Rowan could piece together spoken language easily.
The infant's residual memories were filled with conversations. Tone, cadence, and common phrases surfaced naturally, slotting into place.
Written language was another matter.
Symbols did not carry sound or intent on their own.
To understand them, he needed reference. Pictures paired with words. Basic primers. Children's books.
Only after mastering written language would he be able to read real texts, study deeper subjects, and gather meaningful intelligence about this world.
Which led to a rather absurd sight.
A six-month-old baby in loose trousers, hauling an overstuffed sack of books while leaping across rooftops under the cover of night.
If any ordinary person had witnessed it, their worldview would have collapsed on the spot.
Fortunately, Rowan's perception extended far beyond human limits. He selected routes where no eyes lingered and no footsteps echoed.
He reached home without incident.
Midnight found him seated on the roof, pale moonlight spilling across open pages as he taught himself to read.
By the time dawn threatened the horizon, he slipped back into his crib and resumed the role of a helpless infant.
The act required no effort.
…Except during feeding. That part was still uncomfortable.
During the day, his mother, Chris, carried him through the streets.
This gave Rowan a clearer look at Tingen City in motion.
Brass piping. Gear assemblies. Steam valves sighing in alleyways. Carriages driven by compact engines. Men in tailcoats and top hats. Pocket watches glinting in lamplight. Canes tapping against stone. Buildings layered with carved reliefs and dense ornamental detail.
A city forged from industry and nostalgia.
Steampunk, through and through.
While observing, Rowan turned his attention inward.
Potions did not become harmless overnight.
For normal people, fully adapting to a single potion could take years.
Sometimes more than a decade.
Rushing meant one thing.
Madness.
Transformation.
Becoming a monster.
Because of that risk, many supernatural practitioners chose never to advance again once they reached a comfortable point.
Better stagnant than dead.
However, the secret order the clown had belonged to possessed knowledge most independent practitioners did not.
They called it the acting method.
The idea was simple.
Each stage along a supernatural path corresponded to a role.
By consciously living according to that role, forming personal rules around it, and behaving in alignment with those principles, the foreign power inside the body stabilized far faster.
Digestion accelerated.
Control improved.
The clown had done exactly that.
After becoming a Seer, he had made a living performing divinations.
After becoming a Clown, he wore the mask constantly and shaped his behavior around the idea of a performer who thrived on deception, misdirection, and spectacle.
Upon reaching Magician, his instructions were clear.
Stage deliberate performances.
Prepare them.
Execute them.
Receive acknowledgment.
If he had succeeded in stealing the Antigonus notebook under the noses of six Night Church operatives, it would have been the perfect act.
Daring.
Elegant.
Infamous.
Stories would spread.
His reputation would grow.
Within both the order and the enemy ranks.
That alone would have been enough to fully stabilize his power and allow him to attempt becoming a Faceless.
Instead, he died.
Which left Rowan holding the same power.
To digest it quickly, Rowan would need to perform as well.
Not necessarily on a stage.
But in spirit.
Displays of skill.
Calculated risks.
Demonstrations that embodied what a Magician represented.
Rowan considered the problem for all of five seconds.
"Not exactly difficult."
If stealing from six elite operatives counted as a performance…
Then performing before anyone strong enough to recognize it would suffice.
With his strength, even wiping out every supernatural operative in Tingen would be effortless.
Not that he intended to.
They were, as far as he could tell, this world's version of law enforcement.
People who hunted monsters.
People who cleaned up messes.
No reason to slaughter them.
The point was simple.
Digesting this power would never be an obstacle.
One day, when an opportunity presented itself, he would "perform."
And that would be that.
That night, Rowan quietly rendered his parents unconscious again.
Then he returned to reading.
Thanks to the primers he had studied the previous night, he now grasped the basics of the Kingdom of Loen's written language.
The clown had not been educated.
Before joining the order, he had barely scraped through ordinary schooling.
Most of his time had been consumed by missions and stabilizing his power.
Which meant his general knowledge was shallow.
Rowan would have to build everything himself.
Hour by hour, he devoured history texts.
When dawn approached, he hid the books and returned to his crib.
By morning, Rowan possessed a rough outline of the world.
History was divided into five great eras.
The Age of Chaos.
The Age of Darkness.
The Cataclysm Era.
The Age of Gods.
And the current era.
The Black Iron Age.
There were legends of a prehistoric age that existed before all five.
No evidence supported it.
Only myths.
Records were plentiful only for the Black Iron Age.
Everything before that survived in fragments.
The current year was 1349 of the Black Iron Age.
The world supposedly held four continents.
East and West existed mostly in legend, with many scholars believing they were symbolic or imaginary.
What mattered were the Northern and Southern continents.
And in practice, only the North truly mattered.
The Southern continent was a patchwork of collapsed states, warlord territories, and colonies controlled by Northern powers.
The strongest nation on the Northern continent was the Kingdom of Loen.
Located in the east.
Devotees of the Night Goddess and the Lord of Storms.
Its common tongue was Loenese.
Second was the Republic of Intis, in the central regions.
Devoted to the Eternal Sun and the God of Steam and Machinery.
Third came the Kingdom of Feneport in the south, followers of the Earth Mother.
Fourth was the Feysac Empire in the far north, a nation that worshipped the God of War and claimed giant blood in its ancestry.
Between Loen and Feneport lay several smaller southern states.
Segar.
Lenburg.
Masin.
Nations that had broken away after the War of Apostasy and now primarily followed the God of Knowledge and Wisdom.
Among them, Lenburg was the most powerful.
Rowan closed the book.
The world was vast.
Dangerous.
Structured.
And, slowly, beginning to make sense.