The smell was the first thing that returned: burning straw, damp pine needles, and stale goat milk. Derek opened eyes that felt swollen, blinking against the harsh morning sunlight filtering through the holes of a thatched roof.

His hands were small, covered in calluses and soot. He was no longer a thirty-two-year-old materials scientist working in a quantum optics laboratory. He was an eight-year-old orphan in a backwater village where winter meant either starvation or freezing to death.

“Derek, get up!” a harsh voice barked from the doorway. An old man in a frayed woolen tunic tossed a bucket at his feet. “The well is frozen again. Clear the ice, or there is no porridge for you today.”

Derek took the bucket without complaint. Survival came first. But as he knelt beside the stone well and stared at the thick block of river ice, something strange happened in his vision. He could see the molecular bonds—thousands of vibrating lattice structures of crystalline water. When he focused his will, a tiny filament of heat energy responded from the pit of his stomach.

“Thermal excitation,” he muttered. He placed his fingertip against the center of the ice block and whispered an equation of kinetic transfer. With a sharp hiss of steam, the thick sheet of ice dissolved into crystal-clear drinking water in three seconds flat.