The golden barrier enveloping the western wing of the Draven estate fractured the afternoon sun into scattered prisms. To anyone else, it was a marvel of defensive magic. To Neo, it was just the ceiling of a very expensive cage.
Ever since the incident that pulverized his bedroom wall, his parents had turned his daily life into a suffocating security state. Cassian had deployed a squadron of elite knights to patrol the perimeter, and Sylvia had woven a permanent tracking spell into his boots.
But Neo wasn't complaining. Outwardly, he was playing the long game.
Currently, he sat on the carpet of the sunroom, wrestling with a thick woolen blanket three times his size. Across the room, Sylvia reclined on a chaise lounge. Her eyes were closed, a faint, exhausted pallor clinging to her features. The pregnancy was still in its early stages, but the silent drain on her vast magical reserves was already taking a visible toll.
He managed to bundle the heavy wool together. Dragging it across the floor with the limited, frustrating physical strength of a five-year-old body, he clumsily draped it over his mother's lap.
Sylvia stirred. Her eyes fluttered open, and a tender smile broke through her exhaustion when she saw him standing there, panting slightly from the exertion.
"Thank you, my sweet boy," Sylvia murmured, reaching out to gently stroke his white hair.
"You're taking such good care of Mama today."
"You need to stay warm," Neo said, perfectly pitching his voice to an innocent, childlike frequency.
"The baby needs to be warm too."
Sylvia let out a quiet, emotional laugh, kissing his forehead.
"You are going to be the most wonderful big brother."
Neo leaned against her, offering a gummy smile. Internally, he remained entirely detached.
It felt manipulative, playing the cute card so aggressively, but it was a tactical necessity. He needed to lower their guard. He needed Cassian and Sylvia to look at him and see a harmless child, not an anomaly quietly preparing to derail the fate of the entire world.
He sat there for another half hour, humming a quiet lullaby, until Sylvia's breathing finally evened out into a deep sleep.
The moment he was certain she was unconscious, his innocent smile vanished. His face smoothed into a mask of pure, calculating focus.
Slipping off the lounge, his bare feet made no sound against the rug. He crept to the edge of the sunroom and peeked into the hallway. Two heavily armored knights stood at the far end, distracted by a quiet conversation.
Neo dropped to his hands and knees. He had quickly realized that the visual field of a towering elite knight wearing a restrictive metal helmet was notoriously poor regarding anything below their waistline. Keeping perfectly flush against the shadows of the marble pillars, he scuttled down the corridor. He held his breath as he passed within a few feet of the guards, slipping silently through an ajar door that led to the servants' quarters.
From there, navigating the estate was simple. The servants were too frantic with evening preparations to notice a tiny blur darting between the laundry carts.
Breaching the backdoor of the kitchens, Neo stepped out into the crisp afternoon air and moved with practiced urgency. He headed straight for the most overgrown section of the estate—a tangled mass of dense, thorny briars pressed against the outer stone wall. It was a known blind spot in the patrol routes. Nobody ever came back here because the thorns were sharp, and there was absolutely nothing of value to protect.
Except for a boy with a death wish and a magical amplifier.
Neo squeezed through a narrow gap in the vines, wincing as a stray thorn sliced into his shoulder, and stepped into a small, hollowed-out clearing in the center of the bushes.
He sat down cross-legged on the damp earth. Reaching into his pocket, his fingers brushed against cold wood.
'Let's try this again. Without bringing down the manor.'
He pulled out the Frost-Vein Core. The jagged obsidian pulsed with a hypnotic light, instantly sending a freezing, electric chill up his arm.
Offensive magic was completely off the table. He couldn't practice without drawing the attention of every knight in a five-mile radius. His raw firepower was already devastating; what he severely lacked was a vessel capable of handling it. He needed a deeper reservoir, not a bigger weapon.
Increasing capacity was traditionally a grueling, decades-long process. Mages expanded their cores by draining themselves to the point of exhaustion, stretching the boundaries millimeter by millimeter over years of practice. It was like tearing muscle fibers to build mass, carrying the constant risk of permanent spiritual damage.
But Neo had a catalyst.
He closed his eyes, steadying his breathing, and sank inward.
The familiar, pitch-black void of his inner Sanctum greeted him. In the center of the darkness, his pure, perfectly condensed core spun lazily like a trapped star.
Gripping the black stone tightly in his physical hand, a torrent of wild, freezing energy flooded into his mind. It was sharp, dense, and overwhelmingly cold. Instead of funneling that energy outward into a spell, Neo gritted his teeth and forced the violent torrent directly into his own spinning core.
The pressure skyrocketed instantly.
A sharp, stabbing agony blossomed in his gut. He winced, sweat beading on his forehead as his tiny frame trembled.
'Hold it,' he commanded himself, his mental voice echoing in the dark.
He couldn't just let the energy sit there. He forced it to push against the inner walls of his mana core, using his adult intellect and sheer willpower to maintain absolute control. He packed the freezing energy tightly against his existing boundaries, compressing it until it felt like he had swallowed a block of ice that was actively trying to tear him apart from the inside out.
But the catalyst had a secondary property. As the immense pressure created microscopic tears in the walls of his core, the chilling frost of the stone immediately sealed and soothed the damage.
Break, freeze, heal. Expand.
Neo lost all sense of time. He sat perfectly still in the dirt clearing, consumed by the cycle of internal destruction and rapid creation. The agonizing pain slowly morphed into a dull, heavy ache, and then into a profound sense of lightness.
He could literally feel the walls of his internal reservoir pushing outward, carving out a deeper, darker abyss to hold his magic.
When the stabbing pain finally flared up again, signaling that his physical body had reached its absolute limit, Neo severed the connection.
He opened his eyes, gasping for a huge lungful of air, and slumped forward into the dirt. His body felt leaden, entirely drained of stamina, but his center felt impossibly vast.
A faintly familiar chime rang in his mind.
[ Mana Capacity expanded. ]
A tired, satisfied smirk touched his lips. The growth he had achieved in a single afternoon would have taken an average mage months of grueling meditation. The synergy between his pristine core and the glacial catalyst was terrifyingly efficient.
'I really am a monster,' he thought, dismissing the prompt.
Tucking the stone safely away, Neo crawled back through the thorny gap.
As he navigated the shadows of the estate, slipping past a passing gardener, his mind drifted to the looming future. The Emperor was scheming. The Royal Family was a threat. The original protagonist was out there somewhere, oblivious to his own destiny.
The nightmare hadn't begun yet. The world was still in its prologue.
But as Neo felt the massive, expanded reservoir of power humming quietly in his chest, he knew one thing for certain. When the plot finally came to kill him, he wasn't going to be a stepping stone.
He was going to be the avalanche.