All week Harlan walked with his head down. He took plant readings, worked the beds, cleaned, cooked, cleaned again—mechanical, wordless. The technical staff at this little lodge didn’t have much free time.

  He fed Pinky as if it wasn’t even him doing it, as if his body handled it on its own: he tossed the meat and turned away, refusing to look while the crocodile padded after him, begging for more.

  Re noticed. The change was too sharp. He even tried a few times to pull Harlan into conversation during the healing sessions he still did now and then. Harlan answered in single syllables. Re snorted, and on his way out he tossed a comment at the crocodile weaving around his legs.

  “Come on, Pinky. Don't eat that dead fish, you'll get sick.”

  Pinky made a soft “rff-rff-rff” and trotted after him like a lapdog that happened to weigh three hundred kilograms.

  But here was the interesting part: Harlan didn’t return the Day-Zero Mage handbook.

  That was his secret.

  Every evening, when his “shift” ended, he sat at the desk in his room, set a small bolt on the tabletop—one he’d pried loose during some repair—and tried to make it move.

  Again. And again. Until the strain dimmed his vision.

  He changed approaches. He thought about motion, about the object, about flows of magic passing through it. The last one was especially stupid—he knew that wasn’t how the Field worked. But he grabbed at anything.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling he didn’t understand the principle of sending a message to the Field. His “stone” wasn’t reaching the water. It was landing on the beach with a dull thud.

  Before, he’d wanted to prove something to Re, to Elis, to some mythical villains who’d never believed in him. Now he wanted it for himself. Just to prove: *I can.*

  He reread the handbook’s opening page so often he could see it with his eyes closed:

  *Magic can be available to everyone if you apply enough effort.*

  ?

  On the tenth day after his failed test, the pump in the northern greenhouse died.

  Harlan stood over the cast-iron monster—rusted through and massive—with no idea where to start.

  He flipped through a yellowed reference manual and went straight for the hardest part: the gearbox. The bolt that held the gears had rusted solid. Harlan set a wrench on it and tried to break it loose with all his strength.

  The bolt didn’t even twitch.

  “Come on,” he growled, leaning harder.

  The bolt didn’t move.

  Once he’d made sure no one was nearby, he swore with feeling.

  “Damn you—both of you.” Every bolt in the world, including the one that wouldn’t move in the evenings, made Harlan’s personal enemy list.

  He threw his weight into it, eyes locked on the bolt. Nothing happened.

  He didn’t know why, but he tried magic. He pictured the metal around the bolt heating up, expanding.

  And almost instantly he slipped into a strange state. Everything dulled. Sounds fell away. Colors flattened. He felt submerged. Like in water, or something thicker. Oil. And the oxygen was running out fast.

  The world tilted.

  A heartbeat later the floor slammed into his face.

  A thin thread of blood ran onto the concrete…

  ?

  "Idiot. Damn cretin," Re said, carefully hauling Harlan toward his room. “You’ll pay for this later…”

  He laid him on the bed and checked his pulse and breathing again.

  Steady. Nothing threatening him yet.

  Re looked down at him once more.

  “Stubborn bastard,” he said, trying not to repeat insults. “Good thing I forgot to take readings in the menagerie this morning. Otherwise you’d have died right there.”

  Harlan got lucky. The wound was shallow, even though at least three hours had passed before Re found his limp body. Re had already closed the cut with healing magic back in the greenhouse.

  “You could have just hit yourself with that same wrench,” Re muttered, still fuming. “Once, hard, and it’s done—no problems. Instead you nearly boiled your brains. Then I’d have to suffer you for the rest of my life.”

  He checked Harlan’s breathing again, sighed, and sat at the desk.

  *Physics, Chemistry, and the World for Day-Zero Mages* lay there by itself, inviting him to pass the time.

  ?

  Harlan woke up and regretted it immediately.

  “What kind of idiot wrote this?” Re was swearing somewhere nearby, apparently at the book.

  “Please… shut up,” Harlan groaned. “My head’s about to split.”

  Re froze, then was on his feet in an instant.

  “How many fingers? What’s your name? What day of the week is it?” The questions came like shots.

  “Uh… stop, please. I’m Harlan.”

  “Tch.” Re snorted. “Pull a stunt like that again and I won’t save you.”

  “What… what was that?” Harlan asked quietly.

  “Tomorrow,” Re said. “I’ll explain tomorrow. And don’t you dare play mage again. You lived by a miracle. Rest.”

  Re stayed in the room a while. Harlan turned from side to side—the headache was brutal. He whimpered under his breath, then finally found a position where the pain eased a fraction. He fell asleep again.

  When Re saw things were stable, he left without a sound.

  ?

  The next morning Harlan woke to the same ache. Not as sharp as yesterday, but steady—like a bass note someone had struck and forgot to release.

  He got up and headed for the bathroom, but collided with Re in the doorway. Re carried a tray—either soup or tea. The vessel was something between a bowl and a mug.

  “Well,” Re said, surprised. “You can walk.”

  “Shouldn’t I?” Harlan yawned.

  The yawn shot pain into his temple. He winced.

  “Huh.” Re stared at him, intent now.

  Then he stepped in and peered into Harlan’s pupils without asking.

  “What are you doing?” Harlan snapped fully awake.

  “Mm.” Re thought for a beat, then straightened. “Now that you’re walking, you’ll carry this back to the kitchen yourself. And don’t forget to make lunch.”

  He shoved the tray into Harlan’s hands, turned, and marched toward the lab.

  “Huh?” was all Harlan managed.

  ?

  They met in the kitchen right after breakfast. Re had a large notebook and a pen.

  “Finished? Then let's go,” he said, in a tone that didn’t invite discussion.

  They went down to the lab and straight into the room where they’d tested the cube before. Re gestured to the floor.

  “Sit.”

  “I thought you were a complete zero,” Re began. “Turns out it’s worse—you’re a complete idiot. Do you even know what you did yesterday?”

  Harlan tensed. Re looked unusually serious, so Harlan tried a weak excuse.

  “Well… I was working on the pump, and then the world started swimming… My head hurts, so I guess I hit it?”

  “Don’t play dumb.” Re’s gaze pinned him. “I know you tried to affect something through the Field. That bolt—you were trying to unscrew it. Right?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer.

  “You think I haven’t seen this a hundred times at the Academy? The fainting? Eyes rolling back? Foam at the mouth? The first contact with the Field used to cause Backlash so severe it burned people’s brains out.” Re’s voice went colder. “And that’s not a metaphor.”

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  “So it worked?” Harlan asked, brightening.

  “Are you listening?” Re snapped. “You nearly killed yourself.”

  “But I didn’t. So I’m a mage now?” Harlan looked at him with wide eyes.

  Re exhaled and pressed a hand to his forehead, rubbing his temples.

  “Formally,” he said, “you just made this a thousand times harder. You could’ve spent your life fixing toilets and been happy. But now I have to teach you—so next time, when you latch onto the Field subconsciously, it doesn’t kill you. Better yet, so there is no ‘subconsciously.’ But note this: at your age, training will be ten times harder.”

  “Yay?” Harlan tried to smile. One side of his face twitched.

  “Pshhh.” Re made a dismissive sound. “Tonight. Same room. And no tricks until then.”

  That was how Harlan became the old man’s apprentice.

  ?

  Dim crystal light lit the path.

  “Pinky,” Re said, straining as he dragged his burden down the hall, “how about you finally handle your ward for once? Why am I the only one hauling him around?”

  The crocodile stopped, tilted its head, and blinked its yellow eyes.

  “Oh, don’t pretend it isn’t your problem,” Re went on, shifting his grip and almost losing his balance. “You’re responsible too. Formally speaking, you were appointed his supervisor!”

  Pinky blinked again—slow, deliberate—like it was evaluating the complaint. It offered no answer.

  Re kept dragging the breathless body down the hallway. After another ten steps he stopped to catch his breath.

  “Ffff,” he exhaled. “Maybe I should move him closer to the lab. What do you think?”

  The crocodile stayed silent. It likely didn’t have strong opinions on the matter.

  The scene repeated almost every evening. Nearly every session ended the same way: Harlan connected to the Field, tried to move the cube—and a few seconds later he shut off, dropping like a sack of potatoes.

  Once Re saw the pattern, he started giving theory *before* practice. Because after a few seconds of practice, the student became completely useless.

  But what surprised the professor was that Harlan almost stopped taking Backlash. He woke up in the mornings with barely any headache. He felt normal.

  A clean anomaly.

  “If you ever meet other mages,” Re said once, thoughtful, “never tell them this. You’ll make enemies for nothing.”

  The mechanics of it seriously intrigued the scientist. A new file appeared in his folder of test subjects.

  ?

  Another two weeks passed.

  Two weeks of Harlan grinding at the same miserable task—trying to move the damned cube by even a hair’s width.

  Two weeks of him losing consciousness three or four seconds after connecting to the Field, every time.

  “I’m done,” Re said one evening. “Let's go.”

  “Where?” Harlan raised his head. He’d just come back from another blackout and felt like he’d only nodded off for a minute. His head felt heavy, but nothing hurt.

  “Where, where,” Re mimicked. “To school. Right now you’re a useless resonator. You can connect to the Field and that’s it. It’s like being deaf-mute. You can start a dialogue, make sounds—just noise, nothing like speech. But you don't hear the answer at all.”

  Re headed for his main laboratory. Harlan hurried after him.

  This time Re didn’t go to the training room. He marched into his research office. He dropped his notebook on the center table, then moved to another—massive, reinforced—set against the wall.

  A huge apparatus sat on it.

  Re flipped a switch. The setup woke reluctantly. A few buttons on the casing glowed, slow and dim.

  “What is that?” Harlan asked, eyes jumping after the lights.

  “This, Harlan,” Re said, with a special pride, “is a crystalline STM. Very rare. Worth more than this entire lodge. Power from crystals, signal through the Field. And your new best friend.”

  Re tapped a metal insert at the base.

  “STM?” Harlan was puzzled.

  “Scanning Tunneling Microscope. It lets you see matter. Not individual atoms, of course—but you’ll see structure. Lattices. Bonds breaking and new ones forming.”

  Harlan’s brow tightened.

  “Why?”

  “Because some people—especially the slow ones—need to see once instead of trying to imagine,” Re cut in. “Moving a cube means initiating motion in an uncountable number of molecules. To do it with control, you have to understand what you want from them.”

  “But wait,” Harlan interrupted. “Uncountable? How can anyone control that?”

  Re smirked.

  “Good question. Of course a Field operator never calculates every molecule. That’s impossible. It would be like controlling every star in the night sky. So you give the Field a general command—a vector. ‘Move like this, with this force, in this direction.’ Most of the time it’s enough. The Field fills in the details on its own. It does billions of micro-calculations for you.”

  “Old man, you’ve confused me. Why did I cram all those formulas and solve problems then?”

  “Because the Field doesn’t understand ‘move the cube.’ You have to give it a clear picture: how pressure should change, in what direction, what the trajectory should be. The better you understand the physics, the sharper the command. The sharper the command, the better the result. And ‘move the cube’ is just a set of informational symbols. Not an action.”

  Re reached into his pocket and pulled out a familiar item—the same bolt Harlan had failed to move on his own desk. Then he produced a knife.

  Without hesitation, Re scraped a tiny flake of metal from the bolt’s threads. He set it on glass, dripped some liquid from a vial onto it, and slid it under the scope.

  “Your task is to watch iron,” Re said, “turn into iron oxide under acid. Right in front of your eyes. See how oxygen reorganizes matter. In real time.” Re leaned in to demonstrate, eye pressed to the tube. “Get comfortable. Sit and watch.”

  The scientist stepped back from the microscope.

  “You can start.”

  “And how long do I watch?”

  “Until you start seeing things,” Re said with a predatory grin. “After that—another twenty minutes.”

  The professor settled at his desk, pleased with himself: teaching, and working on his notes at the same time, without losing a minute.

  *Am I not a genius?* he praised himself silently.

  ?

  Harlan sat with his eyes fixed on the screen. Like someone had put a house cat in a cage of birds—same silence, same patient stare. And for a couple of hours, not a sound came from him.

  “Re,” he said at last, timidly. “I think I got it.”

  “Huh? What?” Re tore himself away from papers and thoughts with effort. “What did you get?”

  “Well, how matter transforms. Rearranges.”

  “Oh, really? Well, let's go see if you can apply it in practice,” the old man smirked. “Uh, turn off the microscope, it’s not a toy.”

  They moved to the training room. Three minutes later, Harlan blacked out.

  “Got it, yeah,” the scientist made a face, hoisting him onto his shoulder. “Weakling.”