The old man wasn't teaching me. He was stripping me for parts.
Every breath he took sounded like a wet wheeze through a broken bellows—the sound of a man whose lungs were more blood than air. It made him mean. The abandoned quarry smelled of stagnant water and the sharp, metallic tang of wet limestone. In the center sat the millstone: a massive, moss-slicked slab of granite half-buried in the silt.
"Stop thinking with your tits, boy," the old man hissed from the shadows of the overhang. He spat a glob of red phlegm into the dirt. "Alchemia isn't a prayer. It's a coup. Force the mana into the marrow. If your bones aren't harder than that stone, they'll snap. Now move it, or I'll bury you under it."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. I reached out, my intent hooking into the invisible lines of Gravity. It wasn't some abstract concept; it felt like a physical weight pressing on my eyeballs, trying to shove them into my skull.
I gripped the edge of the stone. I flooded my legs with mana until my shins felt like they were being hammered from the inside out. I pulled.
Crr-ack.
The stone groaned. An inch of daylight appeared beneath it. Then my grip slipped. The granite slammed back down, the shockwave rattling my teeth. I barely jerked my toes back in time.
"Get a grip", I snarled at myself. "You've died once already. Don't let a rock finish the job."
By the sixty-second attempt, I wasn't a person anymore. I was a vessel of pressure. Blood leaked from my nose, hot and salty, dripping onto the gray silt. The Alchemia Morphica was the only thing keeping my spine from exploding like a dry twig. I didn't lift it that day. I just learned that "heavy" was a polite word for "agony."
I collapsed, chest heaving, staring at the pitiless blue sky.
"Look at that face," the old man mocked, looming over me. "What? You want a bandage and a kiss on your boo-boo? Maybe a warm glass of milk?"
"No," I coughed, wiping blood from my lip with a shaking hand. A jagged, ugly grin split my face. "I'm just glad the stone didn't win."
The old man stared at me. Then, a dry, hacking laugh erupted from his chest—a sound like grinding stones. I started laughing too, a pair of lunatics in a hole in the dirt. It was the first time I'd seen him look alive since the winter started.
"Enough flirting," he snapped, the humor vanishing. "Get up. Movement is just a fall you're too stubborn to finish."
He dropped two fifty-pound grain sacks onto my bruised shoulders. Before I could steady myself, he jammed a mana-charged finger into my sternum.
My world tilted. My center of gravity didn't just shift; it felt like my internal organs had been replaced with lead. Every step was a war. I walked until the sun became a white-hot brand against my neck. I walked until the blisters on my heels burst and the inside of my boots felt slick and wet.
When I finally went down, face-first into the grit, I didn't wait for him to help. There were no hands coming. Just the wind and a crow circling overhead, waiting for me to stop moving. I pushed up, my muscles trembling like guitar strings ready to snap, and I kept fucking walking.
The river was liquid ice.
I sat in the grey current up to my chin. My heart hammered against my ribs like a frantic bird in a cage. [Chess Master] flickered in my peripheral vision—cold, blue lines of logic trying to map out a way to survive the hypothermia.
Shift the flow. Constrict the peripheral vessels. Keep the core hot.
I didn't fight the cold; I invited it in, then walled it off in a corner of my mind. When I finally crawled out, my skin was a deathly porcelain blue. The recovery hit me like a shot of cheap whiskey—a rush of heat as my metabolism went into overdrive, healing the micro-tears in my fibers.
Then came the cedar trunk. I used it to beat a standing oak until the vibrations rattled my brain inside my skull. I jumped between the jagged quarry rocks until my landings stopped being soft and started being anchors.
By the week's end, my legs weren't meat anymore. They were pistons.
"Thirteen years old by the moon's turn, eh?" The old man held the wooden training sword like it was an extension of his gnarled arm.
"Thirteen," I grunted, sweat stinging my eyes.
"Then thirteen hundred strikes. No flourish. No bullshit. Just 'The Line.' If you wobble, we start at zero."
"Can I be ten instead?"
"Fourteen hundred for the lip. Start swinging."
Strike 40: My shoulder dipped. "Zero," he barked.
Strike 82: My lead foot was off by a hair. "Zero."
By strike five hundred, the world narrowed to a single horizontal plane. The wood didn't whistle through the air; it cut it. The movement became surgical. Empty.
The next morning, I practiced on the sandbag until my knuckles were a raw, purple pulp. I watched the mana stitch the skin back together, the new flesh coming in thick and scarred. The bag was the world, and I was going to hit it until it broke or I did.
That evening, we sparred in the mud.
The old man didn't use technique. He used mass. He ground my face into the silt until I was tasting worms and ancient decay. I learned to breathe through the side of my mouth. When he pinned my arms, I used my forehead. When my legs failed, I used my weight.
Then, I felt it. A microscopic tremor in his stance. His gravity wavered.
I shifted my anchor. I didn't pull; I pivoted. The old man went down into the muck like a felled ox.
"Finally!" I roared, a primal, ugly sound.
Thwack.
His boot caught me in the gut, sending me tumbling back into the stagnant pool. I came up sputtering, coughing out muddy water.
"Sore loser!" I yelled.
The old man just wiped mud from his eyes and spat. "Don't get cocky, boy. The dirt doesn't care who won the last round."
That night, I sat on the ridge without a fire. The cold tried to take my soul, drifting my mind back to the Atlantic, the hum of submarines, and a life that felt like a dream someone else had told me. I pushed it back. I watched the stars until they bled into the dawn.
When I stood up, my reflection in the frozen puddle wasn't a boy's. It was something harder.
I went back to the millstone. No shouting. No dramatic buildup. I just stepped into the pit and took a breath that tasted of frost and iron.
I reached into my marrow. I didn't just lift. I commanded. The debt the stone owed to the earth was cancelled. The granite rose—fluid, silent, and terrifyingly light.
I held it over my head, the weight of the world balanced on my palms. I didn't feel joy. I just felt the truth: the only limits I had were the ones I was too afraid to break.
I dropped it. The earth shook. I looked at the old man.
"Again," I said.
He grinned, showing his yellowed teeth. We laughed, two ghosts in a dying world, living like today was the only day that ever mattered.