The modified version I was working toward would be far more complicated than the simple mana grip I had already drafted. It would need to begin as at least a third circle, and it would have to be concentric so that I could disengage it at will.

  I still wanted to be able to see the world the way wizards did. I refused to completely surrender the ability to see my new favorite color just for the sake of seeing magic. I had seen mana often enough in my past life. What I wanted now was control. I wanted to decide how much I saw, and when.

  I started with a Tessian's inverse rune, a five?quarters turned circle with a half curl running in the opposite direction. It was reversed from its conventional form, deliberately so. This was not meant to override my natural vision, but to adapt it, shifting my perception from mundane sight to mana sight by placing an array into my eye rather than altering the irises themselves.

  There would be drawbacks. When active, my vision would suffer. Depth and clarity would be compromised. But I would be able to see mana only when I chose to activate it.

  From there, I pulled the design downward and attempted to integrate an axiom transitory rune.

  I stopped almost immediately.

  Something was wrong.

  I redrew the line, then paused again. The Kellmor transitory rune did not fit how I had thought. Worse, I could see the consequence clearly now. The overlap would force the default state into total blindness once applied. I still needed to see the world, even if imperfectly. That rune would not allow it.

  I abandoned it and instead applied Zette’s third?half rune, a mark broken into three short dashes designed to interrupt flow depending on state. Rather than snapping my vision from one mode to another, it would allow a transition.

  The shift would be jarring, but workable.

  It would give me three states of sight: mundane, magical, and something in between. I was not entirely sure what that middle state would do. It might prove utterly useless. It might not. Either way, the first and last states would function exactly as intended.

  With that section resolved, I turned to the next problem: mana sourcing.

  Yes, the concept of runes generally relied on drawing power from the ambient mana around them. That was standard. The issue here was Tessian’s inverse rune. Every line in it faced inward. Instead of reaching outward to the environment first, it would always try to pull mana from the point of contact before anything else.

  I needed a draw rune and a stabilization rune to hold the system together.

  That was where I stalled.

  I had thought about this configuration countless times, but I had never tried to draft it fully. Doing so now, it became painfully clear that my knowledge of runic tattooing was insufficient for the solution I wanted. Anything I placed here using standard conventions would eventually try to drain mana directly from my head.

  Myrda saw me stalling, trying to figure out what to do. She leaned over my shoulder and pointed at the runes. “What is it exactly you’re trying to do here?”

  I looked up at her. “This section controls the flow of mana into my eyes so that it becomes color. This part shifts the state of my vision. But the stabilization rune I need doesn’t fit any convention I know.”

  I gestured at the broken draft. “Runic tattoos are more permanent than spells. This needs to be organic, adaptable, and reversible. If I do this wrong, it will try to pull mana straight out of my brain.”

  She studied the parchment for a moment, then said, “What about using a Ra rune instead?”

  I frowned. “A Ra rune? That’s for external constructs only. As far as I know, it would…”

  I stopped.

  I looked back down at the draft and reconsidered what she had said.

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  The Ra rune was nothing more than a straight line that cut through existing structure and forced everything outward. It would not bind the circuit to my eye directly but it would overlay it .

  It would form a magical construct layered over my eye. When inactive, it would be gone. When active, it would exist as an external overlay, removable by dispel magic or similar effects.

  It would be inefficient in combat.

  But it would work.

  The Ra rune was inherently stable because it acted as an override. By its nature, it told the circuit that there was nothing in the direction it was intended to search, forcing it to abandon that search path entirely and look elsewhere first. That prevented the mana construct from cannibalizing itself by pulling inward before it ever checked the ambient field.

  The danger, however, ran both ways. If a rune array was oriented too heavily inward-facing, the override would cancel the internal search entirely. If it was oriented outward-facing, it would do the opposite, suppressing external draw and forcing the system to look only within. Ra runes were useful precisely because of that blunt authority, and dangerous for the same reason. Most functional systems required both search patterns to operate correctly.

  In this case, the imbalance worked in my favor. I did not need to look inward for mana. There was nothing there to find. I no longer had mana channels to examine or reserves to draw from. For a true wizard, one whose sight I was loosely mimicking, this configuration would have been completely backward, even catastrophic. For me, it was simply pragmatic.

  In a strange twist, it would be an internal mark that only functioned externally.

  I slowly smiled.

  Once I saw it, the rest of the structure began to unfold almost on its own.

  If the Ra rune served as the boundary layer, then everything else could be built as a suspended lattice rather than a bound circuit. Instead of anchoring the enchantment to my optic nerves or the mana channels behind my eyes, the array would float just off the surface, keyed to my perception rather than my flesh. That distinction mattered more than most people ever realized.

  I began sketching again, adding secondary containment lines that would never touch the core. Thin stabilizers, etched as harmonic echoes rather than physical connections, designed to resonate with the Ra rune without feeding into it directly. Each echo had to be offset by a fraction of a degree to prevent sympathetic feedback.

  The mana draw problem solved itself once I stopped thinking in terms of intake and started thinking in terms of pressure. Instead of pulling mana inward, the array would equalize against the ambient field, bleeding excess through micro-vents formed by incomplete sigils. They were not flaws. They were intentional inefficiencies, places where mana could escape safely instead of accumulating.

  I layered in a dampening glyph based on old academic warding principles; one normally used to keep spell matrices from collapsing under their own complexity. Here, it would act as a governor, limiting how quickly the visual state could shift.

  The middle state still bothered me. A partially translated visual field would produce artifacts, false colors, depth distortions, maybe even phantom structures where mana density spiked. But those artifacts could be useful. Enchanters learned more from mistakes than from clean lines. Seeing the seams of reality, even imperfectly, was better than seeing nothing at all.

  I added one final element, almost as an afterthought. A mnemonic knot woven into the outermost ring, keyed to intent rather than command. The array would activate because I wanted it to, and shut down the same way. Crude, by formal standards, but elegant in practice.

  When I finally leaned back, the parchment was dense with lines, curves, breaks, and symbols layered atop one another in controlled chaos.

  Myrda let out a low whistle behind me. “That’s… a lot,” she said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “And that’s just one eye.”

  Myrda was quiet for a moment longer, then she frowned slightly and tapped the parchment with one finger. “Why don’t you just do it for both?”

  I blinked, then leaned back in my chair. “Mostly because when I originally planned this,” I said slowly, “I told you the story about the vial. Why it only had three drops.”

  She laughed softly. “But you have enough mana now,” she said. “Why not just do it? I’m willing to do a fourth mark if it means you’ll be better at what you’re trying to do. And it’s not like Greta is going to yell at you any less for having two instead of one.”

  I thought about that for a moment, really thought about it. Then I nodded. “Why not. It’s the same rune on the other side. I should be able to handle that.”

  “Do you want me to get the chalk?” she asked.

  “No, no, no,” I said quickly. “Do we have any dirt?”

  “Dirt?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Dirt is a much better medium for mana conduction than chalk.”

  “Oh,” she said, clearly surprised. “I didn’t know that.” She shook her head. “All right. I’ll be right back.”

  She left the room, and I waited, using the time to review the designs once more. I refined a few lines, adjusted a curve here and there, and finalized the drafts while everything was still fresh in my mind.

  It was only a few minutes before she returned with a handful of dirt.

  “Do we have a sieve in here?” I asked.

  She glanced around. “I’m pretty sure I can find one.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Can you run the dirt through it? We want actual dirt, not just earth.”

  “Yeah, I can do that.” She nodded.

  She moved past my table, reached up to a high shelf, pulled down a chest, and began rummaging through it. After a moment, she produced what looked like old prospecting equipment. I wasn’t entirely sure what it had originally been used for, but it included a sieve.

  She set up at another table and began working, carefully separating out the debris until what remained was clean, fine dirt, exactly what I needed.