Sleep took him hard.
Not the gentle drift into dreams, but the sudden collapse of someone who'd pushed past every reasonable limit. One moment Nalla was staring at moldy ceiling, cataloging costs and consequences. Next moment, nothing. Black void where consciousness should be, his body claiming what his mind refused to surrender.
He woke to pre-dawn grey seeping through cracks in shutters.
The body was already complaining before he'd fully surfaced. Muscles stiff, headache behind the patient's temples, mouth tasting like copper, and regret. The testing from previous night had left marks. Not just mental drain, but physical aftermath. His hands trembled when he tried to flex them. Chest felt tight, like he'd been holding his breath for hours.
Worth it anyway.
He moved to the table where notes from previous night waited. Diagrams of barriers. Calculations of grain costs. Questions about the third Intention still mocking him from margins.
Two weapons he could use. One he couldn't.
Outside, village stirred to life. Roosters screaming their daily complaints. Distant voices calling morning greetings.
He rubbed his chin and studied notes with fresh eyes. Paper smelled of ink and old wood. His fingers traced over diagrams, following lines he'd drawn while exhausted.
The third Intention called to him like an itch he couldn't scratch.
He closed his eyes and focused inward, turning attention to the third symbol carved into his heart. The moment he concentrated on it, pain lanced through his skull.
Vision blurred. Hands gripped table edge until knuckles went white. The symbol remained frustratingly out of reach, protected by barriers he couldn't breach.
He released focus as pain subsided, leaving a dull throb in its wake. Two cycles yesterday. Attempting a third now would be pushing into dangerous territory.
Each cycle meant draining the full capacity of twenty-seven grains from Caelum and using them completely. Most Assemblers could manage one, maybe two before collapse. He'd completed two yesterday and felt it in every joint. Everyone had theoretical limits that could be exceeded in extremes. But the cost was dangerous. Corruption, madness, death.
He closed his eyes again, focused on the unstable symbol. This time, instead of forcing power through it, he attempted to understand it simply. Read it with the same care a scholar would give an ancient text.
The symbol flickered and wavered, oscillating between the real and the ethereal, like smoke given momentary form. When he tried to focus, the world exploded in sensations that weren't his own.
Suddenly, he was crying tears that belonged to someone else, feeling rage that came from nowhere, love so intense it made his chest ache. Emotions poured over him like waves, each one too real, too strong, carrying fragments of scenes he'd never lived.
He pressed deeper despite the growing pressure behind his skull.
For one crystalline moment, the symbol almost solidified. He caught glimpses of something vast: words flowing like rivers, sentences carving reality into new shapes, descriptions so vivid they became more real than the present moment. The scent of ink and parchment flooded his nostrils, mixed with something else, something that tasted like time itself.
Writing again. But different. Not emotions for others to feel, but something else entirely.
Vision fragmented. The symbol flickered, unstable. Pain exploded through his skull as the connection severed violently.
Nalla gasped and jerked backward, chair scraping against the floor. Blood trickled from his nose in thin rivulets, metallic on his tongue. His hands pressed against his temples, trying to contain the chaos still echoing in his skull.
He grabbed a quill with fingers that still trembled. Blood dripped onto paper, leaving small rust-colored blooms across his notes as he wrote: Third Intention: writing-based, unknown function. An unstable symbol suggests incomplete formation. Connected to description or narrative. Unable to access safely. Current assessment: requires further study when capacity allows.
He wiped his nose on his sleeve and leaned back in the chair. The taste of blood lingered in his mouth. The headache had evolved from a dull throb to sharp spikes behind his eyes.
Two weapons he could use, one he couldn't.
He set down the quill and pulled out fresh sheets of paper, arranging them systematically across the small table. His mind began racing, five centuries of experience suddenly clicking into focus.
He'd seen thousands of Intentions, witnessed countless variations of similar powers. Patterns were there, waiting to be recognized.
His hand moved across paper almost automatically. First principle: Barrier creates a resistant dome with one-sided blocking. But what if I could reverse the blocking direction? Instead of keeping things out, keep them in.
The quill scratched against paper, filling the quiet room. He sketched quickly, rough diagrams showing dome configurations, attack angles, tactical applications.
Size manipulation. If I can control dimensions, I can create weapons. Barrier-spears. Barrier-swords.
Experience in countless battles painted vivid scenarios across his mind's eye. Assassins trapped in shrinking domes. Archers finding arrows blocked while his own attacks passed through reversed barriers. Cavalry charges broken by sudden walls materializing in their path.
Internal manifestation. His pulse quickened. What happens if I create a barrier inside an enemy's body? Expand it from within, let their own flesh provide resistance.
He sketched more complex configurations. Interlocking barriers forming cages. Rotating barriers deflecting attacks while maintaining offense. Barriers shaped like nets, like spears, like crushing vises.
His hand cramped. He shook it out, kept writing.
Years of accumulated wisdom, and here he was getting defeated by furniture and poor penmanship. Glorious.
Paper accumulated across the table. Diagrams overlapping diagrams. Calculations in margins. Questions leading to more questions.
Hours passed. His hand burned from sustained effort. His eyes felt like someone had rubbed sand in them. His back screamed from hours hunched over the table.
He kept working anyway.
The path forward was clearer now. Before last night, he was completely blind. Now he could see the mountain he needed to climb, even if it was higher than expected.
He focused on the symbol of spinning iron rings carved into his heart. But this time, instead of simply using it, he studied it with the patience of a scholar examining a sacred text.
"Verbs are here," he murmured, concentrating on the symbol. Each section brought images and sensations, fragments of fundamental power encoded there.
He opened his eyes and noted methodically each vision the symbol sent him, trying to extract the Verbs from sequences of images. Like deciphering a lost language.
His eyes began to burn from staring at notes. He blinked, rubbed them, continued.
Visions were clear, but translating their meaning into precise commands required total concentration. He shifted position against the screaming of his spine, kept working.
"This sequence..." He frowned, studying a set of lines in his notes. Images were intense: barriers rising, limits being established, boundaries gaining solidity. "Verb is related to defining space, but it's more fundamental than that."
He closed his eyes, letting visions of the second set flow. Energy moving in specific patterns, power channeled through invisible structures. "This one maintains limits. Reinforces boundaries established by the first."
The third set was an enigma. Its visions were more abstract: concepts intertwining, reality bending under specific rules. "Bridge between intention and manifestation. Where other Verbs unite to create the final effect."
"How they connect..." He traced lines between annotations, quill moving faster now. Each Verb built upon the previous one, creating a structure more complex than the sum of its parts.
A pattern emerged from his notes. "There's something here." He circled repeated sequences. "Something about... limits?"
Light through the shutters shifted as hours passed. His hand moved mechanically, driven by obsession rather than conscious thought.
Nalla was completely absorbed in study, lost in a labyrinth of symbols and meanings expanding with each discovery. Papers spread across the table like a map of unknown territory. Ink stained his fingers. His neck ached from the angle he'd maintained for too long.
He couldn't stop.
If he could understand the fundamental mechanics of an Intention, its Verbs, perhaps he could not only modify it but create something new. Something unprecedented.
His eyes ran across pages of notes now carpeting the table, diagrams, observations, partial theories. More pieces he found, the more complex the overall picture became.
Reality settled over enthusiasm like cold water.
This would take months. Maybe years.
Nothing says "survival plan" like a multi-year research project with six chaos spheres and a homicidal uncle. But at least the accommodations were miserable enough to keep him humble.
He was essentially performing reverse engineering on a language he barely spoke, trying to decode the fundamental grammar of Caelum from a single word. Every Intention he had witnessed in his previous life had been built upon generations of accumulated knowledge, masters teaching disciples, techniques refined across centuries.
He tapped his quill against an unfinished diagram. One Intention, dissected piece by piece, trying to extrapolate an entire system of power. Like trying to rebuild a library from a single page.
The mathematics alone would be staggering. Each modification required testing. Each test risked his body, affected his limited capacity. Each failure would set him back days or weeks.
Can't master everything at once. Need to be strategic about this. Pick a few simple modifications that cover basics of survival.
His quill moved across fresh paper, prioritizing ruthlessly.
Mobility first. If he couldn't escape, he was dead. Some variation of Barrier helping him move faster or avoid attacks entirely.
Attack second. He needed to kill efficiently. Range and melee.
His shoulders burned from tension. His back screamed. His eyes felt like they were bleeding sand.
His body had opinions about this. Loud ones. He ignored them with practiced ease, five hundred years taught you that comfort was for people who weren't on borrowed time.
He set down the quill and flexed his cramped hand, watching his fingers shake slightly from sustained effort.
But he had a path now. Before last night, he was completely blind. Now he could see the mountain he needed to climb, even if it was higher than hoped.
Someone has to do the dirty work, as his father used to say.
His hand reached for the quill again, moving automatically despite exhaustion, despite pain, despite every reasonable signal his body sent telling him to stop.
Because stopping meant staying vulnerable. And vulnerable meant dead within the year.