The number stared back at me from the page.
Thirty seconds.
I had written it down three times already, yet the result hadn’t changed.
Thirty seconds was roughly how long I could maintain my natural heightened perception before the familiar pressure began forming behind my eyes.
I tapped my pencil against the desk while studying the bracelet beside my notebook.
The room was still quiet, and sunlight had only just begun slipping through the curtains.
I had been awake for nearly an hour, going over yesterday’s results again and again.
The artifact had worked.
That was precisely why I wasn’t satisfied.
If the experiment had failed completely, I could have discarded the design and started over.
Instead, it had done almost everything I had intended.
It enhanced my physical capabilities, increased my strength and agility, improved my movement efficiency and balance, and allowed me to process far more information than I normally could.
The problem was that the longer I used the mental enhancement, the more obvious its weakness became.
I wasn’t running out of Mana.
My brain was.
I turned the page and looked at the diagram I had drawn the previous night.
The original design was incredibly simple: Mana Crystal, amplification, enhancement.
It was efficient for a basic artifact, but after seeing the results, I could no longer ignore how crude it was.
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my chin.
“I built an amplifier when I should have built a regulator.”
The realization made me sit upright.
That was the problem.
I had been approaching the artifact from the wrong direction.
More power wasn’t necessarily better.
If I simply increased the amount of Mana flowing toward my nervous system, I would only reach my biological limit faster.
My brain wasn’t a machine that could accept an unlimited amount of energy simply because I had found a way to supply it.
What I needed wasn’t more power.
I needed better control.
I picked up my pencil and crossed out the original diagram.
If I wanted the mental enhancement to function more efficiently, I needed another stabilizing component between the amplification and enhancement stages.
Something had to regulate the Mana before it reached my brain.
My eyes drifted toward the small container on my desk.
A second diamond.
Of course.
The first diamond had already proven useful for stabilizing Mana, but I had only incorporated one into the original circuit.
A second one might allow me to smooth the amplified energy before it reached the mental enhancement system.
I didn’t need a large stone.
In fact, a large diamond would only attract unnecessary attention.
I needed something small, inexpensive, and ordinary enough that nobody would question why a fourteen-year-old boy had it.
I began filling the next page with calculations.
The first diamond would remain part of the primary Mana pathway.
The second would act as a stabilizer between the amplification and mental enhancement circuits.
I also wanted to add something else: a feedback mechanism.
If I could make the artifact detect excessive Mana flow, it might be able to regulate its own output before I reached the point of neurological strain.
It wouldn’t remove the limitations of my brain, but it could prevent the artifact from pushing me past those limits unnecessarily.
I continued drawing until several pages were covered with diagrams.
By the time my mother’s voice came from outside my room, I hadn’t even noticed how much time had passed.
“Rafael!
Breakfast!”
I glanced at the clock and realized I had been sitting there for much longer than I intended.
“Coming!”
I closed my notebook and carefully placed the bracelet inside my drawer.
The experiment would have to wait until later.
First, I needed to find another diamond.
Getting one turned out to be more complicated than I expected.
The problem wasn’t finding a diamond; the problem was finding one that wouldn’t make anyone suspicious.
I wasn’t exactly in a position where casually purchasing gemstones was normal behavior.
Eventually, I found a small stone that suited my needs.
It wasn’t impressive, and that was exactly what I wanted.
To anyone else, it would look like an inexpensive piece of jewelry material.
To me, it was the missing component in my next experiment.
When I returned home, I placed the diamond beside the bracelet and looked at them for a moment.
“All right.
Round two.”
I carefully dismantled the previous rune circuit.
This time, I wasn’t going to make a minor modification and hope for the best.
I was rebuilding the system around a completely different principle.
The original design had essentially been Mana Crystal, amplification, and enhancement.
The new design would introduce regulation before and after amplification, with the second diamond positioned between the amplification and mental enhancement circuits.
I also added a feedback pathway that could redirect excess energy back through the stabilizing section instead of allowing it to surge directly into the final stage.
It was still crude, but it was already far more sophisticated than my first attempt.
I sketched the arrangement several times before I was satisfied.
Then I began engraving.
The work demanded patience.
A single mistake could disrupt the entire circuit, so I worked slowly and checked every line before moving to the next.
Hours passed while I carefully carved the new rune structure into the bracelet.
When I finally finished, my fingers were aching.
I placed the second diamond into its position and examined the completed design.
The rune pattern was more complicated than before, but it was still small enough to conceal beneath an ordinary bracelet.
Now came the moment of truth.
I activated the Mana Crystal just enough to test the basic circuit.
A faint glow traveled through the first group of runes, passed through the amplification section, and reached the second diamond.
For a moment, the light intensified.
Instead of surging forward, however, it stabilized.
I held my breath.
The energy continued through the remaining circuit without flickering or destabilizing.
I smiled.
“That part works.”
It didn’t prove that the mental enhancement would work, but at least the regulation system was functioning.
Before I could test it, however, I needed a proper baseline.
Again.
I sat in the middle of my room and looked toward the clock.
The second hand moved steadily around the face while the ceiling fan rotated above me.
I activated my HEMS.
The familiar sensation returned almost immediately.
The world didn’t actually slow down.
I knew that much.
Time itself was moving normally.
What changed was the amount of information my brain could process within each moment.
The second hand became easier to follow.
I shifted my attention to the fan and tracked the movement of each blade without losing sight of the clock.
Outside my window, a motorcycle passed along the road, and I separated its engine from the footsteps nearby.
A bird landed somewhere on the roof.
Someone opened a door in the neighboring house, and a distant voice carried through the morning air.
I kept all of it within my awareness.
Then the familiar pressure began forming behind my eyes.
Thirty seconds.
I deactivated my heightened focus and waited for the sensation to fade before recording the result.
Thirty seconds again.
My natural ability hadn’t changed.
Now I could test the artifact.
I fastened the bracelet around my wrist and took a slow breath before activating it.
Mana began flowing through the crystal.
This time, there was no sudden surge.
The energy moved smoothly through the rune circuit, passing through the regulating section before entering the amplification stage.
The second diamond stabilized the flow, and the feedback circuit kept the output from spiking.
Then the enhancement activated.
The first thing I noticed wasn’t my mind.
It was my body.
Strength surged through my muscles.
I clenched my fist and immediately felt the difference.
It wasn’t an explosive increase that made me feel superhuman.
It was more controlled than that.
My muscles responded with greater efficiency, producing more force with less wasted movement.
I shifted my weight.
My balance adjusted almost automatically.
I took a step, then another, increasing my speed.
My movements felt lighter.
Faster.
More precise.
The original physical enhancement was still there, but the new Mana regulation made the effect feel smoother than before.
Instead of the artifact simply pushing more energy into my muscles, it seemed to distribute the enhancement more evenly throughout my body.
I performed several squats, then a few push-ups.
The movements felt easier than they should have.
I followed them with several quick changes in direction, testing my balance and agility.
The result was consistent.
Strength amplification was functioning.
Agility amplification was functioning.
Movement efficiency and balance were functioning.
I nodded.
“So the physical enhancement survived the redesign.”
That was important.
I hadn’t wanted to improve the mental function at the expense of everything else.
Aetheris needed to remain a multifunctional enhancement artifact.
Only after confirming that did I turn my attention to its newest refinement.
The mental enhancement activated.
My perception expanded.
The clock became clearer.
The fan blades were easier to follow.
I could hear the bird outside, the motorcycle disappearing down the road, and someone talking several houses away without the sounds blending together.
It wasn’t simply that everything felt faster.
It felt cleaner.
I could process each stream of information separately without losing track of the others.
I decided to increase the difficulty.
While tracking the second hand of the clock, I began doing calculations in my head.
Twenty-seven multiplied by thirty-six.
Nine hundred seventy-two.
I kept watching the clock and immediately moved to another problem.
One hundred forty-three multiplied by seventeen.
Two thousand four hundred thirty-one.
The answers came quickly, but the calculations themselves weren’t the important part.
I was testing whether I could perform deliberate mental work while maintaining awareness of my surroundings.
The result was encouraging.
I reached for three small objects on my desk and tossed them into the air.
All three followed different trajectories.
One moved slightly to the left, another climbed higher, while the third began falling sooner.
I tracked all three simultaneously and caught them one after another.
A grin spread across my face.
“This is much better.”
I increased the difficulty again.
I tracked the clock, followed the fan blades, listened to the sounds outside, performed calculations, watched the three objects, and monitored my own breathing.
Six separate streams of information became seven.
My mind handled them.
For a brief moment, it felt almost limitless.
Then I felt the pressure behind my eyes.
At first it was faint, barely noticeable.
I continued for another few seconds, carefully observing the sensation.
The pressure intensified.
I stopped pushing.
The moment I deactivated the artifact, the enhanced perception disappeared and the pressure began fading.
I leaned back in my chair and breathed slowly.
Sweat had formed along my forehead.
I waited until the discomfort was gone before opening my notebook.
The redesigned artifact hadn’t eliminated my limit.
It had moved it.
That distinction was more important than I had initially realized.
My natural HEMS still had the same baseline.
The difference was that the artifact allowed me to process far more information before reaching that limit.
I wrote the phrase across the top of a clean page.
Mental bandwidth.
I stared at it for several seconds.
That was the closest description I could find.
The artifact wasn’t creating a new ability.
HEMS had already given me an unusual neurological foundation.
The artifact was simply amplifying it and allowing me to make better use of it.
I added another note beneath the first.
The artifact enhances an existing neurological capability rather than creating one.
As I looked at the sentence, another memory surfaced.
The alien artifacts.
I leaned back in my chair.
During my first life, I had seen them many times, although I had never been able to study them as thoroughly as I wanted.
The alien invaders possessed technology far beyond what humanity initially understood.
Their weapons were terrifying, their armor was advanced, but the artifacts had always fascinated me the most.
Some contained structures that didn’t resemble conventional technology at all.
Rune circuits, crystalline components, energy channels, and layered systems seemed to work together in ways we couldn’t completely explain.
At the time, I had assumed their superiority came primarily from the amount of energy they could manipulate.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
I looked at the bracelet.
Maybe power wasn’t the answer.
Maybe architecture was.
I remembered one particular artifact recovered during the war.
Most of it had been destroyed, but part of the internal structure remained intact.
I had only been allowed to examine it briefly before it was transferred to another research team.
Even now, I could still remember the rune patterns.
They had been incredibly complicated.
I had wanted to take the artifact apart piece by piece.
I wanted to understand why every component was positioned where it was, how the energy moved between them, and why changing one section seemed to affect another.
Nobody had time for scientific curiosity when people were dying.
If an artifact could be turned into a weapon, it was sent to the battlefield.
If it couldn’t be used, researchers dismantled it as quickly as possible.
If there was a risk of the enemy recovering it, it was destroyed.
We were always working with fragments.
Broken weapons.
Damaged armor.
Half-destroyed cores.
Pieces of technology that had already lost most of their original function.
Sometimes I wondered how much farther humanity could have advanced if we had been given even one completely intact artifact and enough time to study it.
Maybe we could have developed better weapons.
Better defenses.
More efficient energy systems.
Maybe we could have shortened the war.
Maybe some of the people who died would have survived.
I slowly closed my hand around the pencil.
Then I let go.
There was no point dwelling on what I couldn’t change.
That was my first life.
This one was different.
I had something I never had back then.
Time.
And perhaps, someday, I would have another opportunity to study that technology.
Not a broken fragment.
Not a damaged core.
An intact artifact.
Something I could dismantle, analyze, reproduce, and improve.
I looked down at the artifact.
“If I had one of those now…”
I stopped myself.
The aliens wouldn’t appear for years.
There was no reason to obsess over them now.
Still, the thought remained.
If I could accomplish this much with nothing more than my own understanding of runes, what could I create if I finally understood the technology that had once been beyond humanity’s reach?
I shook my head and smiled.
“One problem at a time.”
The bracelet had passed the test.
Now it needed a name.
I picked it up and examined the finished design.
The first version had been nothing more than an experiment.
This one was different.
I had redesigned it, improved it, tested it, and proven that the concept worked.
It deserved a proper name.
I considered several possibilities, but none felt right.
Then one came to me.
“Aetheris.”
I said it quietly.
The name was probably more dramatic than necessary, but I liked it.
I opened my notebook and began documenting its functions.
Artifact Designation: Aetheris.
Primary Function: Physical Enhancement.
Secondary Function: Mental Enhancement.
Physical Enhancement: Strength Amplification, Agility Amplification, Movement Efficiency, and Balance Enhancement.
Mental Enhancement: Accelerated Perception.
Mana Regulation: Integrated.
I looked over the list.
That seemed much more accurate.
Aetheris wasn’t just a mental enhancement artifact.
It was a multifunctional Mana-enhancement system.
The physical functions were what I had originally designed it for.
The mental function was the part I had only recently learned how to refine.
I tapped my pencil against the page.
Then I added one more line.
Skill: Accelerated Perception.
I stared at the words.
It felt strange to give a name to something that had existed within me since childhood.
The ability itself wasn’t new.
Only my understanding of it was.
I fastened Aetheris around my wrist and looked at the bracelet again.
It appeared almost ordinary.
That was exactly how I wanted it.
Nobody looking at me would realize what it could do.
I stood and stretched, feeling the last traces of fatigue leaving my body.
There was still an enormous amount I didn’t understand.
My knowledge of runes was primitive, my Mana supply was tiny, and my body was still that of a fourteen-year-old.
Even Aetheris was nowhere near the level of the technology I remembered from my first life.
Yet instead of feeling frustrated, I felt excited.
I finally understood something important.
I didn’t need to recreate everything I had lost.
I could build something better.
One improvement at a time.
One experiment at a time.
One mistake at a time.
I looked down at Aetheris.
In my first life, I had spent years trying to understand advanced technology while the world was burning around me.
We were always too late, always missing something, always forced to work with fragments of knowledge that had already been damaged or lost.
This time, I had something different.
Time.
And if the future really was coming for me again, I intended to meet it prepared.
I opened my notebook one last time and glanced at the page where I had written about the alien artifacts.
Something about their rune structures still bothered me.
The way one sequence seemed to influence another.
The way different groups of runes appeared to perform different functions while working together.
It reminded me of something familiar, although I couldn’t quite place it.
Not a machine.
Not exactly.
It was closer to a system of instructions.
I frowned at the thought.
Then I shook my head.
I’d figure it out eventually.
For now, I had enough problems to solve.
I had an artifact to improve, a future to change, and a world that still had no idea what was waiting for it.
I smiled as I closed the notebook.
“Let’s see how far I can take this.”
Aetheris rested quietly against my wrist.
It was only my second iteration, but that was enough.
I didn’t need to create something perfect.
I only needed to make the next version better.
Then the one after that.
And eventually, I would build something that even my first life had never seen.