THE HOLLOW SPARK

For five hundred years, the Magisterium has maintained absolute control over its empire through a carefully guarded lie: that magic is a divine mystery, a gift bestowed only upon the worthy. To preserve this monopoly, they rely on a brutal arithmetic known as the Sacrificial Constant, where magically deficient children "the Voids" are condemned as expendable fuses, used to bleed off the elite's excess power.

Seven-year-old Alistair is supposed to be just another disposable casualty in this system. But Alistair is also the reincarnation of a brilliant physicist from another world, and he knows what the Magisterium refuses to see: magic isn't a miracle. It is simply energy, and energy obeys unyielding laws. It can be measured, harnessed, and weaponized by anyone with the right math.

Exiled to a hostile, untamed wasteland alongside thirty other condemned outcasts, Alistair refuses to simply survive in the shadows. He intends to build a sun in the dark. Relying on the unforgiving laws of thermodynamics, he will teach a discarded generation how to turn their sanctuary into a massive industrial snare. Because the greatest threat to a mystical empire isn't a more powerful sorcerer - it's an engineer armed with empirical truth, ready to break their world down to its raw mechanics and rebuild it into something better.