The first thing Kael felt was pressure. Not pain—pressure. A weight. Familiar, yet wrong.
Then came the light.
It lanced through his eyelids like a surgical needle, and he squinted instinctively. The ceiling above him was stone, smooth but imperfect, veins of silver tracing archaic symbols across its surface. The light came from a flickering torch embedded in the wall, casting shadows that danced like hallucinations.
He gasped.
Not because of fear, or even surprise. Because it felt like his lungs were learning to breathe for the first time. Too shallow. Too small.
Something was off. Everything was off.
His limbs were shorter. Softer. Lighter. He tried to sit up and nearly overcorrected, flailing like a fish out of water.
Then it hit him. Not gradually—but all at once.
He was not in his body.
And this wasn't Earth.
Kael Shin, seventeen-year-old high school student, lover of physics and self-declared average nobody, had died three hours ago on a rainy afternoon, his neck breaking at the base of a stairwell in a freak school accident.
The moment before death had been pain, yes—but also something else. A feeling. Not emotion. Movement. Like space had folded, bent, and torn around him. It was brief, imperceptible—like a change in the structure of everything. He hadn't known what it meant.
Now, lying on a carved stone bed in a chamber laced with runes, in a body barely five years old, Kael was starting to get an idea.
He sat upright, slower this time, legs dangling over the edge of the slab. Cold met his bare feet. His fingers—tiny fingers—trembled as he brought them to his face.
A child's hands.
His heartbeat accelerated.
A pulse of fear, then a deeper, more analytical instinct took over.
Assess the situation.
New body. Approximately five years old. Male.
Location: unknown.
Architecture: pre-industrial, ornate.
Ceiling symbols: arcane, possibly ritualistic.
Consciousness intact. Memory intact. No signs of brain trauma or delusion.
He took a slow breath, letting the air fill the small lungs. Shallow, but manageable.
A door opened.
He turned, startled—but kept his posture still. Calculating. Watching.
A man entered. Tall, armored, mid-40s. Steel-gray hair and the posture of someone who'd survived too many wars. His eyes fell on Kael—and something flickered there. Not concern. Not fear. Something colder.
"Your Highness," the man said, bowing stiffly. "You're awake."
Kael blinked. "Your Highness?"
The man's jaw tightened. "I am Captain Orlen of the Royal Guard. You are Prince Kael Arkanos. Third son of His Radiance, Emperor Vaeron of the Arkanian Empire."
The names landed like hammers. Prince? Empire? Royalty?
And yet... it tracked. The stone bed wasn't a coffin—it was a ritual slab. There were sigils etched in concentric circles around him. A resurrection ritual? A healing rite?
Or a container for something unwanted.
Orlen glanced at him again, less with duty and more with doubt. "You collapsed during your Awakening Ceremony three days ago. The priests believed your soul may not have fully bonded to your Core."
Core. That was important.
Kael squinted. "Core… as in, magical?"
Now Orlen's look became sharper. Suspicious.
"You should rest, Your Highness. The court mage will examine your Core again tomorrow." A pause. "There were… complications."
He left.
The door clicked shut.
Kael sat there in silence, watching the flickering light bend across the wall. Slowly, he lay back down, eyes tracing the ceiling once more. The symbols no longer looked foreign.
They looked like equations. Inscribed differently, written with magic instead of ink—but the patterns were familiar. Circular symmetry. Positional charge. Fields.
Force systems.
His breathing slowed.
A broken thought from the moment of death floated up from the back of his brain:
"Even gravity can lie."
He didn't know where the thought had come from—but somehow, he knew it was important.
By the second day, Kael had learned two things.
First, this world did have magic. And it was structured.
Second, he had the wrong kind.
The Arkanian Empire trained all noble children at age five to undergo a "Core Pulse Awakening," wherein their elemental magic affinity would be revealed. Fire, Ice, Lightning, Light, Shadow—dozens of powerful paths. Their mana "core" would shape and pulse according to that elemental resonance.
Kael's core had responded too. But not with flame or light.
With a ripple.
A pull.
Gravity.
The palace physicians hadn't even believed it at first. Gravity wasn't an element. It was a mutation—a deviation, as they called it, from natural mana structures. The core didn't pulse, it dragged. Distorted.
Twisted.
"It's a malformed Earth affinity," one of the scholars whispered when they thought he was asleep. "Warped by stillbirth trauma."
"No. A void resonance. Anti-elemental. It should be sealed."
Even his brothers—older, taller, shining with the promise of lightning and frost—looked at him like something had been spoiled.
Kael listened to them. He said nothing.
But inside, his mind raced.
Gravity was not an element. It was a force. One of the four fundamental forces of the universe.
Electromagnetism. Weak nuclear. Strong nuclear.
And gravity.
The weakest—yes. But also the most persistent. The one that shaped stars, galaxies, time itself.
If this world used magic to command fire and water… what would happen if he learned to command gravity like a physicist instead of a mage?
He didn't know.
But he intended to find out.
On the fourth day, he was taken to the Reflection Pool—an ornate chamber filled with floating mana crystals and shaped mirrors. It was supposed to "attune his Core" through resonance and imagery.
Kael used it for testing.
He bent close to the water, watching his reflection. The face was small, pale, with soft black hair and eyes far older than they should've been.
He stretched out his hand and focused.
What do I know?
Gravity is attractive. Always. Cannot be repelled. A function of mass and distance.
F = G(m₁m₂)/r²
Could he feel the mass of the stone beneath his feet? The distance to the ceiling? The weight of the water?
He pushed with his will. Not outward—but down. He imagined a vector, a field line, an arrow of force radiating from his palm.
Nothing happened.
But something shifted.
The water rippled—upward, for a fraction of a second.
Then stillness.
He staggered back, breath catching in his throat.
That… wasn't nothing.
It was crude. Unstable. But it had reacted. Not like a fireball or a spell script—but a tug. A localized force well.
He needed more data.
More testing.
More control.
A week passed.
Kael was officially labeled a "non-caster."
Whispers in the halls followed him. Servants avoided him. His siblings no longer looked at him—they looked through him.
His only reprieve was the ruin.
On the edge of the palace gardens, long since abandoned, was a collapsed wing of the old academy tower. The structure had been warded off, considered unstable.
Kael made it his sanctuary.
There, with broken crystal panels and shattered spellbooks, he began to experiment.
At first, it was small things. Dropping rocks. Measuring their fall times. Applying mental pressure on their descent.
Then came the first success.
He held a small stone in one hand, standing atop a broken lectern. The floor below was hard stone, twenty feet down. He closed his eyes and imagined the field.
Gravipoint. A directed increase in local gravitational pull.
Not a chant. Not a sigil. Just a concept paired with intention and vector logic.
He dropped the stone.
It didn't fall—it snapped downward, striking the floor with a crack and fracturing on impact.
The acceleration had been far greater than terminal velocity. He'd amplified the gravitational vector beneath it.
It wasn't just a magic spell.
It was physics, obeying a new set of rules.
That night, lying in a dusty corner of the ruin with his heart pounding, Kael smiled for the first time since awakening.
He had no fire. No lightning. No place in the court.
But he had force.
And force obeyed no one.
The stars were strange in this world.
They spun too slowly. Moved like they were swimming through syrup. Some blinked out and returned days later. Kael made note of each one, sketching patterns in chalk and counting intervals.
Something was off about this planet's orbit—or maybe its gravitational constant.
Or maybe this world was closer to a singularity than it realized.
The thought sent a chill through him.
He filed it away.
The next day, Captain Orlen arrived during breakfast. He watched Kael eat alone in silence.
"Still no sparks?" Orlen asked.
Kael didn't respond.
The captain crossed his arms. "The Emperor has decided to assign you a new tutor. Not a caster. A scholar. You'll learn history, languages. Politics."
Kael kept his voice flat. "No physics?"
Orlen stared. "What?"
Kael shrugged. "Nothing."
Later that afternoon, he visited the ruin again.
This time, he didn't drop a stone.
He dropped himself.
He leapt off the top of the broken staircase, body twisting mid-air.
And at the last second, he pushed up—inverted the gravity vector beneath his feet by a fractional degree.
He slowed, hit the floor in a controlled crouch, and rolled to his feet.
His knees ached. His vision blurred.
But he was alive.
And getting stronger.
By the end of the week, he had three working applications:
Gravipoint — increases gravity on a fixed area.
ZeroMass — temporarily reduces weight of small objects.
Directional Pull — an adjustable vector tug, weak but precise.
They weren't spells.
They were tools. Built from laws. Made with will.
And no one else in the palace even knew they existed.
That night, lying beneath the shattered ceiling of the ruin, Kael stared at the stars.
He was a mistake. A reject. A useless third prince with a twisted core.
But the stars above shifted ever so slightly.
And for a moment—just a moment—he felt the field around him bend.
Something had noticed.
Something had turned to look.
Kael didn't understand what.
But he knew this:
He wasn't just reborn.
He was falling.
And the deeper he went…
…the stronger the gravity would become.
To be continued…