Rhys reached the horse stall. It wasn’t vacant now. Diamantakos was here.

A smile graced his lips when he saw the beautiful white horse resting her head over the wooden stall door.

Diamantakos was an ordinary horse.

The sect had originally bought her for the transportation of ordinary workers like him when they needed to move supplies across the lower mountain paths.

But the horse had proved far too violent and stubborn for any of the other workers to tame. She had kicked two stable hands and nearly bit the finger off a luggage carrier, earning herself a reputation as a menace.

Except when it came to Rhys.

For some inexplicable reason, the fierce horse only allowed Rhys to groom, feed, and ride her.

And just like that, through the sheer power of being the only one who didn’t get kicked into a wall, Rhys had acquired a private mount.

He had named her Diamantakos because of a distinct, diamond-shaped white patch right in the center of her forehead.

When he had confidently assigned such a long, aggressively manly name to a clearly female horse, everyone in the outer courtyard had sighed helplessly, shaking their heads at his eccentricities.

But looking at the majestic, muscular beast right now, Rhys couldn’t help but praise his own flawless naming sense.

Upon noticing him approaching, Diamantakos let out a soft, low whimper, rubbing her snout against his chest.

Rhys laughed, rubbing her head right between her ears.

"Stop being so dramatic. I wasn’t abandoning you, girl. Rather, I sent you over to the lower stables for grooming because you smelled like wet straw."

’Snrtt.’

She let out a highly displeased, heavy snort, blowing air right into his face and making Rhys’s lips twitch.

Diamantakos was surprisingly smart despite being an ordinary animal rather than a mutated mana monster.

"Okay, okay, I get it," Rhys said, rolling his eyes as he unlatched the wooden gate and stepped inside the cramped stall.

He turned back to her, his chest puffing out with sudden pride. "I’ll make it up to you. Today is a historic day, girl. I am finally going to show you MAGIC!"

’Prrrffft!’

Rhys froze in place, staring at his horse in utter disbelief.

He couldn’t believe his own mount had just let out a dismissive sound from her mouth.

[Pfft. That is not a dismissive sound, host. Based on my behavioral database for equine lifeforms, that was a clear and direct taunting cry. For a horse to express such an emotion, you should be very special.]

"Shut up," Rhys snapped under his breath, glaring at the empty air.

[And seriously, what is with this long-ass name? DIAMANTAKOS. What is that, a new ancient religion? A foreign country?]

"You are just an AI," Rhys countered defensively, crossing his arms. "You can’t possibly understand the deep, structural aesthetic sense embedded in that name. It commands respect."

[I can easily decipher it into two separate baseline root words,] the system text scrolled smoothly, glowing with a smug silver light.

[Diamond. And Tacos. You named a majestic white mare after jewelry and Mexican street food.]

Rhys completely ignored the system’s commentary as he sat down heavily on his creaking wooden cot.

He reached into a small burlap sack in the corner of the stall and pulled out a handful of premium dried leaves, tossing them into Diamantakos’s feeding trough to keep her occupied.

The horse looked down at the leaves, letting out a sharp, dissatisfied neigh because they weren’t fresh apples, but she began to chew on them anyway.

Taking a deep breath, Rhys calmed his racing heart. He reached into his coat pocket and took out the crumpled Fire Spark spell structure parchment he had retrieved from his Space Stone earlier.

He smoothed it out on his knee, studying the geometric sketch intently.

He had already spent three years staring at this exact parchment, so he remembered every single line, every intersection, and every subtle curve of the runic formula.

He didn’t even need the paper anymore, but holding it gave him a sense of grounded reality.

He held up a single, large dried leaf from the pile, gripping it gently between his fingers.

He closed his eyes, internally structuring the spell exactly as he had practiced thousands of times before.

This specific step had never been the problem. His mind was incredibly sharp when it came to visualizing the spell geometry, and he could effortlessly construct the internal framework of the spell within his mind’s eye.

What he had always failed at was the ignition.

In the past, he had never been able to light this internal structure with mana to project it outward, because his defective body simply couldn’t hold an ounce of environmental energy.

His body was a sieve, and the mana would leak out, tearing his lungs apart in the process.

But this time, he wasn’t using the world’s restricted mana pool to fuel his dream.

’Burn the lifespan.’

With a simple thought, he felt a sudden, distinct sensation within his soul.

It didn’t hurt. It felt like a tiny drop of water being plucked from a massive, roaring ocean.

On his internal status screen, exactly one hundred days of his expendable lifespan instantly vanished from the three-million-day ledger.

The next moment, the imagined spell structure inside his mind suddenly ignited.

An unblemished crimson light flared within his consciousness.

The raw energy projected outward through his fingertips, rushing into the dried leaf.

The leaf acted as a Channelbound catalyst, absorbing the burst of perfect spell output.

Fwoosh!

A bright, crackling, fist-sized orange flame instantly burst into existence, hovering directly over the palm of his hand and consuming the leaf in a matter of seconds.

"It’s a success!" Rhys shouted, his voice cracking with happiness.

Diamantakos’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. She stopped chewing her food mid-bite, her ears pinning back in absolute shock before she reared up slightly and let out a loud, incredibly happy neigh.

"NEEEIGHHH!!"

Hot, heavy tears suddenly welled up in Rhys’s eyes, blurring his vision as the overwhelming excitement of finally summoning a successful spell invaded his mind.

Three years of sadness. Three years of coughing up blood in the dirt.

Three years of being told he was a broken mortal who should just give up and find a village girl to settle down with.

He had done it.

He had actually touched the fabric of magic.

The feeling of the heat radiating from the flame, the bright light illuminating the dim wooden walls of the horse stall, it was the most wonderful, beautiful thing he had ever experienced in his entire life.

And it was also getting really, really hot.

Eh?

"Aaaahhhhh!" Rhys suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs, his emotional breakthrough violently derailing.

He frantically threw the burning remains of the leaf away from him, stamping on the dirt floor of the stall as the fire singed the hairs on his arm.

His palms were bright red and stinging fiercely from the heat. "Holy fuck! Holy fuck, I forgot about this part!"

Because he had spent three years solely focusing on how to ignite a spell, he had completely, utterly forgotten the basic mechanics of casting.

Fire Spark was a basic F-rank spell, but it still produced real, literal fire.

And since he hadn’t shaped the spell to project a few inches away from his skin, the flame had manifested directly in contact with his bare palm.

He had basically just set his own hand on fire.

He sat back down on the cot, cradling his reddened, stinging hand and blowing on his skin while glaring intensely at the blue holographic screen that had just popped up in front of his nose.

[.....]

"You," Rhys hissed, his teeth gritted from the stinging pain. "What is with that condescending text box?"

[It is not condescending text, host. Rather, it is a visual representation of my absolute, profound helplessness.

You have the literal template of a Celestial Origin, a limitless path of infinite growth, and you just managed to give yourself first-degree burns with a basic children’s spark spell.

I am mourning my life choices.]

"Come on, lass. You are acting like you had a choice in the first place."

This time, it was the system which went silent.