Hiding on his bed under the covers was not as safe as staying in the isolation rooms, but he had read the sign as he had entered the room.

This room is a protected space and prevents scrying.

Note: Secrets are not safeguarded from physical observation.

The sign had been modest, a polished piece of metal embedded in the wood, but to Tom it was equivalent to a flashing neon advertisement. They were as good as inviting reincarnated children to practice their magic here. He had done a lot of thinking about this. Given the warning the moment he was awoken, the fact all the adults had been driven from the orphanage and the magic that thrummed in every wall. Given all those precautions it felt safe to accept this sign on face value.

That sign, the oversized blankets that acted as convenient blackout curtains, even the positioning of the beds in their own alcove supported that hypothesis. Outside, the lights went out, and he smiled and pulled out the knife he kept under his pillow.

As far as he knew, everyone in the room had one. They were being prepared for the cutthroat world out of the orphanage, and having a weapon handy when sleeping was an easy lesson to teach.

Silence is vital, he reminded himself as his hand ran over the sheathed blade. Physical observation included hearing, so the sound of him drawing his blade could easily be noted by everyone still awake… which, as far as he could judge from the surrounding noises, were most of them.

If it had been his own dagger, Tom would have no issue unsheathing it silently. But this was a weapon maintained by a four-year-old. It was lacking in most respects, but he was not helpless. Without panicking, he marshaled his mind and focused on the need to unsheathe the weapon without a sound. Then he released a single point of fate to bias the probabilities in his favour. That was all that was needed, as he really wasn’t asking it to do much. With one hand on the sheath and the other on the hilt, he pulled it out and twisted the knife as he did so to allow it to come out smoothly.

It made no noise.

Tom was only inches away, and he didn’t hear a thing. A professional, even an assassin, would have been comfortable with the precision of the attempt. With more haste than necessary, while maintaining the focus of reducing unnecessary noise, he rolled up his left sleeve to expose the flesh of his arm.

It was time to take his first real step in his new life.

It was time to create his first spell.

He clutched his weapon, if it could be called that. It was, after all, a blade designed for four-year-olds to play with. It was, in other words, effectively a toy; on the other hand, the powers of the place did have to balance safety with creating survival habits somehow. The knife was constructed of metal; it had a heft to it, even if it was hollow, so, instead of being paper-thin, the blade was more like cardboard. This safety feature, along with the blunting of the blade, made it safe for young children to use. Only the tip was sharp enough to cut, and the way it immediately thickened meant a kid would be incapable of inflicting a deep cut on anything. It felt like a knife, but, unless you had Skills, you could only use it to inflict bludgeoning-type damage. Piercing and slashing strikes were beyond it.

A mock-weapon for a four-year-old.

It was carefully designed to give the appearance of being real and dangerous while being impossible to do serious damage with. It was, Tom hoped, sufficient for his purposes.

He positioned that tip on the fleshy part of his lower arm, close to the elbow so that his sleeve could cover it if the healing failed.

Then he pressed down.

The soft skin parted surprisingly easily, and he was certain blood welled up.

He ignored the pain.

The room was pitch black, and briefly he had an image of the wound dripping and leaving signs that he had cut himself. Very conscious of his precarious position and the need to hide evidence, he licked the spot, his mouth closing on the injury to capture any leaking blood.

Copper taste flooded through his mouth, and he grimaced in disgust. The taste was unpleasant in battle on the occasions when it dripped down into his open mouth, but actively licking it up made it worse. However, the intensity dropped rapidly. When he licked it again, there was no additional blood to taste. The injury was not significant.

Mentally cursing the situation, he stabbed himself again. Once more, the wound was pathetic. The knife was too much of a toy and not enough of a weapon.

Another thrust. This time, he pulled his arm back and struck down as fast as his weak body could manage.

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The pain this time approached the one the purple ball had inflicted. It was throbbing, which told him he had probably done sufficient damage to test his magic.

All that was left was to cast the spell.

The natives of Existentia would undoubtedly have considered what he was attempting to be crazy. Tom only had a rough concept of the numbers involved, but most people have never created an ability and the majority of those who were successful did it via an achievement and not perfection like he was aiming to do. Basically, they were rewarded for achieving numerous, and usually dangerous and life-threatening, pre-requisites.

What he was attempting was something very few natives managed, because duplicating a skill perfectly based on trial and error was almost impossible. In his last life, Tom had done it with evolutions, but the same principle was involved here, and he was sure he could replicate his earlier success.

Both the achievement and perfection pathways for spell acquisition were considered almost a myth by the natives. For most people, spells and skills were gifted from classes, trial drops or master trainers.

Self-discovery was nearly impossible, almost certainly by design.

Tom was pretty sure he had read once that only one in a hundred natives ever developed an ability outside those three sources, and that increased to one in a thousand when you were discussing the perfection method.

Tom knew that, in some ways, he was arrogant in assuming he could recreate not just one, but many of his skills that way, but he had significant advantages that others lacked. For one, he had possessed the spell, and had cast it thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of times in his previous life. That allowed him to understand how the spell form worked intimately, and not just theoretically from books.

Mentally, he rehearsed the process, recalling how his previous healing spell had been formed and then the tweaks he did to improve its efficiency.

The cut he had created was superficial.

Tom pictured the likely pattern of damage that the last blow represented, the split skin and the burst capillaries because of the blunt force trauma.

Then he envisaged the spell. Usually, the spell form managed by the system would accept the mana he sent into it and do the work on his behalf. This time, he would need to do it manually, to summon the unstructured mana and then fold and spin it into the pattern he had viewed so many times before. He would do that outside his body, and then, when it was complete, he would pull it down onto the wound just like he did with Touch Heal.

Theoretically, it was difficult, but not beyond the realms of possibility, especially since Tom had often taken the basic spell form, then stretched and distorted it to drive efficiency. He was used to manipulating the base form of the spell on the lowest level it had; extending that experience to creating it from scratch was definitely feasible.

The idea was simple.

What he was attempting was not impossible, just highly unlikely. It might have been a remote possibility, but fate could make the near impossible likely.

With that desire crystal-clear in his mind, Tom released all the fate he possessed and bent it to that single purpose. Fate swirled out of him, and it was denser than he was expecting - not necessarily more potent, but there was more of it than a four-year-old should have had.

More than he had brought to Existentia in his first life.

That was an oddity. One more thing to follow up but hardly critical right now.

He refocused on what was important.

The wound ached, and he missed the diagnosis capability of his previous spell, but this was self-inflicted damage, so he had a clear picture of what had been done, and therefore knew how to fix it.

Be perfect, he reminded his fate, and then started the spell.

First, he summoned his magic. He was not surprised to find out that his reserves were tiny. The small quantity let him measure each unit as he cast the spell. He only had eight mana, which was next to nothing, but then, the wound he was fixing was equally small. The magic gathered, and he forced it into the spell form he needed, twisting and attempting to combine it into the exact pattern he remembered.

His magical control was poor, and his memory was patchier than he had hoped. As he was working, he could feel fate tweaking the weaves he had tied together. The almost unknowable substance directed the strings he formed, shifting them subtly to a new position, and made it so that when his control slipped, the weaves fell into stable positions instead of tearing everything apart.

Tom suppressed his disappointment at the ugly construction. It had none of the elegance and crispness of the system framework. Hopefully it would work, despite its clear inadequacies. He pushed it onto the damaged area of skin and visualized the physical changes that were required to close the cuts and heal the bruises. The spell weave would settle into the wound, and then, with a mixture of matter expulsion, movement, and cell growth the damage would be overwritten.

It was a process he had observed thousands of times.

Tom watched in horror as the magic he had created partially worked, but mostly evaporated away without doing anything. He had been hoping to feel the wound become unbearably itchy to signify that it was healing, but the spell did not provoke that sensation. The last of the magic faded, and his arm still throbbed.

It had not healed completely, and it should have. Eight mana with the proper spell would have been a massive overkill.

Lying there in the blackness, he chuckled to himself, soft enough that he wouldn’t be overheard.

Had he really been expecting that to work? Was he truly that arrogant? Fate was powerful, but the material he had given it to direct had been defective. He had expected his natural talent to be sufficient to get the spell form close to what he remembered, but the process was far harder than his memories had suggested. His magical manipulation ability was woefully inadequate.

He flexed his arm cautiously and tried to assess if the spell had worked even slightly.

A frown crossed his face.

Apparently, fate had done a good job. It had turned his failure into a minor success. The wound throbbed less than it should have, and moving his arm did not affect the injury like it would have if it was fresh.

Given how bad his spell form had been, perfection had been impossible, but the experiment was a success. He had cast a completely unassisted heal. His grin broadened.

It was a minor triumph. It had not worked well, but it had worked. Practice, practice and more practice, and he would master this. It might take a month, but Tom was confident his approach was going to work.

Happy with that outcome, he fell asleep.