A month had passed since I’d obtained the thundercite. We were in the heart of winter. The air had become a lot drier and colder. Snow was ready to fall at any moment.
I had spent all month preparing for the season. Every winter, we depended on our food and fuel reserves. This wasn’t Japan, where groceries and supplies were available year-round. It was expected that Marie and I would work, so we often helped out in the village and brought supplies back this time of year. So, I didn’t have as much time currently to research as in the summer. Even so, I used any spare time I had to continue my studies, and I discovered a few things.
When you apply mana to thundercite, the electrical charge turns red and momentarily flashes. Despite numerous attempts, this was the only result I obtained. I decided to stop questioning why exactly those changes happened.
Unlike with fire magic, where the mana could keep floating aflame and be used as a projectile fireball, the mana disappeared instantly after touching the electricity. The change in the mana was only momentary, but I didn’t know why.
I’d been assuming that, while mana wasn’t the same as a flammable substance, it had some sort of energy or quality that allowed it to burn. So long as that mana didn’t naturally disappear, it would continue to exhibit the quality of the substance it encountered. Along with a heat source and oxygen, you needed a flammable substance to light a fire. I had assumed that mana fulfilled that role. My experiments with thundercite proved this hypothesis to be false.
I tried to think about the difference between fire and electricity. They both had plasma, but in different ways. With fire, it would continue to burn until the combustibles were exhausted. In other words, it was a phenomenon that naturally continued. But what about electricity? An electric current moved until all energy was discharged. Then, it stopped until a new electric charge supplied more energy.
You can observe this during a lightning strike. The electricity doesn’t keep flowing. There’s no natural phenomenon where electricity continuously flows, as far as I knew—except for thundercite, which existed here but not on Earth. If fire could be called a continuous phenomenon, electricity was an intermittent one. Of course, electricity could flow continuously with a strong electricity source and a close distance in play, such as with an arc discharge. This wasn’t happening here.
There was another difference as well: the continuity of each phenomenon’s interaction with magic. Fire continued interacting with the mana after it had been supplied, but mana disappeared momentarily after touching the electricity. This led me to arrive at a new conclusion about mana’s function: mana isolates natural phenomenon, forces it to occur, then amplifies it.
With fire, I already had a heat source and the oxygen in our air. My supplied mana filled in the gaps by burning with a sort of “pseudo-fire,” thus mimicking the same natural phenomenon that it encountered. In the case of electricity, thundercite was my source. You needed a moving electric charge to generate an electric current. Mana can’t recreate such a thing. All my lightning magic did was momentarily amplify the electricity.
Therefore, I concluded that mana served as an amplifier. The color changes in both instances served as partial proof of this. Fire would burn, and electricity would discharge. I could only assume that because the thundercite’s electricity grew brighter, that meant a spark of some kind was discharging. In other words, an electric current would run through my mana—which in this case was shaped like an orb—and it would boost the voltage. This was a perfect example of how mana amplifies natural phenomena.
In conclusion, I had identified two qualities of mana: it imitates the natural phenomenon that it encounters, and it replicates what it encounters and amplifies its power.
All in all, mana was not a flammable substance. Of course, all of this was only a provisional theory. I needed to experience a lot more trial and error to both prove it and make my magic more functional.
And that’s as far as I had made it. I still needed to figure out how the heck to make lightning magic.
Fire would keep burning naturally, so I managed to create a fireball projectile just by launching my mana into a spark. Thundercite was tricker since the electricity just dispersed into the air. Yes, the mana amplified its voltage, but it didn’t make it flow anywhere. Electricity’s natural flow was spontaneous and intermittent. I didn’t know how I could get around that.
Anyway, this brings us all to the current moment where I sat on my bed, in my usual place, trying to figure this out. I shook my head left and right, left and right, in frustration.
“Hmmm,” I groaned. “What do I do?”
If my goal was strictly to study the interaction between electricity and mana, then technically, I had achieved that. But I wanted to be able to wield magic freely. The same thing went for fire magic. I needed to figure out how I could use them practically. With fire magic, the best I could do was light firewood and, when armed with a portable flint, aim a fireball at an enemy.
Mana itself was useful, like when I used it to vanquish the goblin by touching it. I still didn’t understand those particulars, other than that the target itself had to possess mana to create a reaction.
“Lightning magic…lightning magic…lightning…” I muttered. “I think I’m starting from the wrong place here.”
I could emit mana from my hands using Magicluster and Mana Eject, and then it would drift away. I used it once, and watched the orb zoom away with my jaw hanging slack.
Something fundamental was off, but what?
“Am I too attached to the trout?” I wondered. They were the reasons that I discovered mana in the first place, so the only way I knew mana worked was the way it worked with them.
Right, I realized. The answer is simple!
The answer?
Mana doesn’t have to be shaped like an orb! Right! How did I not realize that before? The image had been stuck in my head not just because of the trout, but because in fantasy series, mysterious sources of energy are often depicted as orbs. Thus, that was how I’d always imagined how mana would appear.
To test this out, I tried the following command: “Mana gather in my right hand, then release as a cube!” Out of my thousands of attempts to use Mana Eject so far, only once had it released as a sphere. This time, it came out as a cube!
“Whoa! It actually worked!” I watched the cube float up toward the ceiling and disappear. I immediately tried out different shapes, and they all came out just as I wanted. The problem all along had been my fixations on my previous assumptions.
I needed more fluid thinking. I was so fixated on my ideas about magic that I was neglecting what else there was to learn about mana. I needed to start shaking things up.
That meant not just with mana’s shape, but also my commands. I’d only focused on ejecting it out of my hand; perhaps I could make it move in other ways. It was time to start experimenting.
“Heh heh. Let’s do this.” My mouth curled into a grin.
I summoned my mana. At this point, I could activate it around forty times a day. Naturally, there was a limit to how much could be activated at once. While it could increase with further practice, I felt I’d maxed out my emission for any one-time release. It was fine if I had—I didn’t think I necessarily needed more.
With that, I tested out various Mana Ejects. I repeated different commands and observed which ones did and didn’t work. I lost track of time and exhausted my mana. This left me incapacitated and my family grumbling the rest of the night. It was unsettling how accustomed they had become to my antics.