In front of us stood the Aurora.
Even through my fear, I felt it—its presence. She was beautiful. Sleek. Purpose-built. The crown jewel of my father's life's work. A ship made for long sea journeys, faster than anything else on the Eastern Continent. Some of the devices embedded in her hull weren't even officially in production yet.
She wasn't just a ship.
She was an escape plan.
Father carried me aboard without a word and laid me down in the suite. I remember the room rocking gently, the low hum of systems already alive beneath the floor, as if the Aurora herself had been waiting. He didn't stay. He went into the next room and began making calls—first to my mother, then to two of his most trusted advisors.
Friends.
By evening, my mother arrived with everything essential to our lives packed into crates and cases. The two advisors arrived soon after, each with their families, boarding through the private dock and then by train. No one asked questions. No one hesitated.
They already understood.
As my father performed the final checks, we heard sirens in the distance.
Not close.
But approaching.
He didn't wait.
The engines roared to life, and the Aurora slipped free of the docks as if she had been waiting for this moment all along.
For the next ten days, we were hunted.
The Coalition pursued us relentlessly, their ships appearing on the horizon again and again—dark silhouettes against the sea. But the farther we went, the weaker their pursuit became. Fuel ran low. Supply lines stretched thin.
The Aurora had no such problem.
She was stocked to the brim—fuel, food, water. Enough to last seven… maybe eight years. My father had always prepared for the end of the world. In another life, they would have called him a doomsday prepper.
Here, it simply meant survival.
The next five years of my life were spent aboard that ship.
There were no islands.
No land.
No familiar stars.
Only endless sea.
And the things that lived beneath it.
Sea beasts rose from the depths more than once—vast shadows moving beneath the waves, shapes too large and too wrong to belong to any natural order. But my father's frequency emitter kept them at bay, driving them away before they could close in.
We endured storms that swallowed the sky. Waves that struck like mountains. Winds that screamed as if the world itself wanted us gone.
The Aurora endured them all.
She pushed forward.
By the end, the ship that had once been flawless no longer looked beautiful.
She looked like the wife of an abusive husband.
Scarred.
Dented.
Burned.
Still afloat.
Still moving.
Still alive.
After five years of nothing but water and sky, we saw land.
At first, I thought it was a trick of the light—a smear on the horizon born from exhaustion. But it didn't fade. It grew clearer, darker, solid.
Cliffs.
Forested slopes.
Structures carved into the coastline.
The Northern Continent.
By then, I had begun to doubt whether the other continents were real at all. Five years at sea had a way of eroding belief. But the moment we sailed closer, that doubt vanished.
We found a city dock—vast, orderly, bristling with unfamiliar designs. The moment the Aurora anchored, we were surrounded. Wizards stood beside ordinary soldiers, spell-focuses visible, rifles leveled. There was no panic in their movements.
No fear.
Just coordination.
We were interrogated.
Thoroughly.
They questioned us for days, cross-checking every statement, every log, every record my father had preserved. They examined the Aurora from hull to engine, tested her systems, traced her origin.
When they learned why my parents had fled—when they confirmed that the journey had begun to save a child who had awakened as a wizard—their tone changed.
Not to kindness.
To caution.
I was separated from my family.
What followed were fifteen days of tests.
Some were magical—mana resonance, spell response, pathway mapping. Others were purely scientific—blood analysis, neural scans, physiological stress responses. And some… some blurred the line so completely I couldn't tell where magic ended and science began.
They observed.
They measured.
They recorded.
When it was over, I was reunited with my family.
That was when an old wizard came to meet my parents.
He spoke calmly, deliberately. Titles were exchanged. Decisions were made. Our group was granted temporary residency within the Darish Kingdom. Conditions were attached, of course.
Many of them.
One condition concerned me.
I was to attend the kingdom's magic academy.
That meant seeing my parents rarely—at most once a year. I would graduate at seventeen, but I was expected to learn everything children my age had been taught since early childhood.
There were no exceptions.
The next six years eased the tension that had followed us across the sea.
We found a home. My father established a new shipping company—small at first, almost insignificant compared to what he had lost. But he was already experimenting again, this time with magi-tech.
I attended the academy.
I studied.
I struggled.
And I graduated.
After that, I spent the next three years traveling across the Northern Continent, moving between countries, academies, and research centers. I learned different approaches to magic—different philosophies, different casting methods.
But my weakness followed me everywhere.
I had started too late.
My mana storage was low. According to my teachers, the years between five and thirteen were critical—when mana pathways formed and expanded. The more magic was used during that period, the more those pathways widened, the greater the storage capacity became.
I had lost six of those years.
No amount of effort could fully replace them.
I worked harder in the final three years than I ever had before. By the end, my magic level reached nearly sixty percent of the average student.
Respectable.
But the geniuses were far beyond me.
So I adapted.
I focused on spell theory. On structure. On stability.
And I noticed something unsettling.
Most spells lacked proper construction. Nearly seventy percent were unstable, their success dependent on intent and will rather than form. Probability, not certainty. And every time I heard spells cast in the common tongue, I felt something strange—a sense of closeness, as if the words were brushing against something deeper without quite touching it.
At twenty, I was accepted as an assistant teacher at the magic academy.
My subject: Alternative Casting.
The class was usually empty. One student, sometimes two. Most didn't see the point.
The only reason I had been accepted at all was simple.
The main professor was retiring the following year.
And someone needed to take his place.