Third pov
The Eriden library had a hidden room.
It wasn't locked. It wasn't cursed. It simply hadn't been entered in decades.
The door was stuck — swollen with time, dust thick like blankets. No one had cared enough to pull it open.
No one but Sylas.
He discovered it while rearranging old shelves for no reason other than restlessness. A sliver of breeze where no wind should've been. A seam in the wall. A subtle rune — dormant, but not broken.
He touched it.
The door clicked open with a groan, revealing a spiral stairwell coated in silence and cobwebs.
---
The air below smelled like ink, copper, and forgotten years.
Shelves bent under the weight of scrolls and cracked tomes. A long worktable stood in the center, covered in odd tools — chisels, casting frames, glass lenses, rune carvers, miniature enchantment circles. Beside it, rusted machinery half-swallowed by vines that had crept through the cracks.
And at the far wall: a symbol etched into the stone.
Two circles. One nested within the other. A line cutting across diagonally.
He recognized it from a single footnote he'd once read:
> The lost mark of the Old Artificers.
Magic Engineering.
Not spellcraft. Not battle arts.
But the logic of magic.
Design. Pattern. Precision.
A craft once used to create enchanted weapons, flying vehicles, auto-writing scrolls, power cores. Now dismissed as outdated — too slow, too "non-combative" to matter in a world obsessed with strength.
And yet, as Sylas stepped into the room, something deep in his blood hummed.
This… made sense.
More than any sword form. More than battle chants.
The gears. The formulas. The structure behind the chaos.
He smiled — small, unsure — but real.
---
The next week vanished in silence and wonder.
He returned every night. Studied the diagrams. Rebuilt cracked enchantment cores. Cleaned rust from delicate runes. Redrew broken arrays by hand, then tested them using scraps of mana.
There were no explosions. No lightning bolts. No showy spells.
But he made:
A sphere that absorbed ambient mana and glowed brighter the closer someone lied.
A teacup that always kept liquid at perfect temperature.
A worn-down glove that could "record" a person's magical signature on touch.
Small things.
Quiet things.
But precise. Intentional. Innovative.
---
One evening, he created something new.
Not from a blueprint.
Not from a scroll.
But from his own mind.
A storage rune — circular, collapsible, portable — woven into a ring.
He tested it by storing a heavy wrench. Then a spellbook. Then his coat.
The ring didn't heat or flicker. No resistance. No failure.
It worked.
He stared at it in his palm, breath caught between joy and disbelief.
> "I… made this."
No tutor.
No praise.
No audience.
Just him.
And it was enough.
---
He began cross-studying alchemy, too — not potion-selling, but reactive alchemy.
Transmuting failed spell residue into useful compounds.
Combining mana dust with metals to make flexible, mana-conductive alloy.
And slowly, a truth settled in his bones:
He wasn't born to stand in a battlefield and roar.
He was meant to understand the system beneath the surface — the hidden architecture of magic. The flaws no one saw. The possibilities no one imagined.
In a world obsessed with "more power," Sylas found purpose in refinement.
---
One day, he took apart an old levitation crystal from a broken chandelier. Everyone said it was junk.
He rewired it using concentric circuit runes and embedded a dual-flow mana core inside.
It floated silently.
Moved left when he blinked twice.
Right when he exhaled.
> "Motion-synced behavior based on intent focus... without vocal command," he whispered, stunned.
"This should be impossible without Tier 4 spatial theory."
He wasn't supposed to be able to do that.
And yet — he had.
Instinctively.
Like something sleeping had finally stirred.
---
That night, he stood beneath the cracked ceiling of his room again.
But this time… he didn't look at the cracks.
He looked at his hands.
Hands no one trusted to hold a blade.
Hands no one saw potential in.
> "Let them keep chasing raw power," he murmured.
> "I'll rebuild the world they blindly break."
End if chapter