Morning training passed quickly.

  Hayakiri, without wind, felt incomplete.

  Sir Alric corrected my stance more than anything else—how my weight settled, how my feet aligned, how the blade should want to move even when it didn’t.

  There were no techniques. No flashy motions. Just repetition.

  “Remember the shape,” he said, tapping the flat of my sword with his own. “The wind will fill it later.”

  I nodded and committed the form to memory.

  It felt like learning the outline of something that hadn’t been drawn yet.

  __

  Evening training was conducted in silence.

  Lyra didn’t tell me to summon wind.

  She told me to observe it.

  “Wind exists whether you acknowledge it or not,” she said. “Your mana doesn’t wake it up.”

  I extended my senses outward, letting mana spread thin and uniform.

  The air revealed itself—not as something alive, but as movement, pressure, and flow.

  Countless vectors overlapping.

  “Don’t push,” Lyra continued. “Pushing only creates turbulence.”

  I adjusted, threading mana between currents instead of against them.

  The air shifted.

  Subtly. Precisely.

  Not because it was told to—but because the conditions had changed.

  My head spun immediately.

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  “That’s enough,” Lyra said.

  I cut the circulation at once, steadying myself.

  “You didn’t move the wind,” she said, watching me carefully. “You altered the way it could move.”

  That distinction mattered.

  This wasn’t about force.

  It was about understanding structure.

  Wind manipulation wasn’t magic in the traditional sense.

  It was applied theory.

  It’s like trying to shape fluid dynamics with your mind.

  The dizziness faded after a few minutes, leaving behind a dull pressure behind my eyes.

  “What you felt just now,” she said, “was cognitive strain. Not mana exhaustion.”

  I frowned slightly.

  “Your mana capacity is fine. Your control is fine. Your problem is bandwidth.”

  Bandwidth.

  It was an oddly modern term, but an accurate one.

  She gestured to the open air around us.

  “Fire consumes. Earth resists. Water carries. Wind only moves. To manipulate it, you must track everything that isn’t fixed.”

  I nodded slowly, committing the explanation to memory.

  “For now,” she added, “you’ll limit yourself to observation and minor interference. No sustained shaping.”

  That was for the best.

  I could already feel the echo of that brief manipulation lingering in my thoughts, like an unfinished equation.

  Lyra turned away, adjusting her coat as she walked toward the manor.

  __

  That night, nothing remarkable happened.

  I couldn’t track the wind. I couldn’t read its flow. Most of the time, I wasn’t even sure whether what I felt was real or imagined.

  Lyra seemed unsurprised.

  “Basic wind manipulation takes time,” she said. “A week if you’re talented. Longer if you’re not.”

  The days that followed blurred together.

  Morning drills repeated the same empty Hayakiri forms.

  Evenings were spent spreading mana outward, failing to influence anything, then failing again with slightly better control.

  Slowly—almost imperceptibly—failure became consistency.

  By the tenth day, I could give the air direction.

  Not force. Not shape. Just intent—forward, sideways, downward.

  It was crude. Inefficient.

  But it was wind manipulation.

  I let the mana disperse and exhaled.

  For the first time since coming to this world.

  A small smile slipped out before I could stop it.

  Lyra noticed immediately.

  “What are you grinning about?” she asked, eyes narrowing in amusement.

  Then she clicked her tongue.

  “My little sister managed this in seven days. You took longer.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but she raised a hand, cutting me off.

  “Still,” she added, tone casual, “considering wind isn’t your specialty—”

  She shrugged.

  “You did well.”

  “So,” she said casually, “what do you want to learn next?”

  I didn’t hesitate.

  “Dark.”

  “Alright,” she said.

  No warning. No lecture.

  She adjusted her coat and headed for the door.

  “We’ll start tomorrow.”

  Her hand paused on the handle.

  “Rest today. Dark isn’t something you rush.”

  With that, she left the room.

  __

  This was my first step into magic.

  And now—

  Hayakiri was no longer an empty form.

  The outline I had learned earlier—

  it was time to fill in the details.