Chương 23: Chapter 22: A Different Kind of Heartbeat

The catalyst was on the floor. That was the first thing I registered when I opened my eyes. Not the ache in my chest — that came second. The catalyst. On the floor. Inches from my hand. I'd dropped it. The panic that followed was fast, short and pointless. The catalyst wasn't needed anymore — the first circle was already spinning in my heart, self-sustaining, permanent. Dropping the card after engraving didn't undo anything. I picked it up anyway.

The silver was cool and the red core at its center still glowed faintly — just a bit dimmer, it had been unaffected by everything that had happened. I set it on the desk beside the grimoire. Then I sat there for a while, breathing. I could feel the circle was still spinning inside my chest. Not like the catalyst's borrowed effect. Not like the slow, diffuse filling of saturation. This was different. A permanent presence in the center of my chest — not a heartbeat, but adjacent to one.

Something that had been placed there and would now run for the rest of my life. It felt less like an organ and more like a mechanism. A tiny engine tucked behind my heartbeat, turning with patient certainty. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't speed it up. It simply... existed. The Circle was like that. Quiet. Constant. And through it, I could feel things. The barrier. Not as a vague presence anymore — I could trace its shape. A dome enclosing the village, denser at the perimeter, thinning as it rose.

I couldn't see it with my eyes, but I knew its curve the way you know the walls of a room you're standing in without looking at them. The golems. All of them within the range of whatever this new sense was. Each one a small, focused point. Their signals were stronger than I'd expected. The sweeper on the main street. The polisher in the courtyard. The one in the barn... And beyond the barrier — the monsters. I could feel them now. Not as simple shapes anymore. Two of them.

No, three — the third was faint, barely registering. The large one was still moving. The smaller one was still. I stood up. My legs held. My chest ached — a deep, muscular soreness, like I'd pulled something that wasn't a muscle and couldn't be stretched out. The book hadn't mentioned an after-pain. Then again, the book had been written by people who'd done this for generations. They probably had techniques for it the way experienced runners had techniques for not destroying their knees. I didn't have techniques.

I had a circle on my heart that came with the soreness of someone who'd done the procedure without any training. I walked to the window. The main street was the same as it had been since I had first moved in. Snowless stone. Sweeper crossing at the far end. The doubled sunlight of late afternoon — I'd been out for hours. The second sun was already about to disappear. At the north edge of the village, where the barrier dome met the snow, the white wasn't white anymore. I squinted.

Without my glasses, the shapes blurred into smears of color against the snow — dark patches, red patches, things that could have been shadows or rocks. I put my glasses on. Bodies. Six of them. Seven — actually, the third half-buried in a drift, only a hind leg and a curve of spine visible above the white. The nearest one was dark-furred, horned, massive — larger but similar to the first beast I'd killed outside the house. Its throat was open.

The snow around it was red and wide, a stain that had spread while I was unconscious. The second body lay twenty meters past the first. Smaller. Lighter-furred. Like a giant rabbit, Torn open along the belly, something dark and frozen spilling out onto the snow. One of its forelimbs was missing entirely. The snow between them was churned. Not the smooth blanket I'd watched fall for days — trampled, gouged, packed down by weight and violence. A battlefield compressed into a hundred meters of frozen white and red.

And at the center of it, alive, was the winner. It was eating. The shape I'd sensed from the chair — the large one, the one whose mana signature was ragged but still burning — had its head lowered into the body of the horned beast. Tearing. The sound didn't reach me through the barrier, but I could see the motion. The rip and pull. The steam rising from the open cavity into the cold air. It was wounded.

I could see the damage even from this distance — gashes along its flank, a forelimb held at an angle that wasn't right, dark blood matting the fur across its shoulders. The other two had hurt it badly before they died. But it was alive. And it was eating what remained of its opponents. I watched it feed for a long time. The barrier held between us — a dome of invisible mana, denser at the perimeter, something the thing outside couldn't cross. It didn't look at the village. It didn't test the barrier.

It had won, and now it was collecting the first half of its prize. Two kills. Two bodies to feed on during the harsh winter. When it finished with the horned beast, it dragged itself toward the smaller body. Slow. The injured forelimb barely took weight. But it moved. It would keep moving on this battlefield for as long as it could, and then it would heal or it would die, and either way it wouldn't leave. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

There had been more of them last night. I'd heard impacts from different directions, competing rhythms. Five at least, maybe six directions. Most of them were dead now. The winner on this quadrant was one of the only three still standing. I turned from the window. The walk home didn't take long. But it felt longer. Not because of the cold — the thermal road was doing what it always did, steam rising faintly from the stones, and my coat was still the same coat.

Not because of the ache in my chest — that was steady, manageable, the kind of pain you could walk through. It felt longer because I could feel everything now. A dormant magistone in the wall of the first house I passed. Its signal was almost nothing — a whisper of organized mana, a circle waiting for someone to touch the stone. I'd been using these for days. Water from the air. Light from the dark. I'd thought of them as tools, as infrastructure, or as proof that magic was real.

I hadn't understood what I was touching at all. Someone had carved a spell into each of these cores. Someone had designed a circle that gathered water from the air, held it in a sphere, released it on command. Someone else had designed the temperature ring — a separate spell on a separate stone, I realized now, because the signals were distinct. Two big and a couple small magistones working together. One for water. One for heat. The remaining ones for logic and shape. A system built from pieces.

I stopped at the doorway of the next house. The basin. The core above it — thumb-sized, the same dim blue I'd seen a hundred times. I touched it. As expected, the sphere appeared and water poured. I let it run. Watching. I was not a miracle. Neither was it a mystery anymore. A spell spread across many stones. I turned the ring. The water warmed under my fingers. A second core, a second circle, responding to the rotation of the stone collar the same way a function responded to a parameter.

Give it an angle, it gave back a temperature. The comparison made sense — I'd written some programs over the years in python or java, mods, simple scripts, I could recognize the pattern. Input. Processing. Output. Simple pieces chained together into something useful. I'd been using magical APIs for days thinking they were all part of the main stone. The water kept running. Somewhere in the back of my mind a kid who'd made Minecraft mods in his bedroom was looking at a sink and seeing source code.

I turned the ring back. The water cooled. I touched the core again. The sphere vanished. Yato was on the couch, tail wrapped around his paws, ears flat in a way that told me he'd been sitting there for a while and had spent most of that while deciding exactly how angry to be. The food I'd left was gone. The water dish was low.

"Hey." His tail flicked once. Sharp. Three days.

"I know." Another flick. He didn't get up. I walked to the kitchen, opened the freezer, pulled out a chunk of beast meat. I thawed the meat in the microwave. Yato appeared at my feet somewhere between the second and third beep. I still had proper cat food in storage, but the meat made for a better bribe.

"I was learning magic." He didn't look up from the bowl I set down.

"Actual magic. Circles. Mana. Like in all the animes we've been watching together for decades." The meat disappeared. Yato looked up. His expression hadn't changed. You still left. Fair. I filled his water dish, and went to the stove to prepare my own share of food. Even with all the time I had spent in the study I was barely starting to feel hungry, that was weird, but I knew it was probably one of the side effects of what I had done. The beast core was on the shelf above my desk. Palm-sized. Bluish.

Faint and steady, the light of something almost alive. The grimoire had told me what it was. A natural magic circle, huh? I picked it up. Its signal in my new mana sense was faint — dormant, the same whisper I'd felt from the wall cores, but wilder. Less orderly. A monster core that had formed naturally, or a blank magistone. Waiting for a circle. The grimoire was open on the kitchen table. I'd brought it back from the study along with the dictionary volumes — I wasn't spending another night away from the house.

I could still feel the cold stones I'd slept on last night with every part of my body. I sat down on the couch with the core in one hand and the book in front of me. Heat Transfer. The first spell, if something in there could be used offensively that was it. Two pages of diagrams. The circle itself — a central spiral with branching paths, each branch annotated in the local script. Directional markers. Stabilization nodes... It was hard to translate, but the idea was simple enough.

Even so, I read the section three times. When I was done, I closed the book. Then I tried to draw it from memory. Using empty air as my canvas and mana as my ink, just as the book instructed. The circle formed — roughly. The spiral was lopsided. One of the branches curved too early. I held it for three seconds before a node slipped and the whole thing unraveled, mana dissipating into the room like heat from an open door. Nothing had happened. No heat moved. No water warmed.

The circle had never been stable enough to activate. I opened the book. Copied the circle again, this time with the diagram in front of me. Slower. Checking each branch against the page before committing it to the air. The circle held. A faint, trembling thing made of mana and attention — not elegant, not efficient, but complete. Now what? The spell needed a target. Two in fact — a source and a destination.

I set the beast core on the table, losing my focus again, on purpose this time, and I went to the kitchen to pick up an empty cup. Filled it with cold water from the sink and started over. On this attempt I aimed one of the targets at the air and the other at the water. Move heat from the air into the cup. The circle brightened. The water warmed. Not much. A few degrees, maybe. But I could feel it — the air around my hand cooled slightly as the water in the cup heated.

The two sensations arrived together, cause and effect linked in a way that normal physics didn't deliver. I released the circle. Let it dissolve. The water stayed warm. I just used magic. My first spell. Incredible. The spell was not that impressive on its own, the effect was faint, the area was small. But it was a spell. I sat at the kitchen table with my cup of lukewarm water. I was a mage. The Moisture Compression circle was simpler. Fewer branches.

No directional nodes — just a gathering spiral with a compression point at the center. I drew it from the book. Whether because it was my second attempt or because the circle itself was simpler, it came more easily than Heat Transfer had. Fifteen seconds from the first line to a stable circle. I aimed it at the air above the table. Nothing happened for a moment. Then a bead of water formed in the air — small, trembling, suspended at the compression point. Another bead joined it.

Then a thin stream, as thick as a pencil, falling into the cup I had just emptied. I watched it fill. Half a cup. Then a full cup. The circle held — Moisture Compression was gentler than Heat Transfer, less aggressive, easier to maintain. I released the circle and the stream stopped right above the edge making full use of surface tension. The water sat in the cup, perfectly still. It wasn't combat magic either. It wasn't going to kill the thing outside.

But it was proof that I could read a circle, draw it accurately with my mana, and make the laws of the world bend according to my will. Now I needed to make it permanent. The grimoire had a section on core engraving. I found it when I flipped past the spell descriptions — it came right after the First Circle applications, a subsection titled with characters I'd translated as something like "Magicore creation". The process was similar to heart engraving, but simpler.

The core wasn't living tissue — it was crystal, already structured to hold mana patterns. You wouldn't have to deal with the pain while trying to keep focus. You just had to be precise. The book recommended practising the circle by hand until you could draw it cleanly from memory. Only then should you attempt to carve it into a core. A badly carved circle didn't destabilise and vanish the way a hand-drawn one did — it stayed, permanently, and every activation would reproduce the error.

In some cases it could even lead to a disastrous explosion. Could be used as a grenades. I joked in my head. I looked at the beast core. Palm-sized. According to the book's size guidelines, it could hold all three circles with room to spare. Maybe even combined circles later, if I learned how to design them. But I couldn't draw any of these from memory yet. This was going to take practice. Days of it, maybe weeks — drawing circles until the branches and nodes were as familiar as the keys on my keyboard.

I closed the grimoire and the beast core went back on the shelf. I stepped outside. As usual, the cold hit immediately — winter hadn't paused while I was inside. The winners were still feeding. I could feel all three of them. They wouldn't leave. Nothing that had fought through an intense battlefield and survived would give up that easily. I didn't have a spell that could kill them. Heat Transfer couldn't freeze their blood. Moisture Compression gathered water and Air Current pushed air. None of them were weapons.

I stood on the main street for a long time. Then I turned around, walked back to the house and went to shower. Not tonight. I'd barely slept since saturation started and I hadn't showered in three days. Tomorrow I'll find a solution. For now I'll sleep in my own bed.