The manor was quiet when Ethan slipped out of the dining hall.
Kael and Temari had gone their way, still laughing about the lecture they had received. His parents had already retreated to the study. He gave them all a quick goodbye and climbed the long staircase back to his room.
The door shut behind him with a soft click.
At last, silence.
"Alright," he muttered, sitting on the edge of his bed. "Show me the status"
A faint glow appeared in the air as Aimi projected his current status.
Designation: Ethan Vale
Nickname: deleted!
Origin: City- Valeria Country-Solaris Planet- unknown
Classification: knight initiate
Affiliation: Young Master of the Vale family
Current Status: ACTIVE - System Unlocked: 17%
Strength: 84/100 (adult)
Agility: 92/100 (adult)
Constitution: 78/100 (adult)
Perception: 69/100 (adult)
Intelligence: 76/100 (adult)
Mana:No available matric available to quantify (very low)
Luck:Luck variable not available in data base
Cortical Strain: 28% (MEDIUM)
[SYSTEM TASKS]
Mission 14: Practice Vale sword-technique
Timeline: None
Reward: System unlocks knowledge of advanced programming
Penalty for failure: none
"Eighty-four, ninety-two, seventy-eight…" He nodded slowly. "I'm basically two-thirds of an adult already."
"Technically above average for a knight-cadet trainee," Aimi replied. "But still far from a ranked fighter."
"Doesn't matter," Ethan sighed. "None of this solves the real problem."
And there it was again, the wall he kept hitting. For all the numbers and all the training, he was still trapped by the limits of this world.
"What's the point of having advance programming knowledge when this world does not even have vacuum bulbs"
There were no precise tools. No vacuum pumps. Anything more complex than a crossbow took weeks of work, and even then the accuracy was terrible.
He could design circuits, at least on paper. But the copper here was too impure for anything delicate, and if he keeps on using gold he might get kicked out of the house. There were no good insulators. And if he mentioned silicon transistors, people thought he was talking about gemstones.
And then there was magic.
His eyes moved to the rune plate on his desk, or rather, the charred remains of one. His last attempt to inscribe an energy-channeling design had ended with a small mana explosion that burned half the room and destroyed a week's worth of work.
"I still don't know why that happened, what am I missing here?" he muttered.
"Resonance instability," Aimi suggested. "Mana density exceeded containment capacity."
"Which means nothing," Ethan said flatly.
"Containment of what? Field movement? Particle behavior? No one even explains what mana actually is. If I concentrate hard I can see those small colorful particles but even with all the calculations I have not found a way to interact with them safely, good thing mother had water elemental attribute otherwise I would have killed her"
He pushed himself to his feet and began pacing across the room.
"Everyone just says 'feel it,' or 'imagine the spell,' or 'let it happen.' That's not a proper method. That's wishful thinking. Kael can summon lightning with a gesture, but where do the charged particles come from? What's the energy source? What medium are they passing through? None of it makes sense."
"You're applying twenty-first century physics to a system that does not exist there," Aimi noted.
"And why shouldn't I?" Ethan shot back.
"If this is energy, it should follow the laws of conservation. If it's plasma, it should follow Maxwell's equations. If it's ion movement, there has to be a difference in charge. Yet Kael waves his hand and suddenly there's a massive burst of electricity from nowhere."
He stopped pacing and stared down at his hands. "And everyone accepts it because they feel it. Because they believe in it."
Belief. That was the real obstacle. Magic here wasn't studied or proven, it was trusted. And Ethan Vale, engineer, scientist, and man of structure, did not trust anything without evidence, least of all himself.
Even physical combat followed the same frustrating logic. Aimi could model a sword technique down to the millimeter, but mastery did not come from data. It came from practice, enlightenment from hundreds, even thousands of swings.
And Ethan just can't find what's so beautiful about swinging a stick all day like his mother and Kael do.
"Practice builds neural pathways," Aimi reminded him. "There's no shortcut."
He groaned and rubbed his face. "So I'm stuck. I can't build real technology because the tools are too primitive. I can't experiment with runes without blowing something up. I can't control mana because it apparently runs on belief. And I don't have the patience to swing a sword thousands of times."
He flopped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. Outside, faint arcs of lightning flashed across the night sky, Kael again, no doubt, throwing around electric arcs like it was nothing.
"'Just will it,' they say…" he murmured. "If I could will everything into existence back on Earth, I'd be running a fusion plant by now."
"Adaptation takes time, Host," Aimi offered gently.
"Time is fine," Ethan whispered. "Blind faith isn't. If only Hank and that old man leave us with some after sells service contact, idiots"
Morning sunlight washed over the training yard, warm and soft, carrying with it the scent of dew and steel.
Ethan walked across the grass, still stretching the sleep from his arms. Kael was already there, his cloak thrown off to the side, his shirt clinging to a frame hardened by relentless drills.
Sparks crackled lazily around his fingers as he aimed a practice shot at a wooden dummy.
Crack!
A bolt of lightning burst from his palm, splintering the target's chest clean through.
"Morning," Kael said, without looking back. His tone was conserved, as if speaking to people still required conscious effort. He was never timid, but small talk clearly wasn't his strong suit.
"Morning," Ethan replied, rolling his shoulders. "You've been up for a while."
"Couldn't sleep," Kael said simply, flexing his fingers as the last of the static faded. "Wanted to get a few more rounds in."
"Right. Because the hundreds you've done this week weren't enough." Ethan's smirk earned a sideways glance and a faint huff that might have been a laugh, Kael's equivalent of a chuckle.
"Training done: 0%. host's efficiency: below steam engine," Aimi reported in her usual calm tone. "But your sarcasm output remains unnecessarily high."
Ethan ignored her. He took his stance and began running through the sword forms Aimi had drilled into his muscle memory. Step, pivot, cut. Perfect angles, mathematically precise movements, and yet, they still felt robotic compared to Kael's raw, intuitive flow.
"You think too much,"
Kael said suddenly, watching Ethan's footwork.
"You swing like you're solving one of those equations you keep on talking about in your dreams."
"I am solving an equation,"
Ethan muttered, adjusting his grip. "You don't just swing metal around and call it a day."
Kael shrugged. "Worked for me so far."
That was the difference between them.
Kael did things, instinctively, confidently, without needing an explanation. He could shoot lightning with a gesture, move with perfect rhythm without analyzing each muscle.
Ethan, on the other hand, needed to know how and why before he could even attempt the what.
Before their spar could continue, a familiar voice echoed across the yard.
"Good," Arione's deep, commanding tone carried over the clatter of practice. "Both of you are awake."
Their father walked toward them, tall and broad-shouldered, the kind of man whose presence seemed to bend the space around him.
"I have something better for you two than smacking wood," Arione said. "We're going on a hunt."
Kael's head snapped up. "A hunt?" His voice was calm, but his eyes betrayed the flicker of excitement.
"Yes," Arione said, crossing his arms.
"Scouts reported Rank One magical beasts near the western woods. Nothing too dangerous, wolf-level threats with basic magic: fireballs, wind blades, maybe a stray thunderbolt or two. It'll be good training."
Kael nodded. "Understood."
Ethan, however, was less enthusiastic. "Let me guess. We chase them through mud for three hours while they try to kill us?"
"That's the spirit," Arione said dryly. "Get ready. We leave in thirty."
Kael cracked a small smile, brief, honest, and rare. "It'll be good practice for real missions."
"Yeah, sure," Ethan replied, but something Arione said stuck in his head. Magical beasts.
Not just normal hare they catch in their estate's back garden.
Creatures born steeped in mana, capable of channeling it naturally, even when their intellect was little more than instinct.
And that was the puzzle.
Humans struggled for years to form even a single elemental spell. Most were bound to one affinity. Yet a magical beast, an animal could launch fireballs, spit lightning, and slice through air without understanding any of it.
It wasn't skill. It wasn't training. It was biology.
"Interesting," Ethan murmured, his mind already racing.
"If beasts can manifest elemental magic instinctively, there must be a physiological basis for it. Some organ, maybe… or a mana-processing tissue. Something humans lack."
"Your hypothesis is sound," Aimi said. "Magical anatomy studies are scarce. Dissection could provide key insights."
Ethan's lips curved into a small, dangerous smile. "I can't exactly cut a human open to find out how mana works. But a dead beast…? That's fair game."
Kael was too busy tightening his gauntlets to notice the spark of inspiration in Ethan's eyes. Arione was already giving orders, and servants hurried to prepare gear and mounts.
Ethan barely heard any of it. His thoughts were elsewhere now, not on the hunt, but on what came after it.
If magical beasts were walking blueprints of how mana integrated into living systems, then understanding them might be the key he'd been searching for.
No more blind faith. No more guessing.
Hard data. Biological evidence. Real science.
And for the first time, the idea of a hunt didn't feel like a chore.
It felt like the start of an experiment. There is no PETA here to stop his endeavor anyway, a crooked smile formed in Ethan's face.