Chapter 8: Trash with a Famous Childhood

Chapter 8. Trash with a Famous Childhood

It had been so long.

So incredibly long that I had almost forgotten what it felt like.

To feel a spell form inside my own palm.

To have magic answer because my body was actually capable of carrying it.

Before I became a researcher, I had been a magus.

A brilliant one.

My father was a senator.

My mother was a professor at one of the most prestigious magic academies in the country.

And I was their eldest son.

Which meant expectation arrived before childhood really had the chance to.

Tutors came in the morning.

Then another tutor after lunch.

Then combat practice.

Mana control.

Theory.

Elemental structures.

History.

Dueling.

By the time normal children were deciding which cartoons they liked, I could identify six forms of mana distortion and construct three elemental barriers without chanting.

And I loved it.

Nobody had to force me.

Magic fascinated me.

Every spell felt like a puzzle. Every formation had logic behind it. Every opponent showed me another way mana could move.

And I was gifted.

Tournaments started young.

I won.

Then I won another.

Then another.

Regional competitions.

National youth leagues.

International junior exhibitions.

My face appeared on television.

News sites.

Magic forums.

Interviews.

Articles calling me a prodigy.

A future Archmagus.

My parents smiled more during those years.

My father introduced me proudly.

My mother showed colleagues recordings of my matches.

And my little brother looked at me like I was some kind of hero.

He was three years younger.

Nine when everything changed.

I was twelve.

My father brought home an artifact.

I remembered it clearly even now.

A dark metallic object sealed inside layered containment glass.

Someone from the government had recovered it from an excavation.

My father wasn’t a researcher, but senators involved in magical policy sometimes received strange things temporarily for meetings, demonstrations, political negotiations.

I saw it only from far away.

That was enough.

I could feel it. The mana felt violent. Compressed too tightly.

I stayed away.

My brother didn’t.

Dad was escorting guests toward the entrance when my brother found me.

He wanted to see the artifact up close.

I told him no.

He laughed.

I grabbed his shoulder.

He slipped away.

Children were incredibly fast when running directly toward consequences.

He entered Dad’s study.

I followed.

He reached for the containment.

I shouted.

Too late.

The artifact reacted.

Mana expanded.

The room turned white.

I didn’t think. I cast.

Every barrier I knew.

Layers.

One around my brother.

One in front of us.

One reinforcing the first.

All of my mana poured outward.

But I was twelve.

Talented didn’t mean invincible.

The explosion tore through everything.

I remembered being thrown.

Then nothing.

I woke in a hospital.

My parents were there.

My brother too.

He was uninjured except for minor burns.

Because my barriers had held long enough.

Mine hadn’t.

The artifact’s mana had ripped through my core.

Doctors explained it carefully.

My mana core was fractured. Not shattered completely. That would’ve killed me.

Instead, it had become something worse in its own way.

A cracked vessel.

I could still generate mana.

Still cast.

Still feel magic.

But my core could no longer safely hold more than around ten percent of what it once could.

Anything beyond that leaked.

A crippled magus.

That word appeared eventually.

Not from my family at first.

Doctors.

News articles that tried to sound sympathetic.

The prodigy had fallen.

My parents refused to accept it initially.

So did I.

Specialists came.

Healers. Core therapists. Experimental treatments. Potions. Tonics. Herbs. Artifact-assisted regeneration. Mana reconstruction.

Nothing worked.

My brother stayed beside me constantly.

He cried more than I did.

He kept apologizing. Again, again and again.

I never blamed him.

He was nine.

Curious.

Stupid.

But nine-year-olds were professionally stupid.

Then the months passed.

Treatment continued.

Then slowed.

My parents’ attention shifted.

Not suddenly.

That would have been easier.

It happened gradually enough that I noticed every piece.

My brother began receiving stronger tutoring.

They told him he needed to work harder because of what happened to me and the family needed him.

I still went to therapy at first.

Then appointments became less frequent.

Sometimes the doctor was busy.

Sometimes Dad had meetings.

Sometimes Mom couldn’t leave the academy.

A potion shipment was delayed once.

Then never reordered.

One specialist’s consultation was postponed.

Nobody rescheduled it.

Meanwhile, my brother improved.

He won his first tournament.

Then another.

Then another.

I watched his matches from home.

I watched him receive lessons from a magic professor I had idolized when I was younger.

A man I had once dreamed of training under personally.

I watched through the window one afternoon while they practiced in our courtyard.

My brother laughed after successfully completing a spell.

My mother applauded.

Dad smiled.

I was thirteen.

And I understood.

They had their replacement.

Maybe they never said it. But children notice where attention goes.

They notice which dreams remain expensive enough to fund. And which ones quietly become unreasonable.

I had become unreasonable.

Useless medical costs.

Low probability.

No return.

Trash with a famous childhood.

But I wasn’t finished.

If healers couldn’t repair my mana core, then I would learn why.

If doctors didn’t understand the damage, I would.

If modern magic didn’t have an answer, I would search older magic.

Ancient magic.

Forbidden theories.

Artifacts.

Potion science.

Mana anatomy.

Core construction.

Healing matrices.

I devoured everything.

Books replaced tournaments.

Research journals replaced combat training.

Then I went to my parents and asked for formal education in magical research.

They agreed quickly.

It was cheaper than endless treatment.

That was how my career began.

Not because I stopped loving magic. Because I loved it too much to accept that I would never properly use it again. So I researched.

At first, everything had been about my mana core.

I read until words blurred.

Studied diagrams until I could redraw them from memory. Tested theories using the miserable ten percent of mana my broken core still allowed me.

There had to be an answer.

Someone had to have found one.

And if nobody had...

Then I would.

That was the plan.

Simple. Desperate. Childish, maybe.

I was thirteen years old, after all.

Thirteen-year-olds weren’t supposed to spend their nights reading medical research about irreversible magical disabilities.

But life had already decided I was mature enough to understand the phrase ’permanent mana-core damage’, so apparently childhood had left the building without informing me.

The strange thing was... Research became interesting.

One subject led to another.

Mana-core fractures led me into magical anatomy.

Magical anatomy led me into soul-mana interaction.

That led into ancient healing techniques.

Ancient healing techniques referenced forgotten civilizations.

Forgotten civilizations used completely different magical structures.

Then suddenly I was studying extinct languages because some dead magician three thousand years ago had apparently decided his groundbreaking research needed to be written in an alphabet designed by a drunk spider.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot I had originally started researching because I wanted to heal myself.

Not completely.

That wish never disappeared.

It just stopped being the only reason.

I began loving research for itself.

There was something beautiful about finding a question nobody could answer.

Something addictive about staring at a problem everyone had accepted as impossible and thinking ’Why?’

Why couldn’t it work?

Why was this law considered absolute?

Who had tested it?

Under what conditions?

What happened if you changed the mana ratio?

What happened if you inverted the formation?

What happened if you combined modern theory with something everyone had dismissed as obsolete?

Sometimes the answer was nothing.

Sometimes the answer was an explosion.

Several times the answer was ’Evan, please stop touching that’.

But occasionally... Something worked.