Jacob Hemlock was not born in this world.
He remembered another life beneath another sky, streets were without magic, machines that moved without mana, games that turned impossible worlds into numbers and systems, and a version of himself that would have never believed that he would one day wake up in a world of magic as a farm boy in a frontier kingdom.
Then it happened.
He had been ten years old in this life, playing with the chickens, feed in his hands, and no real worries to deal with. The day had been ordinary for the child.
The air smelled of dirt and feathers with a bit of a waft coming from the coop, signaling the need to clean it out. But the hens clucked around his boots, happily.
The farm operated around him as it usually did.
Then his old memories tore through him. Like a tide from a dammed-off river.
They did not return gently. Nor did they rise and bubble up like dreams.
They slammed into his little head with the burden of another life, and the pain dropped him where he stood.
When he woke in bed, his father was beside him.
Arthur Hemlock sat near the cot with a damp cloth in one hand and a face full of care that tried very hard not to show fear. To the confused boy coming out of a fever dream, he looked like a pillar in a flood.
Jacob remembered that part more clearly than the headache. He remembered opening his eyes and seeing a man who had spent the night watching over his son.
That was the first thing his old mind understood about his new life.
He had a family here.
A real one.
He could have spent years mourning the world he left behind. Maybe another person would have.
Perhaps another reincarnated soul would have clawed after the past, bitter over everything lost and furious at whatever had brought him here.
Jacob did not.
The memories from his old life were broken in places. Faces were blurry, and some of the names slipped away. His old family remained more like a dream than a memory, which was probably for the best.
He knew they had not loved him the way a family should, and they had kept him around because social pressures and faux obligation forced them to. He also knew that loneliness had followed him for a long time.
This life, though, was different. And the past did not have to saddle him down with its baggage. Since the memories were just out of reach and easy to forget like a dream slipping through his fingers, he did the only sensible thing he could. He decided to let them slip.
So when the pain passed, Jacob did the most reasonable thing he could think to do.
He went and fed the chickens.
The Hemlock farm sat on the edge of Ruvka, a small frontier village in the Sinclair Kingdom. The kingdom mostly remembered Ruvka when grain taxes came due or when monsters wandered too close to the road.
Beyond that, the village survived because its people knew how to work and because the land rewarded those who would not quit.
But it punished those who did.
Arthur Hemlock was exactly the kind of man a place like that required. He thought more than he spoke, and preferred to spend his days working hard in the fields instead of complaining.
He knew how important good soil was for a farm, and did his best to keep things in order. Though he still ended up with a couple of useless fields over the years.
He also knew magic, though not in the way academy-trained mages knew it.
The Hemlock family had passed down journals for generations. Their magic had always been applied practically, with little real experimentation.
A rune of strength went on a hammer. An enchantment of relative lightness went to a plough.
Their knowledge was written down because they knew that they could not trust that every lesson would be taught in time.
That caution saved them.
Years before Jacob was born, sickness swept through Ruvka and killed many of the adults.
Children inherited farms before they inherited the needed wisdom. The kingdom sent some help, but not enough to make Ruvka particularly productive.
Arthur's apprenticeship under his father ended too soon, but the journals remained.
And Arthur used them.
He kept the Hemlock farm alive. Then he bought nearby farms from people who had inherited land they did not know how to manage.
He did not throw those families away, though. He took the former owners on as farmhands, gave them work, and folded their survival into his own. He had plenty of room on his expanded farmlands to house his workers, which kept them out of the forests.
That was Arthur. A quiet man, both practical and loyal, past the point most people considered reasonable for someone in his situation.
And he taught Jacob the family magics early.
That turned out to be both wise and dangerous. For both of them.
Jacob learned the basics from his father, then started doing things Arthur had never seen and could not explain.
Where Arthur saw patterns, Jacob saw purpose. Where Arthur saw runes as strict tools, Jacob saw a sort of conversation with the ethereal.
The old journals had given Arthur enough to preserve the family craft. Jacob took those lessons and bent them toward something stranger but also more versatile.
May Hemlock ran the house the way Arthur ran the farm.
Nothing escaped her. She knew when a child was hungry before the child said so, and she knew when Arthur was worried by how long he stood at the door.
She also knew when Jacob had pushed too hard by the way he tried to act normal.
May fed people like feeding them was a sacred duty. She put love into stews, bread, tea, and every full bowl she set down.
She did not need speeches. Her pride was expressed in her warm meals, clean clothes, and the loving way she kissed her children's heads, whether they had asked for affection or not.
Caleb was Jacob's older brother. Arthur had named him after his late father. Caleb did not say much, but he watched everything. Over the last year, he had grown into a kind of strict competence that made Jacob wonder about him.
Caleb had started learning magic after seeing enough impossible things happen in the barn. He had more talent than anyone expected.
His mana pool was small, and that held him back, but Jacob already had plans for that. Just as he had plans for most things, although most of those plans currently lived in his head.
Lila was the youngest. She was five and still tried to tell three stories at the same time at dinner. No one on the farm had managed to stop her. And no one really wanted to. She brought plenty of joy with her disjointed stories, and no one wanted to end that.
Then there was Sera.
Sera entered Jacob's life the way important things often did, through trouble no one had planned for. Her family situation fell apart, and the Hemlocks took her in.
She sang with a voice that carried something more than sound, and no one fully understood the magic woven through it, but everyone who heard her knew it was there.
Then her grandmother died.
Grief changed her. It quieted her songs and pulled her inward. She still smiled sometimes, especially when Lila dragged her into childish nonsense at the dinner table, but the loss had been there for the past few months.
Jacob did not try to fix it with clever words. He stayed close enough that she knew she had not been abandoned and gave her enough space to breathe as she mourned.
People in Ruvka sometimes misunderstood what Sera was to him.
Jacob understood it less neatly than he wanted to admit.
She was not his girlfriend, and she was not his sister. She was not simply a friend either. She was Sera, and that had to be what it was for now. They could figure things out when they were old enough to actually think about it.
Mira came into his life from the edge of the woods.
She was the daughter of a trapper and a leather worker, a quiet girl who knew the forest paths better than most adults and moved through brush like the trees had conspired to keep her hidden.
Her father spent long stretches away checking snares and hunting. While her mother taught her practical work with cloth and gear. The forest taught her everything else.
During Jacob's Trial Year, he wandered farther than he should have and got turned around before dusk.
Mira found him before the woods could become a real problem. She did not make a speech about it. She simply guided him back in silence, as if rescuing strange farm boys from their own curiosity was something she had decided was a part of her duties.
Later, she admitted she had seen him enchanting a bow and had been curious.
Jacob repaid her by enchanting her boots to reduce fatigue on long walks. That was fair in his mind, as she was not really expecting anything in return.
She had saved him from spending the night lost in the trees, and he had made sure the trees would have a harder time wearing her down.
Mira was not very easy to read. She watched more than she spoke, with curiosity behind her hazel eyes. But Jacob noticed her sharp senses and steady nerves. The way she always seemed to be a few steps ahead of trouble.
Jacob's magic made simple situations much more complex.
Old Thom was the first person with enough power and age to properly scare him.
The old sorcerer lived near Ruvka in a crooked little house that was not really a house. From the road, it looked rundown. The porch creaked wrong, and the fence warped in ways fences should not.
Even the trees were bent in the wrong directions.
The whole place seemed one hard rain away from collapse. Yet it stood longer than anyone in the village could remember.
Inside, it opened into something much larger.
Old Thom's home was a dimensional gateway hidden behind bad boards and a creepy atmosphere.
The old man was a centuries-old sorcerer with power no villager could measure, and he had the personality of someone who had long ago stopped caring whether anyone found him pleasant to be around.
He did not praise Jacob often, and he really did not praise anyone often. If Arthur can be trusted with his personal observations.
Instead, the old man handed Jacob a dagger made from a strange, dark material and told him to enchant it when he was ready.
It took Jacob the better part of a year.
When he finally brought the dagger back, it carried five enchantments. Jacob had poured so much of himself into the work that he barely made it to bed afterward. He passed out face-first before he could take off his boots.
Old Thom called the dagger a unique artifact. He also hinted that Jacob should try spending himself in work like that to help his magic grow.
That was significant for Jacob because he knew that Old Thom did not waste words on flattery. He paid Jacob in C-rank cores, gold, and a selection of nature, light, and darkness cores that Jacob had not seen before.
He said he wanted to see what Jacob could cook up with his special magic and unique problem-solving skills.
Then he told Jacob to leave before the old sorcerer was forced to take him as an apprentice.
He also told Jacob something more dangerous.
No one currently alive on Meldra could do what Jacob did with magical equipment. That was a revelation that shook Jacob a bit.
Old Thom said it like a warning, more than encouragement.
That was usually how he delivered his advice or warnings. It was so cryptic at times that it was hard to tell which he was hinting toward. Or if it was just the ramblings of a madman.
Jacob's enchantments were not normal by any stretch of the imagination.
He did not force magic into metal through rigid formulas or command the material to obey. He built a complete picture in his mind and then shaped a purpose until it felt right, then asked his magic to bridge the distance between the object as it was and the object as it should become.
Sometimes his magic felt like it listened, and sometimes it felt like it helped. It was kinda like a curious cat in that regard.
His enchantments seemed to carry a sort of intelligence, not enough to speak or think like people, but enough to understand their own work. They partnered with an instinctual purpose instead of merely holding a rigid function. At least, that was how Jacob viewed it.
And that made his magic powerful in his hands.
But that power also made it dangerous. For him, and also those he cared about. But only if he was not careful.
Gerald Viscerent understood that better than almost anyone else Jacob knew.
Gerald was a young academy mage, a noble, and one of the few people Jacob trusted with the stranger edges of his work.
Their relationship began as a business contact and ended up becoming something closer to a friendship. He met Jacob monthly, traded knowledge for enchantments, and reacted to Jacob's breakthroughs with equal parts delight and horror.
Sometimes he secretly felt a little terror. But that was the thing he loved about magic. And that was what kept him coming back to Thornhold when he had already finished his studies for the semester.
Gerald once asked Jacob to create a distortion band using a C-rank water core.
Jacob made it work.
Gerald laughed for nearly a full minute. Then he stopped laughing and told Jacob that the band should have been impossible. He told Jacob not to show work like that to anyone until he had the power to fight off an army.
Gerald was not being dramatic.
He was being careful. And he was being serious.
Jacob took the advice with all seriousness and put it to the back of his mind for later, which was where he put most warnings that were probably important. Not because he was careless, but because he had some magic to focus on at the present moment.
Those warnings would come back to him when he needed them. Hopefully.
The farm improved because Jacob could not leave a solvable problem alone.
It began with the dirt.
Those older fields that had gone wrong, he figured he could do something about it and restore the full capacity of the farm as it was supposed to be.
Jacob tried enchanted stakes. He tried careful watering. Then he tried watching drainage patterns and studying the crops until the frustration drove him to crouch, scoop up a pinch of soil, and touch it to his tongue.
It tasted salty.
Wrong.
Dead in a way soil should not be dead.
Years of hard use, poor drainage, and frequent Ruvka rains had left salt behind. The earth had been poisoned slowly. No enchantment Jacob could currently manage would convince plants to drink poison and thrive.
The answer came from swamp grass.
A specific kind of salt grass grew inside F-rank dungeon gates. Its bulbs could break down salt and restore balance to damaged earth. Obtaining it should have been a job for adventurers, not a farm boy who had not yet unlocked the system.
Jacob went anyway.
Carlos Weaver made that possible.
Carlos led the adventuring party sent to evaluate the new Mire Gate near Ruvka. He was a powerful knight and not someone who was easily impressed. Jacob changed that by showing him an enchanted sword with edge stability, structural resilience, self-mending properties, and minor trajectory correction built into the blade.
Carlos bought the sword for a few gold coins and a future favor.
Jacob valued the favor more.
He called it in and convinced Carlos to let him join the dungeon run. The trip began as a grass collection job. But it became something else before anyone knew what was happening.
The party went deeper than intended. They found a Behemoth boss at the bottom of the Mire Gate.
The fight should have been beyond Jacob. He survived anyway, and more than survived. He pushed external mana through the party mage's staff like opening a valve and used a pre-loaded light spell to neutralize the boss.
Carlos's system upgraded its danger assessment of Jacob by two levels that afternoon.
Jacob came out with salt grass, monster cores, a Void Knight's gauntlet, and some worthy crafting materials to use in his experiments.
The salt grass worked.
He just had to build a greenhouse for it to grow in. The type with atmospheric controls. Nothing too fancy. Though Gerald called it a herbarium or something like that.
The damaged fields began recovering. By summer harvest, the Hemlocks would have more productive land than they had managed in years. They had also purchased two additional plots from struggling neighbors who were glad to have the tax burden lifted.
He built an automatic seeder to plant the bulbs, too.
Jacob did not stop at the fields, though.
He built a harvester as well.
The idea came from his old-world memories and his refusal to accept that the harvest needed to leave the whole family bent over in the field for a week.
The machine would separate wheat from chaff and move sorted grain into a wagon. Jacob knew what he wanted it to do. And Bran knew how to take his ideas and craft them into reality.
Bran was a young tinkerer from Ruvka. He apprenticed at the wainwright shop and treated every mechanical problem as a new puzzle to be solved.
Thus, he attacked the harvester design with obsessive precision, which made Jacob trust him almost immediately.
The brass gears came from a master blacksmith in Thornhold. The frame came together in the barn over two days. Then Jacob, Arthur, and Caleb enchanted it together.
That was where the family magic really started to change.
Arthur had spent twenty years thinking magic required rigid formulas. Jacob talked to him about intent over structure, and something shifted. That same afternoon, Arthur placed his first new-style enchantment on leather.
Caleb lagged behind, but not for lack of effort. Arthur promised to teach him the method as soon as he understood it well enough himself.
The harvester enchantments snapped together without exploding.
That alone made the attempt a success.
Something else happened too.
Arthur and Caleb changed. Neither received a system message that explained what had occurred, but both felt the difference. Before that day, one enchantment before bed was all Arthur could manage. Afterward, he could enchant several times in a day.
Jacob did not know exactly what he had done to them.
He only knew his family had moved one step closer to him.
The list of things Jacob made kept growing.
A coat that stopped an impact Arthur believed would have shattered Jacob's ribs. Greaves. Bracers. Reinforced boots. A sword that guided his swing and linked to his armor through shared resonance. A burlap sack that held things it had no business holding. Sera's shawl, which drew a merchant's wife into touching the fabric for ten straight minutes because she could not identify the material. Gerald's wand, made from the same dark material as Old Thom's dagger, which Gerald called a true artifact even though Jacob had meant it as a commission.
He also enchanted Oren's cuirass.
Oren was a young swordsman who stayed in the Hemlock guest bed and spent his mornings killing goblins in the woods before sunrise. He began teaching Jacob sword forms after hearing about the wilderness training ahead.
His judgment was blunt.
"There is a difference between swinging a sword and using one," Oren told him.
Then he put Jacob through forms and footwork until the reincarnated mage was sweating hard enough to regret every clever thing he had ever said about combat.
Jacob re-enchanted Oren's cuirass that same night. He layered new protections over the old enchantment without stripping it first, which should not have worked. When Oren tried to thank him, Jacob waved it off. Oren was teaching him the sword. That made it fair.
Money moved through Jacob's hands in amounts that would have made most Ruvka villagers dizzy.
He sold the Earthshaper's Aegis in the village square. The blade carried triple-layered enchantments built around an E-rank earth core. It went for one hundred and twenty gold coins, fifteen E-rank earth cores, and five D-rank water cores.
He sold Carlos the original sword, completed paid work for Gerald, and even signed a royal land purchase contract with Arthur in the county capital to permanently record the Hemlock farm's expanded holdings.
Jacob also spent money as fast as his projects demanded it. Custom blacksmith parts. Mechanical components. Monster cores sorted into glass jars. At night, those cores painted his room in soft colors while he lay awake thinking of the next thing to build.
The transactions would have looked strange from the outside.
A twelve-year-old farm boy handled gold, cores, contracts, and impossible artifacts with businesslike calm.
Of course, Jacob was not exactly twelve.
That detail made everything complicated.
Gerald eventually brought him to the Adventurers District in Thornhold.
The district sat behind a guarded gate. A stone-and-timber guild hall waited at the end of a cobblestone path. Adventurers moved through the place with weapons, armor, scars, and the confidence of people who regularly survived things meant to kill them.
The guildmaster of Thornhold's branch watched Jacob demonstrate his magic.
Then he offered him an apprenticeship before the afternoon ended.
The man was not gentle.
He was a combat mage, an academy graduate, and the kind of person who could carry both a sword and a wand without looking like either was decoration. He smoked a pipe, wore a scar over his left eye, and cast force spells fast enough to make Jacob understand that speed could be its own form of brutality.
Jacob had spent months thinking his enchantments were impressive.
The guildmaster kicked that confidence out from under him.
One small strike destroyed the enchantments where his foot touched Jacob's armor. The impact sent damage through Jacob's body, and the guildmaster had to heal him afterward.
The lesson was clear.
Jacob's work was impressive for furniture, tools, and low-risk village use. Against real power, his equipment was trash.
Worse than trash, because it made him think he was protected when he was not.
The problem was core-binding.
Jacob had been skipping the step that gave high-end equipment the density and durability needed to survive serious combat. His enchantments were clever. They were unique. They were also fragile when measured against the wider world.
The guildmaster still took him as an apprentice.
That said more than the insult did.
He saw Jacob's potential, and he wanted it sharpened before it got him killed.
He taught Jacob about magical density and core-turning. Jacob finally understood why his fireball could barely damage an F-rank goblin. He had magic, control, creativity, and impossible insight, but he lacked density. His mana was too thin. His power could do clever things, but it did not hit hard enough.
The guildmaster intended to fix that.
Unfortunately, Jacob was small even by farm boy standards.
The solution was boot camp.
The training grounds lay northwest of Thornhold, beyond the safer edge of civilization. The place was designed to be brutal. Prospective adventurers went there to be broken down, rebuilt, and measured against dangers that did not care about talent.
The guildmaster wanted Jacob to begin core-turning before he turned twelve.
He was strangely insistent about that.
He did not explain why.
Arthur noticed something fishy in the master-apprenticeship arrangement when Jacob told him about it. Arthur did not push hard enough to stop it, but the concern stayed in his eyes.
Gerald added one more piece.
The training grove was full of excessive life energy. That energy concentrated in the fruit that grew there. Eating the fruit could accelerate recovery faster than any normal healer or potion.
Gerald told Jacob to use that recovery window to practice turning his core as often as possible.
He said it would hurt.
He told him to do it anyway.
Jacob treated that as an instruction, not a warning.
Arthur handled the news like Arthur handled most things that frightened him.
He sat by the fire and whittled a stick down to almost nothing. He nodded more than he spoke. Then he told Jacob that this was what the Trial Year was meant to lead toward. Children were given freedom from eleven to twelve so they could explore, fail, and find the shape of their lives before the system made that shape visible.
He said he would talk to May in the morning and then told Jacob to make better defensive equipment before leaving.
He told him to stay safe.
Then Arthur closed his grandfather's old journal and went to bed.
Jacob had the distinct impression that his father sat with his quill for a while before the lamp finally went out.
Old Thom gave him no such softness.
Their last conversation before the training period was the longest they had ever had, which still ended with Jacob being thrown out.
The old sorcerer told Jacob that both he and Arthur would face trials. He told Jacob that stepping in for each other every time would cripple one or both of them.
That old man also told him that adversity was where strength was born. He had been watching to see how Jacob used the power that had fallen into his lap.
Apparently, he was satisfied.
He warned Jacob again about the dagger. His warning was that no one on Meldra could currently do what he did with magical equipment. That anything he made at B-rank or above would attract the kind of attention he would not want to bring back to Ruvka.
Then Old Thom told him to get out of his hut.
Jacob turned to ask one more question.
The door had already closed.
He flew back to the farm, wondering whether Old Thom had actually been anywhere near the field across from the greenhouse or whether the old man had somehow watched everything from inside his impossible house the entire time.
That was where things stood before Jacob left.
He had experienced a true reincarnation from the life of an antisocial adult who loved video games to that of a farm boy with magic. His memories gave him strange ideas that most people from this world might not have, but he was able to leave the baggage of his last life behind him.
He had spent two years turning a struggling frontier farm into something greater than it used to be, but it was uncertain at this point if he was changing the farm much or if it was the farm that was changing him.
He enchanted artifacts that trained mages called impossible.
But he charged fair prices for them.
Lately, he flew to the village when he was in a hurry, and the adventurers near the well were getting used to it, though some still watched him from the corners of their eyes. Only experienced mages were known to fly, and he still looked like a boy.
He sat with the chickens when he needed to think.
That part had not changed.
His father was still learning magic at thirty. His brother had followed him into it. His mother loved him with full bowls and fierce kisses. His little sister could still derail dinner with a smile and a sentence that went sideways halfway through.
He had Sera under the same roof, grieving but not alone.
He had Bran waiting for the next project.
He had Mira somewhere near the edge of things, watching the woods and the caves with silent eyes, noticing more than anyone gave her credit for.
He had Oren in the guest bed and goblins dying in the woods before breakfast.
He had Gerald watching from the academy side of things with a noble's caution and a friend's concern. The mage seemed to know more than he let on, but Jacob got the feeling that he was waiting for something; maybe Gerald was just waiting for him to grow in power.
He had Old Thom, as well, who threw him out of a dimensional gateway and somehow made that feel like guidance.
He had a master waiting in the north. A man he hardly knew, yet had apparently broken a few rules to help him grow in power.
He had a world that had not yet decided what to make of him.
That was probably fair.
Jacob had not finished deciding what to make of himself either.
He had two weeks before everything changed.
He used them well.
He made equipment for his family first.
Not tools and not just prototypes. Not clever household conveniences that made life easier, either. He enchanted armor.
Real armor. Something that could hold things together while he was away.
He rebuilt the defensive pieces with core foundations wherever he could. He checked the resonance and the failure points, ensuring it would hold out where it mattered most.
He made sure May, Arthur, Caleb, Lila, and Sera each had at least one item that would keep them alive if danger reached the farm while he was gone. Help them to hold on until someone could help, something that could absorb one more blow when all else failed.
He trusted Oren.
Oren promised the farm would still be standing when Jacob returned.
Jacob believed him.
But, just in case, he used the last of his dungeon materials to craft an orb. It was an ugly thing, an amalgamation of furs and leathers of beasts with random fangs and claws sticking out of it.
But it was powerful, if nothing else.
He left it to Sera. It was a one-use item, but he figured it could take out Carlos if the unassuming girl could catch him off guard.
Then Jacob left.
Four months passed.
The guildmaster had told him exactly what to expect.
He would be pushed past his physical limits every day. He would be pushed past his magical limits every day.
On top of that, he would need to take his body further than it was meant to go, eat fruit swollen with life energy, recover just enough to stand, and then do it all again the next morning.
The training grounds northwest of Thornhold were not comfortable because comfort was not the point. They existed to turn the potential that the guild could see in promising new recruits into functional guild members.
Adventurers cleared dungeons, contained outbreaks, guarded roads, and killed the things that slipped through the cracks of civilization. That potential needed to be refined into something that could hold up to the challenge.
Potential had to be beaten into shape. And these grounds allowed the guild to push that potential where it needed to go.
Gerald had been right about the fruit.
It tasted like sunlight.
It filled Jacob with warmth so intense it almost hurt. It smoothed soreness into ache, and aches into pressure. That alone did not make the training easy. But it did make more training possible.
That was worse, in Jacobs' opinion.
He used every recovery window the way Gerald told him to. He turned his core until pain crawled through his ribs, up his spine, and shocked his mind until he was unable to think any longer.
He turned it when his hands shook and when his body begged him to sleep. He turned it after drills, after falls, after victories, and even after failures.
He turned it until he felt like his body would fall apart into ribbons.
Then he ate the fruit, and healed his body with the restorative magic that would allow him to adapt.
Then he turned it again.
The core turned and turned.
Sometimes it felt like grinding stone against bone.
Sometimes it felt like his mana was folding inward around a center that had not existed before.
Sometimes it felt like he was being rebuilt from the inside by a combination of magic and mettle. But they seemed to fight against each other, and rip each other's work apart just to start anew after healing.
Yet, he did it anyway.
The person assigned to watch his back did not hover. The guildmaster had promised that much.
Whoever had been sent was stronger than Carlos was currently, and that was the only comfort Arthur allowed himself to keep when Jacob left home.
Jacob saw little of the watcher directly.
He felt the presence sometimes. A shift beyond the trees. A monster that turned away before it reached him. A killing intent that vanished as quickly as it appeared. The message was clear enough.
He was not alone.
He was also not being saved from the training.
The guildmaster expected him to return as a Tier 1 mage.
The boy who entered the grove had been clever and talented, yet dangerously underbuilt. He had impossible enchantments but thin mana.
He had a sword that helped him swing, but armor that was unable to stand up to a simple kick from an experienced warrior.
Four months changed that.
Four months of pain.
Four months of fruit.
Four months of magic collapsing inward and growing denser.
Four months of learning the difference between a trick and real power.
Four months of discovering that every limit had another limit waiting behind it.
Jacob Hemlock had never been the type to break.
Now the training was almost finished.
Somewhere northwest of Thornhold, beyond the safe roads and familiar fields, a twelve-year-old farm boy stood at the edge of the life-energy grove and breathed through the last ache of the last lesson.
The world had thought him strange before.
Old Thom had called his work unique.
Gerald had called it impossible.
Carlos had watched his system reassess him in real time.
The guildmaster had looked at everything Jacob built and called it trash, then took him as an apprentice anyway.
They had all seen pieces of what he might become.
None of them had seen what was coming home.
He sat down one final time during this month-long training session and turned his core with no effort whatsoever.
Finally, his body had adapted to the rampage of magic and was able to sustain the pressure without falling apart.
Finally, the core could turn on its own.
Finally, the systemless boy was a tier 1 mage.
Finally, he was heading home.
Book Two begins.