He had been thinking about how to start this for weeks.
The question wasn't whether to teach his family magic. He had decided that a long time ago, back in the cradle when the plan had just been survive and provide and protect, and protect had always meant eventually this. The question was how.
You couldn't just hand someone magic. There was a reason most people who had mana never learned to use it — the reservoir was there, banked and untouched, and without someone to show you the first step it just stayed that way forever. Arthur had had the advantage of a prior life full of light novels explaining the theory and a pool that had started responding to him before he could walk. His family had neither of those things.
He needed a method.
He started with Lyra.
Lyra was only a year older, perceptive in the way of someone who had spent years paying quiet attention, and she already knew that something about her brother was not quite what it seemed. She hadn't said it directly — Lyra rarely said things directly — but it was in the way she watched him, the way she filed things away with the patient certainty of someone who was waiting for the picture to become clear. Teaching her first made sense. She was ready, she was careful, and if the method worked, she would be a useful second teacher for whoever came after.
He found her in the garden on a cool morning, pulling weeds with Tsuki draped across her shoulders like she lived there.
'Sit down,' he said. 'I want to try something.'
Lyra looked at him. Then she looked at the weeds. Then she sat down on the low garden wall without complaint, which was how he knew she had been waiting for this.
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He had developed the diagnostic over the previous month.
The basic version was simple: he extended a thin thread of his own mana outward and let it brush gently against someone else's magical signature, the way you might press a finger lightly against a door to feel if there was warmth behind it. Most people he had tested it on — quietly, without telling them — gave back the same result: mana present, reservoir intact, completely dormant. Banked fire that had never been lit.
He pressed the thread gently toward Lyra and felt what was there.
Present. Intact. Not dormant in quite the way he had expected.
He paused and looked more carefully.
Most dormant reservoirs had a quality of stillness to them — quiet in the way a room was quiet when no one had been in it for a long time. Lyra's wasn't still. It wasn't active either, not burning, not drawing on itself. But it had a quality of readiness to it, like something that had been gently vibrating for a long time at a frequency too low to hear. And the signature had a color to it, or the magical equivalent of a color — a quality he was reaching for a word for and settling on: light. Clean and clear and slightly warm.
He had a theory about what that meant but he wasn't ready to say it yet.
'Hold still,' he said.
'I am holding still,' Lyra said.
He extended the thread further and let a tiny amount of his own mana flow along it — not into her, just adjacent to her reservoir, close enough that she would feel it.
Lyra went very still in a different way. Her eyes, which had been watching him with patient skepticism, changed.
'Oh,' she said quietly.
'You feel that?'
'It's...' She tilted her head slightly. Tsuki, disturbed by the motion, resettled with dignity. 'It's warm. Is that — is that yours?'
'Mine. You're feeling mana. Your own reservoir is right next to it. Can you feel the difference between them?'
She was quiet for a moment. Her eyes went slightly unfocused, the look of someone paying attention to something internal.
'Yours is warmer,' she said. 'Mine feels like — like it's been waiting for something.'
Arthur looked at his sister and thought: yes. That's exactly what it's been doing.
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The question was how to get from 'you can feel it' to 'you can use it.'
The traditional method, as far as he understood it from the fragments of information he had pieced together over seven years, was practice. Sit with your mana. Try to move it. Fail. Try again. Fail better. Eventually, over weeks or months, something clicked and a person produced their first effect. It was slow and miserable and most people gave up long before they got there.
He was not interested in slow and miserable.
He had been thinking about a different approach. He had the ability to build spells — to assemble magical instructions from the ground up, precise and specific, every component placed deliberately. He had done it thousands of times. He thought of it these days in terms of code: a spell was a program, a set of instructions that told the mana what to do and in what order, and when you cast a spell you were running the program.
Which meant, theoretically, that you could give someone a program they didn't know how to write themselves.
Not just explain it to them. Imprint it. Write the spell, complete and ready, and place it in someone's mind like a shortcut — so that all they had to do was reach for it and press the key and the spell ran on its own.
The method had one major risk: he would be placing something he had built directly into his sister's mind. If he made a mistake — if the spell had an error, if the mana ratios were off, if anything went wrong at the point of imprinting — the damage would not be to a practice target but to Lyra. He would not use his parallel minds for the construction. He would do this one himself, from start to finish, slowly, checking every component twice.
He had decided to start with the safest spell he knew.
Water ball.
The OG. The first spell in every beginner's handbook from every light novel he had ever read. Simple, harmless, useful, and the kind of spell that if it went sideways produced a wet person rather than anything worse. It was also a pure water element spell, and given what he suspected about Lyra's affinity, it seemed like the right place to begin.
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He built the spell by hand.
No parallel threads, no distributed construction, no offloading the detail work. Just Arthur, one mind, one piece at a time.
The mana draw first — how much, from where, at what rate. For a water ball the amount was small. He set the draw low, well within a beginner's reservoir, with a ceiling that would cut the spell off automatically if the pool dropped past a safe threshold. He was not interested in Lyra exhausting herself on her first attempt.
The element instruction next. Water. He wrote it as a precise specification rather than a general direction — the molecular structure, the temperature range, the surface tension, all of it defined in the syntax that spellwork used, which looked nothing like any coding language from his previous life but operated on similar logic. He went over this section three times. Water was gentle but it needed to be correct.
The form instruction: sphere, palm-sized, stable surface, hovering at a distance of approximately one hand-length from the fingertips. Simple shape, no rotation, no pressure behind it.
The trigger: a verbal incantation. He hadn't designed the word — he was leaving that to Lyra — but he built in the requirement for spoken intent as the activation condition, so the spell would only run when she deliberately called for it and not by accident.
He assembled the components. He checked the assembly. He checked it again.
Then he looked at what he had built and held it in his mind for a long moment, testing the weight of it, looking for anything wrong.
It was clean. Simple. Completely safe.
He turned to Lyra.
'I'm going to put something in your mind,' he said. 'It won't hurt. It'll feel like a dream, maybe. Don't panic.'
Lyra gave him the look she reserved for instructions that were easier said than followed. 'Maybe and don't panic. Hmm..'
'Haha it will be fine, I promise,' he confirmed.
He placed the spell gently into her consciousness, the way you set something fragile on a shelf.
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