Chronicles of the Untalented

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Chapter 17 – Dust Between Pages

The past bled in like spilled ink.

Silas sat alone at a wide desk, light flickering from the cheap bulb overhead. The library was quiet at this hour—barely anyone came here anymore. Dust clung to the air, to his fingers, to the open book beneath him. A physics textbook—advanced level, full of equations he wasn't supposed to understand yet. But he did. Because he had to.

A door slammed in the distance. He flinched.

Then silence again.

He turned another page with trembling hands.

It wasn't fear of the dark. It wasn't even the bruises. It was the noise. The screaming. The never-ending sound of two people trying to kill each other with words. Then with fists. Then with silence.

He had no one, not really. Not in that world.

But he had books.

Not for escape, no—never fantasy novels or cartoons. He wanted truth. He wanted to understand the world. Maybe if he could solve the laws that governed everything… he'd find a way to control even the chaos inside his home.

Maybe even himself.

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He woke in this world with that same urge still burning.

The ceiling above him in his current bedroom was cracked. The cold never really went away here—just dulled itself until your skin forgot warmth. But today was different.

Silas sat up slowly, quietly. His room was dim, lit by his personal lantern. His effigy stood against the wall like a silent statue, watching him with those same crimson eyes that never blinked. He smiled back at it.

Today… he would test a theory.

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Chapter 18 – Shadow Equations

Later, at the library—Velira's domain—he borrowed a corner table and a stack of dusty scrolls. Velira sat nearby, reading a water-path theory guide and occasionally glancing up at him.

She didn't know. Couldn't know.

He jotted quick symbols in a journal, muttering to himself. His notes from yesterday's experiment crackled in his mind:

> "The shadow burst isn't just an explosion. It's a localized entropy spike." "The scream... it doesn't use sound. It manipulates the psychic vibration field. A chain-reaction pulse."

Magic here obeyed rules.

But rules were meant to be broken, twisted. Refined.

Velira looked over. "You're talking to yourself again," she said, sipping tea.

Silas looked up, blinking, caught in a moment of manic clarity.

"Am I?" he asked, smiling too wide. "Well, sometimes the best conversations are with people who can't argue back."

Velira raised an eyebrow. "You're weird today."

"Only today?" He laughed lightly, but there was a coldness underneath. "I'm making progress."

She nodded slowly. "Good. Just don't forget to sleep."

Sleep. Right.

He hadn't slept properly since his mind began piecing things together—dark path spells weren't just destruction. They were disintegration. Entropy embodied. The collapse of order. A spell wasn't a trick. It was a formula—like how fire was oxidation, or gravity was curvature in space-time.

The more he remembered from his past life, the more he understood this world was a science project waiting to be cracked open.

The problem?

Everyone else was still coloring inside the lines.

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That night, he returned home, alone with his effigy.

He looked at it—taller than him now, lean but powerful, its fingers claw-like, its aura wrong. Not evil. Not demonic.

Just unfiltered.

"Do you feel it?" he whispered to it.

The effigy tilted its head, almost curiously.

"This place… it bends. It bends if you know where to push. Just like back home." He stepped closer to it. "They called me broken there. The quiet kid. But I see the truth now."

He placed a hand on its chest.

"I'm not broken. I'm ahead."

He turned, eyes wild with the same spark he had back when he solved quantum orbital models at age thirteen just to block out the noise at home.

"Level 2's not a boundary," he muttered, pacing now. "It's just a higher threshold of control. If spellcasting is symbolic logic—and it is—then the next step is refining the mental circuit."

The world was math. Magic was chemistry. Dark path was physics gone mad.

His hands trembled, but not with fear.

With hunger.

Not like his effigy's hunger for magical material. His hunger was for knowledge. For understanding. For the next key.

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