I wasn’t grown in a flask. A common misunderstanding. I had real parents once. For the first six years of my life, I was an ordinary child in an ordinary family in a very ordinary small town, although my memories of that time have grown distant and hazy. I wasn’t sure what happened or how, but I suddenly found myself an orphan loitering in the streets, surviving off the pity of the neighbors.

  During the day, I’d play outside with the other children and act the same as always, but when the sun set, the others went home to their families, while my home stayed dark and empty. One day, I ran into a bunch of strangers in our house, ran away, and didn’t dare to go back there again. I believed my parents were only away on a long trip and would eventually come back and set things right, but days turned to weeks, and I was alone.

  I recall an elderly couple who often treated me to a meal in their humble one-room apartment. All they had to share was a piece of dry old bread and watery soup, but it kept me alive. I couldn’t remember their names anymore, if I ever even knew what they were.

  The old pair debated adopting me. The lady was in favor, but the husband opposed. He reasoned they were too old and poor to raise a child who wasn’t even their own. The missus was fast talking him over until the soldiers appeared.

  The army went around from town to town and village to village, collecting the homeless for reasons they wouldn’t tell anybody. Their tour eventually brought them to the door of the old couple too, in the middle of dinner. They’d heard from the neighbors that I had no parents and wasn’t needed or wanted. The soldiers asked if the seniors planned to take me in. In case they were, I could stay. But they would take everyone who had no one.

  Take where? To war? No, I would be taken good care of. They had places for children like me, where I could have food and shelter and education.

  The old couple was kind, but they weren’t stupid. They sensed foul play, though they couldn’t explain it. But I was becoming more trouble for them than I was worth. The talk dragged, and, unnerved by the men in uniforms, they finally caved in.

  Well, take her then!

  I never blamed that old couple for their choice, or even thought about them again. I was going to leave them anyway when my parents returned, and was relieved I didn’t have to play family with them. But it wasn’t about to get better.

  Boot camp wasn’t my destination. I was shipped to a plain-looking installation at the remote Lake Biscal, disguised as a fish farm. Within was hidden a state-of-the-art research facility run by the mages’ association, Mysterium.

  The bitter war with the beastmen of Rapatia had barely ended, and a new conflict already loomed on the horizon, the Empire of Tarachia swallowing up her neighbors at an alarming rate, like a giant, ever-hungry toad. More than muscle and steel was needed to prevail in a world of adversity. The Royal House pressed various factions for solutions, at whatever cost.

  The flow of armed campaigns typically hinged on the use of magic, and if common wizards weren’t good enough to make a real difference, then better wizards had to be manufactured.

  It wasn’t a new idea. Through history, Calidea had so far produced eight generations of artificial mages, but the results were less than stellar. They’d found methods to expand mana circuitry and techniques to augment casting processes via etchings, but the procedures had many drawbacks.

  If the power output was too high, it undermined stability; the subjects died too fast and randomly. If the rituals were too advanced, the information load grew too high on the brain; the subjects went insane or wound up catatonic, or just...got weird.

  Millions of crowns had been wasted to create unreliable suicide bombers, who were more a threat to their own than to the enemy. Researchers were happy to make discoveries, but the state thought otherwise, and Mysterium was fast earning itself the heretical brand.

  A man named Philemon became the savior of the project.

  Philemon wasn’t even a mage, but he was what all great endeavors needed: a man with a big vision and no morality whatsoever. He reasoned that the main problem with the previous generations was the antiquated obsession with universal mastery. There was no reason to create archmages when what you really needed were catapults. It was better to create a pawn that could only do one thing, but who did that one thing better than anybody else.

  Philemon picked out orphans of unique traits, assigned each a specific focus, and then doctored and trained them from the ground up to support that specialty. The ultimate fire mage. The ultimate wind mage. The ultimate earth mage. The ultimate metal mage. The ultimate lightning mage. And so on…

  Extreme specialization—that became the core principle behind the ninth generation of “super mages.” The Nines.

  Of course, if you named your Ultimate Human Weapon Research Project like so, it would quickly become a top target for sabotage and espionage. So it was called simply PROJECT FAR SHORE.

  And that was where it became my story.

  My lack of elemental affinity was supposedly a rare trait. One in a million. So I became the poster girl of the project branch Philemon was personally most interested in: the ultimate neutral mage.

  The “training” in the facility was, of course, nothing but torture.

  “Ultimate” couldn’t be reached without crossing a lot of lines. The reason they looked for orphans was because the mortality rate in the experiments was high. Previous generations had primarily used adult volunteers, but hiding the death toll from the media was hard.

  Nobody asked after the undesirables, which wars, monsters, poverty, and lack of sex-ed supplied in a steady stream. If anything, cleaning up the streets gave the government a big popularity boost on the side.

  Children were preferable to adults also because their brain and mana channel were still developing and more open to modifications. Who I used to be was efficiently, systematically broken down, physically and psychologically, and rebuilt over three years to become someone—something else.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  I forgot about the pain and fear the first time I cast a Tier 7 spell.

  I’d never forget that visceral dance of atoms in the desert night sky. Clouds of pure light and fire, blooming in the way of living flowers, faithfully fulfilling the prophecies of mathematics. The firmament replaced with a manmade radiance that cleft across time and space, echoing the early seconds of the cosmos. Calculations that had previously existed only in lunatics’ scribbles, made manifest on demand.

  Only then, for the first time, did I feel truly “alive.”

  No longer an ignorant, frightened, tormented child, but an emissary of realms beyond mortal understanding, a prophet delivering truths of existence that human ingenuity had torn from the darkness of ignorance.

  In that moment, enlightened, I could see the wisdom and purpose of those heartless days of abuse, and was made a believer on the spot. Even my life, the life and suffering of thousands like me, would’ve been a small price to pay to bring such glory into being.

  Everything for which so many people had worked for so long, and bled and died to create, had come to fruition at last, redeemed—The feeling couldn’t be described in words. We all wept out of joy, the researchers of Mysterium and I with them.

  But there was still the war to fight too.

  The project had achieved its goals—surpassed its goals—in creating mages of exceptional ability. But our opponent was a federation of nations, overwhelming in scale and numbers. Conflicts like this didn’t pan out like methodical exchanges on the Go-board. It was a vast, sprawling, garbled, ugly, inchoate sludge smeared wide across the map, burying continents under it. There was no one big problem with a matching solution, but a shapeless conglomerate of problems giving rise to yet more problems, and each solution came at a heavy cost. There was only so far theory could take you.

  No one person, however powerful, could “solve” war. And even the ultimate mages were not immortal. Of the thirty completed Nines to survive Project Far Shore, only two lived to see the days of peace. Only two.

  Family. The meaning of that word I’d already forgotten.

  Even the fact that I’d been someone’s child, once.

  Come to think of it——what had been my original name?

  —“Aha! There, Hope. You got that part wrong. Tut-tut. Redo.”

  Ms Asia would point over my shoulder, when I tried to solve math exercises. For reasons unknown, she insisted on personally tutoring me for the entrance exam. That meant, my days of taking it easy were over.

  Charlotte always maintained a polite distance, only offering friendly suggestions at times. But in Ms Asia’s eyes, I was only a teenager cruelly deprived of her biological parents, and she saw no need to be cautious of me. Like the General, she didn't have any children of her own, and was looking for someone to dote on—or so I suspected.

  Or maybe she was just that bored and had nothing better to do?

  “Focus now, Hope,” Ms Asia playfully scolded me. “A mage must always be in control of her body and feelings, isn’t that right? I may not be a mage, but I know that. Even if the subject seems boring and useless. But math isn’t neither boring nor useless. It is quite possibly the most useful thing in existence. It’s everywhere around us, all the time. You could say math is the language of the universe.”

  “Be that as it may, it's not like I really need to do math exercises,” I protested, leaning back. “Mages all have an intuitive grasp of values and quantities, without going out of their way to note numerals and equations. To be honest with you, I’d much prefer to learn the language of love.”

  “Then you’re in the right place. Universe itself is love. Thus, mathematics is also the language of love.”

  “Not sure I see the logic.”

  “Hey now. Your pen is not moving. Are you already that interested in bees and butterflies. Weren’t mages supposed to be detached and above all worldly concerns? I may not be a mage, but even I know that.”

  “I’m eighteen, not a toddler. It’s in the nature of mages to want to explore the unknown.”

  My life so far had been exceptionally loveless, and I couldn’t see that changing any day soon. But that didn’t particularly mean that I enjoyed being without human contact. Wasn’t it the same for everyone.

  “Then,” Ms Asia said, “consider G?del’s incompleteness theorem.”

  “What?”

  “I know you heard me. It is a pretty famous mathematical idea. One of the big ones. Our reality may seem bewilderingly huge—infinite even—but no matter which part of the cosmos you travel to, certain rules must be in place, for that part to exist at all. And I’m sure that no matter what world it is, as long as they have intelligent people, they will know an idea like G?del’s incompleteness theorem. Surely.”

  “I wonder…”

  “You know how in math, we often need certain postulates, or axioms, to be able to make a statement? It’s like lifting a singular sentence out of a book, in order to check if that sentence is linguistically sound and logical. As an example. But in many cases, we can’t really assess the logic of the sentence without knowing its context. Surely no one would be delusional enough to take lines out of a book, and act like the words explain themselves and have any value without the surrounding story?”

  “Thank you kindly for the advice. ”

  “Ah-a,” she interrupted and purred in my ear. “There. See? A rounding error. Are you even paying attention? Ho~pe. Are you telling me you can’t solve such simple problems and listen at the same time?”

  “Humans usually can’t do two things at the same time. Unless they’re multicasters.”

  Was this brainblast session payback because I teased her about being cute earlier? What a vindictive woman my aunt was. But if she thought I’d get all flustered and fall to pieces when confronted by the limits of my modest intellect, she had it all wrong. As a matter of fact, I could do multicasting. Handling only two things at the same time was not a problem at all—at least when I was at all full strength.

  “So then,” my adopted aunt resumed. “G?del. Similarly to the language example, more or less, we must give context to our mathematical statements. We do that by assuming certain things are true about the premise, in order to proceed with the calculations. However, G?del’s theorem states that while any consistent system of axioms contains statements about natural numbers that are true, it cannot also provide the means to prove them within the system. We’ll always need to make more assumptions to solve problems than the problems give us facts to prove our assumptions. A statement that would make no sense to a layman, but which is, provably, mathematically sound.”

  “Is…that so?”

  “Did you understand? It’s not only a theory of magic. The same thing applies to human life too, doesn’t it? When you solve one problem, you only get more problems, to perpetuity. There will always be things left outside our control, which may only quietly accept. Our existence, as free-form as it looks, is rather more like a cruel play of numbers dressed in flesh.”

  “That history repeats itself is not strange to me,” I said.

  “Is that so? What a bright student you are. Then, next, we should discuss my absolute favorite math thing: Euler’s identity.”

  “Aa, would you look at the time!” I let my pen drop, got out of the chair, and went firmly striding for the door. “I believe I'm taking a law-ordained break now. Bye.”

  “Boo. She ran.”

  Family. Were they all like this one?