Chapter 2: A Mind Awakened

The world was blurry.

Diffuse colors, indistinct shapes, muffled sounds. Erikan — for that was the name given to him here — opened his eyes to a universe he did not recognize. He was merely an infant, unable to hold up his head or control his hands, but his mind… his mind was fully there. Lucid. Sharp. Too sharp.

And that was the most unsettling part.

He spent his days lying in a polished wooden cradle, wrapped in blankets embroidered with floral patterns. Morning light filtered through beige curtains, and the sounds outside were calm: a few birds, the wind, sometimes a step or muffled laughter.

His mother, Stella, was a radiant figure in this blurred world. She often came, held him gently, whispered sweet words he only half-understood, fed him with divine patience.

And the most troubling thing… was when she cleaned him.

He wanted to vanish from shame. He, the former physicist, a Cartesian and modest man, found himself naked, helpless, sometimes covered in his own excrement. Stella cleaned him with a soft smile, focused and methodical, as if all this was normal. And it was… for a baby.

But for Éric, it was a torment of embarrassment. He would squeeze his eyes shut, as if that could erase the scene.

Then, little by little… he adapted.

His father — Gaël — was not a man of many words.

Tall, bearded, often smudged with soot, he spent his days in the back workshop hammering metal. The sound of the hammer became a daily melody. A steady rhythm, almost soothing.

Gaël was not an exceptional blacksmith. He was rather clumsy. He grumbled often. Banged himself. Cursed when a blade bent at the wrong moment. But he never raised his voice at home. Never failed in his duty. And most of all, he was there. Present. Steady. With calloused hands and crooked smiles.

He didn't say much, but when he looked at his son, his eyes sparkled with quiet pride. He held Erikan with almost comical tenderness, as if holding a fragile treasure he was afraid to break.

Éric, in his broken adult mind, felt that warmth.

One day, while he sat near the fire, Stella summoned a stream of water to clean a small scrape he had from falling. It was nothing, a mere scratch. But when the water emerged from her hands in a soft blue glow…

…the memory returned.

Flames.

A violin.

Screams.

Shadows dancing under a crimson light. A familiar silhouette — a man, wielding a flaming sword, his body covered in wounds, standing alone against dozens of enemies. A woman with long hair, holding a shattered violin, singing something inaudible as the world collapsed.

But a gentle hand touched his head.

— It's okay, Erikan, Stella whispered, thinking he was simply scared.

And in that voice… there was love.

A love he didn't understand. A love he had never known. In his former life, he had none of that. He had grown up in an orphanage after losing his parents. He had grown up alone, buried in books and equations.

Today, he was no longer alone.

And it was this warmth, this family, that disarmed him.

He didn't understand why these two adults — Stella and Gaël — loved him unconditionally. He didn't know what he had done to deserve it. But he accepted it. Every smile. Every caress. Every story told by the fire. It was new. It was precious.

It was a form of rebirth.

Time flowed slowly in his little room. Sometimes, he would lie awake for hours, staring at the wood grain of the ceiling, listening to distant sounds. He marveled at the softness of the sheet against his skin, the natural scent of clean linen, the new sounds his hearing was slowly grasping.

And one day… he saw something impossible.

His mother came with an empty basin. She waved her hand over it, whispered a word… and water appeared. Not poured. Not fetched. Appeared. Directly into the basin. As if by magic.

His heart stopped.

He froze, eyes wide. He knew science. Real science. Conservation laws. Fluid dynamics. But none of that explained what he had just seen.

It was impossible.

And yet… it happened.

That day, something shifted. He decided he would understand this world. Understand everything.

In the days that followed, he watched. Every time Stella used water, he paid close attention. He wanted to know. To pierce the mystery.

And one morning, as he watched her work, he felt… something.

A shiver. Subtle. Barely there. Like a breeze inside him. A vibration, nearly imperceptible.

He didn't know what it was. But he knew it was real.

He tried to reach out, clumsily, as if to grasp those invisible particles. Of course, nothing happened. He was only a baby. But he tried again. And again. For weeks. Then months.

Stella thought it was just reflexive movement. But in truth, he was trying to absorb mana.

He failed. Repeatedly.

But he never gave up.

And so Erikan spent the first years of his life: lying down, then sitting, then crawling… always observing the world with a burning fascination. He could not yet speak. Nor run. Nor hold an object for more than a few seconds. But he had a purpose. A red thread in this new world.

To understand. To decode. To awaken.

It was only around his eighth year… that things finally began to change.

Years passed, and the child grew.

The boy with white hair and deep blue eyes was no longer a crying baby in the hands of fate. At eight, he was sharp, quiet, and intensely observant.

Those who saw him play in the garden, sitting for hours staring at the sky or stacking stones in strange formations, thought he was a dreamy child. What they didn't know was that he wasn't dreaming. He was thinking. Calculating. Remembering.

In his past life, Éric had been an orphan. No family, no warmth. Only cold institutions and manuals. He had never been the luckiest, nor the smartest. He admitted that. But he had always been the most rigorous. The most passionate. The most obsessed.

"Imagination," Einstein said, "is more important than knowledge."

That phrase had become his motto, his sacred flame. In his old world, he used it to survive. In this one, it would become his weapon.

This world, he discovered each day with the fascination of a scientist before an unmodeled phenomenon. Everything was strange, and yet oddly logical. Mana was everywhere: in the air, the water, the plants, the living beings. An energy field no one here seemed eager to understand. They accepted it. Felt it. Sometimes channeled it. But Éric wanted to analyze it.

So he began observing the world methodically. Each night, he wrote what he had seen in a notebook hidden beneath his bed: the light variations of crystals, the resonance of certain woods, the behavior of water around enchanted stones.

But he quickly realized the world was governed not just by nature or magic. There was a system. A structure. A hierarchy.

Society was divided:

The superhumans or Awakened — those who absorbed mana through their Dantian, a core located in the abdomen. They used it to enhance their bodies, reflexes, and weapons. Their progression followed similar ranks:

Awakened (1 to 5 stars)

Master (1 to 5 stars)

Grand Master (1 to 5 stars)

Lord

Emperor

The ordinary beings — about 90% of the population — with such low elemental affinity that they could only use it for minor tasks.

But there was more. The society included artisans, alchemists, beast tamers, and rune scribes. Each used mana in their own discipline. Some forged living weapons. Others carved ancestral spells into stone.

And then there were the races.

Éric discovered he was not alone in having a special essence. There were humans, of course. But also:

Elves, graceful, masters of life magic and elemental song.

Dwarves, born forgers, capable of infusing mana into metal bare-handed.

Drakans, half-dragons with scaly skin and blazing breath.

Aetherins, beings tied to wind and illusion.

And even beastfolk, born from ancient crossings, with raw strength and heightened instincts.

The world was vast. The powers immense. And he, Éric, was still a child. But a child with ancient memory. A flame unbroken.

So he decided he would not be content to merely learn.

He would understand. And one day, he would master.

And in his notebook that night, he wrote a single sentence:

"Mana is a living equation."