The wind coming off the gorge carried the scent of wet pine and distant frost. I stood at the edge of the sheer cliff drop that bordered my territory, looking out over a sea of ancient green canopy that stretched to the horizon. Below, the river roared through the canyon, a silver thread cutting through grey stone. It was a dizzying drop, one that would make a regular man's stomach lurch, but my mind-sight mapped the jagged rocks and shifting winds perfectly in the back of my brain. I felt entirely grounded.
Turning away from the ledge, I walked back toward my home. It wasn't a primitive lean-to or a crude hide tent like the ones the First Men used. My past life had given me the blueprints for a proper log cabin. I had notched and fitted the heavy timbers myself, sealing the gaps with moss and clay, and building a sturdy, sloped roof to shed the heavy winter snows.
There was no door on the front entrance—just a wide, reinforced archway. As I stepped inside, a massive silver she-wolf trotted past my thighs, nudging my hip with her snout before heading out into the sunlight. Inside, three other adults lay stretched out across the smooth dirt floor, fast asleep. They came and went as they pleased, treating the cabin as an extension of the communal den.On the wooden table I had carved sat the remains of a roasted stag. Strictly speaking, I didn't need to eat anymore. The mutated font of vitality pulsing within my chest perfectly sustained my body, keeping my cells in a self-replenishing loop. Yet, I still hunted, and I still ate. Food is one of life's great pleasures. If the pack took down an elk for its hide and bones to forge new tools, we ate the meat.
A sudden, high-pitched yip broke my thoughts.
From beneath my heavy wooden bedframe, three tiny, uncoordinated bundles of fur came tumbling out, tripping over their own paws as they scrambled toward me. I knelt, chuckling as the wolf pups swarmed my knees. I extended my hands, and they immediately began aggressively licking my fingers and palms, their tiny tails wagging so hard their entire hindquarters shook.
It was an amusing sight, but the reason was profound. These pups barely even bothered with their mother's milk anymore. The font of satiety leaking from my skin was a hyper-concentrated, metaphysical nutrient. Just by licking my hands, they received a far superior source of life force than anything biology could provide, leaving them fatter, stronger, and more clear-eyed than any normal wild pup had a right to be.
As I watched them wrestle with my fingers, my mind drifted toward the nature of the ambient energy I was constantly absorbing and mutating. Over the last few years, my hyper-dense soul had allowed me to map the invisible currents of this world's magic. And I had formulated a distinct hypothesis.
Magic in this world wasn't a fixed, permanent constant. It felt fluid, shifting like the tides across vast eras. Right now, the land was practically drowning in raw, wild vitality—a golden age of growth and fertility. My mind-sight could literally feel the earth breathing.
But I knew it was a pure coincidence that I had been born right now. If I had triggered that emergency Synthesis in a different era, the result would have been entirely different. If the world's ambient magic eventually dried up or shifted into something colder, darker, and more barren, a child attempting what I did might end up a monster, or fail entirely. I didn't fully understand what kind of world I had been reborn into yet, but I knew one thing for certain: the rampant, overflowing life magic of this age would not last forever. I needed to make the most of it while the tide was high.
I paused as I recalled what I wanted to do this afternoon. Quickly, grabbing my fur coat again and walking to the large shed I made to store a large amount of ore.
The copper and tin veins running through the gorge had served me well enough for simple tools, but my mind-sight had mapped a far greater treasure hiding deep within the belly of the earth.
Connected to the very rear of the wolf pack's main sleeping cave was a narrow, jagged fissure in the bedrock. Over the last few seasons, while the pack slept, I had used my strength and a few crude bronze wedges to silently excavate the vein hidden inside. It wasn't copper. It was an incredibly rich, untouched deposit of native silver, webbed with glowing crystalline impurities that thrived on the ambient vitality of this early era.
It had taken months of grueling physical labor to haul the heavy, unrefined ore into my cabin. I hadn't smelted them into bars; instead, I had meticulously broken them down into raw, interconnected chunks, sorting them by weight, density, and volume until I had two completely identical, massive piles resting on my log floor.
I stood between the two heaps of silver, my heartbeat settling into a steady, intense rhythm. The golden warmth in my chest was roaring, a full decade's worth of magic reserves eager to be spent.
I extended my hands, burying my fingers deep into the cold, metallic chunks of both piles.
Synthesis.
The command tore through my soul, and the reservoir in my chest violently emptied. The drain was a physical weight that nearly brought me to my knees, forcing a low gasp from my throat as every drop of stored magic flooded down my arms. A blinding, silvery-white flash erupted within the cabin, so intense it bled through the wooden slats of the walls.
Under the absolute mathematics of 1 + 1 = 3, the two massive piles of silver did not merely melt and combine. The atomic geometry of the metal shattered, dissolved, and rebuilt itself into a completely impossible blueprint.
When the light died, the two heavy piles of raw ore were gone. In their place rested a single, massive, shimmering mass of a brand-new element.
I reached out and lifted the solid chunk with one hand. My dense muscles braced for a heavy strain, but I nearly threw it through the ceiling. It was impossibly light—featherweight compared to the raw silver it had been forged from—yet when I rapped my knuckles against the surface, it gave a clear, ringing chime that vibrated right through my ivory bones. It was harder than any steel from my past life, glowing with a faint, ethereal inner luminescence that chased away the shadows of the cabin.
"Mythril," I whispered into the quiet room, the modern word slipping naturally from my tongue.
I ran my fingers over the pristine, cold surface of the mythril mass. In an era where humanity was still fighting with soft, clunky bronze and brittle flint, I was sitting on a mountain of a legendary, near-weightless magic alloy. My magic was completely dry, locked behind another cold ten-year countdown.
But as I noticed the three wolf pups, who had followed me out of the house, tumbled over the mythril block, happily playing across its surface, I began to smile.
I could take things slow. I had ten years before the Synthesis ability would recharge. I could slowly experiment with this metal that looked so like the legendary magic metal imagined from Lord of the Rings.