The white room was completely filled with small translucent orbs floating in the air.
They gave off a faint rainbow shimmer, drifting lazily in every direction like luminous soap bubbles. Some of them brushed against Leo's skin, producing a warm, fuzzy sensation — like the feeling of being home.
He felt compelled to touch one.
He poked at an orb in front of him, and it floated away from the force of his finger. Now knowing they were solid enough to interact with, he decided to try holding one. He grabbed an orb gently and brought it close to his face.
The orb melted into his hand before he could even study it.
"Okay..." he murmured, staring at his palm.
Leo thought about what he had to do next. He assumed these orbs were some form of magic — raw, unrefined energy suspended in this strange white space. According to the technique the tome had planted in his mind, the first step was gathering that magic. The second was forming a star.
He closed his eyes and tried to recall the exact instructions.
"I have to call out to the orbs and get them to gather around me," he recited slowly. "And then I have to... absorb them?"
The absorption part — that had to be the melting. When the orb touched his skin, it had dissolved into him naturally. So if he could draw more orbs in and let them melt, he'd be absorbing magic.
Simple enough in theory.
But how exactly was he supposed to "call out" to them?
He thought about it for a while, running through different ideas. Since he was dealing with magic, there was no instruction manual beyond what the tome had given him. No teacher. No guide.
Eventually, he decided to just try the most intuitive thing he could think of.
He closed his eyes and visualized the orbs drifting toward him. All of them. Slowly, steadily, like a tide being pulled by the moon.
When he opened his eyes, the orbs were closer.
Noticeably closer. More densely packed around him too, hovering just inches from his body.
A grin crept onto his face.
*It's working.*
He was going in the right direction. He held the visualization firmly in his mind — the image of all those rainbow orbs converging on him — and soon noticed his body warming up. Not uncomfortably. More like stepping into sunlight after a cold morning.
The orbs were being absorbed automatically. One by one, they dissolved into his skin, his arms, his chest. Each one added a tiny pulse of warmth.
Soon, he became aware of the magic inside his body.
It was a strange sensation. Like a warm current flowing through his veins, mingling with his blood. He found he could move it — direct it through his limbs with focused thought.
But he didn't know where to store it.
He recalled the next step from the technique buried in his memory: store the gathered magic in your mind.
"My mind..." he muttered.
He decided to start simple. Direct the power toward his head and see what happened.
The warm current obeyed, flowing upward through his neck and circulating around his brain. Immediately, something shifted. His awareness sharpened. Every sensation became slightly crisper — the feel of the floor beneath him, the ambient hum of the white room, the subtle weight of the magic still trickling into his body.
It heightened his senses. Not by a lot, but enough to be noticeable.
Still, he didn't know what "mind" actually meant in the context of the technique.
The magic was right there, swirling around his brain. But his brain wasn't the same as his mind, was it? One was physical. The other was... something else. Somewhere else.
He had no idea where to find the place the technique was referring to.
Frustration crept in.
He opened his eyes and let go of control over the magic in his body. The warm current settled, diffusing evenly through him like heat fading from a cooling ember.
He was starting to grow tired. The mental effort of manipulating magic for the first time had drained him more than he expected. Since he didn't know what step to take next, he decided to stop meditating.
He'd absorbed the magic power. That was progress. He just didn't know where to store it yet.
*One problem at a time.*
He stopped forcing his mind to think about magic and simply... let go.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in the same white room.
But the magic orbs were all gone.
Every single one of them. The space that had been filled with drifting rainbow light was now empty and still.
Except for one new addition.
A door.
Leo blinked.
On one wall of the room, a door had appeared. It was white — almost the same shade as the wall itself — with a single golden handle. Extremely simple. Almost too simple. It practically merged into the surface around it, as though it had been carved from the same material as the wall.
Pure, solid light.
Leo stared at it.
The mysterious white space had already been puzzling enough. But this? A door appearing out of nowhere after he'd absorbed all the magic?
His curiosity surged.
*Where does it lead?*
He walked toward the door and grabbed the golden handle. It was warm to the touch. He pulled it open and stepped through without hesitation.
When he looked back, the door he'd walked through had vanished.
Gone. Just like that.
But Leo wasn't concerned about what he could see behind him.
He was far more interested in what he couldn't see in front of him.
"Wow."
He stepped forward onto a field of grass.
There was nothing for miles in every direction. Just an endless, flat expanse of grass stretching to the horizon — if there even was a horizon. He knew it was grass. He could feel it beneath his feet, soft and springy. He could sense its presence spreading out around him in all directions.
But he couldn't actually see any of it.
Everything was pitch black.
No light. No color. No visible features at all. And yet, somehow, he knew exactly what was around him. It was as though the knowledge existed in his head independent of his eyes.
But Leo wasn't bothered about something like the grass.
He was looking up.
The sky above him was vast and empty. Completely devoid of stars. No moon, no sun, no light source of any kind. Just an infinite black canvas stretching overhead.
A thought flashed through his mind like lightning.
*What if... this is it?*
He stared up at the empty sky, his heart beginning to beat faster.
What if the sky was what he was supposed to fill with stars? What if this endless dark expanse was the very place the technique described?
What if he was standing inside his own mind?
The realization hit him like cold water.
He still had control over the magic in his body. He could feel it — that warm current, still diffused through his veins. He tried something he hadn't attempted before.
He pushed the magic outward. Outside his body.
It came out immediately.
But instead of the small translucent orbs he'd seen before, the magic emerged as a single cloud of swirling, rainbow-colored light. It hovered above his open palm, roughly the size of a basketball, pulsing gently with energy.
And it was bright.
The cloud lit up the area around him, casting prismatic light across the field. It didn't change his strange ability to sense his surroundings, but it made the place feel more vibrant. More alive. The grass that the light touched was revealed to be green — vivid, rich green — compared to the rest of the field that remained lost in darkness.
Leo stared at the glowing cloud for a long moment.
Then he let go of his control over it.
The cloud drifted upward. Slowly, gently, like a lantern released into the night. It rose higher and higher, shrinking as it went, until it was just a tiny speck against the infinite black sky.
The light it emitted grew so faint that the darkness swallowed it almost entirely. He could barely see it anymore — just the faintest glimmer, like a distant, dying ember.
But he knew it was there. His first bit of magic, floating somewhere in the sky of his mind.
*It's not much,* he thought. *But it's a start.*
He didn't know what to do next, so he decided to go back to the white room. But the moment the thought formed, a problem presented itself.
The door had disappeared when he'd entered.
How was he supposed to get back?
All of a sudden, a door materialized directly in front of him.
Leo flinched and stepped back, heart hammering. The door had appeared out of thin air, identical to the one before — white surface, golden handle, simple and elegant.
He recovered quickly and reached for the handle.
No point in hesitating.
He stepped through and found himself back in the white room. Everything looked the same as before — the same pristine walls, the same ambient glow, the same impossible space.
But the door that led to the dark field was still there, right behind him. It hadn't vanished this time.
Leo turned and looked at it more closely.
There, etched into the white surface in fine golden script, was an engraving he hadn't noticed before. A single word, glowing faintly against the door's surface.
"Leo."