I ran until my lungs felt like two lumps of molten lead, tearing at my ribcage from the inside. Each breath came with a wheeze, and a sharp taste of copper filled my mouth—burst capillaries. I only stopped at some crumbling stone gates, as if chewed by the teeth of time itself. The city beyond looked like a set for the cheapest medieval movie: the air was so thick it could be cut with a knife, and the open gutters along the streets served the locals as both water supply and waste disposal.

  Biological resources—none. Pulse off the charts. Muscle glycogen depleted, I noted, pressing myself against a wall. If these bastards caught me, I wouldn’t even be able to lift my hand.

  My new body wasn’t just weak—it was defective. Malnourished, obvious vitamin deficiencies, atrophied muscles. I looked eleven, but in reality, I was a bag of bones this city intended to chew up and spit out into the nearest sewer. In my previous life, I complained about back pain after eight hours in an office chair. Now I would have traded every savings for that old, healthy thirty-year-old body. At least then I knew my limits. Here, I was like a computer with a high-end processor encased in a solar calculator battery.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” croaked a voice from the deep shadows of the gate. I tensed instantly, though my bones protested. My hand instinctively grabbed a jagged stone from the mud. An engineer’s habit: if there’s no tool, make one from what’s underfoot. The stone weighed roughly three hundred grams. A strike to the temple or throat could end it.

  From the shadows stepped an old man. “Old man” was too soft a word: it seemed he had personally witnessed the Big Bang and left with a faint sense of dissatisfaction. Shabby layers of gray cloak, road dust crusted in sheets, a crooked wooden staff, and eyes… those eyes didn’t just look—they scanned me, as if with an industrial X-ray.

  The old man snorted. At that moment, three others burst from an alley. They panted heavily, faces flushed with rage. The one in a vest was already swinging a rusty cleaver, its blade scarred from poor maintenance.

  “Got you, rat-boy!” he roared.

  I braced for a throw, though the odds were slim. But the old man didn’t even blink. I didn’t even see the wind-up. His staff rose through the air with a speed that clearly violated every law of inertia for such an old stick. A dull crack at the first one’s kneecap. A thin, dry snap of bone. The cleaver flew from his hands, and the man collapsed like a broken tripod. The second motion—a short jab into the next one’s throat. He gasped, clutching his neck, and fell into the mud. The third froze, looked at his companions, and, deciding not to tempt fate, fled back into darkness.

  Stolen story; please report.

  No special effects. No magical screams. Just perfect leverage, pressure points, and vectors of force.

  “Applied mechanics in action,” I muttered, dropping the stone. “Clean work, old man. Minimal input—maximum output.”

  The old man looked at me. Long. And in that gaze, I felt a strange pressure, as if I were being squeezed.

  “You don’t speak like a child,” he said slowly. “In your eyes, I see the experience of a beaten dog who somehow learned calculus. What’s your name?”

  “My name stayed in another formula,” I answered, straightening as much as my injured side would allow. “Right now, I need shelter, food, and an answer to one question: what the hell is going on here?”

  “Bold. Very well. In the forest, the bold are eaten last,” Zeno (as he later introduced himself) nodded toward the city exit. “Let’s go. Let’s see how much will to survive you really have.”

  We walked for about an hour. My legs buckled, and my mind feverishly analyzed the surroundings. Two moons hung in the sky, causing real cognitive dissonance. One—huge, silver, cratered. The other—smaller, copper-red, spinning noticeably faster. How does such a system remain stable without catastrophic tides? Either the gravitational constant here is different, or… magic serves as the “cosmic glue.”

  Zeno’s hut was a drafty shed on the edge of what locals called the Black Forest. Inside, it smelled of dried herbs, smoke, and something sharp, metallic. Zeno silently gestured toward a corner with a pile of straw.

  “Your place. Tomorrow, you start earning your bread.”

  He tossed me a piece of stale bread. I bit it; my gums bled. Didn’t matter. I needed carbohydrates. Glucose for the brain.

  “Listen, old man,” I muttered with my mouth full. “You swung that staff too fast. That was more than skill. What did you use?”

  Zeno sat by the hearth, blowing on the embers. His face in the orange glow looked carved from ancient oak.

  “The mages call it ‘mana.’ They think of it as the breath of gods. For us, it’s fuel.” He extended his hand, and the air above it distorted. No fire, no light. Just a shift in air density creating a lensing effect. My inner physicist shouted: “Local change in refractive index!”

  “It’s everywhere,” Zeno continued. “It penetrates you, the stones, the trees. But your body right now is like a leaky bucket. It doesn’t hold charge. To use mana, you have to stop being just a piece of meat. You have to become a conductor.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to feel that “charge.” A ringing in my ears. That same tremor beneath the skin. It wasn’t “inner light,” as cheap novels describe. It was like static electricity before a storm. Hair on my arms stood on end.

  “Careful,” Zeno warned. “If you try to release too much without preparation, your veins will simply evaporate.”

  I smiled despite the exhaustion.

  A conductor, huh? Perfect. If this world has an extra variable, I’ll find its coefficient.

  I fell asleep immediately. I dreamed of blueprints written in phosphorescent honey and two moons colliding silently.

  My new life had begun. And I wasn’t going to waste it praying to gods. I was going to study the technical specifications.