Arin woke to wheels, mud, and the smell of animals.
For three breaths, he thought the deployment pager had finally broken him.
The sound was wrong, though.
No electric hum from the old apartment fridge.
No fan coughing dust from the ceiling.
No phone vibrating itself into a slow death against the table.
Just wood creaking, hooves striking wet ground, and voices speaking a language he understood with the wrong part of his head.
He opened his eyes.
Gray sky.
Canvas roof.
A wagon bed packed with sacks, crates, and children.
Not office.
Not home.
Not hospital.
A girl across from him stared blankly at her knees, both hands wrapped around a bundle of clothes.
A thin boy slept with his cheek pressed against a grain sack.
Near the back, two older youths whispered like every word cost money.
Everyone looked hungry.
Everyone looked scared.
Everyone looked too young.
Arin tried to sit up.
His body moved badly.
Too small.
Too light.
His arms were narrow, his hands soft and bony, the nails rimmed with dirt.
He stared at them until the wagon jolted and pain sparked through his shoulder.
Child’s hands.
No.
No, no, no.
He swallowed the sound before it became a scream.
A web developer with six years of experience did not scream in production.
You checked the logs first.
You found the blast radius.
You identified whether the system was recoverable.
He breathed in.
Rotten straw.
Damp wool.
Horse sweat.
Smoke somewhere far ahead.
He breathed out.
The memories came after that, not like a movie, but like files being mounted into a directory that had not asked for them.
A village.
Thin soup.
A mother with rough hands.
A father who had sold two goats to pay a “testing fee.” A black-robed man placing a cold crystal against his forehead.
The crystal glowed faintly, almost apologetically.
Grade 1 talent.
The words landed in his stomach with more weight than the wagon.
Magus.
Academy.
Caravan.
Arin closed his eyes.
He knew this story.
Not perfectly.
He had read it years ago, late at night, the way people consumed long webnovels when sleep felt optional and tomorrow felt negotiable.
He remembered fragments: a ruthless protagonist, a mysterious A.I.
Chip, academies full of apprentices, bloodlines, potions, wars, worlds, laws, devouring.
And the name.
Leylin Farlier.
Arin opened his eyes again, slower this time.
There.
Near the side of the wagon, a boy sat with his back against a crate, posture calm in a way no frightened child should be calm.
Black hair.
Pale face.
Eyes that moved with quiet attention and gave away almost nothing.
Leylin.
The main character.
Arin’s heart kicked once, hard.
Every stupid instinct in him tried to stand up.
Talk to him.
Warn him.
Befriend him.
Follow him.
Use him.
Every better instinct grabbed those thoughts by the throat.
No.
Leylin Farlier was not a golden thigh to hug.
He was a walking risk engine.
A person who survived by calculation, deception, poison, and a total lack of sentimental weakness when his interests were threatened.
If Arin approached him with too much knowledge, he would not become a friend.
He would become a question.
And Leylin was very good at solving questions.
So Arin did the first sensible thing of his second life.
Nothing impressive.
He looked away.
A guard shouted outside.
The wagon slowed as the caravan reached a patch of broken road.
Someone cursed.
A child began crying quietly, then stopped when an older apprentice snapped at him.
Arin lowered his head and pretended to be smaller than he already was.
Inventory, he thought.
That was always the first step when something broke.
Body: child, around twelve by memory, maybe weak from poor food.
No training.
No weapon.
Talent: grade 1.
Bad.
Not impossible, but bad enough that no one important would invest unless he created value another way.
Knowledge: partial plot memory.
Dangerous if used loudly.
Useful for avoiding disasters.
Maybe useful for identifying names, factions, and timing.
Skills from Earth: web development.
JavaScript, Python, databases, APIs, logging, deployments, debugging, user permissions, version control, security habits, architecture diagrams, incident response.
Combat ability: zero.
Social status: poor apprentice candidate.
Expendable.
Cheat: none.
He almost laughed at that and bit the inside of his cheek instead.
No A.I.
Chip.
No status screen.
No hidden bloodline.
No system reward for breathing dramatically under the moon.
Just him.
A man who had once spent two days tracking a production bug caused by a cached permissions object.
In a world where mistakes melted souls.
The wagon jerked again.
The sleeping boy beside him slid sideways, shoulder bumping Arin’s arm.
Arin flinched, then forced himself still.
“Sorry,” the boy muttered.
“It’s fine,” Arin said.
His voice was thin.
Younger.
Wrong.
The boy blinked at him, then looked away.
Good.
Unremarkable interaction.
No consequence.
No flag raised.
Arin kept his eyes on his hands and built rules.
Rule one: never reveal future knowledge.
Rule two: never compete with Leylin.
Rule three: never appear suddenly clever in front of dangerous people.
Rule four: learn the language of this world’s power system faster than his talent allowed.
Rule five: if he could not be strong, be useful.
That last one settled him.
Useful people survived longer than brave people.
A low-grade apprentice who could sort herbs, copy notes, maintain lab records, clean equipment, detect inconsistencies, and keep his mouth shut might live.
Maybe even earn crystals.
Maybe even learn enough to patch the holes talent left behind.
The original Magi treated spells like models.
Structures.
Runes.
Energy pathways.
Arin could work with structures.
He did not need to invent fireballs.
Fireballs were obvious, violent, and attention-seeking.
He needed tests, alerts, wrappers, fallback logic.
The boring infrastructure around magic.
The parts nobody praised until everything else failed.
A spell was code.
Mana was runtime fuel.
Mind force was control and execution.
A bad model crashed.
A crash here could take the caster with it.
So the first useful spell he would ever design, if he lived long enough, would not attack anyone.
It would stop a spell from killing him when it failed.
The thought was small.
Weak.
Almost ridiculous.
It was also the first thought since waking that felt like his.
Outside, the caravan began moving again.
A cold wind pushed under the canvas.
Children pulled their cloaks tighter.
Somewhere ahead, a rider laughed at something Arin could not hear.
Leylin remained quiet.
Arin did not look at him again.
He looked at the crates instead.
One had markings burned into the side, crude but repeated: a triangle, three hooked lines, and a dot at the center.
Not decoration.
Too deliberate.
A label, maybe.
A warning.
A primitive interface for people who used symbols to control forces instead of screens to control servers.
His fingers twitched.
He wanted a notebook.
The old Arin had kept notes for everything: deployment steps, bug traces, database migrations, commands he would forget in three weeks.
The habit had seemed mundane on Earth.
Here, it might be survival.
A notebook could become memory.
Memory could become pattern.
Pattern could become method.
Method could become power.
Not fast power.
Not protagonist power.
But repeatable power.
The caravan rolled toward the academy, carrying frightened children into the jaws of a world that ate the careless first.
Arin tucked his hands into his sleeves and made himself a promise.
He would not be a hero.
He would not be interesting.
He would not chase treasures with skull-shaped doors or ancient voices whispering about destiny.
He would learn.
He would test.
He would document.
He would leave before disasters.
He would build tools so small nobody noticed them until they had already saved his life.
And if the Magus World insisted that only monsters reached the top, then fine.
Arin would begin as a bug in the system.
Quiet.
Persistent.
Hard to reproduce.
The wagon wheels sank into mud, pulled free, and kept moving.