He stomped at the grass of the garden frantically, putting out the fire he’d set using the Ruby of Light and his newfound ability.

This was an almost useless new ability. Even so, there was an adrenaline thrill running through him: he’d achieved something! The past 100 days of grind hadn’t been worthless; they’d given him a genuine boost in power.

But it wasn’t enough.

(It never was, nagged a little voice at the back of his head. In this life and the last, no matter what he did, it was never enough.)

But, ignoring that little voice, practically speaking, this actually wasn’t enough. He could make the Ruby of Light become hot and set flames from afar, but he had no way of projecting that power unless he wanted to throw the Gem at every foe he met and scramble to recover it — and he hadn’t spent any time at all honing his aim. He didn’t have the power to aim and throw true.

Deliberate practice, a form of practice that was purposeful and focused on skill development, was a thousand times more effective in this world. If he’d had a week, he could’ve grinded that skill.

But he didn’t.

He had the scant hours until dawn, and he hadn’t kept track of the time.

How hard could it be, really? He’d learned control over his magic by converting light to heat, and in the process learned that the electromagnetic spectrum functioned the same way in this world as it had in the last. One day, gamma rays might be at his disposal.

But if he didn’t want to give himself cancer via radiation, he had to turn his manifested power from diffuse light into a direct, brilliant laser.

The Ruby had cooled enough for him to pick up.

He held it in front of his eye. And, on a whim, he nudged it with magic — and it started levitating above his palm, tumbling in the air, casting a faint warmth.

It was the same tetrahedron it had always been, with slight flaws, which acted as grooves and channels for his power. It was these imperfections that shaped his raw magical outflow into visible light; to create heat and fire, he’d had to overcome the instructions engraved in its heart.

These same instructions told it to radiate the light outwards. He didn’t even know if this world had a concept of laser beams or rays of light, and if corresponding instructions existed — so he would have to mimic the effect through brute force.

----------------------------------------

He didn’t actually know how lasers in his old world worked in detail. There were mirrors involved, but he hadn’t been an engineer. If his memories were right, he’d studied Physics, not engineering.

But hopefully that didn’t matter. Because magic was neither physics nor engineering.

The difference between a diffuse light source, like the sun or a candle, was that the light scattered in all directions. At the nanoscopic scale, light was a wave. It was also a particle, but for imagining the laser, he chose to think of it as a wave.

And it behaved like waves on the ocean (which, he suddenly realized, he’d never seen with these new eyes). Two waves coming from opposite directions or at an angle would break each other apart and weaken their force upon the waters, but two waves from the same direction would merge and add their strength.

The Ruby — calling it the “Ruby of Light” was inaccurate and mentally limiting — converted his magical power to electromagnetic waves. Left alone, all those waves went in every direction. He had to mentally will them to only go in one direction.

Because what even was magic? He’d had assumptions, and they were already falling apart. He’d thought magic was governed by how much power you could pour into a Gem, and so his training exercises had focused on building up that power. But now it seemed that magic was holistic, that the Gems were just catalysts in the hands of those skilled and powerful enough, and that you could override their programming simply through Understanding of the Self and the World Around You.

This reminded him of college admissions from his last life. He’d gotten very good grades on all of his tests, but it turned out colleges also wanted people to show they were well-rounded through extracurriculars and things that were harder to measure. Holistic admissions, they’d called it.

He couldn’t afford to dwell on this. All of that was from a literal lifetime ago. Why the hell did he still care?

He only had a few hours left. Were there less stars now? Was the sky getting lighter?

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

He lit the Ruby. It glowed a dim red. A minimal drain on his magical power, not hot enough to burn his hand, soft enough to not disturb anyone, but enough to test his power.

Why did light naturally radiate in all directions, as opposed to being a single laser beam?

Because natural examples of light did. The sun. Fire. The moon. Fireflies.

And Gems were cut based on what their designers knew.

But there was no reason that light couldn’t manifest as directed bursts.

The Ruby tumbled in the air above his hand, and with but a thought he made it rotate counterclockwise. It almost looked like a brown dwarf, the last remnant of a star that had burned through all of its fuel and was now slowly fading to nothing.

But that wasn’t the only way that stars could die.

Bigger stars would explode, scattering their starstuff throughout the cosmos, in supernovae so bright they could be seen in the daylight sky. And even bigger stars would collapse upon themselves, the fusion pressures of their cores unable to support the gravitational force of their mass, becoming infinitesimally dense, inescapable black holes.

Those black holes would rotate, drawing in matter. As that matter fell towards the black hole’s event horizon, that final barrier after which there was no hope of escape, it would be compressed by the sheer gravity. It would glow bright. It would turn hot. And, if matter somehow managed to avoid getting sucked into the event horizon, it might shoot out along the black hole’s axis of rotation, jets of superheated ionized plasma and X-rays and gamma rays blasting trillions of miles into the void of space.

Like a laser.

There was no reason magic should work along these lines of naturalistic inference. He was analogizing magic to physical systems he’d studied a lifetime ago — and yet wasn’t that just natural in itself? Electrons in a circuit didn’t really behave like water in pipes, but the analogy worked for most applications.

But he was desperate. If he wasn’t on the front lines, he wouldn’t get any of the spoils or any of the experience. If he didn’t get any experience on the easy battles, he wouldn’t be able to challenge the harder battles at all. If he didn’t challenge the harder battles, no one in House Granavale would gain any loot from Granavale Dungeon. And if House Granavale didn’t benefit from Granavale Dungeon, it would become a metaphorical quarry, stripped of all its resources, wrung dry by adventure and wanderlust. He would inherit a broken husk and could only hope for a political marriage to save him from a life of slow decay.

Was he spiraling?

It didn’t matter if he was catastrophizing, if it worked to alter his magic. He stabilized the Ruby’s rotation as he let his magic flow into it, so that one of the faces was parallel to his palm and one corner pointed skywards. He lit it up, keeping it a faint red.

He felt his magic marshaling with the rotation.

Faster and faster it spun. And as it did so, he willed his magic to move closer and closer to the center, resisting the urge to suffuse the Gem. The light of the Ruby narrowed, becoming a single straight line along the axis of rotation. And still it spun, faster and faster, until it was a blur.

There was an itch inside of him, a bursting irritation, a breath he hadn’t meant to be holding — and he let it out.

And with it came the light. A single, blinding beam, brilliant red piercing into the night sky. A burst of laser.

He stumbled back, fell to his knees, dropped the Ruby in surprise. That had been more tiring than he’d expected.

But he drew the Ruby to his hand with his magic. He was only halfway done.

Now he had to train until it was as natural as breathing.

----------------------------------------

When dawn broke, Archmund beheld the fruits of his labors.

Patches of burnt grass. Dead flowers. Ashes upon the garden path.

He floated the Ruby in front of him and pointed it at a rock. His magic flowed. The Ruby spun.

A point on the rock glowed bright red from invisible beams of pure, concentrated heat.

And then it melted into slag.

----------------------------------------

Archmund Granavale

Lifespan: 9/91 Stat Value Titles Achievements Bound Items Relationships Skills Strength 7 Granavale Heir Reincarnated Memories Ruby of Light (Awakened) Lord Reginald Granvale, Father Heat Dexterity 7 Lady Sophia Granavale, Mother (deceased) "Infrared Lance" Constitution 6 Amelia Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Intelligence 6 Linus Granavale, elder brother (deceased) Wisdom 7 Calla Granavale, elder sister (deceased) Charisma 6 Luck 5