Daniel

The lab lights pulsed low and steady, the air thick with stored mana and old invention. Crystal strands hummed faintly beneath Daniel’s boots as he crossed to the main worktable—a wide, rune-etched slab surrounded by relics of half-completed theory.

He stood over a boxed array of spell matrix crystals, each one no bigger than a peach pit, their edges flickering with dormant power.

Daniel, with Ethan, of course, were up late trying to get a handle on their System-slash-Framework issue, the problem with the Princess’s handmaiden on the back burner for the moment.

Three weeks have already passed, and they are making slow, really slowly, CRAZY slow progress.

Part of that process had been Daniel learning about the formal application of mana the old-fashioned way.

It was freaking impossible; how anyone got anything done seemed crazy. Currently, he was applying what he learned to some experiments that Ethan said was “crucial” to his development.

“Start with the leftmost one,” Ethan’s voice murmured from the back of his mind. “That’s the anchor node. Everything else cascades from there.”

Daniel followed the instruction, aligning the squared crystal into the first socket. The silver-threaded runes around the socket flared in soft recognition.

“Why are they shaped like this?” Daniel muttered.

“Because some dead noble two centuries ago thought squares were divine geometry,” Ethan said. “The theory was ‘mana likes clean edges and right angles.’ That’s about as deep as the explanation goes.”

Daniel smirked, placing the rest of the matrix into its slots—one at a time, guided by Ethan’s fragmented memory and steady mental commentary. It was a simple array, or so Ethan claimed. A basic delayed-cast spell, designed to create a soft kinetic barrier in a controlled space.

“Simple,” Daniel echoed. “For magic.”

“Simple for idiots,” Ethan grumbled. “But still expensive. Every adjustment to the sequence burns out a thread. Every recast destabilizes the matrix. And if your intent so much as wavers, the spell doesn’t fizzle—it misfires.”

Daniel connected the final crystal and laid his hand over the array. He concentrated—not just on pushing mana, but shaping it. Wrapping it around a clear thought: protect, then dissolve.

The central crystal lit with a pulsing blue glow. A thin shimmer spread across the table, rising in a dome barely visible to the eye. It held for three seconds, then collapsed in on itself and vanished.

Daniel exhaled.

“Well,” Ethan said, “it didn’t explode. That’s progress.”

Daniel looked down at the array. The crystal tips were already dimming, flickering with the strain of single-use burnout.

“All that setup,” he said, “for one three-second bubble?”

“And that was a success,” Ethan replied. “Try modifying it and you’ll blow half the table into the wall. Ask me how I know.”

Daniel stared at the array for a long moment.

Daniel held up the gauntlet.

The runes were still faintly glowing—fractured in three places, but intact enough to hint at what had once been a stable enchantment.

“So walk me through it,” he said. “How do enchanted artifacts actually work?”

Ethan’s voice echoed from the back of his mind, steady. “You take a spiritually and mana-receptive material—metal, bone, refined jade, whatever—and embed it with a ritual-bound spell. It’s usually done with physical glyphwork, sometimes mental etching for high-tier artifacts. Then you infuse the structure with mana, seal it with intent, and bind the result to a specific user or bloodline or activation sequence.”

Daniel rotated the gauntlet in his hand. “So you’re writing a static function into an object. A single spell or set of spells. Pre-set. No real input variation.”

“Exactly. Once it’s sealed, the artifact behaves like a trigger. Activate it under the right conditions, it does the thing. No variation. No adaptation.”

“What happens if the user’s emotional state doesn’t match the binding?”

“It’s a closed system at that point so it’s more difficult to affect, but with strong enough emotion, the spell can misfire. Or it warps. Or, in a few memorable cases—explodes.”

Daniel set the gauntlet down. “So even enchanted gear runs on hard-coded spell effect. One spell. One alignment. One user, if you’re lucky, not all the time.”

“Pretty much.”

Daniel folded his arms. “And this is considered a high achievement?”

“Hey, there are practitioners that can fly. Can you fly?”

Daniel snorted.

Ethan continued. “Centuries of tradition, enchanted artifacts are symbols of legacy. Craftsmanship. Power. I mean they build the Magenet, and there are a lot of workarounds as you call them, but it works.”

Daniel gave the gauntlet one last glance, then turned back to the main table, where broken mana slates and fractured sigil arrays lay scattered across a half-cleaned schematic.

“Okay,” he said. “Now let me get this straight. All spellcasting—not just artifacts, but real-time casting too—is based on embedded commands, either mentally visualized or physically written with glyphs or circles, which we call arrays. All powered by raw mana, and all aligned to the caster’s emotional state and activation sequence/trigger?"

“Yes.”

“And the system has no optimization. No reusable parts. No formal interface. No error isolation.”

“I never thought about it like that, but… yeah.”

Daniel leaned against the table. “You’re describing magic-powered spaghetti code.”

“What’s spaghetti?”

He laughed. “It’s food in most circumstances. A type of noodle made with semolina wheat, water, a bit of salt, sometimes eggs. But I digress. What I’m referring to here is computer language. It’s what we called software too tangled to fix without starting over. Patches stacked on bugs stacked on duct tape.”

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“I don’t know what any of those words mean.”

“Let me back up,” Daniel continued, “I’m referring to something from my world. Computer language. We called it ‘software’—a kind of logic system we used to run machines. Spaghetti code was what we called it when things got too messy to fix—patches stacked on top of bugs stacked on top of temporary workarounds that should’ve never worked in the first place.”

A pause.

“Yeah…I know you’re trying to help….”

Daniel grinned. “Sorry. Yeah, that’s like you speaking Chinese and me talking slower and thinking it will help. Let me start at the beginning.”

He straightened and gestured toward the mana console. “You were trying to build a construct/machine to help with spellcasting, etc. We had these things called computers that were the same type of thing. They are machines built to process logic—yes/no, true/false, ones and zeroes. Binary code. Every program, every function, every complex instruction—it all boiled down to combinations of two states.”

“And people built things out of that?”

“In my world, people do everything with these machines,” Daniel said. “Participate in commerce. Government. War. They use it to connect with family and entertainment. Entire economies ran on it. But it only worked because the language we used—code—was structured. Modular. Measurable. Programmable. It could change and adapt with needs, wants, and movement in the marketplace.”

Ethan was quiet. Then, finally: “How do these computers work… with mana? Doesn’t the mana hurt the system because of inconsistency in flow, intent, and purity, or are all these computers connected to leylines in your world?”

Daniel smiled, a little crooked. “Not at all. Mainly because they don’t work on mana. We don't have mana where I am from.”

“Then how do they do anything? If there is no mana?”

“They run on electricity,” Daniel said. “Think of it like a controlled lightning pulse. Circuits act like channels—mana-less meridians that allow the movement of energy. That energy moves through them in precise patterns, flipping between on and off, yes and no. From that binary rhythm, we built everything.”

“So they’re like talisman arrays,” Ethan said slowly, “but without the intention—just the energetic pathways—the structure.”

“Cannot say for sure as I am not exactly sure how talisman arrays work. Intent wasn’t in the wire. It was in the programmable design. It is in the instruction or it’s supposed to be. Our instructions are written with the code and usually adjusted through interfaces that don’t mess with the underlying structure, which would consist of two parts: hardware, the actual materials that make the machine that gives it power and creates the components to bring the code to life, and software, or the actual language that allows the machine to do what it does.”

Daniel pointed to the crystal array. “I think the problem with your machines is that there is as much mysticism as there is engineering. Let me give you an example. This right here? It's a mess. Too many overlapping and incomplete instructions, no modular design, and when something breaks, you can’t fix one part without screwing up the rest. That’s the spaghetti code I was talking about. A tangled disaster that only works sort of halfway, and only because everyone’s afraid to touch it because they are afraid it will fail.”

Ethan made a thoughtful sound. “…So what you’re saying is, our entire magical system is a plate of noodles someone dropped, scooped back up, and enchanted?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that. From what I can see, your spell creation is trying to do everything without actually breaking down and compartmentalizing the task—it’s the structure, the fuel, the instructions, and conclusion/purpose all thrown together into this jumbled foundation. No wonder it breaks down.”

Ethan sounded almost annoyed. “…That’s so stupid it makes sense. It’s been what I have been trying to pinpoint in two lifetimes.”

Daniel laughed. “Welcome to system design.”

He pointed at the crystal network. “You’ve basically got a magic-powered computer system here, but it’s running on gut feelings, good vibes, and century-old prayers.”

Daniel stepped back, eyes scanning the shelves lining the room—racks of scrolls, incomplete constructs, cracked core fragments. “You realize what this means, right?”

“That the Empire runs on a spell system nobody understands? I’ve been yelling about that for years.”

Daniel shook his head. “No. It means you’ve accidentally built a distributed computing framework without any of the logic control that makes systems reliable. And you’ve embedded it into every level of governance while being completely vulnerable.”

Ethan had been unusually quiet ever since Daniel compared spell arrays to spaghetti code. The mental silence stretched as Daniel followed him deeper into the lab’s archive wing—a long corridor filled with wall-mounted crystalline consoles and filing arrays pulsing with residual mana.

Then Ethan spoke, low and sardonic.

“You want to see something stupid? Watch this.”

Daniel stopped at the main terminal—a waist-high pillar of black crystal, its surface dotted with glowing sigils. Ethan guided him mentally.

“Right node: communication interface. Left: archive retrieval. Center: encoded command trigger. It’s all hardwired into the Li estate’s private relay chamber.”

Daniel brushed his fingers across the runes. The console warmed, lines of blue light running through the carvings like veins. A shifting field of sigils flickered to life above the crystal, arranged in nested spirals and moving way too fast to be natural.

“What is this?”

“The state’s comm relay system. Everything goes through crystal network relay points scattered across imperial sectors. Long-range communication. Public registry updates. Bloodline-verified technique sharing. This is how the empire talks to itself.”

Daniel blinked.

“This is a… what? Public access magic terminal?”

“Sort of. Nobles have higher permissions. Commoners get filtered access. Scholars pay extra to license node links. Same core system, just throttled by class and clan.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes. “You’re describing… decentralized servers.”

“Decentralized what?”

Daniel frowned as another glyph flickered, pulsed, then collapsed into recursive static. “This is a distributed information system. You’ve basically built a magical internet. But there’s no OS. No user authentication. No intelligent indexing. Half of this thing is just glowing runes reacting to half-baked legacy input.”

He gestured at the tangled floating script. “It doesn’t make sense. How are messages categorized? How are they routed across cities, let alone provinces?”

Ethan hesitated. “That’s… actually a closely guarded secret.”

“You don’t know?”

“No one outside the imperial infrastructure really does,” Ethan admitted. “I know the Empire has a central hub somewhere—probably near the capital—where every message is supposedly routed or logged. But how they handle handoffs between devices, or control interference? Not a clue.”

“Yet it works.”

“But clearly there is a better way if we can build it,” Ethan’s voice was dry. “A lot of resources are dedicated to the system’s upkeep. I do remember that. Elite squads. Top-tier spell-weavers and writers, all of them dedicated to making this damn thing work. Half the Imperial registry and the Empire’s budget are used to keep this thing working.”

Daniel tapped one of the floating sigils again. The screen flickered—first dim, then pulsing with what looked like layered error glyphs and arcane recursion loops.

He took a step back. “This system isn’t sustainable as is.”

The silence stretched.

Then Daniel asked, “When the Demon Clan attacked… do you know what happened to this, what is called? Was it intact? Was it usable?”

Ethan was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Magenet.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Clever.”

“Shut up, it’s a great name. And no to your other question.”

“No, you don’t know? Or no, it wasn’t?”

“No, it wasn’t usable. At least—not everywhere. I remember during the war, there were entire regions that went dark. No updates. No recall logs. No way to coordinate. Just silence.”

Daniel’s expression hardened.

“Then it failed exactly when it was needed most.”

“Yes.”

Daniel folded his arms. “Then that’s what we fix.”

Ethan chuckled. “Among other things.”

Daniel stared at the console; “You know the thing is… You guys invented a magic-powered, fully decentralized, real-time messaging and data-sharing system… and no one taught it how to organize itself. If you think about it, it is impressive.”

“Maybe we lack vision to get it where it needs to be.”

Daniel paced slowly. “Or maybe magic gives you the ability to skip steps even when it doesn’t make sense. If your intention is clear enough. The thing is—this could be incredible. Peer-to-peer spell trading. Live collaborative technique research. Real-time battlefield messaging—all protected and encrypted. All of it is possible. And instead, it’s being used to send birthday congratulations and keep technique vaults locked behind clan sigils?”

Ethan didn’t answer right away—likely considering the words. “It’s what happens when power builds faster than philosophy.”

Daniel stopped pacing.

“If we’re going to build something new,” he said, “something better—something that doesn’t melt when you cast two thoughts at once—we’re going to need tools. Real ones. The ones you describe in your notebook. We will need it for both the Framework and the New, uh, Magenet technical specs as much as we can get. We will need everything you mentioned: the calibrated diagnostics protocols, spells for clean casting environments, those modified trace readers, the legacy scrapers. Input tools for glyph burning—the works.”

“I had those once,” Ethan said.

Daniel looked up.

Ethan’s voice was quieter now. “Imperial Academy. Deep storage wing. I kept backups in my private vault. Assuming the academy didn’t gut the place after they reassigned me.”

Daniel tilted his head. “You think it’s still there?”

“If it isn’t, we’ll make them regret touching it.”

Daniel smiled. “Field trip, then.”