Four days of digging.
Four days of barking at servants who believed shovels were decorative.
And somehow, the manor was still standing.
A miracle.
Or a statistical anomaly.
Kang Dojin stood in the courtyard at dawn, arms crossed, watching the morning mist coil above the newly cut trenches. The air smelled of damp clay and mana discharge—a strangely satisfying scent, like wet earth after lightning.
The channels gleamed faintly, lines of dull blue weaving through the soil. Mana currents. They followed his design almost perfectly now, draining water toward the slope without flooding the lower fields.
Almost.
A splash drew his attention. One of the laborers—Bram—had stepped directly into a trench and sunk to the knee.
"Bram."
"Yes, m'lord?"
"You see that blue line?"
"The shiny one?"
"That's mana flow. It's also the reason you currently have one leg and half a shoe."
Bram stared down. "Should I… pull it out?"
Dojin sighed. "No, stay there. Maybe the estate will absorb you and gain intelligence."
The workers exchanged glances. None laughed.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. Too advanced. I need smaller words.
***
By mid-morning, the sun burned away the fog, revealing the estate in all its patchwork misery. Piles of stone waited near the west wall. Buckets of lime and ash sat under a tarp, slowly being contaminated by curious pigeons.
Dojin squatted beside a mixing pit where a thin layer of mana-reinforced mortar shimmered faintly. He stirred it with a wooden rod. The mixture resisted like elastic metal.
"Ratio's off," he muttered. "Quartz density too high."
As he spoke, something strange happened—numbers fluttered at the edge of his thoughts.
Not words. Not imagination.
More like measurements.
Mana Saturation ≈ 1.4 × Water Viscosity Stability Index ↓ to 0.63
He froze.
The values vanished as quickly as they came, like after-images when he blinked too hard.
"Huh."
Gerald, who stood nearby taking notes (mostly spelling his own name wrong), looked up. "My lord?"
"Nothing. The air just… did math at me."
"…Pardon?"
"Never mind."
He adjusted the ratio, adding more lime. The shimmer steadied. The phantom numbers flickered again—higher this time.
Stability Index ↑ to 0.87
He exhaled slowly. Either I'm hallucinating, or physics finally learned manners.
***
When he tested the mixture on a cracked wall section, the mortar adhered instantly, mana threads latching onto the stone like veins seeking a heartbeat. The glow dimmed, leaving a faint silver sheen.
Solid.
He tapped it twice. The echo rang sharp and clean.
"Perfect."
Behind him, Gerald clapped weakly. "Marvelous, my lord! The wall lives again."
"It was never dead," Dojin said. "Just stupid."
"Indeed, my lord."
***
Lunch was a disaster.
The cook served something that might once have been stew, but the spoon stood upright in it unaided. Dojin stared at it long enough to question the estate's food hierarchy.
"Gerald," he said. "Have we considered eating the pigeons instead?"
"My lord?"
"They're at least naturally seasoned by your lime barrels."
Gerald blinked. "That would be… unorthodox."
"So is surviving this menu."
He ate three bites, then surrendered. Engineering required calories; suicide didn't.
***
Afternoon brought rain clouds—dark, heavy, promising trouble. Dojin gathered the servants in the courtyard.
"All right. We're testing the trenches during rainfall. No one runs, no one screams, and absolutely no one blames ghosts this time."
A collective nod. Half sincere.
The first drops fell, pattering softly on the stones. The flow began immediately—thin streams sliding into the channels, merging, spiraling downward in neat patterns.
Then the shimmer appeared again—faint blue grids overlaying the scene, hovering like translucent diagrams only he could see. Angles, percentages, depth markers.
Flow Rate = 0.83 m/sSlope Efficiency = 92 %Leakage Detected → Sector 4B
Sector 4B.
He turned instinctively toward the lower corner of the courtyard, where the newest trench met the garden wall. A small breach bubbled, water spilling over.
No one else seemed to notice the glowing data hovering above it.
He jogged over, grabbed a spade, and adjusted the soil angle. The overflow stopped.
The phantom text flickered once more.
Leakage Resolved. Stability Restored.
Gone.
He stood in the rain, heart pounding. "Okay," he murmured, "either I'm a genius or I've completely lost my mind."
From behind, Gerald called out, "My lord, the trench works splendidly!"
"Of course it does," Dojin said, straightening. "Sanity is overrated anyway."
***
When the rain eased, the courtyard gleamed with perfect runoff. The channels glowed faintly before fading back to dull earth tones.
The servants cheered—not loudly, but with the cautious optimism of people unused to success.
Gerald approached, smiling for the first time. "You've done it, my lord. The estate breathes again."
Dojin looked around—the stable roofs no longer leaked, the fountain gurgled instead of wheezed, and the puddles drained smoothly.
"Not bad for a haunted ruin," he said.
"Shall I record the achievement?" Gerald asked.
"Record this: 'Lord Leonhardt successfully bullied gravity into obedience.' "
"Understood… er… how do you spell gravity?"
Dojin rubbed his temples. "Never mind."
***
That night, the storm returned with fury. Thunder rolled across the hills, shaking the windows. Dojin sat at his desk again, candlelight flickering over fresh sketches—refined blueprints of mana-channel networks, ratios scribbled in the margins.
Every time he wrote, the faint ghost-numbers appeared beside the ink, confirming his calculations before he even double-checked them.
Predicted Flow → Actual Flow Deviation: 0.02 %
"Impossible," he whispered, half in awe, half in denial.
The lines between engineering and sorcery blurred further each hour. He wasn't sure which side he stood on anymore.
Still, the logic soothed him. Equations had never betrayed him; people did.
He closed the notebook, leaned back, and listened to the rain hammering against the glass. The estate groaned softly in response, not with weakness, but like an old creature learning to breathe again.
***
Somewhere deep beneath the manor, mana pulsed through the repaired conduit—a rhythm that now matched his heartbeat.
For the briefest moment, the numbers in his mind aligned into a single phrase, clear and deliberate:
Structural Integrity – 13 % → 15 %
Then darkness reclaimed the thought, leaving him with only the echo of progress.
He smiled.
"Good. Keep counting."