I did it on a Sunday morning when everyone was at temple service.
I'd been planning it for a month. Every detail. Every variable. Every excuse in case someone came home early.
The garden ward anchor — the small stone pillar at the center of our herb garden — was my target. Not the house wards. Those were too important, too visible, and too likely to trigger alarm if anything went wrong. The garden ward was minor. If it failed, the worst consequence was some magical pests nibbling at the wintermint.
I knelt beside the pillar. It was about knee-height, carved from whitestone, with the standard hexagonal pattern etched into its faces. A depleted mana crystal sat in the socket at its top, barely glowing — due for replacement this week.
I had three hours until the family returned. Plenty of time.
From under my shirt, I pulled my notebook. The page was open to a diagram I'd spent two weeks refining — an octagonal pattern. Eight points of resonance instead of six. The angles calculated and recalculated, adjusted based on everything I'd learned from Father's books, Mother's ward maintenance, and my own observation.
I wasn't going to recarve the stone. That was beyond my physical ability and would be immediately noticeable. Instead, I was going to do something subtler.
The ward patterns worked through etched channels that guided mana flow. But mana, I'd observed, responded to intention as much as physical structure. Priests shaped mana through prayer. Holy knights shaped it through willpower and martial forms. The physical patterns on the anchor stones were guides, but they weren't the ONLY way to direct the energy.
What if I could overlay a secondary pattern using my own mana?
I placed my hands on the stone.
I'd never deliberately channeled mana before. At seven, formal mana training was still years away. But I could feel my core — that warm second heartbeat in my chest. I'd been feeling it for two years, growing more aware of it, learning its rhythms.
Slowly, carefully, I pushed.
Not hard. Not fast. Just a gentle outward flow from my palms into the stone. I visualized the octagonal pattern — eight points, evenly spaced, the geometry crisp and clean in my mind.
Nothing happened.
I pushed harder. Focused more. Visualized more intensely.
Nothing.
Frustration crept in. In my old world, if a theory was correct, the experiment confirmed it. Here, the theory should be correct — the math made sense, the logic was sound — but the execution...
Maybe I was approaching it wrong. I was trying to impose a pattern through raw mana and force of will. But that wasn't how Sanctus Arts worked. They worked through prayer. Through faith. Through alignment with the divine.
I wasn't particularly faithful. I'd been reincarnated by... something. Maybe the Goddess, maybe random chance, maybe a cosmic clerical error. I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about the theological implications because thinking about it honestly terrified me.
But I understood the principle.
Sanctus Arts weren't powered by the caster alone. They worked because the caster aligned their intention with a larger system — the divine framework that permeated this world's mana. Prayer was the alignment mechanism. Faith was the permission.
I didn't need faith. I needed alignment.
I closed my eyes. Took a breath. And instead of pushing my mana outward, I listened.
The ward hummed. The mana in the stone flowed along its hexagonal channels like water in a riverbed. And beneath that, deeper, I felt something else — the ambient mana of the world itself. The background radiation of magic. It was everywhere, in the soil, in the air, in the moonpetals glowing softly beside me.
It had a rhythm. A frequency. Like a low, constant tone just below the threshold of hearing.
I matched it.
Not through prayer. Not through faith. Through resonance. I let my mana vibrate at the same frequency as the ambient field, and then I gently, gently nudged the flow in the anchor stone toward the octagonal pattern in my mind.
The stone pulsed.
The hexagonal glow flickered — not failing, but shifting. For just a moment, additional points of light appeared between the existing six. Eight points. Octagonal. The barrier field rippled and then stabilized, thinner but tighter, with a crystalline clarity the old pattern lacked.
The depleted mana crystal, which should have been nearly dead, glowed brighter.
Not much. But measurably, visibly, undeniably brighter.
I held the pattern for about thirty seconds before my concentration broke and it collapsed back to the default hexagonal.
I was breathing hard. My hands were tingling. My mana core felt like I'd just sprinted a mile — not painful, but exhausted in a way I'd never experienced.
But I was grinning.
It worked.
The octagonal pattern used less mana for the same coverage. The math was right. The theory was sound. And I'd just proven it, alone, in a garden, at age seven.
I sat back against the pillar and laughed. Quietly, so the neighbors wouldn't hear.
Then I heard a sound behind me.
I turned.
Edric was standing at the garden gate. He was supposed to be at temple. He was staring at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"Lucien," he said carefully. "What did you just do?"