The System in his head tracked every attempt. By day forty-one, he had a technique. By day forty-two, he had a methodology. By day sixty, the methodology had a name.
The cardiac channel experiment began on the eighth day of the semester and was documented, in Kael's internal System, under the heading: OVERCLOCK — DEVELOPMENT NOTES.
He had chosen Overclock as the project name because it was accurate and because the term from his first life had no equivalent in Eryndal's vocabulary, which meant nobody would recognize it even if they somehow read his notes.
The principle was simple enough to state: the body's biological systems ran at conservative default settings. Mana channels adjacent to those systems could be calibrated — not forced, not flooded, but tuned, resonantly, like adjusting the frequency of a signal — to encourage the systems to run at higher-than-default efficiency.
The heart first, because it was measurable. He could count his own heartbeat. He had a clear baseline. He had the feedback of a body that had spent six years in operating theatres learning to read its own signals.
Day one through four: locating the cardiac channel. The mana channel adjacent to the sinoatrial node resonated at a slightly different frequency from surrounding tissue — the SA node's electrical signature had shaped the adjacent mana over time. Finding it required forty-minute sessions of internal mana-sense work, holding his attention at a resolution most Healers never practiced.
His System logged the attempt data every session. Frequency readings. Stability duration. Mana cost estimates. By day three, the Log had enough data to suggest the approach angle that would work, and the Queue updated: try resonant parallel rather than direct infusion.
Day five: first success. His heart rate increased four beats per minute. Smooth, controlled, no destabilization. He held it thirty seconds and released.
He logged it. Updated the confidence rating on the hypothesis from THEORETICAL — POSSIBLE to EMPIRICAL — CONFIRMED. Noted the mana cost, the quality of the feedback, the post-session state.
Day twelve: twenty beats per minute increase, held two minutes. The Monitor had been tracking his baseline heart rate throughout the development period and flagged that his resting rate had also decreased slightly — the control work was improving overall cardiac efficiency, not just the Overclock peak.
He had not planned for this. He logged it as an unexpected secondary benefit and added it to a new Queue item: OVERCLOCK — SECONDARY EFFECTS. The body responded to precise mana calibration not just in the moment of calibration but across time. He was not just running techniques. He was changing how his biology worked.
Day twenty-eight: the catastrophe.
He had tried extending Overclock to the adrenal axis simultaneously with the cardiac channel. The feedback resonance from two incompatible frequency calibrations knocked him out. He came back to awareness on the archive floor with Oswin standing over him holding a cup of tea.
'Seventh time someone's passed out in here this week,' Oswin said.
'Exam stress,' Kael said, sitting up carefully.
'Probably,' Oswin agreed.
Kael ran a systematic self-diagnostic, logged the failure mode with full data — two simultaneous channels interfered destructively when not first established sequentially — and added to the Queue: OVERCLOCK — SEQUENCING REQUIREMENT. Cardiac first. Stabilize. Then next channel. Always.
His System had, by day forty, accumulated enough entries under the Overclock project that the architecture of the technique was visible from the outside. The process queue showed him the critical path: cardiac, then motor, then proprioception, then pain modulation, then sensory acuity. Each building on the last. Each requiring its own calibration period before the next could begin.
Day sixty: he ran all five partial components sequentially for the first time. Eleven minutes of total duration before mana reserves hit the safety threshold.
His System noted: eleven minutes is not enough for extended field use. Capacity expansion is the critical path dependency for everything else.
He noted back, in the way he sometimes did when a Queue item was simultaneously obvious and inconvenient: I know. Working on it.