Morning in Oakhaven arrived without warmth. Pale sunlight crept lazily through the cracks in the wooden walls of the shack, bearing with it a bone-chilling cold. For Rian’s family, winter was no mere change of season; it was an exhausting trial of survival. In the corner of the room, his father, Mark, coughed softly while wrapping himself in an old, heavily patched coat. The bruise on his cheek from the debt collector's slap a few days ago still retained a purplish hue, standing out sharply against his pale skin.

"Mark, is there enough firewood outside for the next two days?" his mother's raspy voice, Elena, echoed near the small fireplace, which held only a few dying embers.

"Enough for today, Elena. I'll head up the hill behind the house this afternoon to chop a few dry branches," Mark replied with a weary tone, forcing a faint smile to reassure his wife.

From the corner of the room, Rian sat cross-legged, observing his parents' every move. Inside the body of a three-year-old toddler, the soul of a former elite mercenary was hard at work analyzing the situation. Ever since he successfully unblocked his meridians and triggered his mana circulation a few nights ago, his body had felt lighter and far more energized. However, physical strength alone would not suffice to alter this family's fate beneath the iron grip of a greedy landlord. They needed resources—and more importantly, a power that surpassed normal human limits.

An opportunity presented itself as the sun began its shift toward midday. Mark decided to clean out the small loft above the ceiling—a storage space for ancestral heirlooms that had been left to gather dust for decades, deemed utterly useless.

"Rian, stay here, okay? Don't climb the ladder—it's not safe for a child your age," Mark instructed his son before ascending the rickety wooden ladder into the loft.

Rian merely gave a small nod, putting on the innocent demeanor expected of a toddler. However, as soon as his father disappeared into the loft opening and began shifting old crates, Rian stood up silently. Moving with trained, noiseless steps, he approached the ladder. His newly refined sensory awareness granted him incredible stability in every step, remarkable even for a three-year-old.

Within seconds, Rian scaled the ladder after his father, crawling stealthily behind a stack of old burlap sacks to remain unseen.

The loft was suffocatingly stuffy, thick with the stench of heavy dust and decaying old wood. At the far end of the space, Mark was unearthing a small, tightly sealed wooden box.

"Good heavens, what is this?" Mark muttered under his breath, lifting an ancient, faded object bound in animal hide.

From behind the nearby pile of straw, Rian narrowed his eyes. He could sense a faint, peculiar pulse of energy radiating from the object—a mystical resonance that instantly caught the attention of his mana instincts.

"Ah, Great-Grandfather's old book... This damned thing was what got our family ostracized back then," Mark scoffed softly to himself. He stared at the tome with hesitation, then let out a long sigh. "This place is too small to keep useless junk. Should've thrown this out years ago."

Just as Mark raised his hand to toss the leather-bound book into a pile of broken trash to be discarded, a deep, cold voice suddenly whispered directly into his mind—not a physical sound, but an urgent telepathic echo.

Don't.

Mark gasped, dropping the book back onto the loft floor. He turned around in a panic, his eyes wide with fear. "Who's there? Who spoke?" he asked, his voice trembling as he clutched his chest in sheer shock.

There was no answer. Only the winter wind howling outside the wooden walls. Shivering and convincing himself that exhaustion was making him hallucinate, Mark shook his head rapidly. "I'm losing my mind," he muttered. Making a quick decision, he left the old book lying right there on the dust-covered floor, turned around, and descended the ladder to continue his chores outside.

A few minutes passed until the shack fell completely silent. Mark had gone outside to cut firewood, while his mother had left for the village well.

From behind the stack of burlap sacks, Rian crawled out. His footsteps were weightless, completely silent. He stopped right in front of the leather-bound book lying on the dusty floorboards.

Rian knelt down, extended his small hand, and touched the surface of the cover. The leather was cold, rough, and covered in mysterious markings that had almost faded with time. The moment his fingertips made contact with the surface, a soft whisper hummed inside his head once more—no longer a foreign voice, but a calling attuned precisely to the flow of mana within his body.

He opened the book slowly. Page after page turned, revealing ancient handwriting filled with complex magical symbols and unnatural anatomical diagrams of the human body. Under the dim glow of a candle stub he had brought from the corner table, Rian's eyes gleamed with an insatiable hunger for knowledge, far too sharp for any child.

This was no ordinary journal. It was a grimoire—a book of forbidden magic.

He devoured page after page at incredible speed. Rian discovered deep records on shadow manipulation to absorb dark energy, as well as secret, advanced cell-regeneration techniques that allowed the body to repair tissue damage in mere moments. These notes were penned by someone who understood with complete clarity that this world was built not on mercy, but on absolute power.

However, when Rian reached the final page of the grimoire, he found something peculiar. The page appeared completely blank, devoid of any ink. In the center of that clean white surface was a circular symbol featuring a broken chain link.

Rian frowned, attempting to analyze the symbol. Accidentally, a minor scrape on his palm—a remnant of his intense training the night before—reopened from rubbing against the stiff parchment, oozing a single drop of fresh blood.

The dark red drop fell squarely onto the mysterious circular symbol on the grimoire's final page.

Instantly, the silence in the loft shattered.

The symbol on the paper flared with a blinding purple radiance. Rian's blood was not merely absorbed; it boiled and spread rapidly, forming intricate lines that spider-webbed across the entire page.

Before Rian could pull his hand back, a massive surge of informational energy struck his consciousness like a heavy steel hammer. Hundreds of ancient spell verses, shadow magic formulas, and forbidden cell-regeneration techniques flooded in, imprinting every detail of knowledge directly into his long-term memory at a dizzying speed.

Rian gasped, clutching his throbbing head as if it were about to split open, while his eyes shone with a brilliant light in the darkness of the loft.