Chapter 10: Chapter 10: What Would Rin Do?
Almost half a decade after his birth...
The palace at night had a particular quality to it.
Not silence, there were always footsteps somewhere, guards cycling through their posts, the low creak of wood against cold stone.
But quieter.
The kind of quiet where a small person sitting very still in a window seat could become effectively invisible.
Alex had discovered this early.
He sat with his back against the cold stone frame, knees pulled to his chest, watching moonlight bleed silver across the corridor floor.
Eclipse was asleep.
Mom was asleep, maybe.
The palace breathed its slow night breath around him.
Alex was thinking about Rin.
’Rin would have lost his mind,’ he thought. ’Completely and spectacularly.’
That was always the first thing.
The ache of it was dulled now, worn smooth by months of infant helplessness and the sheer volume of new information.
But it never quite disappeared.
It just sat differently.
Rin, who had ambushed him with three-hour rants about manhuas he’d found at two in the morning, who had a gift for making someone feel guilty for not having read something they’d had no particular reason to read.
Rin, who kept a handwritten list —"an actual handwritten list, cross-referenced, with a rating system that made no sense to anyone except him"— of every series he’d read where a protagonist woke up in a magic world with a system and had to figure out how not to die before they figured out how to be powerful.
Rin, who had on one memorable evening delivered an extremely passionate lecture about why the mana absorption arc in some novel was the single greatest power-up sequence in fiction, and had kept going even after it became clear that his audience was not listening, had in fact stopped listening some time ago, and was not going to start.
Alex had not been listening.
He had been eating.
’I should’ve listened,’ he thought now, in the flat tone of a man acknowledging an irony too large to be dramatic about.
’Of all the things to not pay attention to. Of all the lectures to let wash over me. The one time in my life that a three-hour rant about fictional power systems was going to turn out to be directly applicable, and I spent it thinking about whether I wanted dessert.’
He remembered fragments.
A protagonist who woke up in a magic body and immediately started cataloguing power options.
A system interface that rewarded every small action with experience.
A slow-burn journey from nothing to something that made the world sit up and pay attention.
He remembered enough.
He also remembered what always came first.
Mana.
The thing was, he could already feel it.
Not clearly.
More the way you became aware of a smell you’d been breathing so long you stopped registering it, until someone pointed at it and then you couldn’t stop noticing.
Mana moved through the air in currents he was only just beginning to map.
It pooled in certain corners of the palace and thinned in others.
Densest near the east garden, where someone, Mom, he suspected, did whatever people did in those stories during practicing hours.
He’d been noticing it for weeks without a name for it.
Now he had a name.
’So.’ He pressed his fingertips together.
’The question is what to do about it. Which requires knowing what I actually have to work with, which requires knowing what’s typical for someone in my situation, which I don’t know, because my primary source on this topic was a man I wasn’t listening to at the relevant moment. This is a problem entirely of my own making.’
In Rin’s stories, the protagonist either stumbled into first mana absorption by accident, during a crisis, conveniently timed, or sat down and simply tried.
Reached out.
Pulled.
Alex considered the crisis option.
Discarded it immediately.
He was not in a crisis, and he had no intention of manufacturing one just to see if the narrative would be kind to him.
In his experience, narratives were not kind.
You got what you prepared for, and sometimes not even that.
Which left sitting down and trying.
He turned this over carefully.
The reason children didn’t cultivate early could be physiological, maybe the body needed to develop before the pathways could handle mana safely.
That was bad.
That meant trying too early could have consequences he couldn’t predict or see coming, and he had exactly one body left and no particular interest in damaging it.
The reason could be conventional.
Tradition.
The way things had always been done because they’d always been done that way and nobody had thought to ask why.
That was fine.
Tradition he could work around.
He had no way to know which it was without more information, and he had no way to get more information without asking questions that would raise other questions he wasn’t ready to answer.
’The intelligent move,’ he thought, ’is to gather information first. Observe. Build a baseline. Approach this the way I’ve approached everything else since I got here carefully, patiently, without tipping my hand before I know what the hand is worth.’
He paused.
’...But.’
The but was significant.
He was five years old in this body, sitting in a window seat at midnight, attempting to sense ambient mana.
The ship for intelligent conservative choices had arguably already sailed some time ago, possibly around the point where he’d started running unauthorized intelligence operations out of Eclipse’s bedtime stories.
Alex looked at his small hands in the moonlight.
He thought about Rin explaining, with genuine reverence, about a protagonist who sat in a forest for three days doing nothing but learning to feel the difference between the mana in the air and the mana in their own body.
’The key,’ Rin had said, ’is that you can’t want it too hard. Not desperately. More like extending an invitation. Calling to something that could come to you or not, and being genuinely prepared for the not, because if you’re not prepared for the not then you’re not inviting, you’re grabbing, and it doesn’t respond to grabbing.’
That had been Rin’s exact phrasing.
Embarrassingly poetic for a man who had introduced himself to the organisation by breaking someone’s kneecap, but Rin had always had that quality, the capacity to be ruthlessly practical about most things and then say something that belonged in a book of poetry about the ones that mattered to him.
Alex exhaled slowly.
He let his eyes close.
And then, very carefully, with the same patient attention he’d used to learn the palace’s sounds, to map his mother’s moods, to catalogue every person who had ever entered this room and how they’d looked at him while doing it—
He reached toward the currents he could almost feel.
Nothing happened.
He stayed very still.
Still nothing.
’Rin,’ he thought, with something close to fond exasperation, ’if your entire theory was based on fiction I am going to be very disappointed in you.’
He tried again.
Slower.
Less reaching, more listening.
The way you didn’t grab for a sound but tilted your head toward it, let the angle change, let your own noise quiet down until the other thing had room to be heard.
The mana moved.
Not toward him.
Not yet.
But it moved, he felt the nearest current shift, almost imperceptibly, like something that had been flowing in one direction pausing to note that it was being observed.
A thing that had not been paying attention to him suddenly considering whether to.
Alex didn’t breathe.
’...Oh.’
And then, from somewhere that wasn’t quite inside him and wasn’t quite outside—
The warmth stirred.
He felt it the way you feel someone standing just behind your shoulder.
Not threatening.
Not urgent.
Just watching.
And absolutely, unmistakably, amused.
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