Jin sat beneath the flickering light of the control room, staring at the glowing sphere that now floated beside the pedestal. His fingers lightly turned the crystal he had taken from the wall—still warm, still pulsing. The Keeper stood in silence, watching.
"The knowledge is waiting," the alien said. "But you must choose to receive it."
"What kind of knowledge?" Jin asked, wary.
"Foundations," the Keeper replied. "Truths encoded long ago—geometry of form, energy, language of structure. Those who once guarded this place used it to shape the world itself. Understanding it means becoming more than a witness."
Jin hesitated only a moment longer, then stepped closer to the floating sphere. A set of triangular patterns expanded from its surface like a blooming flower. His hand hovered over one of them, then pressed gently.
The world went silent.
In the space between seconds, Jin's vision filled with symbols—hexagons, circles, interwoven fractals spiraling outward into ever more complex matrices. Concepts poured into his mind like ink spreading through water: sacred ratios, modular lattices, planes that folded into dimensions he never learned about in school. Geometry wasn't just math here—it was the skeleton of magic.
The ancients hadn't just used shapes. They lived by them.
He saw memories—not his, but left behind. A civilization etched into crystalline spires, each rune a mathematical precision of energy flow. Architects of magic who saw mana as frequency, tuned like music, amplified through shape.
And then, blackness.
Jin dropped to his knees, gasping.
He was back in the chamber. The sphere pulsed faintly, now quiet.
The Keeper knelt beside him. "You saw."
Jin nodded, wiping blood from his nose. "I saw everything. Or... enough."
"You now carry a foundation they once guarded."
Jin stood, legs shaking but firm. "I need to leave. Something's waiting for me out there."
The Keeper bowed slightly. "Then go. But remember—knowledge is potential. How you use it will decide if you build... or destroy."
The tunnel led him out through a narrow crevice, steep and slick with mist. He emerged on the lower side of the mountain he had fallen from earlier, the serpent long gone. The sun was lower now, casting golden stripes through scattered clouds.
And in the valley ahead—smoke. Villages.
Jin blinked. Civilization. Or at least… something like it.
He made his way downhill cautiously. As he approached, he saw fields, huts of thatched roofs and stone ovens, and rough dirt roads between wooden fences. People moved about in hooded cloth and tunics, many bearing spears or carrying baskets. Their eyes held a wariness—the kind of survivalist mistrust born from enduring the elements.
And towering above it all, near the edge of the village square, stood a massive stone statue of the serpent.
Its coils wrapped around a tower of stacked runes. Its wings unfurled skyward, open in devotion. Even its eyes—cold, hollow cavities—seemed to watch the sky reverently.
Jin stared at it. "You've got to be kidding me."
That's when they noticed him.
At first, the villagers simply stared. Then someone shouted. Others rushed forward, weapons raised.
Jin quickly raised both hands. "Hey! I come in peace—uh, friendly! I'm not a threat!"
They didn't understand his words, but something in his tone or body language must've calmed them. The spears didn't lower, but they didn't jab forward either.
A man in a heavier fur cloak stepped forward. His beard was braided with iron bands and his eyes were sharp with command. He spoke, not in English, but in a tongue that was guttural and thick with consonants. Jin could only blink in confusion.
"Sorry," Jin said. "No clue what you're saying."
The man frowned, then gestured toward the statue of the serpent. One word stood out from his speech:
"Valthuun."
Jin followed his gesture. "That thing?" he asked.
The villagers murmured.
The man repeated the word, slower this time, with a reverent tone: "Valthuun… Sky-Wyrm… our protector."
Jin's stomach tightened.
They worshipped it.
He'd barely escaped becoming snake food, and these people prayed to the creature like it was divine.
Still, he played along. He bowed awkwardly, hands still up. "Great Valthuun, sure, real majestic."
A girl, perhaps sixteen, stepped forward from the crowd, tugging at the bearded man's arm. She pointed at Jin's pocket—where the crystal still pulsed faintly beneath the cloth.
The man barked a command. Suddenly, Jin found himself bound in leather ropes and escorted to a stone hut at the edge of the village.
He spent the night on cold straw. No guards, though; they must not have viewed him as a serious threat. Or perhaps they believed Valthuun would judge him.
That night, Jin dreamed of runes.
Shapes assembled into layers within his mind—pentagons folded into pyramids that spun and split into circuits. He awoke breathless, a single conclusion burning in his skull.
Magic was geometry. And geometry was magic.
He'd seen how the ancients did it, carving equations into the fabric of mana. But the people here… didn't know any of this. They revered the magical without understanding it.
Jin stood, pacing. In the ancient vision, he'd seen cores—crystalline organs embedded into beings, acting as magical foci. The mages of that lost civilization inscribed glyphs into their cores using language grounded in form and proportion.
But these villagers, they had no such knowledge. They thought the flying snake was their god. The real power, the real structure, was buried beneath history.
A plan started to form.
If he could recreate what he saw—forge a core based not on belief, but on shape and reason—then maybe he could harness mana without needing their forgotten spell language.
It wouldn't be magic by their standards. It would be his.
Jin began experimenting.
In the early mornings, he explored the nearby woods under the guise of gathering herbs. What he was really searching for were minerals—quartz, crystal fragments, even polished bones. Anything that could act as a medium.
He found a piece of obsidian-like stone in a dry riverbed. Pitch-black, yet glossy, and oddly symmetrical. It would do.
He studied the patterns etched into his memory. He started with a spiral—a Fibonacci sequence embedded in a hexagonal plane. Within it, he carved radial lines, intersecting them at points of harmonic resonance he remembered from the alien console.
He drew these shapes using a makeshift compass of twigs, marking it onto a flat stone. He meditated there, breathing slowly, trying to will something to happen.
Days passed.
At first, nothing.
Then, during one session—he felt it.
A pressure inside his chest. A flicker beneath his ribs, like static trying to ground itself.
Jin gasped.
It was like something had nested inside him—small, fragile, but pulsing.
His thoughts spiraled. Was this the beginning of a mana core? Had he actually succeeded?
Each night, he meditated beside the carved stone. The pressure inside grew.
Finally, on the seventh day, as moonlight struck the obsidian piece, a flicker of light coursed through its etched lines. A shape floated above it—three-dimensional, translucent, rotating slowly.
A geometric shape—impossibly perfect. A dodecahedron wrapped in recursive fractals.
Jin stared, wide-eyed.
It responded to him. As he focused, he felt something click inside his chest.
A soundless hum vibrated through his bones.
He'd done it.
He'd built a mana core—not from inherited spellcraft, but from structure, logic, and the sacred geometry of a dead civilization.
The next morning, the villagers found him beside the glowing shard. Some knelt. Others ran to summon the elder.
They thought it was a sign.
Jin didn't correct them.
The bearded chieftain approached again. This time, he didn't bark orders. He bowed.
Behind him, the girl who had first pointed out Jin's crystal whispered a word Jin could almost understand: "Mahanir."
A title. A prophecy?
Or maybe just their word for 'weird glowing stranger who speaks in shapes.'
Either way, it seemed Jin had made his entrance.
But if the glowing serpent was a god to these people—and Jin had just tapped into powers buried below the soil—they wouldn't be the only ones watching him now.