# Chapter 4: Mana in the Veins
The universe was noisy.
Not in the auditory sense—though the wind battering the slate roof of Vane Manor provided a constant, mournful soundtrack—but in the data stream.
Sylas Vane, six months old and currently trapped in a body with the motor skills of a intoxicated slug, lay on his back and listened to the static.
To anyone else, the air in the nursery was empty. It was cold, smelling of old stone and the lavender sachets Martha tucked into the linens to mask the scent of mildew. But to Sylas, to the dormant kernel of the Architect buried deep in his undeveloped frontal lobe, the air was screaming.
It was a jagged, high-frequency interference. It flowed through the walls, eddied around the iron crib bars, and pooled in the corners of the room like invisible smoke.
*Illogical,* Sylas analyzed, his infant eyes tracking a movement no one else could see. *Physics violation in Sector 4. Energy mass without source.*
It was Mana.
He knew the term from Lilliana's fairy tales, but the reality was far messier than the stories. It wasn't a mystical river or a divine light. It was unstructured data. It was raw code floating in the open air, uncompiled, waiting for a command line.
It irritated him.
In Elysium, code had structure. Syntax. Rules. This—this was garbage data. It was a memory leak in the fabric of reality.
He lifted a hand. The limb was chubby, pale, and dimpled at the knuckles. He stared at it.
*System status,* he queried.
*...Loading... 4%...*
Four percent. The hardware was growing, the neural pathways myelinating, but it was agonizingly slow. He was a supercomputer trying to boot up on a potato battery.
He focused on the space between his thumb and forefinger.
He could feel the interference there, thick and viscous. It felt like static electricity, a subtle prickly heat that had nothing to do with temperature.
*If this is code,* he reasoned, fighting the urge to drool, *then it has an execute function.*
He narrowed his eyes. The physical strain of focusing his mind was immense. His heart rate accelerated, thumping against his tiny ribs like a trapped bird.
*Visualize the syntax.*
He didn't try to imagine fire or light. That was user-interface thinking. He went deeper. He imagined the binary state of the oxygen molecules in the air.
`Molecule.State = Excited`
`Molecule.Velocity = Max`
He pushed his will against the static. It resisted. It was heavy, slippery, refusing to be grasped by his mental cursor. It was like trying to catch oil with a net.
Sweat beaded on his forehead. His vision swam, the edges turning gray. The headache hit him instantly—a sharp, blinding spike behind his eyes that felt like a soldering iron.
*Compile,* he mentally screamed. *Execute.*
He poured every ounce of his will, every fragment of the Kaelen Vance persona, into that one square inch of empty air.
*Zap.*
It wasn't a fireball. It wasn't a bolt of lightning.
It was a spark. A single, blue-white snap of energy, smaller than a grain of rice. It fizzled into existence between his fingers, burned for a microsecond with a sound like tearing silk, and vanished.
Sylas gasped, his lungs heaving. The backlash was immediate. Nausea rolled over him. His nose felt wet. He reached up—clumsily—and touched his upper lip.
Blood.
He stared at the red smear on his finger.
He had rewritten reality. Only for a fraction of a second, and with negligible output, but he had done it. He had accessed the root directory of the universe.
He let out a breathy, triumphant laugh.
"Gah."
The door creaked.
Sylas froze. He wiped his hand on the blanket, hiding the blood.
Elara slipped into the room.
She moved differently than the adults. Martha plodded; his father marched; his mother drifted. Elara stalked. She was five years old now, her legs getting longer, her knees perpetually scabbed. She wore a dress that had once been nice but was now frayed at the hem, likely from climbing trees she had been explicitly told to avoid.
She closed the door softly, her violet eyes scanning the room for threats. Finding none, she relaxed.
"Potato," she whispered.
She approached the crib. She looked taller from this angle, a giantess with tangled black hair and a smudge of charcoal on her cheek.
Sylas stared up at her. He felt exhausted, drained by the single spark. He blinked slowly.
"You're red," Elara observed, leaning over the rail. She frowned, her eyebrows knitting together. She reached down and touched his forehead. Her hand was cool. "Are you cooking?"
Sylas swatted her hand away weakly. *I am not cooking. I am overheating due to CPU strain.*
Elara didn't pull back. She looked at him, then at the space in the air where the spark had been.
"You were staring at nothing again," she accused. "Martha says babies stare at ghosts. Are there ghosts, Potato?"
She looked around, her eyes narrowing.
"If there are ghosts," she whispered to the empty room, "I'll kick them."
She turned back to him. She dug into the pocket of her dress—a pocket that seemed to contain a dimension of infinite storage—and pulled out a feather. It was gray, striped with white. A hawk's feather, likely scavenged from the woods.
"Look," she said, holding it up. "I found a sky-knife."
She twirled it between her fingers.
Sylas watched the feather. He was tired. He wanted to sleep and let his neural pathways recover. But Elara was expecting a reaction.
He let out a noncommittal grunt.
Elara sighed. "You have no appreciation for treasure."
She held the feather over his face. "Watch."
She didn't wave it. She didn't make swooshing noises.
She just stared at the feather. Her face went slack, her eyes losing focus, dilating until the violet irises were swallowed by black pupils.
The air in the crib changed.
Sylas felt it immediately. The static—the Mana—didn't just flow; it *snapped* to attention.
It was distinct from his own clumsy attempt. When he had tried to grab the mana, it was like wrestling a greased pig. With Elara, the mana seemed to *want* to move. It rushed toward her, drawn by a gravity he couldn't see.
*Observation,* his mind noted, the headache momentarily forgotten. *Subject Elara acts as a conductor. Resistance is negligible.*
The feather didn't fall.
It hovered.
It hung suspended three inches above Sylas's nose. Then, slowly, erratically, it began to spin.
It wasn't graceful. It wobbled. It jerked. It looked less like magic and more like a glitch in the rendering engine. But it was defying gravity.
Sylas watched, mesmerized. He looked at the feather, then at his sister.
She wasn't speaking. Her teeth were clenched, her breath coming in short, sharp hitches through her nose. A vein in her temple pulsed.
She was running code.
She didn't know the syntax. She had no compiler. She was brute-forcing the command through sheer, biological instinct. It was messy. It was inefficient.
It was beautiful.
The feather spun faster, blurring into a gray disc. A small vortex of air whipped up in the crib, cooling the sweat on Sylas's face.
"Dance," Elara whispered through gritted teeth.
The feather shot sideways, slamming into the wooden bars of the crib with a distinct *thwack*.
Elara gasped, the connection breaking. She stumbled back a step, catching herself on the rocking chair. She looked pale.
The feather fluttered harmlessly to the mattress next to Sylas's ear.
Silence stretched in the nursery.
Sylas looked at the feather. He looked at Elara.
She looked terrified. Not of the magic, but of being caught. She glanced at the door, then back at him.
"You didn't see that," she whispered.
Sylas stared at her.
*I saw everything,* he thought. *I saw the source code. I saw the input variables. I saw the energy consumption.*
He realized something then, looking at his five-year-old sister who was trembling from exertion.
She was dangerous.
In a world where magic was a resource for the elite, for the Academy-trained nobility, a child manifesting unstructured telekinesis in a farmhouse was a liability. If she couldn't control it, it would kill her. Or worse, it would draw attention they couldn't afford.
She rubbed her nose, sniffing. "It makes my head hurt."
*Feedback loop,* Sylas diagnosed. *Neural overload. Same as me.*
He reached out. He couldn't speak. He couldn't explain the laws of thermodynamics or the principles of mana manipulation.
He grabbed the feather.
He held it up to her, shaking it slightly.
Elara blinked. She stepped closer, warily.
"You liked it?" she asked, her voice small.
Sylas grinned. It was a toothless, gummy expression, but he put genuine effort into it.
"Gwah."
Elara's shoulders dropped. The tension bled out of her frame. She smiled back, though her eyes were still heavy with fatigue.
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay. Just for you, Potato. But it's a secret."
She leaned over the rail, resting her chin on her arms. "Papa says magic is for people with gold. We don't have gold. So we have to be quiet."
She poked his cheek. "But when I'm big, and I'm a knight, I'll use the wind to chop the monsters. Swoosh."
She made a cutting motion with her hand.
Sylas gripped the feather tightly.
*No,* he corrected her silently. *You won't just chop them. We are going to optimize them out of existence.*
He looked at the feather in his hand, then at the ambient static filling the room.
He had been approaching this wrong. He had been trying to impose his old world's logic on a new operating system. He had been trying to write C++ in a Python environment.
Elara didn't use logic. She used emotion. She used *intent*.
The mana wasn't just data. It was reactive. It responded to the user's state of mind.
*Hypothesis,* Sylas thought, the gears of the Architect turning, grinding against the limitations of his infant brain. *The system interface is not a keyboard. It is the nervous system itself.*
He looked at his sister. She was already half-asleep, her eyes drooping as she watched him.
He wasn't alone.
He had a user base of two.
*Objective Updated,* the dormant System whispered in the back of his skull.
**Current Task: Decode the Mana Syntax.**
**Secondary Task: Train Subject Elara.**
**Timeframe: Immediate.**
Sylas closed his eyes, clutching the feather to his chest. The headache was still there, a dull throb, but the frustration was gone.
He knew the language now. He just had to learn the vocabulary.
"Sleep, Potato," Elara murmured, her voice thick with sleep. "I'll guard the door."
She sat on the floor, her back against the crib, clutching her knees.
Sylas listened to the wind outside. It no longer sounded like noise.
It sounded like raw material.
***
Days turned into weeks, and the winter deepened. The world outside the window turned into a stark monochrome of white snow and black trees.
Sylas spent every waking hour working.
To the outside observer—Martha, his parents—he was a remarkably quiet baby. He spent hours staring at his hands, or at the dust motes, or at the flames in the hearth.
"He's a thinker, that one," Arthur Vane said one evening, standing over the crib. The Baron looked haggard. His beard had more gray in it than Sylas remembered from the month before. He smelled of cheap ale and desperation.
"He's just calm, Arthur," Lilliana replied from the doorway. She was holding a candle, the light casting deep shadows in the hollows of her face. "Unlike Elara."
Arthur chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. "Elara is a storm in a dress. This one... this one is a deep pond."
He reached down and let Sylas grip his finger. Arthur's finger was rough, calloused, scarred from sword drills and plow handles.
"I sold the southern acreage today," Arthur said quietly.
Lilliana didn't answer immediately. The silence stretched, tight and brittle.
"The orchard?" she asked finally.
"The orchard. And the mill."
"Arthur..."
"We had no choice, Lily!" His voice rose, cracking. He lowered it instantly, looking at Sylas. "The interest on the loan... the Crown waits for no man."
He pulled his hand away from Sylas gently.
"It buys us a year," Arthur whispered. "Maybe two. If the harvest is good."
Sylas watched him. He saw the tremor in his father's hands.
*Observation: The financial ruin is accelerating.*
Selling assets to cover interest was a death spiral. Basic economics. They were burning the furniture to heat the house.
Arthur leaned down, kissing Sylas on the forehead. His beard scratched.
"Grow up strong, Sylas," he whispered. "Don't be like me."
He turned and walked out, his boots heavy on the floorboards. Lilliana lingered a moment longer, her expression unreadable, before following him.
Sylas lay in the dark.
*Two years.*
That was the deadline. In two years, the money would run out. The house would be gone. The protection of the Vane name, however faded, would vanish.
He needed to accelerate the timeline.
He raised his hand.
He didn't strain this time. He didn't try to force the universe to bend.
He relaxed. He remembered the feeling of Elara's magic—the flow, the emotion, the intent.
*I am not commanding,* he thought. *I am requesting access.*
He focused on the air above his palm. He visualized the mana not as code, but as a fluid. A stream.
*Gather.*
The static in the room shifted. It was subtle, sluggish, but it moved. It swirled around his hand, a cool, tingling vortex.
*Condense.*
He pushed his will into the center of the swirl.
A spark flared.
Then another.
And another.
For three seconds, Sylas Vane held a tiny, crackling constellation of blue light in his palm. It wasn't fire. It was raw, unrefined magical energy, stabilized by pure will.
It illuminated his face, casting stark shadows in the crib.
He clenched his fist. The lights vanished.
He exhaled, feeling the familiar drain on his stamina, but no pain this time. The pathway was forming. The hardware was adapting.
Two years.
He would be a toddler. He wouldn't be able to wield a sword. He wouldn't be able to fight an army.
But he could build.
He looked at the door where Elara had entered earlier.
He needed soldiers. He needed resources. He needed information.
The "Hidden Organization" his previous self had scoffed at in fiction... it wasn't a trope. It was a survival strategy.
Sylas Vane closed his eyes.
*System,* he thought. *Create new directory.*
*...Processing...*
*Directory Created: Shadow Garden.*
*Rename,* he thought instantly. *Too cliché.*
*...Processing...*
*Directory Created: The unseen.*
*Better.*
He drifted off to sleep, the blueprint of a kingdom expanding in his dreams. The first brick had been laid.
The mana in his veins hummed, waiting for the next command.