Fire.
In his past life, fire had been mastered. Contained in stoves, driven through turbines, weaponized in engines. It bent to the laws of chemistry, bowed to formulas and equations.
But here? In this dirt-stained world?
It devoured.
It spread like a beast unleashed, feared and half-understood.
Arion stared into the dying embers of the village cookfire as Kelan's grating voice echoed from their earlier lesson:
"Memory is your first power. Fire, your first tool."
---
That evening, Arion wandered behind the village, carrying a stick, a handful of dry grass, and three flat stones. Not spirit stones—just river-worn, common earth.
But his mind wasn't bound by what was allowed. It ran along old highways of thought, forged in classrooms and lab benches.
He remembered—
Conduction. Oxygen flow. Spark-to-fuel ratios.
The fire he built wasn't random like the village's cooking pits. He dug a shallow cone, lined the inner layer with stones, and stacked the dry grass using a structure that channeled air beneath the fuel.
The Dakota Fire Hole.
Not a cultivator's flame.
A survivalist's.
When it lit—quietly, efficiently, with barely any smoke—his eyes lit up too.
"This," he whispered, "is memory made real."
---
Kelan found him there, hours later, squatting by the flames and scribbling diagrams in the dirt with a charred twig.
"Looks like you were a fire god in another life," the old man muttered.
Arion didn't look up. "I was a man who studied how to make fire behave."
Kelan chuckled. "That's almost the same thing."
---
By morning, Arion had taken over the family's old cookpit—modifying it with stone rings and shallow air tunnels. His mother laughed at first, until she boiled water in half the usual time using half the fuel.
The neighbors mocked. Then they imitated.
Within three days, five homes had changed their hearths.
The village elder noticed and narrowed his eyes.
"Who taught you this?"
Arion smiled. "No one."
It wasn't a lie.
Not in this lifetime.
---
Later that night, Kelan handed him something wrapped in brittle cloth.
A fragment of parchment.
The ink had faded, but Arion could barely make out a sketch of a pressure-based footwork pattern—one meant to reduce wasted motion during a lunge.
Beneath it, a single phrase in small, clean script:
"Earth remembers."
Kelan tapped the page. "I found this decades ago in the ruins of a sect that never made it into the songs. They thought body movement could mirror terrain—solid, grounded, unshifting."
"Like martial arts based on topography," Arion murmured. "That's… genius."
"No," Kelan said, eyes gleaming, "it's forgotten."
---
That night, Arion did not sleep.
He dug into the earth behind the hut and drew foot-sized circles into the dust, mimicking the stance. He moved slowly. Incorrectly. Then again. And again. Mapping not just his body—but friction, momentum, recoil. Like physics models.
He fell often.
But something in the rhythm clicked.
Not cultivation.
Foundation.
---
When he returned to Kelan the next day, the beggar handed him a clump of dark soil and a bowl of water.
"Your next lesson. Build something that uses earth as more than floor. Fire as more than heat."
"Why?"
"Because the village will soon test you again. They'll strip away your future with a smile."
He paused.
"But knowledge? They can't take what they can't name."
---
Arion nodded slowly.
From ashes and soil, he would carve memory into method.
And from method—he would one day craft a power no stone could measure.