That made sense. I could tell from Rose’s expression that she also looked a bit more excited than normal. Girls really stumped me sometimes. Still, it was nice seeing their two thrilled faces beam at me.
Let’s get back to more experiments, I thought. That previous technique had no practical usage. If I could manipulate the movements of water freely through the air, that would be another story. Sadly, the previous technique maxed out the force of mana I could activate at once. Maybe in the future, I would be able to increase that amount. But now I was at my limit.
Unlike fire and electricity, water was a physical substance. It had weight and mass, and it did not let off free energy for me to manipulate. That meant that it would take a considerable amount of energy to move it or change it. Did that mean water magic was off limits for me? No, surely it was too early for that conclusion.
I had to think more about the atmosphere and how mana amplified its properties. Since the atmosphere naturally had water vapor within it, I theorized that mana could freely move through water as it did through the air. In that case, I should think more about commands I could issue as air magic.
Magic occurs when mana contacts another phenomenon. Water magic was different. It manifested when mana contacts a physical substance. This was both a disadvantage and an advantage.
As for mana, I could issue it specific commands in terms of its movement or amount, but those commands were ineffective unless the mana also contacted a natural phenomenon. In the case of water, I had to stick to the basics. With Flare, I could freely increase the amount of mana to boost or reduce the thermal power. The fire still behaved according to its own natural properties, so I couldn’t freely manipulate the temperature to melt literally anything. Maybe in the future, with more mana, that would become possible, but it wasn’t now.
How did all this change when it came to a physical substance? Could I issue commands to the air that touched my mana? Commands that I knew worked hinged on manipulating movement and the mana’s amount and power.
Were there any other ideas I could try? Could I reduce the temperature in a sphere of air touching my mana until the moisture inside there froze? Surely not. Mana wasn’t all powerful; it couldn’t just manipulate the properties of the air like that.
Maybe I could if the conditions of the air were already right, but I doubted that mana could shift the surrounding environmental conditions. I had to think up something that mana’s natural properties could handle effectively. Something about a physical substance that mana could manipulate.
I knew that mana could increase the amount or force of a phenomenon and move it around freely. Of course, once what I was manipulating moved away from my body, it became autonomous, and I could no longer issue commands. To flip that logic around, I could issue as many commands as I wanted, so long as I was physically touching the substance or phenomenon in question.
That’s it! If I released what I was handling from Magicluster, I’d lose control of it.
I held out my right hand and used Magicluster. I kept the mana in the palm of my hand and focused my attention on it. Then I commanded: “Gather the water vapor from the air.”
Will it work? I thought. Will nothing happen? Hang on, is my hand starting to feel wet…?
Next to me, Rose squinted, waiting for something to happen. Meanwhile, Marie looked around for results in all directions. Their reactions were making me flustered, but I couldn’t tell them to back off.
I didn’t blame them for not noticing. In my hand, I had generated an orb the size of a basketball. There wasn’t much moisture in that much air volume. If I’m remembering my figures correctly, there’s about seventeen grams of water in a cubic meter of air, depending on the humidity and temperature.
Wait—that’s it? One gram of water was one milliliter, and an average water bottle was five hundred milliliters. So, I’d need…let’s run the numbers…thirty cubic meters of air for that much water? Would it even be possible for mana to be effective when stretched out that thin?
Even if I put my hand underwater, gathering the water like that didn’t seem much easier. Even if I somehow managed to gather all that water and freeze it, the technique wouldn’t exactly be more practical than what I had done before with the splash of water. But no, I hadn’t thought this through enough. Let’s see…I know that lifting up water requires a large amount of energy, I thought. It would be a tall task to carry water using mana alone.
Water had weight, tension, and pressure. Gathering the water vapor in the air didn’t require fighting all those forces, so it should be much easier than lifting a volume of liquid water. At first, you might think that lifting water sounded easier than gathering water vapor together. It was much more energy efficient to gather water vapor from the air.
The proof would be in the pudding. For now, I had to try creating a thirty cubic foot orb of mana, all while keeping the mana touching my hand. That was stupidly big, but it was possible.
I tried it out. I cast my mana ten feet in each direction, commanded the water vapor to gather, and then lastly gathered the mana back into my palm. When I did, a large amount of water filled my hand, floating in space on top of it. It wiggled in the air, burbling and bubbling, before falling in a splash down to the lake.
“Whoa!” shouted Marie. “Where’d all that water come from? It wasn’t from the lake, right?”
Rose stared in surprise at the bubbling surface of the water.
“Right,” I said. “I took that water out of the air. Apparently, doing so doesn’t require much mana. I could do it even stretching out my mana to cover a large area. It doesn’t appear to have an impact on our surroundings, either.” I had been assuming that sucking the water vapor out of the air of a bedroom-sized area would cause some kind of effect, but it didn’t even feel particularly dry. Maybe it was because we were standing right next to a lake. I imagined that there would be some kind of effect if I drained the moisture out of an even bigger area.
It doesn’t matter if I steal the water vapor out of the air? I supposed that it only composed a tiny percentage of the atmosphere anyway, and that the water vapor from the surrounding area would just move in and replenish wherever I drained. Maybe the air had felt a tad dry after I used the technique, but that was it.
Thinking back to the blob of water from before, it had been less water than I was expecting. Maybe I hadn’t actually absorbed all of the water from the volume of my mana. Regardless, I now knew that mana could gather the water out of thin air.
Next up, I had to see what kind of things I could do with that gathered water.
I quickly found out that I was, in fact, able to move the water, and apply force to the water I had gathered using mana. That force turned out to be quite low. The water did shoot a few feet through the air and splash everywhere, but I didn’t manage anything beyond that.
Water was water. I couldn’t make it do anything that ordinary water couldn’t do. If I could keep my mana activated for a few minutes straight, there was a chance I could gather enough water to wrap it around an enemy’s mouth and nose, and suffocate them to death. That would require more lasting time, and at present, the water dispersed after three to four seconds. That wasn’t nearly long enough. Using Flare with Compound Magic only extended it to about ten seconds.
Still, I was glad I managed to do something with water. Who knows, maybe I’d come up with some practical use later. I decided to be happy with my results.
“Boy, I’m loving this,” Marie said. “I’m digging this!”
Rose nodded. “I’m also intrigued by this type of magic. It’s not nearly so dangerous.”
Marie and Rose stood a few feet away, gathering water themselves. They figured it out in a jiffy once I taught them the basics. They were skilled magic users and learned the method in no time at all.
“Okay, now, let’s take a look around the lake,” I said. “You guys have the hang of water magic now.”
“Yeah, sure.” Marie looked at me. “But Shion, you’re not as excited as usual. Even though we’re using water magic!”
“Good point, Marie,” Rose said. “I thought you would’ve been chuckling like a madman at this point.”
I shrugged. “Water magic—uh, let’s call it Aqua—but as is, Aqua doesn’t have any practical uses. Maybe it could make you thirstier or less thirsty, but that’s about it.”
“True, you can’t really do much with this. I’m sure you’ll figure something out!” Rose said.
“Yeah, that’s true. It’ll come in time,” Marie echoed.
“But why do you want to take a look around the lake?” Rose asked.
“I thought maybe we could figure out why the Etten trout here have mana,” I replied. “I doubt we’ll find anything, but who knows.”
“It’s certainly true that if we could figure out why they have mana, it may have a big impact on our understanding of it.” Rose said.
“I’ve never looked around too closely myself,” Marie said. “Sounds good to me. Let’s split up and investigate!”
We got out of the lake, split up, and searched the surroundings. As Marie pointed out, we had never actually done this before. We had only really paid attention to the trout back in the day.
One lap around showed me that this lake was connected to a few different rivers. I assumed that they flowed down from the nearby mountains. Did that mean the source of the mana was coming from there?
Starting that day, we followed these rivers upstream. We found waterfalls and a few ponds with more Etten trout. Those trout didn’t have any mana. Sometimes, we found trout in the rivers in between the ponds, but those didn’t have mana, either.
What did that mean? It puzzled me deeply, and I couldn’t solve it. Eventually, I decided to drop the issue for now and move on to the next batch of experiments.