Three months is long enough to either adapt to the strain—or burn out completely. My body chose the first option, though sometimes it felt like it did so out of sheer stubbornness.

  Zeno’s hut now resembled a high-end electronics repair shop more than a home—and I was the central processor on the workbench. Every morning began with a damage assessment. I lay on the straw without opening my eyes and ran an internal systems check.

  “Ribs — intact, mobility preserved. Vessels in left arm — mild burning, probable micro-tear from yesterday’s resonance. Pulse — fifty-eight beats per minute, within acceptable range.”

  [Will to Live] no longer screamed in my head like a siren. It hummed quietly somewhere at the back of my skull. I had learned to switch it into idle mode. It no longer scorched my nerves in seconds; instead, it functioned like diagnostic software, highlighting weak points in real time.

  Zeno had become my primary controller. He barely lectured me anymore, but his presence felt like that of a seasoned safety inspector. Sometimes, when I practiced fine impulse control, he would approach silently and place a hand on my shoulder. In those moments, I felt his calm, dense mana gently dampen my chaotic surges, showing me exactly where I was generating unnecessary friction.

  “Your flow is still too erratic,” he remarked once as I tried to hold a handful of small stones suspended in the air by altering the density of the air beneath them. “You’re wasting thirty percent of your energy fighting your own tremor. Relax. If you overheat steel, it becomes brittle. Right now, you’re an overheated blade.”

  I exhaled, and the stones fell with dry clicks onto the ground.

  “If I relax, I’ll lose control of the gradient.”

  “No,” Zeno shook his head. “You’ll lose fear. And fear is what’s forcing your system to operate at maximum wear.”

  Over those three months, my body had changed. I didn’t grow into a mountain of muscle—an eleven-year-old kid physically couldn’t turn into a bodybuilder. But I became wiry, like a steel cable. My skin hardened; my palms grew calloused from working with bone plates and from constant magical burns. Most importantly—my vessels. They strengthened, widened, as if I had replaced old household wiring with modern high-gauge cables. Now I could channel currents that, on my first day, would have reduced my veins to ash.

  My armor was finished too. The composite of troll hide and wolf bone plates turned out surprisingly light. I configured it to function as a passive exoskeleton. When the skill activated, mana flowing through the plates created a surface-tension effect—any piercing strike would simply slide off, unable to find purchase.

  But not all tests went smoothly. A couple of weeks ago, I found a localized anomaly in the forest—a small mana vortex that twisted the air into a dense spiral. I decided to use it as a training device: attempt to enter resonance with its frequency and cancel it out through interference.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  At first, everything went according to plan. I synchronized with the vortex, feeling its rhythm. But the moment I tried to increase output, the system failed. My biological “fuses” couldn’t handle the load. The vortex jerked—and instead of collapsing, it pulled my mana back into itself.

  It hurled me against the rocks with enough force to darken my vision. I lay on the ground, blood running down my chin, consciousness fading.

  I woke up in the hut. Zeno was pressing a cold compress to my forehead.

  “One more experiment like that and I’ll be burying you under that pine tree,” he grumbled. “You tried to calculate something that needs to be felt. Mana isn’t a mathematical equation, boy. It’s an element.”

  “Math works everywhere,” I rasped, trying to sit up. “I just failed to account for the medium’s resistance coefficient.”

  Zeno only sighed. He didn’t understand that this was the only way I could keep from losing my mind in this world. If I reduced magic to formulas, it stopped being terrifying chaos. It became a tool.

  I set the knife aside and sat in silence, listening as the echo of [Will to Live] gradually subsided within me. It was like a racing engine cooling down: the metal still ticked as it released heat, but the RPMs had dropped.

  My hands no longer trembled, but my fingers felt alien—rough, hardened. In three months, I had almost forgotten what soft skin felt like. My palms were sandpaper now. A necessary price for gripping a vibrating blade and hauling stone.

  “Spacing out again?” Zeno approached from behind, leaning heavily on his staff. “When you freeze like that, it looks like you’ve stopped breathing altogether. Counting all the little gears in your head?”

  “Running defragmentation,” I muttered without turning around.

  He didn’t understand the word, but he grasped the meaning. He sat down on the chopping block I used for splitting wood and knocked his pipe against the heel of his boot.

  “You need proper sleep, kid. Not the kind where you drop into a pit from exhaustion. Real sleep. You’ve got the eyes of a century-old man.”

  I said nothing. He was right. But in this world, “real sleep” was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Every idle hour was a lost opportunity to strengthen my body or refine my gear.

  I stood and walked over to my armor. The troll-hide breastplate looked marginally better after being treated with wax, though it still resembled a slab of boiled rubber. I checked the tension of the inner tendons. The wolf bone plates, arranged like scales, sat tight. I had calculated their placement so that when I bent forward, they overlapped, creating a double layer of protection over my liver and heart.

  “You know, Zeno,” I ran a finger along the sharp edge of a bone plate, “in my… framework, defense isn’t just about material thickness. It’s about how you distribute force.”

  “And how do you distribute it?” the old man narrowed his eyes with interest.

  “Through vectors. The hide absorbs part of the energy through viscosity. The bone redirects the remainder tangentially. The key is never to meet force head-on. Always be at an angle.”

  Zeno snorted, rose, and headed toward the house.

  “Vectors… angles… Just make sure when something pins you down, you don’t cut yourself on those angles. Get inside. It’ll be dark soon. Nothing worth catching in the forest at night—even with your ‘will.’”

  The evening passed in familiar routine. We each ate a bowl of thick lentil stew Zeno cooked in a massive cast-iron pot. The food was bland, but hot—that was all I needed to replenish calories. I felt the warmth spread through my body, easing the remnants of the day’s tension.

  I lay down on my straw, using a rolled jacket as a pillow. The hut smelled of dried herbs, smoke, and old wood. [Will to Live] operated at minimal output, a barely perceptible vibration in my chest, stabilizing my breathing and accelerating muscle recovery.

  “Daily biological wear — eight percent. Regeneration initiated. System stable,” passed through my mind automatically as consciousness began to blur.

  I closed my eyes, and sleep took me instantly—deep, heavy, and utterly silent.