I woke up to the sound of dripping.
Not the romantic kind—no rain-on-window, no lo-fi beats. This was the erratic, statistically annoying drip of a leak that had been ignored long enough to become a personality trait.
Drip.
Pause.
Drip-drip.
Pause too long.
Drip.
My first thought, professional reflex hard-coded into my spine, was: non-random interval, likely pressure imbalance.
My second thought was: I'm not paid enough for this.
Which was impressive, considering I had very recently died.
Let me rewind the dataset.
My name was Park Min-ho. Thirty-one. Data analyst. Specialized in optimization models and risk mitigation. I lived a clean life: black coffee, blue-light glasses, and an unspoken hatred for anyone who said "the data will speak for itself." Data never speaks. It screams, if you know where to poke it.
The night I died, I was debugging a logistics algorithm at 2:47 a.m., arguing with a spreadsheet like it owed me money. The problem was simple: inefficiency disguised as tradition. It always is. Someone before me had hardcoded assumptions from 1998 and expected the universe to politely agree.
It didn't.
There was coffee. There was a flickering light. There was my laptop overheating like it had emotional issues. Then—this is the scientifically unsatisfying part—there was absence. No pain, no tunnel, no light. Just a hard cut, like reality hit Alt+F4.
Next thing I knew, I was on a cold stone floor, staring at a ceiling that violated at least three architectural safety codes.
And one law of physics.
The ceiling was floating.
Not metaphorically. Not artistically. Literally hovering, with faint glowing lines etched into it—circles within circles, symbols nested like bad recursion. Mana glyphs, I would later learn. At that moment, I just knew one thing:
Those circles were asymmetrical.
Which meant they were leaking.
I sat up. My body complied, which was encouraging. No stabbing pain, no paralysis. Different body, though—lighter, weaker, unfamiliar center of gravity. My hands were calloused in the wrong places. Janitorial calluses. The kind you get from scrubbing other people's messes while they debate metaphysics.
I looked down.
Grey uniform. Cheap fabric. A badge stitched onto the chest, barely holding on:
"Maintenance – Rank 9."
Rank 9. Not even last place. Last place's embarrassing cousin.
I laughed. A short, incredulous sound. It echoed badly. The acoustics were awful—too much reverb, not enough damping. Whoever designed this building hated sound engineers and janitors equally.
Memories slid in next, not gently. They arrived like an uncompressed file dumped straight into RAM.
This body's name was Dexter.
No surname worth mentioning. Orphan. Contract-bound worker at Aurelius Magic Academy, the most prestigious institution on the continent. Home of prodigies, nobles, chosen ones, and people who believed chanting louder improved spell accuracy.
Dexter cleaned. Floors. Laboratories. Libraries students weren't allowed to enter but constantly snuck into anyway. He knew which corridors exploded weekly and which professors pretended not to notice.
He also knew he was invisible.
Good. Invisibility is an underrated superpower.
As the memories settled, I noticed the drip again. It was coming from a mana conduit running along the wall—cracked, glowing erratically, bleeding energy into the air like a punctured budget.
I stood, walked over, and crouched.
No fear. No awe. Just professional irritation.
Mana, in this world, was considered mysterious. Divine. Temperamental. The textbooks said it responded to emotion, intent, faith. Which was adorable.
What it actually responded to—what I could see immediately—were gradients. Flow rates. Load distribution. The same principles governing electricity, fluids, and badly managed office teams.
The conduit's sigil array was misaligned by maybe two degrees. Insignificant to a mage. Catastrophic to efficiency.
I picked up a piece of chalk from the floor. Someone had dropped it mid-lecture, probably while shouting about destiny.
I corrected the angle.
The glow stabilized. The drip stopped.
Silence.
The air pressure equalized. The ambient hum of mana dropped by approximately 14%. I didn't have instruments, but I had instincts honed by years of optimizing systems no one wanted to admit were broken.
I leaned back on my heels.
"…Huh."
That was the moment it clicked.
Magic wasn't random.
Magic was badly documented math.
I laughed again, longer this time. A janitor laughing alone in a forbidden hallway while fixing an arcane infrastructure problem that had probably killed at least three students this semester.
If this were a regression model, the variables were obvious. Spells were functions. Circles were equations. Mana was just a resource with terrible loss management.
And everyone here was brute-forcing miracles instead of simplifying the formula.
I checked the corridor. No witnesses. Good.
I grabbed my mop, dipped it in the bucket, and went back to work.
After all, if the world insists on running on inefficient equations, someone has to clean up the errors.
And apparently, that someone is me.