst.

The book had a section on the First Circle — the first change any mage has to undergo — and it described exactly what I held. A silver conductor. A monster core, engraved with a mana-gathering circle. Designed to be held and temporarily reproduce that same gathering pattern inside the user's body, allowing the apprentice to begin the first stage of mana circulation without carving and maintaining the circle themselves. Without it, the body cannot begin the transformation required to retain mana.

All the ambient energy a human drinks leaks back out in moments. The catalyst was nothing permanent — it was temporary, in fact the book was quite clear on that — but it was also the only safety the designers could provide. In the time before catalysts — the book explained — apprentices could attempt the same gathering manually. But they had to hold the pattern in place for days without sleeping, weeks without breaking. Historically, many died from exhaustion before reaching the saturation point.

A little card of silver and a red core had turned a deadly initiation ritual into something that could be performed safely, even while sleeping. Historians apparently considered this one of the greatest turning points in magical history. The book certainly considered it one. The phrasing was almost amused, and I took it as something like the invention of the steam engine being placed in its most proper place. I set the catalyst on the desk, beside the open book. Both of them stared up.

Saturation is not compression. The text repeated that twice. The first step wasn't learning to force or command mana. It was simply... filling every piece of you with low-density mana until there was no place to fill. Every muscle. Every bone. Every blood vessel. Days of just... allowing. The book recommended three days with a catalyst. More if something was impaired in either the environment or the user. But three days was the median. Three days would mean I could be a mage by the end of the week.

I could start tonight. Again, that evening, I didn't go home. Yato had been fed. One more night alone wouldn't kill him. Besides, I'd said I wouldn't sleep in the study. I hadn't said I wouldn't stay. As usual, I was looking for excuses for my reckless actions. The book was open beside the window. The light I'd been using for days was still in its early shape, soft and steady.

I'd brought water, a blanket from one of the houses — I had come to terms with taking from the already-empty — and all three volumes of the dictionary stacked on a low stone corner. The word saturation was translated across three languages in my skull. I still couldn't say it aloud in any of them. The catalyst rested against my palm. I hadn't had to press it in or hold it there — the warmth in the metal seemed to read my fingers on its own, and the red core lit softly, about the same luminance as a village core.

Nothing spectacular. Just... a sensation. Small and distant, as though the silver were mapping my body from afar. I closed my eyes and let the mana gather. I wasn't sleeping, exactly. Just... there. Sitting. The pages I'd read dozens of times were still open beside me, the instructions already memorized but impossible to ignore. Saturation. Fill every part of you with mana until even your capillaries knew where it was.

The world from within felt heavier and lighter at once, both in ways my head refused to reconcile. Outside, the snow had resumed its quiet fall. I was still here. Still in my chair by the window. The light floating above me, a glow and a core I had found centuries after its builder installed it. And in my palm a piece of metal with an even-longer story — the history of a revolution, a single card that had finally allowed a generation to survive something that used to kill them outright.

The card was warm against my skin. I closed my eyes and let it do what it was designed to. More than at any other point in my life, I felt like I was beginning something big. Outside, the sky was darkening. Winter wasn't over.