Chương 25: Chapter 24: Not Enough

I was on the floor and Yato was sitting on my chest. I blinked. He blinked back. His tail flicked once. Sharp. You're an idiot. I tried to sit up. My arms didn't cooperate. They felt heavy, distant, like they belonged to someone else and I was only borrowing them for a moment. My head was worse — a dull, throbbing weight that sloshed when I moved. I gave up and lay back down. Yato stayed where he was. Warm. Heavy. Judging.

"How long was I out?" His ears twitched. He didn't answer — he was a cat; he couldn't answer — but the light through the curtains had shifted since I last remembered seeing it. Morning had become afternoon. Or afternoon had become evening. Hard to tell. I closed my eyes. My whole body felt like a bruise stretched thin across every muscle. I remembered the experiment. The build-up. The moment where something had almost happened — a crackle, a spark, the air turning sharp and electric between my hands.

And then the drain. A vacuum opening inside me, pulling everything out through a hole I hadn't known existed. After that, nothing. I lay on the floor and let Yato's weight remind me I was still alive. The room told the story better than my memory could. Papers everywhere — not the organized chaos of a few nights ago, when everything had clicked and I'd written my first original spell, but something more desperate. Crossed-out diagrams. Pages torn from notebooks and crumpled.

A dark streak on the floorboards near the desk. The only physical trace of the lightning attempt. I sat up slowly. Carefully. My head complained but stayed functional. Yato had relocated to the couch, tail curled around his paws, watching me with the flat expression of a creature who had seen me do many stupid things and was beginning to suspect I hadn't learned from any of them.

"I'm fine," I said. His tail flicked. Fine. The five days hadn't been nothing. I'd learned things. Real things. The first two days I'd drilled the basic circles — Heat Transfer, Moisture Compression, Air Current — by the end of day two I could draw any of them in the air without the book open. By day four I could do it with my eyes closed. That was the milestone I'd been chasing since I'd last left the study. The ability to draw a circle cleanly from memory. The prerequisite for engraving. I'd reached it yesterday.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The other requirement, the core, was still on the shelf. I'd held it. Turned it over in my hands. I could have done it — Heat Transfer, my pick of the three, the one I knew best. A few minutes of focus, and the circle would be permanent. Carved into the crystal. Ready whenever I needed it. But I decided to put it back. Mostly because Heat Transfer couldn't kill the monsters outside. I'd spent days proving that.

Even perfectly executed, the mana resistance of a living creature ate the effect before it could do anything meaningful. The directed heat stream I'd been so proud of — the one I'd stayed up all night perfecting? I'd aimed it at a frozen fish from the river. Left it there for a full minute. The fish had thawed slightly. That was the ceiling. An engraved Heat Transfer would be cleaner. More efficient. But not stronger. And my first magistone had to count. I only had one blank core.

If I wasted it, I'd be out of options entirely. No second chances. No do-overs. So it stayed on the shelf. Today was the lightning attempt. I'd been thinking about it since I first read the section about first circle applications — the idea that if I understood the laws of physics well enough, I could skip the grimoire's pre-built circles and design something my own way. Lightning was the obvious choice. Direct. Powerful. The kind of thing an isekai protagonist would pull out in the first episode.

I'd spent the morning rearranging components I'd written on papers over the floor. Before long, I was convinced I'd found the right configuration — a way to charge the air using Air Current's movement, compress it, and release it. It didn't work. What did happen was harder to explain. I'd felt something building — a tension in the air between my hands, a sharpness that made my teeth ache. For one second I thought I'd done it. A flicker. A spark. Real electricity, jumping the gap. Then the drain hit me like a truck.

Every drop of mana I had went into that spark and kept going. It demanded more, pulling from reserves that weren't available. I felt the spell circle I'd built collapse inward, and the feedback loop hit the engraving in my chest like a slap. After that, the floor. The real problem wasn't the circles. No, the circle was perfect, almost too perfect. I'd been treating it like a design problem — find the right combination, arrange the components correctly, and the spell would do the work.

That was how the breakthrough had worked a few nights ago. I'd found the right arrangement and the directed heat stream had worked on the first try. But killing a beast wasn't going to be the same as melting some snow through a window. The mana resistance of a living creature pushed back against everything I could throw at it. An engraved core would reduce the casting time and help remove the overhead of maintaining the circle shape, but it wouldn't change what I was working with. The ceiling was my mana density.

I sat at the table with the grimoire open and read the sections I'd been avoiding. The Second Circle. The book described it as the natural progression after the first. It was simply a second circuit carved alongside the first. Doubling the mana-gathering efficiency and increasing the density of the mana my body could accumulate. One person's mana could only affect the body of someone with weaker mana. The beast was stronger than me. That meant I had to become even stronger.

But it meant carving another circle through my own skin, all the way to my heart. I remembered the first circle vividly. The metal scraping sensation through my chest. The circle slipping. The terror of feeling it destabilize inside my chest. The screaming I hadn't been able to stop, and that... That moment where I was almost certain. Certain that I would die alone on the study's floor. And I'd need to do that again. On purpose. Knowing exactly what it felt like. The requirements were more or less the same.

I simply needed to reach the right mana density before attempting the engraving. The first circle had been refining the mana inside me for about a week now. I could feel the density increasing slowly, but it wasn't just there yet. A few days. Maybe a week. Yato was asleep on the couch, one ear twitching at some dream-sound and the Roomba was in its corner, dormant, dark-eyed. Waiting for the next mess Yato would make. The room was quiet. The core was still on the shelf. I didn't take it down this time.

I just looked at it for a while — the faint blue glow, the palm-sized weight I'd memorized by now. I could still engrave it. The temptation hadn't gone away. A working magistone, even with a basic spell, was better than nothing. If I was clever about it — if I found the right composite, the right combination that pushed past the mana density problem through pure design — maybe I could make it work. But I'd been trying that for five days. And I hadn't found anything that could kill one of these things. Not yet.

I stood up. Walked to the window. Somewhere at the edge of the barrier, the monsters were still healing. I drew Heat Transfer in the air. Clean. Stable. From memory. The circle was perfect. The spiral, the branching paths aligned, every stroke exactly where it needed to be. I could do it in my sleep now. I held it for a moment, watching the faint blue lines rotate in the afternoon light, and let it dissolve. Just to prove I could. Just to remind myself the work I'd done hadn't been wasted.

Then I opened the grimoire to the last section of the book, two pages covering the process to create the second circle and the subsequent ones. And I started reading the procedure again. Not because the words would change. Because I needed to sit with them until the dread became familiar enough to walk past.