Dawn rose over the village like a slow exhale, golden light kissing rooftops still heavy with dew. But the peace was deceptive.

Tension ran like a current through the air.

At the village assembly, elders sat in a tight circle. Their robes rustled with every shift, their expressions drawn. Villagers huddled nearby, trading fearful whispers.

“The beasts were never this close before.”

“Something’s stirring them.”

“Three attacks in one week… What if we’re next?”

Kael stood at the edge, half-hidden by a support beam. His hood was up, but his eyes were distant, drawn inward.

Because he had felt it too.

The night before, when he had fought that obsidian-furred beast—there had been a moment. A flicker. As if the world had slowed. As if something in his blood sang with perfect clarity. He had struck with precision, not rage. Efficiency. As though every cell in his body had clicked into alignment with the magic around him.

That moment haunted him now.

---

Later, Kael walked alone into the forest behind the river, a place forgotten by the village but overflowing with silent mana. Lumen drifted beside him, glowing faintly.

He pulled off his cloak and shirt, feeling the raw air on his skin.

He stood still. Listening.

Not to sound, but to vibration.

To the rhythm of magic.

He didn’t just pull mana from the air. He reached into himself, deeper than before. Into the atomic weave of his muscles. Into the residual knowledge from his past life—quantum flow, particle movement, frequency collapse.

He matched it.

And it responded.

A dull thrum built inside his chest.

Then his limbs.

Then his mind.

And then—release.

A single pulse of light cracked through the air like a heartbeat. Lumen jolted, wings flaring wide.

Kael dropped to one knee, panting, but grinning.

“I was right,” he whispered. “It is magic—but magic that obeys structure, rhythm—and chaos.”

---

Back at his loft, pages flew beneath his ink-stained fingers. Diagrams overlapped. Glyphs shimmered with half-finished formulae.

No one else had this view of magic. Not yet.

But he would give it shape.

Astra Quotient — a new measure. A personal index. Not of raw mana, but of a body's ability to synchronize with the magical lattice of the world.

Resonance. Stability. Surge potential.

He scratched in a symbol. Then ran the test.

> AQ: 2

He stared at the number.

Then at his hand.

He had just quantified what everyone else called talent, instinct, or bloodline.

---

That night, a beast returned.

Not the same. But kin to the one Kael had fought. Drawn by the residue of power Kael left behind in the forest.

It was leaner, faster—eyes glowing with unstable glyphs. It attacked without warning, crashing through the brush in the dead of night.

Kael didn’t run.

He stepped into its charge, synchronizing with the flux around him.

Every movement wasn’t reaction—it was prediction.

He spun past claws and drove his palm forward, striking a node of mana between the ribs.

The beast fell in a burst of light and silence.

Kael knelt beside the body. His breath was calm, but the forest wasn’t.

He felt it.

The shift.

The resonance had grown.

He whispered the glyph, let the ink burn into the new number.

> AQ: 5

He rose slowly, no longer panting.

He had crossed a threshold.

“Now,” he said, voice low, “we evolve.”