I discovered two important things when I was five years old.
First: mana was real.
I mean, I'd known that intellectually since I was born into this world. Hard to miss when your father literally glowed during prayers. But at five, during a routine blessing, I felt it for the first time — a warmth in my chest, like a second heartbeat, pulsing in rhythm with Father's prayer.
I had a mana core.
Everyone in this world did, apparently — the same way everyone in my old world had a circulatory system. But most people's cores were small, dormant. Only those with sufficient capacity and training could actually channel mana into spells.
Mine was... not small.
Father had tested it during a routine childhood assessment. He'd placed his glowing hand on my chest, gone very still, and then said to Mother, in a carefully controlled voice: "He has potential."
Mother had asked how much potential.
Father had said: "We'll discuss it later."
They'd discussed it that night, behind their bedroom door, in voices too low for me to hear. But I'd caught fragments — "exceptional," "too young to tell for certain," "the diocese will want to know," and Mother's firm, quiet, "not yet."
I didn't know exactly what my mana capacity was. But I knew it was enough to make my father — a man who dealt with the supernatural daily — go quiet.
Second thing I discovered at five: mana crystals were expensive.
This sounds mundane, and it was. But it mattered.
The Ashveil household wasn't poor, but we weren't rich either. Father's salary as a Regional Saint was comfortable — better than a common tradesman, worse than minor nobility. We had a house (owned by the church, technically), food, clothes, education funds for three children. Comfortable.
But mana crystals ate into that comfort like termites.
Household wards required them. Father's healing work required them. Celestine's training equipment required them. The parish itself required them for the public wards that protected the town. The church provided a stipend for official use, but it never quite covered everything, and the difference came out of our household budget.
I knew this because I'd started reading.
At five, while other children were learning their letters, I was plowing through every book in Father's study. He thought I was precocious. I was just bored and literate in a language that, thankfully, this world's written script mapped onto fairly intuitively once you understood the phonetic system.
One of the books I'd found was the household ledger. Mother kept it meticulously — income, expenses, projections, notes. And the single largest variable expense, every month, was mana crystals.
Two years later, at seven, I was still thinking about it.
Not because I wanted to save money (though I did — financial anxiety apparently transcends reincarnation). But because the ward system was wasteful, and the waste was right there in the geometry, and it drove me insane that nobody seemed to notice.
"Mother, how much do we spend on mana crystals each month?"
It was afternoon, the quiet hours between lunch and dinner when Mother sat in the parlor and handled correspondence. I'd perched on the chair opposite her with a glass of milk that I was nursing slowly.
She looked up from her letter. "That's an odd question for a seven-year-old."
"I heard you and Father talking about the budget last night."
This was true. I had excellent hearing, or maybe their walls were thin, or maybe they just forgot that their youngest child was a light sleeper with an eavesdropping habit.
Mother studied me for a moment. She did this sometimes — looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite decode. Not suspicion, exactly. More like... she was trying to understand something that didn't fit into the categories she had.
"About twelve crescents a month," she said finally. "For the household. The parish budget is separate."
Twelve crescents. To put that in context: a skilled laborer in Mireth earned about eight crescents a month. We were spending one and a half times a worker's salary just on magical batteries.
"That seems like a lot."
"It is." Mother's voice was matter-of-fact. She wasn't the type to sugarcoat things, even for children. "Mana crystals are controlled by the church supply chain. The prices are standardized, which means they're standardized in the Empire's favor. Smaller kingdoms like Verath pay a premium."
Monopoly pricing. Some things were universal across worlds.
"Could we use fewer?"
"Not without reducing ward coverage or your father's healing capacity. Both are essential."
I sipped my milk. Thought about it.
"What if the wards were more efficient?" I asked. "Used less crystal energy for the same coverage?"
Mother set down her pen. "Lucien, ward geometry is a specialized field. The patterns we use are designed by the church's Artificers — trained professionals. They've been optimized over centuries."
Optimized by people who don't understand wave mechanics, I didn't say.
"I was just curious," I said instead, and smiled.
She smiled back, but her eyes lingered on me a beat too long.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I lay in my bed — small, warm, pushed against the wall beneath a window that looked out over the moonlit garden — and thought about ward geometry.
The patterns carved into our anchor stones used a symmetrical six-point design. Standard issue, according to the books I'd read. The six points created a hexagonal field of mana resonance that formed the barrier.
But hexagonal symmetry, while stable, wasn't the most efficient way to create a standing wave. There was inherent destructive interference at the midpoints between each apex. Lost energy. Wasted mana.
What if you used an eight-point design? Octagonal symmetry. More points of resonance, shorter distances between them, less destructive interference.
The math — well, the intuition, since I didn't exactly have a calculator — suggested you could reduce energy consumption by maybe twenty to thirty percent.
But I couldn't test it. Not at seven. Not without tools, materials, and a very good explanation for why a child was redesigning centuries-old church infrastructure.
So I did what I'd been doing since I was born into this world.
I waited. I watched. I learned.
And I wrote it down.
Under my mattress, wrapped in an old cloth, was a notebook. I'd asked Mother for it a year ago, saying I wanted to practice my letters. She'd been delighted. Father had been proud.
The notebook was full of diagrams, observations, and half-formed theories about how magic worked, written in a cipher I'd invented based on English — a language that did not exist in this world and therefore served as a perfectly unbreakable code.
I pulled it out now and, by the moonlight filtered through stained glass, added a new entry.
Ward efficiency — hexagonal vs. octagonal geometry. Need to find precise angle measurements. Need to understand mana conductance properties of different anchor stone materials. Need to test on small scale before proposing changes.
Also: farmer's knee. Look into anti-inflammatory applications of targeted low-intensity healing. If Father's 4th Circle burst healing addresses symptoms, could a sustained 1st Circle micro-application address the cycle? Like the difference between dumping a bucket of water on a fire vs. a steady stream on the embers.
Note: I am seven years old. Nobody will take any of this seriously for at least five more years. Plan accordingly.
I closed the notebook, hid it, and stared at the ceiling.
The stained glass cast colored patterns on the plaster — red, gold, blue. The room smelled like moonpetal from the garden. Somewhere in the house, I could hear the faint hum of the wards, steady and constant, like a heartbeat.
In my old life, I'd fallen asleep to the sound of traffic and the blue glow of a phone screen.
This was better.
This was so much better.