The Historian's Guide to Arcane Heresy

Cato Basian was a historian on Earth, a quiet academic who specialized in the collapse of belief systems. His ordinary life ends abruptly, and he awakens in the body of a young man in the Theocracy of Vossen, a world governed by the Church of the Unspoken Flame. Here, magic isn't a science but a divine gift, channeled through complex, dogmatic runic arrays. To question the Church's methods is heresy. But Cato, seeing the runes not as prayer but as a programming language for reality, recognizes the system's crippling inefficiencies. Armed with a historian's understanding of systemic change and a grasp of forgotten scientific principles, he begins to quietly optimize magic. His first breakthrough - applying thermodynamics to a simple fire rune - is a feat of impossible power that marks him as a dangerous heretic. Hunted by the Church and watched by a jealous rival, Cato must introduce an age of reason to a world steeped in faith. But why does this ancient world feel so familiar, and why do the runes whisper a name he thought he'd left behind on Earth?