From that day on, his life had followed the same pattern every day—morning was for training, and afternoon until evening was for studying with Owen and Ellory, who had also joined his daily lessons not long after she found out what Axelius had been working on.
Together, they read books, tested theories, broke things, fixed things, and failed so many times that no one could even remember how many versions they had already tried and remade. But through it all, they never gave up, and they never stopped trying.
The project that took most of their time and energy was the small mana-powered car—a toy-sized vehicle that they dreamed would be able to move on its own using only stored magical energy. The world only knew carriages pulled by strong beasts, so even the idea of a moving object without a beast or constant mana caster was already strange and exciting, but Axelius believed it could be done, and Ellory believed in him.
