The ink was still wet. The charcoal lines of my "Source Code" rune were jagged and ugly compared to the elegant calligraphy in the textbooks. It looked less like magic and more like a circuit diagram drawn by a caffeinated spider.
I pressed my finger to the input line.
"Hello World."
I pushed a single, microscopic droplet of mana into the ink.
FZZZT.
There was no ramp-up. No hum of gathering energy. No "entreating the spirits."
The parchment detonated into light.
It wasn't the soft, warm glow of a standard Lumen spell. It was a harsh, blinding, blue-white flare that seared the retina. It was the visual equivalent of a scream.
"Gah!" I threw my arm up over my eyes, stumbling back against the bookshelf.
The light flooded the dark reading room, casting stark, razor-sharp shadows against the walls. It was so intense I could feel the heat of the photons on my skin. It burned for exactly ten seconds—the duration I had coded into the loop—and then, instantly, cut to black.
I blinked, trying to clear the purple spots dancing in my vision. The room smelled of ozone and scorched paper.
I looked at the table. The parchment wasn't burned. The ink hadn't run. The spell had been executed with such terrifying efficiency that there was zero waste heat.
'By the Light...' Ronan's voice was a hushed whisper in my head. 'Murphy... how much mana did you use?'
"A drop," I wheezed, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "A speck. Maybe ten per cent of what the book says is required for a candlelight spell."
I grabbed the edge of the table, a manic, terrified grin splitting my face.
"It works," I whispered. "Ronan, it works. The standard runes... they're leaking. They're wasting ninety per cent of the energy on 'prayers' and 'gratitude.' It's like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on."
I grabbed the charcoal again. My hands were shaking, not from fear, but from the adrenaline of discovery.
"If I strip the brake..." I muttered, sketching rapidly on a fresh sheet. "If I optimise the flow... I can cast fireball for the cost of a matchstick. I can cast shields that don't break. I can rewrite the physics engine."
'You are dangerous,' Ronan said. There was no judgment in his tone, only a profound, dawning realisation of what we had just unlocked. 'You have turned magic into math.'
"Not math," I corrected, staring at the raw logic gates of the spell. "Code. And I'm the only hacker in the server."
I looked at the mountain of books. They weren't insurmountable tomes of wisdom anymore. They were just buggy software waiting to be patched.
"We need to go deeper," I said, my eyes feverish. "I need to rewrite the defensive wards. I need to optimise the kinetic output. I need to—"
'Murphy,' Ronan interrupted. His voice was calm, cutting through my mania. 'You have the key to the library. You have the method. But while you build the mind, we are leaving the body unguarded.'
I paused, the charcoal hovering over the paper. "What?"
'You are entering a fugue state,' Ronan diagnosed. 'You are going to be in this room for days, running simulations. But we have an ally outside who thinks we are just reading history books. He needs to know the scope of the operation.'
'Elrend,' I realised.
'I need to speak with him,' Ronan said. 'Face to face. Without you distracted by the code.'
I hesitated. Giving up control still felt like peeling off a layer of skin. But the logic held. I was too wired to talk diplomacy.
"Fine," I said, reaching for the Art. "Take a Clone. I'll stay here and keep the engine running."
I pushed a chunk of mana—efficient, clean mana—into the space beside me.
Pop.
A Ronan-Clone materialised. He wasn't wearing my slouch or my manic grin. He stood tall, his grey cloak hanging like a military uniform. He nodded to me once.
"Don't blow us up," the Clone said.
"No promises," I replied, already turning back to the Source Code.
The Ronan-Clone slipped out of the reading room and into the silent, vaulted corridor of the Great Library.
I moved with purpose. The air was cool and still, heavy with the scent of old paper. I tracked the faint signature of a living soul to the service entrance.
Master Elrend was standing guard in the shadows of the vestibule, his hand resting lightly on the pommel of his sword. He didn't startle when I approached; his eyes simply slid toward me, tracking the movement.
"You're loud," Elrend noted dryly. "For a ghost."
"The boy is excited," I said, my voice echoing slightly in the stone space. "He has found... a leverage point."
Elrend raised an eyebrow. "Is he reading?"
"He is rewriting," I corrected. "But that is not why I am here."
I gestured to the heavy iron door. "Is the perimeter secure?"
"For now."
"I need privacy, Lieutenant. Absolute privacy."
Elrend studied my face. He saw the gravity in my expression. He reached into his robe and produced a small, dense stone carved from black obsidian—a Silence Stone. He placed it on the floor and tapped it with his boot.
Hum.
A sphere of dull grey distortion expanded around us, swallowing the ambient noise of the library. The world outside the bubble became muted and distant.
"We are dark," Elrend said. "Speak."
I sat down on a wooden crate, motioning for him to do the same. Elrend sat, his posture relaxing but his readiness remaining.
"You asked me who was with me," I began. "You asked about the body."
"I did," Elrend said. "It is a young body. Unscarred. But the eyes... they are old. And they are frightened."
"The body belongs to Murphy," I said. "But Murphy... is not what you think he is."
I took a breath. This was the dangerous part. The truth that could shatter the vessel if spoken too loudly.
"I spent a thousand years in the Void, Elrend. A thousand years of torture. Of dying and being reborn only to die again. The pain was... absolute."
Elrend winced. He knew the cost of war, but he couldn't imagine the cost of eternity.
"My mind," I continued softly, "could not hold it. The memories of the fire, the trenches, the starvation... they would have unmade me. I would have become a broken thing, useless to the world."
I tapped my own chest.
"So, I created a shield."
Elrend narrowed his eyes. "A shield?"
"I took the trauma," I explained. "I took the fear, the survival instinct, the paranoia... and I walled it off. I built a consciousness out of the scar tissue to bear the weight so that I could sleep."
Elrend's eyes widened. "The boy..."
"Murphy is the Scar," I whispered. "He is literally me, Elrend. He is the part of my soul that endured hell while the rest of me hibernated. He does not remember ever being me, yet he remembers every death. He remembers every scream. He believes he is a reincarnated boy from another world because that was the lie I needed him to believe to function."
I looked Elrend dead in the eye.
"He does not know. He believes he is the Original. He believes I am the passenger. And he must never know."
Elrend was silent for a long time. He looked at the library door, where the original body was currently reinventing magic.
"If he finds out..." Elrend murmured.
"He dissolves," I said simply. "Or he shatters. He defines himself by his struggle. If he learns that his struggle was just... a mechanism to protect me? It would likely destroy him."
Elrend let out a long, slow breath. He ran a hand through his silver hair.
"You possess a weapon made of your own suffering," Elrend said, his voice filled with a mix of horror and awe. "And you let it walk around thinking it is a boy."
"He is a boy," I defended fiercely. "He has a heart. He has humour. He has an incredible will to live that rivals the gods. He is my partner, Elrend. And I will protect his reality with everything, even my life."
Elrend nodded slowly. He reached out and gripped my forearm—the warrior's clasp.
"I swear it," Elrend said, his voice grave. "The secret stays in the dark. The boy is real to me."
He released me, leaning back against the wall, but his eyes remained sharp. "But you are taking risks, Commander. Breaking into the Library? Why the sudden urgency?"
"Because the walls are closing in," I said, my voice dropping. "Pontiff Vane has Murphy's scent. He knows the boy is an anomaly. He wants to exterminate him and, by proxy, me. If the Inquisition doesn't destroy us... the other thing will."
Elrend stiffened. "The other thing?"
"The Hunger," I whispered. "It might already be here, Elrend. Inside the City. We believe we have seen the scouts."
Elrend's face went pale, then hard as granite.
I nodded. "They are gearing up for something big. Our information said we have six months. Now closer to five, but I believe the timeline has moved up. They must have gotten word that a warning has been sounded."
Elrend let out a sharp breath, his hand drifting to his sword. "So you are arming yourselves."
"With knowledge," I explained. "Murphy has discovered a flaw in the modern Runic syntax. He is stripping the spells down to their base logic. And he is using the Clones to accelerate the learning process."
"Accelerate how?"
"A shared memory," I said. "We summon twelve clones. Each reads a different book. When they dispel, the memories flood back to the host. He learns twelve hours of theory in sixty minutes."
Elrend paused. He looked at the Silence Stone. He looked at his sword.
A slow, grim smile began to spread across his face. It wasn't the smile of a teacher. It was the smile of a Drill Sergeant who had just realised he had an infinite supply of recruits.
"He retains the memory?" Elrend asked sharply. "The experience?"
"Yes," I said. "It is disorienting, but effective."
"And you are using this miracle..." Elrend stood up, pacing the small circle of silence. "...to read books?"
I blinked. "We need the knowledge, Lieutenant. We need to understand the magic."
"The magic is a tool," Elrend scoffed. "But the boy? Murphy? I watched him in the arena. He fights like a frightened rat. He has instincts, yes, but he has no foundation. No muscle memory."
He stopped, turning to face me.
"If he can learn a year of history in an hour by remembering what a clone did..." Elrend's eyes glittered with a dangerous light. "...then he can learn a lifetime of swordplay the same way."
I stared at him. The implication hit me like a physical blow.
We had been using the clones as batteries and scholars. But Elrend saw them as sparring partners. Disposable, infinite sparring partners who could practice a form a thousand times in a single afternoon and transfer that perfection instantly to the host.
"You want to train him," I realised.
"I want to forge him," Elrend corrected, resting his hand on his sword. "The Hunger is coming, Commander. Books won't stop it. But a blade? A blade held by a man with ten thousand hours of practice compressed into a week?"
Elrend drew his sword an inch from the scabbard. The steel sang in the silence.
"Bring the boy to the arena tomorrow night," Elrend commanded. "It is time Murphy learned to fight."