Daniel

Daniel shut the lab door and turned the latch with a solid click. He set the simple seal on the space he’d poured himself.

No one else entered here. Not General Li. Not the aides who brought food and stopped asking questions. Not even the scribes who used to linger near the glass to steal glimpses of his workings. For the most part, people lost interest. This was his space alone for him to work and plan. Those plans were finally coming to fruition; it was ready.

Daniel stepped to the main table, the hum of circuits vibrating faintly beneath the surface. The room smelled of ink, scorched crystal, and something faintly metallic—the scent of theory made real.

He'd built this. From etched plates and sleepless nights. From sketches that shouldn’t have worked, and principles the Empire didn’t even have words for.

Ethan stirred faintly inside him, quiet in disbelief. “You actually did it,” the voice murmured.

Daniel shook his head. "No, Ethan. We did it. Now let's see if the damn thing works."

Daniel hesitated just for a moment, because spread across the surface before him was a device no scholar, scribe, or spirit engineer had ever conceived. Not here. Not in this world.

Not until now.

Blood-copper conduits, etched with logic-bound glyphwork. Skyglass memory plates, layered for directional mana capture. A tri-core processor sealed in geometric shard containment. A cooling array vented through alchemical heat siphons. And at the heart—a nested soulglass shell. Silent. Inert. Waiting.

Daniel circled once. At the base of the table, built flush with the obsidian surface, was a rune-etched console resembling a keyboard, its glyph-keys glowing faintly. Above it, a projection screen shimmered into existence, displaying a blank interface of swirling light. He slid a silver-etched slip of parchment into a top bracket. Inked with coded runes, a boot glyph. The paper shimmered briefly—then dissolved into light, its data flowing into the system.

Immediately, the projection screen illuminated fully, coalescing into a display of flowing glyphs and mana readings. The skyglass pulsed. Threads of light ran through the conduits and into the shard cores, illuminating the intricate network in hues of blue, violet, and gold. He pressed a glyph-key on the console—a "boot" command—and the array responded. Smooth. Balanced. Like a breath drawn in and held.

The cores pulsed in quiet rotation, each feeding the framework a trickle of power. Not enough to sustain full operation—but enough to keep the shell warm. Awake, in a way.

And the room itself helped. The skyglass plates captured ambient mana—slowly, methodically. Drawn from the currents that saturated the air. Like lungs pulling breath in from a sleeping forest.

The system was alive. It wasn't what a protagonist expected, not sentient or godly. But functional and one step closer to bridging the gap of information and power.

A dialogue box flashed on the screen:

"Are you ready to execute OS Silica?"

Daniel hit the "Enter" key.

The project screen went nuts with code.

Then it stopped and the screen flashed. "Welcome to Framework Silica - How can I help you?"

Holy shit. It worked. Daniel sank onto the bench beside the rig.

A magical computer...a real, functioning logic engine—designed to parse structured input through mana-aligned hardware. It didn’t cast for him. It didn’t divine or feed him experience to make him stronger. It didn’t “understand” in the way novel heroes interact with their magical guide. It calculated. The glyph compiler mapped pathways. Mana gates opened and closed based on ordered instruction sets. Error loops caught themselves. Input matched output.

It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t what they really needed it to be. But it worked. The damn thing worked. He leaned forward and rested a hand against the housing. Felt the faint vibration of internal mana flow—shard cores cycling through the loop.

He didn’t speak. He pulsed his core once—quiet, deliberate. The system flickered.

Paused. Then flickered again, but it didn’t respond.

Not to him or his intent-filled mana.

A closed system. They had really done it.

Daniel exhaled slowly.

“The shell works,” he said aloud. “Framework holds. Compiler’s clean. Energy stable. Silica is running. It's actually running.”

He opened the interface housing.

Inside, the cradle anchor glowed faintly with residual charge—but the heart slot was still empty.

Where the core stabilizer should be.

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“This is a machine,” Daniel murmured. “But it doesn't have all the functionality and applications that we need.”

Ethan was about to ask him a question, he could tell, but he didn't. He remained silent.

Daniel knew what he was going to ask. The machine had no intelligence in it. No large language models. No adaptive logic. Just lines of fixed instruction stacked across enchanted hardware. It parsed commands. It returned outputs. But wasn't powerful enough to affect him directly; it wasn’t even AI from his world, something he could interact with. It was the magical equivalent of Microsoft Vista—functional, fragile under load, and guaranteed to crash if he pushed it too far.

But it booted. Even with the knowledge that he needed more to accomplish what he wanted, this was something to be celebrated.

He needed a real system. Something that could help him cheat in this world.

He could already see the problems ahead. He needed more than mana. More than logic-sealed conduits and precision-crafted cores. He needed translation. Resonance. A bridge between intent and instruction, between man and machine.

They never talk about that in all those Chinese manhwas. Those protagonists just get dropped into life after death and bam—System.

Daniel thought to no one in particular. If I find out there is some random goddess behind my sudden move here and instead of giving me a system you made me build a half-ass one, I am seriously going to piss on your shrine.

Daniel sighed. He didn’t have a system to help him cheat, so he was going to make this one work. Still, it’s an accomplishment. He made a magic computer that he built with just him and Ethan. Now he had to up it. There had to be a way to take it to the next level.

Daniel stared at the terminal, then asked the question without looking away.

“...Is there a way to explore and connect someone’s being?”

Ethan paused. “What?”

“I mean—not kill them. Just… unfold them. Like, open a person up. Show everything that makes them who they are. Not just physically, but their will. Their intent. Their structure.”

Silence.

Then Ethan slowly exhaled. “That’s not a normal question.”

Daniel finally turned. “First, nothing we have going on is normal. My friend's body who I have taken over. Answer the question, is it possible?”

Ethan was quiet for a moment. “You’re talking about a soul-link. A deep magical resonance. The kind used in old master-disciple training and oath taking.”

Daniel blinked. “Really. Those are real?”

“They’re ancient. But yes, very real. The master can mold the disciple’s inner world. Help them progress to enlightenment, which is the less remembered part of advancement on the progression path. One cannot perceive thoughts, exactly. But structure. Alignment. Emotional current. Intent. It wasn’t mind-reading. It was… recognition. At the level of being.”

Daniel nodded slowly. “That. I want that. For the system.”

Ethan’s voice sharpened. “You want to bind a machine to your core?”

“Not to control it,” Daniel said. “To sync with it. So it doesn’t just read input—it reads me.”

Ethan went very still. “Inner-world syncing would require a ritual. And not just any ritual—a divine-grade one. Those bonds aren’t symbolic. They’re metaphysical structures, woven into the foundation of soulspace.”

“That doesn't mean anything to me,” Daniel said. “But If I am understanding context theoretically, if we had the right material, and the right ritual…I could connect this machine to myself, my entire self.”

“Daniel, that is insane. Your machine isn’t alive. You’re trying to bind a logic system to your spiritual architecture,” Ethan said flatly.

Daniel hesitated. “I’m… trying to bind it to me. If we can do that, we might be able to codify training and skill acquisition. Directly affect development physical, emotional, mental, magically all at the same time. The sky is literally the limit.”

“But you’d have to connect it to your core,” Ethan clarified. “To your intent. To your inner world.”

Daniel frowned. “You keep saying that—‘inner world.’ What is that exactly?”

Ethan exhaled like a teacher reaching for patience. “Every mana user has a soul-space. A domain shaped by their core—their will, their memories, their nature. Most people never see it directly unless they're deep in meditation or under divine scrutiny. But it exists. It’s how your intent manifests. It's how your power knows what to be.”

Daniel blinked. “So it’s not just metaphorical.”

“No. It’s you, Daniel. Or me? Actually, I am not sure anymore. It’s not just your mind. Not just your mana. But the thing underneath it all. The structure of who you are when everything else is stripped away. That’s your soul-space.”

Daniel looked at the machine. Slowly, the pieces began to connect.

“So if I could access that soul-space and somehow use the computer to map its signals—I could design a system that knows what I mean, what I want, what I am.”

Ethan considered the statement. “You’d need a ritual built to anchor consciousness across soul-barriers and resonant intent. A master-disciple bond at minimum. Those are divine-class spells. And even then, they only work because the master’s will is strong enough to bridge the gap.”

“Right. I read about that in your notes. So we need divine power.”

“Do you even understand what divine power is?”

Daniel turned, brow raised. “I’m guessing it’s not just mana with extra zeroes.”

Ethan shook his head.

“No. Mana is versatile—it moves, it adapts, it answers intent. Think of it as the power of the people of the world, of the mortal. But divine power comes from the heavens. And it isn’t about force. It’s about purity. Alignment. It’s not stronger than mana—it’s stricter. You can’t shape it. You have to match it.”

Daniel frowned, listening.

“It’s used for rituals. For binding oaths. For connections that go beyond energy—things that have to be true to work. Divine power doesn’t overwrite reality. It clarifies it. It brings things into focus that mana alone can’t even see.”

"Does it actually come from gods—or the divine?”

Ethan snorted. “No idea. I’ve never met one.”

Daniel’s eyes returned to the terminal.

“If I have divine power, material that can handle that power and a ritual to invoke it. It is in theory possible.”

Ethan made a strangled noise. “You’re insane. You’d need divine material just to keep the system from exploding on contact. Divine power is NO joke.”

“Which is why we need something that’s been used in soulbinding before,” Daniel said. “Like… like divine moon steel. Nathan told me his dream is to one day have a sword made of the stuff.”

“That stuff’s sacred! It’s forged under celestial anchor light and sealed by divine glyphs. It’s used for inheritance blades and holy artifacts, not… whatever this is. You can’t just slot it into a motherboard and hope it syncs.”

Daniel smiled at Ethan's understanding of the motherboard.

“I’m not hoping,” Daniel said. “I’m building a bridge. If I replicate the logic of a master-disciple ritual—then use Divine Moon Steel as the stabilizer and synthesiser of divine power—I can hardwire the system’s memory lattice into my intent stream and both map and connect my inner world. Once we do. We have a chance. We have a chance to win. To change the fate of your world.”

He placed his hand on the edge of the rig.

There was silence.

Then Ethan muttered: “How the hell did you even come up with this?”

Daniel smiled faintly.

“Solo Leveling.”