Now, the throttle itself.

  He reached for the severed copper pin. It wasn't enough to shove metal into the path. The metal had to speak the language of the current.

  He brought the Rune Engraver to the flat face of the copper cylinder. The tip hissed as it bit into the conductive alloy.

  Face one: Dqfqhglozoct.

  He etched the strict, angular glyph—the Positive Rune. He flipped the pin.

  Face two: Dqfqftuqzoct.

  He carved the Negative Rune.

  Push and pull. A dipole moment within a singular point.

  He set the prepared rod down. It was ready.

  Now, the aqueduct.

  Arthur looked at the empty air between the crystal socket and the lamp socket.

  Sixty centimeters.

  A significant gap. Too far for the cut rod to bridge, and he had already dismissed Thermal Conduction as waste.

  Field Coupling?

  He considered it for a split second. Induce Positive behind the crystal, induce Negative behind the lamp, and arc the gap?

  No. It bleeds energy into the atmosphere as ionization. It's messy. Undisciplined.

  His gaze drifted upward, past the classroom ceiling, imagining the massive infrastructure hidden behind the stone barriers of the Academy.

  Lasers.

  The image bloomed in his mind—the Parabolic Retro-reflector System. He closed his eyes, visualizing the geometry. A massive parabolic dish collecting the rear-facing energy, reflecting it forward in parallel lines. A spherical cap mirror on the front, recycling the divergence back through the core.

  The output wasn't a clumsy spray of sparks. It was a "Donut Beam"—a perfect ring of coherent light shooting from the annular gap, stabilized by a core rod preventing thermal blooming.

  It was the pinnacle of human engineering. Elegant. One-hundred percent efficiency.

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  I would love to see the main power core of this city, Arthur thought, a pang of genuine intellectual hunger striking him. To see a Metastable Crystal lasing at full capacity...

  But looking back at his desk, the fantasy collapsed. He didn't have mirrors. He didn't have a parabolic dish. Attempting to replicate a city-scale laser with a desk kit was an impossibility.

  He looked back at the soft stone baseplate.

  Wired transfer. It is the only logical choice for a closed circuit: maximizing efficiency and safety.

  Arthur took the Rune Engraver again. He didn't inject mana into it yet. First, he mapped the path in his head.

  He would carve a channel—a physical tunnel to direct the flow of mana—linking the sockets. But the order of operations was critical.

  I must build the aqueduct before I breach the dam.

  He had to carve backwards, from the lamp to the crystal.

  If I slot the crystal first, and the path exists, the energy follows the current. It drains.

  He glanced at the air surrounding the desk. Air was an insulator. If it were a viable path, the crystal's potential would have grounded itself long ago. The path he carved with the Rune Engraver, however, would be a receptive medium.

  Arthur pressed the tip of the engraver into the soft stone near the lamp socket. He didn't hesitate. He began to carve the channel, working his way back toward the source, preparing the vessel for the blood it was about to receive.

  The stylus moved with surgical confidence, extending the channel from the lamp socket, carving through the soft stone, until it kissed the edge of the crystal's housing.

  Connected.

  The physical path was complete, but without a driving force, it remained inert. To induce flow, he needed to warp the environment. He needed to establish a potential difference that the mana would have no choice but to obey.

  He looked at the vertical housing behind the lamp socket.

  The Sink.

  He pressed the engraver into the stone, carving the precise rune: Negative.

  He shifted to the housing behind the crystal socket. The Source.

  He carved the opposing rune: Positive.

  The inscription acted as an anchor. By defining the start as high potential and the end as low potential, he had constructed an invisible slope—a tangible electric field spanning the sixty centimeters of dead air and stone. The voltage gradient was now absolute; the energy would have no choice but to run down it.

  Arthur set the Rune Engraver down. The preparation was finished. Now came the proof.

  He picked up the modified crystal. The red stone felt warm, vibrating slightly against his skin. The hole in its center stared back at him like an eye.

  He aligned it with the source socket.

  Slot.

  He pressed the crystal into place.

  Snap.

  The moment the crystal touched the housing, the circuit closed. The positive field shoved the mana out of the stone, and the negative field dragged it screaming across the channel.

  Ignition.

  The lamp flared to life. A blinding, solid white light flooded the desk.

  Arthur narrowed his eyes against the glare.

  It works.

  The energy flowed freely. The fuel was burning. If he left it like this, the crystal would be dead in ten minutes.

  He reached for the severed copper pin. He held it over the crystal, aligning the runes he had carved on the metal with the invisible fields of the system.

  Positive to Positive. Negative to Negative. Repulsion stops flow.

  He drove the pin into the hole he had drilled in the crystal's core axis.

  Clack.

  The copper seated firmly. The repulsive field generated by the rod slammed against the crystal's internal pressure.

  The light died instantly.