The transition from a sterile Seoul hospital to a drafty farmhouse was a sensory assault. One moment I was Han Jisoo, seventeen and fading; the next, I was a weightless bundle of limbs, staring at a thatched ceiling while my lungs burned with their first real breath of air.
Reincarnation wasn't the power trip the novels promised. It was a humiliating, slow-motion crawl.
For the first two years, I was a prisoner of my own biology. My parents, Darian and Elena Vale, were kind people living on the ragged edges of the Veylor domain, but kindness couldn't cure the soul-crushing boredom of a crib. To keep my sanity, I turned inward. I couldn't walk, but I could feel.
I spent thousands of hours in a state of "infant meditation," mapping the hum in my chest. Most people in this world likely didn't discover their mana until their teens, but I had nothing but time. I learned to pull the energy from my core, threading it through my dormant pathways like silk. By the time I could say my own name, I didn't just have mana—I had a nervous system that was already primed for it.
By age four, the internal mapping was complete. It was time for a live test.
I sat behind our cottage one afternoon, staring at a fallen oak leaf. I didn't just want to move it; I wanted to sharpen the air it rested on. I reached out, focusing four years of mental discipline into a single, needle-thin point.
Snap.
The leaf didn't just blow away; it was sliced perfectly in half.
[Skill Acquired: Wind Cutter] [MP Cost: 15]
The rush of success was instantly replaced by a wave of nausea so intense the world turned gray. My heart hammered against my ribs, and my vision tunneled.
[Warning: MP Critical (5/50)]
The System was unforgiving. At my current level, I had a total of 50 MP. A single Wind Cutter took nearly a third of my entire reserve. I had fired off three in quick succession before the "Mana Crash" hit. My brain felt like it had been dunked in ice water—a shivering, cold vacuum where my thoughts used to be.
I woke up to Elena's panicked face, her hands trembling as she wiped my forehead. It was my first lesson in this life: Mana wasn't a game. It was a physical resource, and when the tank hit zero, the body paid the price in raw, neurological pain.
By six, I had learned to respect the red line. I spent every spare moment in the fields, experimenting with the dual nature this world had granted me. I learned to let the wind carry my weight through Levitate and how to condense heat into a piercing point with Fire Arrow.
One evening, I threw a Fire Lance into a rotting stump. The spear of flame hissed through the air, piercing the wood with a satisfying thump.
"Where did you learn that?"
I froze. Darian was standing ten feet away, his arms crossed. He didn't look like a farmer in that light; he looked like the Captain of the Guard he used to be. His eyes weren't angry; they were guarded, full of a heavy, calculated silence.
"I... I just tried," I whispered.
He looked at the smoldering stump for a long time, the scent of charred wood hanging between us. Finally, he exhaled, the tension leaving his shoulders. "Don't use that where others can see, Kael. The world has a way of breaking things it can't control. If you're going to be powerful, be quiet about it. Especially here in Veylor's lands."