Chapter 58 – The Yggdrasil Jarl (Ethan)
The lift rattled once as it passed the last stone marker and slid into the lab level.
I'd seen this floor a hundred times by now.
I still felt like I'd been away from it for years.
The doors scraped open. Warm, bright air washed in—mana hum, faint chemical tang, the metallic smell of tools. Compared to the throne room's careful theatre, the lab was pure, honest chaos.
Benches everywhere.
Half-finished devices. Glass tubes. Copper coils. Runes burned into stone in neat, obsessive arrays and others added later in frantic, "I wonder what this button does" scribbles.
Home, if I'd been born in the wrong genre.
Julia stepped out first, automatically scanning the room—shelves, exits, people. Her eyes did a quick tally: present, active, no immediate disaster.
Mine went somewhere else.
"Computers," I thought.
The word felt wrong in my mouth here.
I'd tried explaining them to Ethan once. Not even the full thing—just the idea. A machine that ate numbers and spat out answers. Layers: logic gates, transistors, switching, binary. He'd listened, eyes shining. Understood the concept.
Understanding and building were not the same.
No silicon. No industrial manufacturing. No integrated circuits. No clean rooms. No standardised anything except what we forced into existence with sheer stubbornness and stolen knowledge.
We could imitate.
Fake.
Cheat with mana.
But If I pushed too hard, too fast, I'd end up with a fragile, half-baked thing even I couldn't trust. Worse, I'd turn Ethan from "brilliant, functional madman" into "unstable thaumaturge with a grudge against reality."
So: start small.
Circuits he could touch. Logic he could see.
Filters before CPUs.
"Hmm," I murmured under my breath, already mentally drawing airflow diagrams on the backs of my thoughts. "If we route intake there and add a layering of fine mesh plus a mana-stirring rune, we can get rid of particu—"
"AHHHHHHHHH—!"
The scream hit me from the left, bounced off glass, and came back as a chorus.
Something green and fragile launched itself across the room.
"My savior–teacher–master–god—oh-oh-oh-oh-oh," Ethan shrieked, sprinting in my direction at a speed his body had no right to manage. "You're here, you're real, you're walking, walking, WALKING inside my lab-lab-laboratory sanctuary of spark and smoke and *NO ONE TOLD ME*—"
He tried to stop.
His feet disagreed.
He pinwheeled, skidded sideways, lost his balance, and went full-body into the nearest wall.
"Exciting!" he howled, forehead connecting with stone with a loud *thunk*. "Exhilarating! Ecstatic–electrical–eclectic–Eryndical! Ow. Ow. Ow." He bounced back, clutching his head, grinning like an idiot. "You're back!"
Julia exhaled slowly through her nose.
She did not say anything.
But her expression said: *this is why we soundproofed this floor*.
Ethan was the same age as us, technically. Thirteen, because his birthday came earlier in the year. His body hadn't quite caught up with the idea of "growing human" though—thin wrists, narrow shoulders, bones that looked like the world had tried to snap them once and failed halfway through.
Green hair, perpetually messy, like he'd stuck his head into a mana conduit and left it there. Blue eyes, clear and bright as fresh river water and twice as dangerous because the current underneath them didn't always go in predictable directions. His glasses were self-made—thin metal frames, rune-etched lenses, three different adjustment mechanisms because "sometimes numbers want to be closer."
He wore the same Yggdrasil uniform as everyone else: dark tunic, trousers, arm-brace. On him, it somehow managed to look like he'd put on a lab coat and then forgotten the coat part.
"Good morning, Ethan," I said.
"Yes," he agreed breathlessly. "Morning, noon, night, all of them, all at once, I haven't slept in—" he paused, blinked, counted on his fingers, gave up, "—a while. But I *would* sleep if my Lord told me to. Do you want me to sleep? Should I sleep? If I sleep now I might dream equations and then I'd have to wake up to write them down and that's terribly inefficient, but if it's an order, I'll rearrange my inefficiencies—"
"Breathe," I said.
He sucked in air so hard his glasses fogged.
Julia took a half-step further behind me, as if using me as a shield against secondhand enthusiasm.
[ System ]
[ Subject: Ethan ]
[ Mental State: Stable (For Him) ]
[ Risk Profile: Genius–Hazard Overlap ]
[ Advisory: Do Not Give Too Many Ideas at Once ]
"Ethan," I said, "remember what we talked about."
He fidgeted in place.
"Full sentences," he recited. "Less echo, more meaning, fewer—" he waved his hands, "—sound fireworks."
"Close enough," I said. "How's the ventilation?"
His entire body *lit up*.
"Ahhh, you saw it," he gasped. "You *felt* it, right? The air is less, less, less… thick, gummy, it doesn't cling to your lungs like sad porridge anymore! We routed the exhaust away from the lift shaft so it wouldn't cook people, and then Edward tried to put a fan in the wrong place, *again*, and then we realised we needed to stop dust from colonising everything, so we just, you know, blew it out, but then it came back like an untrained dog—"
"Filter," I cut in.
He stopped mid-gesture.
"Filter," he repeated.
"Yes," I said. "We're not just moving dirty air around. We're cleaning it. Dust, particles, tiny things you can't see. Remember?"
He stared at me for one, two, three seconds.
Then his eyes widened.
"Oh!" he said. "Oh-oh-oh. The tiny invaders. The invisible army. The *particles*." He made a grabby motion at the air. "I tried to imagine them, but my brain kept turning them into angry beans. It's not precise enough."
"That's why we don't imagine," I said. "We look."
I held out a hand.
"Do you still have the prototype?" I asked. "The lens stack we were working on. The thing that was sort of a telescope pointed at the wrong target."
Ethan spun in place.
Literally.
Half-turn, quarter-turn, full-turn, pointing at shelves as he went. "Yes, yes, yes—no, that's *acid*—no, that's the *other* acid—aha!"
He darted to a side bench, rooted through a pile of cloth and tools, and came up with a carefully wrapped cylinder.
He carried it to us in both hands with the solemn reverence of an acolyte bringing out a relic.
Julia leaned forward, curiosity softening her usual sharp focus.
The "microscope" was… primitive.
Brass cylinder. Crude focusing mechanism. Two lenses we'd managed to shape and polish well enough not to warp the world too much. A stage with clips to hold whatever we were abusing.
In my last life, it would've been an antique.
Here, it was a miracle.
Ethan set it down, almost vibrating.
"Show me," he said. "Show us, show *her*, show *me*, I want to see the dust beans be wrong."
I took a moment to appreciate that sentence.
Then I plucked a hair from my head—Ethan made a faint, horrified noise at the self-harm—and laid it on the stage.
"First," I said, "we show scale."
I adjusted the focus, the way we'd practised, until the view sharpened. The hair thickened, turned from "line" to "rope" in the glass.
"Julia," I said. "Come here."
She stepped closer, a small frown of concentration between her brows.
"Look," I said, stepping aside so she could lean down.
She bent, pressed her eye to the lens.
For a second she was all cool analysis.
Then her whole face… changed.
"That's—" she breathed. "That's just one hair?"
"Yes," I said.
She pulled back, eyes wider.
"It looks like a thread," she said. "Like the rope we use for the lower shaft. But that's on your head."
"Exactly," I said. "Your body is made of smaller things than your eyes can see. Layers. Structures. So is the air. So is dust."
Julia straightened slowly, then did something she almost never did.
She clapped.
Soft little claps, hands pressed together like she was trying not to disturb something sacred. Her eyes shone in a way that had nothing to do with fanaticism and everything to do with genuine awe.
"As expected of my Lord," she murmured. "You see worlds inside of pieces."
I did not deserve that sentence.
Ethan shoved her gently aside.
"My turn, my turn, my turn," he chanted, already leaning in.
I adjusted the focus again, more out of habit than need.
He pressed his eye to the lens.
Silence.
Which, for Ethan, was as alarming as any explosion.
"Ethan?" I asked.
He didn't answer.
His shoulders rose and fell with a shallow, fast breathing pattern—over-excited, not panicked. One hand shot out blindly, patting the bench until it found a scrap of paper and a piece of charcoal. He started sketching what he saw without looking away.
"Lines," he muttered. "Curves. Thickness. This is… oh, this is good. This is very good. I thought my Lord was exaggerating when you said we were blind, but we are blind, we are so blind, we're bats without echo, we're… I don't know what we are, but it's embarrassing."
"Welcome to scale," I said.
He tore his gaze away, eyes bright.
"Show me dust," he demanded.
I obliged.
A bit of scrap cloth, a tap, a small cloud of invisible armies settled onto the slide. Ethan watched, utterly transfixed, as tiny specks that had never known they were annoying came into towering, gritty detail under the lens.
Particles.
Not beans.
He laughed.
It wasn't his broken laugh—the one that came from the parts of his mind that still lived in a dark cell.
It was bright. Sharp. Almost painful.
"Ah," he said. "Ahahaha. It's *there*. It's all there. We can *see* it. You're giving me a new layer to go mad about."
Julia glanced at me, amused despite herself.
"You've made him worse," she said.
"I've made him better," I said. "Worse later."
Memory pricked.
A cell. A boy chained to a wall, more bone than flesh, eyes sunk deep into bruised sockets. Black veins tracing up his arms like rot. The symbol of the Order of the Black Hand burned into his skin in three places—shoulder, chest, inside of the left thigh.
A cult that believed knowledge was a weapon you applied directly to the soul. That you could carve people open and etch truths on their hearts.
They'd treated Ethan like a test animal. Less than that, really. You didn't torture livestock for fun.
When Julia and I had cut him down, it had been… messy.
Corruption had eaten into his flesh in patches, turning skin and muscle into something that wanted to be fungus and crystal at the same time. Healing that had taken days of focused work—Julia's newly blossoming control over Awaken channels, my mana forcing his circuits to remember what "human" looked like.
His mind had never fully snapped back to whatever "normal" was.
But his intelligence…
If he'd been a thaumaturge, an Abyss cultist with this level of broken brilliance, the world would have a new nightmare.
He was ours instead.
Small mercy.
"Thank Vastriel you're on my side," I said under my breath.
"Always," Ethan said, mishearing the context and taking it as a personal vow.
He straightened, eyes still shining.
"So," he said, words spilling again now that the dam had broken. "Filter. We trap the tiny junk-mites in layers of cloth and mesh, we push air through, we use a rune to stir it so it doesn't sulk in corners, and then we don't breathe other people's failures."
"More or less," I said. "You'll work out better designs once you've stared at enough dust."
He nodded fervently.
"I will build a dust prison so sophisticated they write ballads about it," he declared. "Dust will fear my name. It will whisper to its children—"
"Ethan," Julia cut in gently. "Focus."
He blinked.
"Right. Right. Focus." He looked at me again, calmer. "Is that all for today? Or do you have another world-shattering idea you want to drop on my tender, overcooked brain?"
"…Actually," I said.
His back straightened.
Ears, metaphorically, shot up.
"My Lord?" he asked, already on the edge of vibrating again.
"A weapon," I said. "That can kill from far away. Without needing a perfect arc. No mana. No spell. Just force."
He stared at me.
"You just described rocks," he said cautiously. "Thrown very hard."
"More controlled than that," I said. "Imagine… an enclosed tube. A metal barrel. A small piece of metal—call it a pellet—inside. You put something that expands very fast behind it. The expansion pushes the pellet forward, down the barrel, at high speed, in a straight line. The pellet hits something. The something dies."
He did not blink.
"A… tube," he said slowly. "With exploding pressure. To throw… metal. Fast. Very fast. Very, very fast. Faster than any arrow, faster than any sling stone, so fast the air doesn't even have time to argue."
"Yes," I said. "You control the direction with the tube. You control the force with how much… expansion you trigger. You can use powder. Or compressed mana. Or a combination. I'm not going to tell you how to make the powder yet."
"Because you like your underground not on fire," Melody commented in my ear.
Because I liked my underground not on fire.
Ethan's mouth worked silently for a second.
"…A weapon that shouts," he said at last. "Not a bow. Not a crossbow. Not a wand. A *boom-stick*. A… gun." He tasted the word, rolled it around.
"Mmh," I said. "Name's not important yet. Start with a single-shot prototype. Simple. No magazine. No fancy mechanisms. Just barrel, chamber, trigger. Precision and reliability over power. If you need a word from me to focus: think 'mechanical spear you can hide behind a wall.'"
Julia shot me a look that said: *and you tell me I am the cultist*.
"Mechanical spear…" Ethan murmured. "…that spits lightning-fast metal… that you can enchant later… that anyone can use…"
His eyes met mine again.
There was something scary there now.
"A weapon that lets a weak man kill a strong one," he said quietly. "Without training. Without aura. Without… fairness."
"Yes," I said.
He considered that.
Then he smiled.
Not wide and feral, like usual.
Small. Sharp. A scientist's smile when the experiment just became morally complicated.
"I will build it," he said. "Slowly. Behind locks. With safety runes. We will test it in the deepest pit of the training hall. And if it is too good, I will break my own hands before I let anyone steal it."
That was… more responsible than I'd expected.
"Good," I said. "Start with understanding pressure. And metal fatigue. And *don't* point anything at your own face."
"Or anyone else's?" he asked.
"Anyone else's," I confirmed.
He nodded, satisfied.
Then, because he was Ethan, he suddenly bowed.
Not the stiff, trained bow of a noble.
A messy, spine-too-flexible fold, hands at his sides, head dipped low.
"Thank you," he said.
"For the idea?" I said.
"For everything," he said. "For the lab. For the air that doesn't try to kill us. For the dust I can see now. For not leaving me in that cell. For not… throwing me away when I started speaking in… this." He gestured at himself, at his words, at the thin line between genius and broken.
His voice wobbled once.
He steadied it.
"I am very happy," he said, more formally, borrowing Julia's cadence. "To be insane in your direction, my Lord."
And then he straightened and spun away, already muttering calculations under his breath, heading for a corner of the lab where he could start bullying reality into new shapes.
I watched him go.
Relief sat heavy in my chest.
He was still here.
Still *Ethan*.
Not a cult's weapon. Not an Outer's anchor. Just a boy whose mind had cracked in a way that made him good at the things I needed.
That was its own kind of cruelty.
But it was better than the alternative.
"Your collection of emotionally damaged geniuses is growing," Melody said, drifting lazily through a rack of tools. "At some point, someone is going to write a book about this place and it's going to sound like a mental hospital with better branding."
"They'll call it a school," I thought back.
"Worse," she said.
Julia cleared her throat softly beside me.
"Shall we go, my Lord?" she asked. "Zoe will be expecting you."
"Right," I said.
I turned toward the door opposite the lift, the one with the small, simple plaque next to it.
[ SHADOW ]
The Shadow room sat on the same floor as the lab, tucked just beside the lift shaft, doors facing each other like two sides of a coin.
One made things.
The other moved them.
Julia fell in step half a pace behind and to my right, as usual.
If I hadn't been paying attention, I might have missed the slight tightening at the corners of her mouth.
The quick little sideways glance she shot at the lab as we left.
The almost-inaudible mutter that slipped out under her breath when she thought I wasn't listening.
"…Pay attention to me too," she whispered.
I pretended I hadn't heard.
It didn't make the words sit any lighter.
I raised my hand and knocked on the Shadow door.
Time to see Zoe.