Five years passed quietly. The year was January 1999
Sougen managed to pass down the magic crest, along with all the knowledge he knew to his grandson.
"Kakine Teitoku," Sougen said, his voice steady and unadorned. "What I am about to give you is not power in the way children imagine it. This crest is not a weapon, nor is it a curse. It is a record."
He placed a hand over the old sigil carved into the floor, prana flowing with practiced restraint.
"It contains the accumulated magecraft of this family. Techniques refined, mistakes preserved, theories abandoned and rediscovered. When you accept it, you accept all of that weight. Your body will change to accommodate it. Your circuits will be rewritten. For a time, you will hurt."
Sougen's gaze hardened slightly.
"You will not be injured. You will not die. But you will ache in ways that cannot be explained to anyone who lacks circuits. It's a short amount of time, but you'll feel better in no time."
"If you wish to refuse, now is the last moment you may do so without consequence."
I met his eyes without flinching. "Do it." This would help him
Sougen nodded once.
The transfer was brief.
The moment the crest entered him, I felt something tear and settle at the same time. Heat flooded his chest, then his spine, then outward through every limb as foreign pathways carved themselves into his body. It was not sharp pain, but a deep, grinding ache, like his bones and nerves were being rearranged by an unseen hand.
The crest hurt like hell, and made my body feel like absolute shit. Every morning my body felt wrong. My limbs were heavy, my joints stiff, my muscles sore no matter how much I rested. Prana circulated unevenly at first, pooling where it shouldn't, dragging against circuits that hadn't fully adapted yet. Sometimes my hands trembled when I tried to focus.
It took a few days to get myself together again. My magic circuits integrated with my crest perfectly and I felt brand new. But the pain felt horrible, and I'd rather not go through all that bullshit again.
But you wanna know something funny?
The moment the crest fully finished integrating with my body, I watched my grandfather walk out with packed bags.
"…"
He told me everything was my responsibility now. That I didn't have to worry about anything anymore. What he meant was that he didn't. He'd handed me decades of unfinished research, political obligations, Association bullshit, and a magic crest heavy enough to rewrite my body, then walked away like he'd just finished a chore. He didn't abandon me. He delegated himself out of relevance. He basically dumped all his trash onto me and called it inheritance.
But at least I get to be alone, the only people that are in the house with me are the servants. And being alone comes with more dangerous experiments. The servants don't come into my workshop and since my grandfather isn't here I get to do fuck shit all I want.
With the house quiet, I decided to try something irresponsible, stupid and pure idiotic. Actually, no idiocy isn't even the right word. It's full blown crazy and destined to fail. He was attempting to draft a new set of physical laws for a one-meter sphere of existence and then sever it from the planet's Texture. He was trying to use magecraft to build a system, a self-contained reality with its own foundational rules, independent of Gaia's rejection of the unnatural.
Experiment 1, Creating a Bounded Field That Ignores The Laws Of Physics And Separating It From The World
The Foundation, instead of anchoring the field to the land (a fatal concession to the World's rules), he would anchor it to a conceptual "point zero" defined by his own Magic Crest, using his prana as both fuel and foundational law.
The Lattice was a three-layered spherical matrix, each layer inscribed with a different purpose. The innermost layer, carved into a suspended orb of purified quartz, would hold the "New Law", a single, simple principle: "Within this boundary, Kakine Teitoku's will defines material properties." The middle layer, drawn in mercury and powdered diamond dust on the floor, was a Separation Field, designed to isolate the interior from the external laws of physics. The outer layer, a ring of forged iron and his own blood etched into the stone, was a Prana Sink and Stabilizer, meant to absorb the catastrophic backlash of the World's attempt to correct the anomaly.
The Catalyst was a fragment of a meteorite, chosen for its "alien" origin, material that had already undergone a journey disconnected from Earth's natural order. It was something his grandfather held in the workshop, but it was never used so I figured I'd make good use of it now.
It was, in Thaumaturgical terms, an act of profound arrogance. He was attempting to establish a Marble Phantasm-like effect through brute-force ritual, and a Reality Marble-like isolation without the inherent World Egg of a soul to sustain it.
It sounds like I'm crazy, but I'm taking a lot of inspiration from Academy City and personal realities for this experiment. The foundational theory of Academy City's espers are Personal Realities. Through the Power Curriculum Program, a student's brain is rewired to force their subconscious perception of reality to overwrite the existing physical laws in a localized area. This isn't belief; it's a calculated, psychological imposition backed by complex mathematical models.
The brain generates an AIM diffusion field, a passive emission of their Personal Reality, that forcefully asserts their own internal rules onto the environment. Think of it as running a personal simulation that has higher authority than the base reality within a limited scope.
What I'm working with now is supposed to be a direct translation, from what I learned from academy city to here. I don't know all the in's and outs of said system, but I can make inferences along the way from what I learned from school and other scientists.
The bounded field is supposed to work as an artificial AIM Diffusion field. The New Law is meant to act as a magecraft interpretation of his Personal Reality's core command. In other words, I'm trying to write my own rule into the fabric of a space.
Success would have created a pocket dimension where he could, without his original brain's calculation power, manifest even a speck of true Dark Matter. This space would ignore Gaia's laws because its own law, Kakine's law, would have primacy. It would be a Thaumaturgical Reality Marble, but one based on scientific solipsism rather than a soul's inner world.
With all that said, I began chanting the incantation.
"Disconnect. Define. Dictate. This point is not of your world. Its ground is my will. Its sky is my logic. I reject the compaction of reality. I refuse the alignment of phenomena. Here, matter obeys a single decree: the shape I give is the shape it takes."
The quartz orb at the center pulsed with a sickly, ultraviolet light, the same aberrant hue his presence had inflicted on his grandfather's diagnostic ritual years before. For a glorious, terrifying second, it worked.
Inside the one-meter sphere, the air stilled. The hum of the house, the pull of gravity, the very concept of color seemed to thin and bend. Kakine raised a hand within the sphere. He willed the air to solidify into a geometric lattice of light. It began to obey, crystalline shapes forming from nothingness.
I look back on this experiment and realize how stupid I was. It turns out that the Texture of the Human Order, does not tolerate independent, self-declared realities sprouting within it. Such things are foreign bodies, cancers to be expelled or crushed.
First, the Separation Field shattered. The complex magical symbols dissolved into inert sludge and grey dust as the concept of "separation" was fundamentally rejected by the unified laws of reality. This transferred the full force of the World's Correction directly onto the Prana Sink. The ring flared white-hot, then imploded. It disintegrated into fine, oxidized powder. The blood inscriptions evaporated. The magical energy they were meant to absorb, a force akin to localized planetary pressure, had nowhere to go but inwards.
The quartz orb, now the sole focus of this corrective force, emitted a sound like a universe screaming in a vacuum. It underwent conceptual collapse. The "New Law" inscribed upon it was forcibly overwritten by the planet's immutable physics. The orb compressed into a pinpoint of impossible density before vanishing, taking the nascent pocket reality with it.
The final result was a physical rebound. The released energy, having destroyed every layer of containment, blasted outward. Kakine was flung across the room like a ragdoll. He slammed into the far stone wall, the impact driving the air from his lungs. But the physical blow was nothing compared to the magical backlash.
His circuits, wide open and channeling immense power at the moment of collapse, were seared. It felt like every nerve had been dipped in acid and then flash-frozen. A coppery taste of blood filled his mouth.
Fuck… I mean it could've gone worse. I'm still alive, and nothing inside the workshop broke. Actually I should probably find a way to make sure none of my grandfather's materials get destroyed in the next one. I'll also be forced to clean all this up.
After a few hours I managed to get the place all tidied up, the whole thing took rather painfully long to complete, but at least it was finished now. I went upstairs to get this week's newspaper before going to my room.
I grabbed the newspaper off the hall table, the pages still cold from the morning air, and headed back to my room. I skimmed past the usual garbage first, like politics and the weather so I could get to the juicy stuff. But while I was skipping, one of the headlines caught my eye.
Fujou Building Demolished Following Structural Concerns
The article was very short, and most of the time it wouldn't have even caught my eye. But the issue is that I know people at school that live in the building. People who I've known for a while stopped coming to school last year out of nowhere. It was strange because out of nowhere multiple children from my school stopped coming all at the same time. Coincidence? I think not bitch.
The Fujou Building, an old high-rise scheduled for renovation, had been taken down after inspections revealed "irreparable internal damage" inconsistent with its original design. No casualties reported. No criminal investigation. The demolition was described as a preventative measure following a series of unexplained incidents over the past year.
Huh?
I folded the paper and grabbed a pen from my desk, circling the building's name hard enough to almost tear through the page. Fujou Building. Late last year. Structural concerns my ass.
I stood up and crossed the room to the wall. Where other parts of different newspapers were taped there.
It wasn't neat by any means, more of a cluster of different newspapers strung together. Different newspaper clippings taped over each other, dates scribbled in margins, arrows drawn and redrawn when they stopped making sense. Stuff I'd half-forgotten until I saw it again.
I taped the Fujou article onto an empty space and stared at what was already there.
July.
A local article about people found dead in alleys and parking structures, bodies described as "unnaturally contorted," bones broken in ways doctors couldn't explain.
I snorted.
Yeah. Sure.
August.
Another clipping, this one uglier.
Multiple patients at the same hospital committing suicide over the span of a few days. They all died the same way as well, they jumped off the exact same building. Every article danced around the same phrases.
"No evidence of external influence."
"Mental health complications."
"An unfortunate coincidence."
All in the same building. I'd circled the hospital's name so many times the ink had bled through the paper.
I knew magecraft of some sort was involved, I just couldn't prove it. I mean these many incidents happening all during summer vacation? This city was filled with mysteries, and every year more bullshit pops out of the woodworks.