Daniel

The lab had gone quiet again, save for the low crackle of a rune light flickering in the corner. Daniel sat cross-legged on the floor, sleeves rolled up, chalk dust on his fingers, glyph diagrams sketched all around him in a looping mess of intention and irritation.

Ethan was quiet, for once. Watching.

Daniel exhaled slowly, then reached for the next old component—a broken core array etched with burned sigils, clearly overloaded by emotional resonance.

He had the idea down: hardware, operating system, and then software for the overall program—and then somehow integrate the system into a person.

Daniel thought of all the manhwas and cultivation novels he’d read back home. Rarely is the system explained, let alone designed by the main character.

Why did I get such a sucky transmigration story?

Lame.

Ethan was still quiet. Watching.

Daniel set the cracked mana array aside and reached for the next relic—another failed barrier circuit, its spell matrix blackened from burnout.

“These all collapse for the same reason,” Daniel muttered. “No shielding. No buffering. No way to separate the spell’s structure from the caster’s state.”

“Spell gets contaminated.”

“Yes. The spell is the contamination. No wonder casting is such an advanced skill. The practitioner basically has to do everything from scratch, over and over again.”

Daniel leaned back, drawing three clean lines across the slate beside him. “We need to divide the process. I thought a single layer might be enough. I’m not so sure now. How about this—Intent. Structure. Execution. Each in its own layer.”

“That’s a casting sequence. How is that any different?”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“No. Like a computer system from my world,” Daniel corrected. “Hardware to create and carry the signal. A language to define it. And a runtime to make sure it behaves—can interact with the user, be changed, and debugged.”

He tapped each word as he wrote it: Hardware. Glyph Syntax. Software System.

He stood and began pacing slowly between the worktables, collecting fragments—burnt conduits, corroded gems, notes from Ethan’s college years written in overlapping glyph dialects and increasingly frenzied shorthand.

“First,” Daniel said, holding up a cracked core, “we need hardware. Something that can handle high mana throughput without reacting to every flicker of emotional charge.”

“Skyglass,” Ethan offered without hesitation. “From collapsed cloudstone. Doesn’t carry emotional imprint unless you force it. High-end noble families use it in long-range scrying tools. Stable. Cold. Rare.”

Daniel jotted it on the slate.

“Skyglass conduits. Emotionally inert. Perfect for base signal routing.”

He moved to the next tier.

“A language,” he said, half to himself. “Not glyphs layered on intuition. Not poetic metaphors. A clean, closed system—symbolic logic. Glyphs that represent intent, not channel it. Modular and stackable.”

He picked up Ethan’s old language binder—the one that looped back on itself in increasingly unreadable spirals.

“This was close,” he admitted. “But you encoded emotional tags into the root logic. It collapsed under contradiction.”

“I thought spellcasting had to feel something. I think this is what I was trying to do in my past life.”

Daniel shook his head. “Emotion is noise. This needs to be written like code… like a simple letter. Static. Silent. Repeatable. We’ll create a syntax from null-rune glyphs—clean forms with no resonance. Build a logic tree that can run without spiritual input.”

He tapped the middle of the diagram and labeled it:

GLA — Glyph Logic Assembly.

“Fine,” Ethan said. “You’ve got your ‘hardware.’ You’ve got your ‘code.’ How do you inject the commands or the intent you desire?”

Daniel drew the third tier slowly.

“This is the shell. The layer that takes the compiled logic and handles casting cleanly, safely, and in isolation. The spell engine. The OS.”

He paused. Then, quietly: “Silica.”

“Naming it already?”

Daniel smiled faintly. “Always name the thing you’re afraid to break.”

He added another note:

Silica – Their operating system. Modular. Resilient. Filters emotional bleed. Sandboxes intent.

“No one’s ever built anything like this,” Ethan said.

“No need here,” Daniel agreed. “Because they didn’t need it.”

He looked at the ruined spell fragments lining the bench. Tools for mages who’d grown up trusting chaos to behave.

“I do.”

He stepped back and looked over the slate.

No spell runes. No activation glyphs. Nothing that glowed.

Just architecture.

A map, one that represents not power but stability.

And now they knew what it would take to build it.