Prologue

The cave was cold.

Not the ordinary cold of winter air, but a deep, merciless cold that seeped through stone and flesh alike.

The cave itself was enormous. Jagged walls rose into darkness overhead, their surfaces covered in layers of mineral deposits and ancient cracks. Near the entrance, the floor ended abruptly at a vast opening

Its ceiling disappeared into darkness, far above the reach of the firelight. Rough walls of gray stone surrounded the chamber, streaked with moisture where water slowly seeped through the mountain. The floor was uneven and cold, covered in layers of animal hide, stone, scattered bones, and the remains of old fires.

Cold air entered through the distant mouth of the cave, carrying the smell of snow and mountain earth.

A brutal draft screamed through the cavern mouth, rising from somewhere far below. Every few seconds, the wind surged upward from the darkness beyond the cliff, carrying the frozen breath of the Screaming Abyss.

Water dripped from the granite ceiling.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The droplets struck the stone floor and disappeared into shallow pools of meltwater.

And in the middle of that freezing cave, something moved.

My fingers.

Or rather, they tried to.

I couldn't move them properly.

I knew the signal my brain was sending.

Move the index finger.

Nothing.

Move the thumb.

A twitch.

My mind understood the command perfectly.

My body didn't.

Why...?

I tried again.

The result was worse.

My entire arm jerked uselessly.

Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

My thoughts were strangely clear despite the cold.

For more than thirty years of living, i know how the human body translated intention into movement, at least indirectly. I knew anatomy only as far as an engineer needed it. I understood joints, mechanical advantage, load paths, tolerances.

But this wasn't a body I recognized.

My arm was too short.

My fingers were too small.

My muscles barely responded.

And my entire body felt absurdly light.

Structural diagnosis...

The thought came automatically.

Unknown biological frame.

I tried to breathe.

Air entered my lungs.

Cold.

Painfully cold.

I opened my eyes.

Something thick and translucent clung to my vision.

I blinked.

Again.

The world slowly came into focus.

Granite.

A rough ceiling.

Water droplets.

Then two enormous silhouettes.

They stood above me.

At first I couldn't understand what I was seeing.

They were huge.

Eight feet tall, perhaps more.

Broad shoulders. Thick limbs. Slate-colored skin covered in old scars. Their bodies were wrapped in coarse animal hides, crudely stitched together and fastened with bone and leather.

One of them leaned closer.

A man.

His face was wide and heavily scarred. A thick beard covered most of his jaw.

The other was a woman.

She was holding me.

Her hands were enormous.

One palm could almost cover my entire chest.

"He does not cry."

The man's voice was deep enough that I felt it through the stone beneath me.

The woman looked down.

"He's breathing."

"His pulse is weak."

"The frost will claim him before sunrise."

I didn't understand everything they were saying.

But I understood enough.

They were talking about me.

I tried to move.

My arm twitched.

The woman noticed.

Her expression changed.

"He moves."

The man crouched beside her.

"Then he lives."

I stared at them.

What the hell happened to me?

The last thing I remembered was-

Work.

A monitor.

A CAD model.

Too many drawings.

Too many revisions.

A hydraulic system that wasn't finished.

I remembered the glow of a screen in a dark office.

I remembered telling myself I would sleep after finishing one more problem.

Then another.

Then another.

I remembered my hands shaking.

I remembered thinking that I could rest tomorrow.

There had always been a tomorrow.

Until there wasn't.

I had never been particularly smart.

That was the truth.

I wasn't some genius who could look at a difficult problem and immediately understand it.

Engineering had never come naturally to me.

I struggled through mathematics.

I reread textbooks.

I watched lectures more than once.

I practiced CAD commands until my hands remembered them without thought.

I made mistakes.

A lot of them.

When I didn't understand something, I studied it again.

When studying wasn't enough, I practiced.

When practice wasn't enough, I found another explanation.

Then I tried again.

That was how I became an engineer.

Not talent.

Not genius.

Just years of refusing to give up.

Eventually, I became a CAD engineer.

But I never stopped learning.

Mechanical systems.

Structures.

Hydraulics.

Materials.

Manufacturing.

Electrical systems.

Whatever problem appeared on my desk, I tried to understand it.

And eventually, I became good at something I had once thought impossible:

turning an idea in my head into something that could actually exist.

But there was a price.

I liked working alone.

It was easier.

I didn't have to wait for anyone.

I didn't have to explain things.

If someone made a mistake, I could fix it myself.

If I didn't know something, I could study it myself.

If the project was behind schedule, I could simply work longer.

So I worked.

And worked.

And worked.

Until one day, my body finally refused to cooperate.

I had spent my entire life learning how to build things.

I had never learned how to stop.

A sudden gust tore through the cave.

The woman holding me tightened her grip.

I felt the cold bite into my chest.

My body began to shake.

Hypothermia.

The diagnosis came immediately.

Core temperature falling.

I tried to move.

Nothing.

I was an infant.

An actual infant.

No tools.

No shelter.

No food.

No clothing.

Two enormous strangers were standing over me.

And somewhere outside this cave was a three-thousand-foot abyss.

For the first time in my life, I encountered a problem I couldn't solve with a machine.

I couldn't even stand.

I couldn't speak.

I couldn't use my hands.

Then something appeared in my vision.

Thin blue lines.

They spread across the cave.

One line became ten.

Ten became hundreds.

A three-dimensional grid unfolded around me.

The walls.

The floor.

The ceiling.

The cave entrance.

Every surface became a collection of points, planes, dimensions, and relationships.

I froze.

What... is this?

The system continued expanding.

Stress concentrations.

Material density.

Temperature gradients.

Airflow.

Geometry.

It was like looking at the world through a CAD program.

Except there was no computer.

No monitor.

No mouse.

No keyboard.

The information simply existed inside my mind.

A name surfaced instinctively.

[Mind Blueprint]

I didn't know what it was.

I didn't know why I had it.

But I understood what it did.

It showed me the structure of things.

The cave suddenly became understandable.

The wind wasn't simply cold air.

It was moving air.

A mass in motion.

Kinetic energy.

My eyes shifted toward the cavern mouth.

Another powerful gust surged upward from the abyss.

I felt the cold strike my chest.

Then something inside me responded.

Mana.

I didn't know how I knew that word.

But I could feel it.

It was flowing through my body.

Not like the magical circles described in the fantasy stories I used to read.

It was heavier.

Denser.

More physical.

It pressed against my bones like fluid inside a sealed hydraulic line.

My engineering instincts immediately tried to understand it.

Pressure.

Flow.

Path.

Energy transfer.

The blue lines of [Mind Blueprint] followed the movement.

The mana struck my skeletal structure.

Then redirected.

The next gust hit.

Something changed.

The kinetic energy of the wind was being transferred through the strange pathways inside my body.

Heat spread through my chest.

The shivering stopped.

The woman holding me suddenly gasped.

"What..."

She looked down.

Faint blue lines glowed beneath my skin.

The man leaned closer.

His expression changed for the first time.

The woman looked at him.

Then at me.

"Vorn."

The name was spoken softly.

"My son."

I stared at her.

Vorn.

So that was my name.

Vorn.

I didn't understand this world.

I didn't understand why I had been reborn as a giant child in a freezing cave.

But I understood one thing.

I had been given another life.

And this time-

I didn't want to waste it.

I didn't want to spend another lifetime alone in front of a screen.

I didn't want my final memory to be an unfinished drawing and an empty room.

I wanted people around me.

I wanted a family.

I wanted friends.

I wanted someone to laugh with.

Someone to argue with.

Someone who would tell me to stop working when I had gone too far.

I didn't know how to build that.

Engineering was easier.

Machines followed rules.

People didn't.

But I had learned something in my first life.

If I didn't understand something-

I could learn.

The woman pulled me closer, shielding my body from the wind.

Her warmth spread through me.

For the first time since waking up, I relaxed.

I closed my eyes.

I didn't know what the future held.

But somewhere beyond this cave was a world waiting to be understood.

And for the first time in my life-

I wasn't going to build it alone.