Jin had lived through a lot recently.
He'd fallen off a cliff, been chased by a sky-serpent that thought he'd be a delightful afternoon snack, survived a cave crawl, absorbed alien knowledge through a glowing geometry orb, accidentally built a mana core in his chest... and now, apparently, he was a village idol.
All in all? A Tuesday.
Currently, he was seated on an awkwardly lopsided wooden stool while an elderly woman poked his arm repeatedly with a stick made out of what looked suspiciously like polished raccoon bone.
"I'm not sure what this test is, but if this is acupuncture, you're missing the pressure points by... oh, roughly 100 percent."
The old woman glared at him, muttered something in her native tongue, and jammed the stick into his side again.
"Okay, that one was close to a kidney. Respect."
He wasn't sure what the village elders were trying to diagnose. Mana? Cursed blood? Holy spleen? They didn't speak his language, but they spoke in loud enough frustration that it translated pretty clearly.
After three more pokes and a brief chant that sounded like someone reciting a list of goat names, they gave up and let him go.
Jin stretched, wincing. "Whew. Glad I passed the medical exam from hell."
Out in the village square, the snake statue loomed like it was judging his entire life. He flipped it a casual salute.
"You're welcome, Flying Worm God."
Since earning the villagers' cautious curiosity—and by "curiosity" he meant "polite suspicion mixed with intense shrine-level reverence"—he'd been gifted one (1) potato, a small bed of straw behind the baker's hut, and regular pickpocket attempts by the kids. Jin tolerated the last part because honestly, he respected the hustle.
He still hadn't figured out their language, though he was getting decent at interpreting tone. For example, "AH!" followed by rapid clapping meant "do it again," while "AHHHHHH!" usually meant "stop, you're setting things on fire."
Which had happened.
Twice.
Because Jin had started experimenting again.
His mana core still pulsed beneath his chest like a second heartbeat. He didn't know if it was supposed to. There wasn't exactly a User's Manual for Off-Brand Magic Geometry Hearts.
What he did know was that shapes mattered.
A triangle focused energy in sharp bursts.
A circle looped mana infinitely... sometimes too infinitely. Don't ask about the floating turnip incident.
And a dodecahedron? That one gave him a headache just trying to visualize.
He found an old clay bowl and began etching basic runes onto it with a stick of charcoal and aggressive trial-and-error energy.
He tried something simple first: a gust of wind. Seemed manageable.
Shape: triangle. Directional. He carved it onto the bowl's inside, paired it with a spiral for flow and a dot for ignition.
"Okay," he muttered, standing back. "Let's see if my high school geometry teacher would be proud... or alarmed."
He touched the rune.
FWOOOSH.
A tornado the size of a toddler launched the bowl into the air. It hit the thatched roof of the pottery hut, spun twice, and landed on an unlucky goat.
The goat screamed. The villagers screamed. Jin screamed.
The goat lived. Barely. The bowl did not.
He spent the afternoon apologizing with exaggerated pantomimes that roughly translated to: "I didn't mean to yeet the soup dish at your livestock."
He hoped.
Later that night, as he lay staring at the stars from his hay nest, he whispered, "Okay, Jin. You need a proper test. No more bowls. No more goats. You need structure. Reproducibility. You need… a lab."
The next morning, he built one.
Sort of.
It was a tent made from spare firewood, a donated bedsheet (he assumed it was donated), and six rocks holding down the corners. Inside, he arranged materials like a caveman science fair: soot for ink, stone tiles for etching, and a stick of chalk he guarded like a dragon hoarding treasure.
Every night, he recorded what worked, what nearly incinerated the hut, and which goats had started avoiding him on sight.
He even started naming the effects.
"Windy Wham" – the gust spell."Glowy Glow" – a basic light sigil (accidentally used it in the village latrine… apologies to the poor guy inside)."Boomsquare" – self-explanatory.
As days passed, villagers began watching his experiments from a distance, hiding behind fences and pretending not to be impressed.
One child, the same girl who first pointed at his crystal, approached him during a quiet evening.
She offered a drawing—a crude but strangely accurate replication of one of his sigil designs.
He smiled. "You've got the talent, kid."
She pointed at the core in his chest, mimicked a triangle in the air, then poked her own chest.
Jin's eyes widened. "You… you get it?"
She smiled and nodded once.
That night, he didn't sketch another rune.
He sketched a lesson plan.
By the end of the week, Jin had a tiny following.
Three kids, two overly enthusiastic farmers, and one suspicious chicken who never stopped staring at his hands. He called it Professor Beakley.
Each day, he taught them basic shapes, flow patterns, how to scratch runes onto stones without blowing off their eyebrows.
Progress was slow—but real.
Except for the farmers. They somehow made fireballs while trying to conjure apples. That might've been a user error.
On the seventh day of "Jin Academy for Geometric Nonsense," something weird happened.
The wind shifted.
Not metaphorically.
Literally. The breeze changed. Pressure dipped. And above the village, Valthuun—the very sky-serpent that once tried to eat Jin—appeared.
The villagers knelt. Chanting started. Drums pounded. It was worship time.
Jin, meanwhile, backed into his hut. "Ohhhh no. Nope. Not doing round two. I am not Snake Snack Deluxe."
But the serpent didn't descend in wrath.
Instead, it circled once. Then… hovered. Watching.
Staring.
At Jin.
The crystal in his chest pulsed once.
He had a bad feeling about this.
"Okay," he muttered to himself. "Either it recognizes me as the geometry messiah… or I owe it dinner."