- Chapter 093 -

  Practical Design

  The blinding light of the ritual simply bleached out reality.

  The world resolved into white, a flat, absolute negation of color. It was an infinite expanse of nothingness, stretching out in every direction without a horizon to break the monotony. It was the polar opposite of the dark, starless void he had used for weeks to hide from his own trauma. That had been a bunker. This was a clean room.

  There was no sound. No hum of electricity, no distant wind, not even the sound of his own breathing. It was a silence so heavy, it felt like a physical pressure against his eardrums.

  Mark looked down. There was no floor, just more white, yet he felt solid resistance beneath his feet. He looked up. No sky, just an endless, illuminating ceiling. He felt it was a space outside of time, a pause in the universe.

  He took a step.

  The reflex was immediate. He braced his core, tensed his left leg to take the weight, and waited for the familiar, grinding protest from his hip and the dull ache in his spine.

  It never came.

  He froze, his foot hovering. He shifted his weight, testing the joint. Nothing. No pain. No stiffness. No lingering phantom sensation of shattered bone. He moved his leg again, a full, fluid stride that he hadn't been capable of since he walked out of his office in Manchester what felt like a lifetime ago.

  He looked at his hands. They were steady.

  "Right," Mark said. His voice didn't echo. It didn't travel. It just existed.

  He started to walk. It was disorienting without landmarks. Without a point of reference, movement felt theoretical, a calculation of intent rather than distance. But he walked anyway, enjoying the sheer, mechanical perfection of a body that worked.

  It's not a dream.

  Tori's warning echoed in his mind. It is real. It is you.

  He stopped, looking around the infinite white. If this wasn't a dream, and it wasn't a hallucination induced by burning iron sand and a dead phone...

  "So this is my soul," Mark murmured, checking his cuffs out of habit. "It's surprisingly under-furnished."

  He walked until the concept of duration became a rounding error.

  It might have been hours. It might have been days. Without a sun to track or a clock to watch, time was just a variable he couldn't solve for. He counted steps for a while, reaching ten thousand, then twenty before discarding it as another useless measurement.

  The silence remained absolute, but it wasn't lonely. For the first time in years, perhaps his entire adult life, there was no immediacy. No pending emails, no urgent projects, no demanding stakeholders demanding to update. Just the rhythmic, pain-free motion of his own body moving through a void of perfect potential.

  He didn't feel hunger. He didn't feel thirst. He felt peace.

  Then, at an unknow duration and distance from the start, the uniformity broke.

  It started as a pinprick on a non-existent horizon, a single dot on the white canvas. Mark didn't sprint toward it. He didn't alter his pace. He simply adjusted his direction, locking onto the anomaly with calm focus.

  As he drew closer, the dot expanded. Becoming an island, or at least a mound. It had a color.

  A pocket of vibrant, electric green cutting through the white. A sharp, illuminated green of a circuit board.

  It sat there in the emptiness, a destination waiting to be reached.

  Mark kept walking. He felt no need to rush. The green wasn't going anywhere. It was a fixed point that he approached with a steady pace. A measured stride of a man arriving early for an appointment he knew he couldn't miss.

  The island was a glitch in the perfection of the void.

  As Mark stepped onto the mound, the ground beneath his feet changed. It wasn't earth. The grass wasn't the expectation, this was a synthesis of his offering. The blades were a vibrant, circuit-board green, interspersed with stalks of gleaming silver solder, veins of conductive gold, and crystalline shoots as clear as a smartphone screen. It rustled with a sound like wind through fiber-optic cables.

  And hovering in the center, floating a foot above the strange, digital turf, was the Concept.

  It was a sphere of absolute white, no larger than a tennis ball. It rotated slowly, humming with a frequency that Mark felt in his bones.

  Tori had called this phase "greeting the raw power." She had described it like a wellspring, a battery waiting to be tapped. But looking at it now, Mark saw the flaw in her assessment, at least for his perspective. She was a Healer, she saw magic as a resource to be poured into a wound.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Mark was a Manager. He didn't see a battery. He saw pure potential, a blank project with infinite capacity, waiting for a scope of work.

  He stopped at the edge of the mound. He felt the Concept’s attention shift. It didn't have eyes, but it was watching him. It was assessing the user who had approached. It was waiting for him.

  "Hello" felt inadequate. Words were cheap, they were air vibrating in a throat he didn't currently possess. A greeting requires context. This to him was more of a proposal, context and intention of the future.

  Mark smiled. He didn't speak. Instead, he let his intent flow into the space around him. He imposed his own structure on the void.

  Let's get to work.

  The white floor rippled. A table rose from the nothingness, pushing up through the digital grass. He dismissed the idea of a stone altar or a mystical pedestal. Choosing a fine, sturdy workbench of polished maple, broad and flat, with the solid legs of a piece of furniture meant to last generations.

  It rose until the floating white orb hovered perfectly in the center, at a comfortable working height. The Concept was the focal point of a workspace and no longer a floating anomaly.

  Mark walked to the table. He turned his hands palms up. He didn't have magic, but here, in his own soul, he had inventory.

  He visualized the pillars of his new existence. He compressed them, forging them into symbols he could place on the desk.

  Three glass spheres materialized in his grip. These had weight, a solid presence, a permanence, snowglobes of his existence.

  He placed the first one to the left of the Concept. Inside the glass, miniature snow swirled around the jagged, grey peaks of the Mountains of Titan. It represented the environment. The context. The physical reality he now existed as part of.

  He placed the second one to the right. Inside, a tiny, electric-blue tiger prowled, static lightning arcing from its fur. Tony. The Guardian. The defense.

  He placed the third one in front. This one was darker. Inside the glass, a ruined library stood behind granite walls, leaking a faint green mist. The Library of Corruption. The stolen knowledge. The forbidden resource.

  He lined them up with the precision of a man setting out his tools before a shift. He looked at the white orb, sitting amidst the artifacts of his struggle, but the setup was incomplete and with a thought two more orbs came into existence.

  A party of five sitting around a campfire in the snow, and finally the blue Marble, his history, his origin story. The homeworld dead for a thousand years, and in this place he could admit to himself that he did not believe, that he would need to see the body to accept the story.

  This is what I have, Mark projected, his thoughts clear and absolute. This is who I am.

  The white void simply ceased.

  Mark blinked. The cavernous bedroom was dim, the crystal lighting having dimmed to a standby glow. The air smelled of scorched metal. He looked down at the floor. The intricate patterns of iron sand had burned out completely, leaving only a fine grey ash that crunched softly under his boots. The smartphone was gone, consumed entirely by the reaction.

  He stepped out of the circle.

  There was no hesitation in the movement. No phantom twinge in his hip or spine, his body felt lighter, reinforced, humming with a low-level background sense he hadn't possessed an hour ago. He was connected, accepted into their system of magic, now his system of magic.

  He walked to the bedside table and untied the twine on the heavy parcel. The brown paper fell away to reveal Bjornson’s work.

  Mark ran a hand over the fabric. The tailor had taken liberties, as threatened, but looking at the result, Mark couldn't find fault. The heavy, restrictive suit jacket design was gone. In its place was a waistcoat of deep, forest green wool, cut sharp and high, edged with a piping of electric blue. It was practical, allowing for a full range of motion while maintaining the feel of formal wear.

  He dressed with efficient, practiced movements. The charcoal trousers settled perfectly, the magical enhancements in the weave adjusting the fit as he moved. The cream silk shirt was cool against his skin. He fastened the waistcoat, the silver buttons clicking into place.

  Finally, he picked up the tie. The strip of green silk with its gold chevrons. He tied the knot in the mirror and tightened it, muscle memory in perfect condition. This wasn't just an accessory, this was the final component of the uniform.

  He checked his reflection. And for the first time since he arrived, the displaced victim failed to look back, for the first time in years the man that he saw was one he was happy to have become, a picture of health and profession.

  Mark turned and walked to the door. Leaving his cane leaning against the wall, a retired tool for a phase of the project that was now complete.

  He pushed the heavy wooden door open and stepped out into the living room.

  Conversation died instantly. They were all there, Carl, Dawn and Tori, even Taz shimmered into existence for the moment, all gathered around the dining table like a team waiting for the promised results.

  They stared. They took in the charcoal trousers, the silk shirt, the striking green waistcoat with its flash of electric blue trim. It was an outfit that defied the standard Guild liveries, a declaration of independent neutrality.

  "Well," Dawn said, breaking the silence. "That is definitely not a tunic."

  Mark walked to the head of the table. He moved with a steady rhythm, his stride eating up the distance. He placed his hands on the back of his chair, looking around at his team.

  "Recovery has been a success," Mark announced, his voice clear and resonant. "I think we should find out what's next on our list."

  He raised his right hand, turning it so the back faced them.

  There was no complex, spiraling monstrosity of lost magic. No jagged lines of the unknown.

  Inked into his skin was a perfect, geometric circle surrounding a stylized gear. It was the standard, foundational sigil of the Heart of the Engineer. The most common, practical design in the Collective.

  The ink wasn't black. It continued to shift. As the light caught it, the lines cycled through a subtle, mesmerizing loop of colors, the vibrant green of a circuit board, the conductive gleam of gold, and the bright, clean flash of silver solder.

  "The Heart of the Engineer," Mark said, flexing his fingers. He felt the hum of the house's infrastructure, the latent potential in the walls, the flow of the steam pipes. It wasn't magic in the fantasy mystical stories from home. This was data, a raw and unfiltered connection to the potential of reality.

  He looked at them, a small, confident smile touching his lips.

  "My name is Mark Shilling," he said. "I once declared myself as the Forger of Fictional Futures."

  He tapped the shifting gear on his hand.

  "To keep it simple, my path forwards, is of the Project Engineer."

  [Mark and his team will return in Book 2: The Steam-Forged Expedition]