Though he would have preferred a less ridiculous name, calling the local flavor of the Mana Field Arcane was not far from the truth.

  It was shifting, ever-obscuring, and more importantly, capable of producing unexpected results, giving weak spells new strength and transforming temporary magics into more permanent ones.

  It was exactly the extra quality he needed to build his magical computer, the spark that would bring together earthly science and impossible magic into a unified whole.

  Orion was tempted to start the process right then. He didn’t have much time, especially with how busy the next few days would be. And impressing upon Elder Yue that he wasn’t just a precocious kid but an actual asset worth protecting was even more critical, especially with the High Council meeting they’d been called to.

  But this kind of magical work required more than just peace and quiet. Once he began, he had to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t be interrupted, so he went looking for his mother.

  The embassy enveloped him, with space stretching and shifting in impossible ways, but this time it didn’t block his way. Instead, it led him straight to Asteria, who was deep in discussion with an older witch, who bore a striking resemblance to Margareth, the Magistra in charge of Last Thaw.

  “That is all that will happen, dear. A lot of posturing by old men, and some attempts to throw you off balance by a young firebrand. This isn’t the kind of thing anyone wants repeated, so they will try to make everyone forget it once they have made sure they look like they’re handling it.”

  Even her voice had the same croaky quality as Margareth's, but her eyes were softer, and the way she held his mother’s hand made him think she was a much nicer woman than her relative.

  “Oh, moonbeam, what can I help you with?” Asteria asked, noticing his arrival.

  Orion inclined his head in greeting toward the old woman, earning a gentle smile back, before he turned to answer the question. “I’m close to a breakthrough, but I need a place where I can work without being disturbed.”

  Knowing she would understand what he truly meant, that he wasn’t worried about people coming in uninvited, but rather about mana fluctuations or external magic affecting his work, Orion didn’t add more.

  Asteria nodded, eyes shining brightly with pride. “I can ask around; I’m sure a training room can be reserved for your use.”

  She started to move, but the old witch beside her stopped her with a hand, “If it’s an experiment the likes that would catch the Elder’s attention you seek to complete, then you’ll need state-of-the-art equipment. Follow me.”

  She suddenly stood, her warm eyes taking on an assessing quality that made Orion want to tug at his clothes to make sure they were in the right place.

  “Magistra Kissea, there is no need,” Asteria said as she got up to follow, but the old woman shook her head.

  “No, it’s no trouble. I know that the task placed on your son isn't easy, and while I can't assist in the practice, this much is perfectly acceptable," Kissea said, regarding the younger witch with affection.

  Clearly, there was some history there, but that shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d known his mother had spent many years as Elder Yue’s apprentice, which meant she had to know just about everyone in her retinue, especially considering how long-lived witches could be.

  Following the woman out of the room, he felt glad he’d asked. Setting up the right protections around his room wasn’t beyond his skills, especially since he had some practice now, having refined his lab over the years, but it would have taken more time than he had.

  I’ll probably still need to make some adjustments. Regular spellwork isn't affected by taint on the mana field, but you can feel the hum of wards from here. I don't want that to cause strange mutations in my computer.

  As he had come to realize was the norm, space warped oddly around them. The hallways clustered together, significantly shortening their route. A quick glance at his companions revealed they felt no surprise, indicating this was either a familiar characteristic of the embassy or, more probably, an effect favored by Elder Yue.

  The Sanctum didn’t have that, but it held a hundred times more people than this building, including many non-magicals.

  Before he knew it, they were standing in front of a heavy steel door, reinforced by what appeared to be several powerful runes.

  Observing their flow with [Verification Principle], Orion could tell they were meant to serve as both filters and barriers, only letting undirected mana pass through, while containing any internal magic.

  They reminded him of the wards he’d seen around Elder Morliana’s class, which told him they had to be of very high quality indeed.

  “Here,” the old witch said, running her finger over the door’s latch and unlocking it. “No one shall disturb you while you work. Take your time.”

  There was no offer to help him, but Orion hadn’t expected any. Elder Yue had given him a task, to prove his worth, and no one in the embassy would dare interfere with it.

  It also meant he probably wouldn’t be sabotaged, which was nice, but he wouldn’t trust the room until he had thoroughly checked it.

  Saying his goodbyes to his mother, Orion walked in and closed the door behind him, taking a moment to breathe.

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  He always got strangely nervous when it was time to turn theory into practice, despite his repeated successes over the last few years. The shadow of his past life simply wouldn’t fade until he’d truly understood everything that had gone wrong that day, and such high concepts were still far from his grasp.

  Shaking his head, he refocused, dropped his bag on the marble table in the corner of the room, and took a moment to explore.

  Describing it as a laboratory wouldn’t have been wrong, but only in a technical sense. It was clearly a workspace designed to keep outside influence at bay, which fit the broadest possible description, but the absence of specialized equipment made it difficult to truly consider it a lab.

  That wasn’t to say there was nothing useful inside. No, the numerous ampoules, cauldrons, knives, and tools all indicated this was a place that saw a lot of use, but it just wasn’t anything Orion would have considered lab equipment.

  Fortunately, he didn't need anything more. He had everything he required on himself.

  Opening his latest journal, which contained the best model he had been able to develop, he flicked to the schematic section and laid the notebook open beside a tray of thumb-sized crystals.

  Most were pale citrine or smoky quartz, cheap practice pieces he could afford to sacrifice. Only one, glowing with a deep carmine, was the blood crystal, the core around which the entire system would revolve.

  The first step was setting up the environment. Orion cleared the marble table with a sweep of his hand, then unrolled a spool of silverite-threaded conductive cloth he’d bought in Silverpeak on a whim.

  He draped it over the entire surface, smoothing out wrinkles. It would help absorb any extra fluctuations, giving the crystals more stability until the model could fully form.

  Four copper nails, each engraved with a depolarization sigil, held the corners in place, and a low hum filled the room as the veil absorbed some mana at his command.

  Next, he assembled the laser focusing device: a compact chassis scavenged from a jewelry cutter and rebuilt so many times that it no longer resembled the original. The focusing lens, taken from the spectroscope in his lab, rested on an articulated spine of brass joints.

  Orion manually connected it to the Mana Field, and a delicate violet beam suddenly appeared, carving a point of light on the far wall. He turned the intensity dial down to almost zero, as anything higher would cut straight through stone.

  Finished with the setup, he placed the first citrine shard in a gimbal at eye level and exhaled. The model in his notebook was an ecosystem composed of thirty-seven macro-layers, each divided into hundreds of micro-traces, interconnected computation, resonance indicators, error-handling programs, and even a simple form of self-optimization.

  Like a transformer stack, with token pathways, attention heads, and positional encodings, but built with mana instead of pure math.

  He angled the laser, brushed his fingertips against the crystal to anchor its intent to his, and began. The beam cut only microns deep, but that was all he needed.

  The first layer was simple: the token preprocessor, a ring of resonant glyphs that broke down incoming mana into standardized quanta he defined as a tenth of the amount required for a Torchlight spell.

  But halfway through the second layer, the citrine screeched, as hairline cracks appeared as internal stress exceeded its limits. He quenched the beam with a frown.

  Too fast, I need to generate less heat.

  For the second shard, he adjusted the frequency, making the beam flicker quickly in a staccato pattern that cut the heat buildup in half.

  Better, but still not enough. He finished three layers before the crystal shattered into sparkling dust, recording the parameters in the margin of his notebook, careful not to miss anything [Verification Principle] showed him.

  Hours passed, marked by shattering pops and the patter of fragments hitting the cloth. With each failure, his adjustments became more precise, evolving into finer tweaks, sub-micron refinements, and active cooling spells that warded off excess heat, converting it into tiny snowflakes on the far side of the shard.

  Finally, on the twelfth attempt, he reached layer thirteen, where the model's intellect would reside, before the crystal guttered out, unable to channel the mana it had started to attract.

  I feel like I should be shouting “Eureka!”, but this is stuff I already knew.

  That was enough proof of concept. He powered down the laser, flexed his fingers that had gone numb, and turned to the blood crystal.

  Carefully seating it in the gimbal, Orion double-checked its alignment with the local field and, almost reverently, tightened the retaining clasps.

  The beam activated on his command. Channels opened like rivers through red stone, and the crystal absorbed the ambient Arcane as if it had been starving. The preprocessor ring flashed, stabilized, and the first layer was complete, much faster than on a regular crystal.

  Layer two, three, four. He fell into a rhythm, tracing, pausing to check he was keeping the proper alignment, cooling his tools, and always verifying his work before moving on.

  Each loop reinforced the one below, as glyphs stacked in multidimensional harmony. Mana began to circulate, drawn in by the emerging computational lattice, with each quanta fitting smoothly into the inner register.

  By the tenth layer, he could feel the crystal at work. Errant mana flickered through half-finished conduits, creating fleeting sparks of sympathetic magic, failing to produce real spells only because he didn’t give it enough purpose.

  Orion adjusted his posture, rolled his shoulders, and pushed on.

  Layer nineteen introduced the reflexive optimizer, the sub-schema that allowed the crystal to fix inefficiencies in real-time. He included guardrails because a self-optimizing spell could spiral into runaway recursion, just as an AI model might overfit noise until it hallucinated patterns from static.

  I really don’t want to be the first to create true artificial intelligence and grant it access to unlimited power.

  As he carved, he began to sense some resistance: the blood crystal’s matrix was subtly shifting, as if it favored a different topology.

  After a moment of frantic checking, he realized that it was its self-healing feature that was realigning some glyph edges and smoothing out imperfections.

  This was positive but risky, as too much autonomy could warp its data pathways into unusable forms. He lowered the mana input and allowed the changes to slow down, aiming to make the system more flexible instead of making it brittle and overly perfect.

  The crystal thrummed, accepted the compromise, and grew steadier. Arcane Mana flowed more freely through it now, as the ambient hum of the room grew into a soft roar in his ears.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead. He had been working for hours, but the toughest part, the inference stack, with its ten concentric layers of decision logic and spell-routing, that would turn the crystal's raw intent into active magic, was still to come.

  This was what would truly make his focus greater than any before it.

  He carved attentional gates, forming tiny trapezoids intersecting at non-Euclidean angles, each a conditional modifier waiting to be weighted by incoming mana signatures. He wove feed-forward couplings, rolled residual glyphs into place, establishing pathways that folded back on themselves like M?bius strips so that mana flow could circulate without dissipating.

  With each written line, Arcane mana saturated the lattice, thickening the crystal until it felt heavier than lead even though its mass didn't change.

  Scarlet deepened into garnet.

  At layer thirty-four, the laboratory lights flickered. Orion’s hair lifted, buoyed by raw mana pressure. The Faraday veil sparked, shedding motes that drifted like lazy fireflies.

  The crystal thrummed back.

  Only three layers remained, similar to a deep-learning model’s output layer. They determined the computer's function, turning it into a versatile caster capable of dynamic resource allocation—meaning it could virtualize multiple spell slots in real time.

  He inscribed the first one, SpellParse, a decoder that would turn his neural intent into a structured bytecode of runes.

  The second, ManaScheduler, implemented a priority queue for power distribution, balancing throughput and risk factors much like a cloud orchestrator deploying microservices.

  The final layer was SafetyNet, a hardware-level kill switch: a simple glyph made of one diagonal line bordered by two concentric rings, yet the most important one. Without it, any emerging intelligence inside the lattice could, in theory, refuse shutdown, and he wasn’t about to allow the first technomagical spirit to be born. Not that I expect it to happen, but it’s always better to be safe.

  He carefully drew the final line, and the entire crystal erupted into inner fire.

  For a moment, he feared it would shatter and that all his hard work would be for nothing. The pressure was overwhelming, like holding a newborn star. But instead of breaking, the blood crystal’s brilliance softened, and a perfect balance was achieved.

  The System chimed, signaling his success.

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