It takes me about fifteen minutes to calm down and recover. Agnes gives me her waterskin, a floppy leather thing that I’ve heard described by many books and stories but never beheld myself, and I clear my mouth out. Ji passes several times, apparently on patrol. At one point he asks me to pick my feet up so he can blow a small fireball and obliterate my mess.

The townspeople tentatively return to their daily business, especially once Liv comes out and loudly announces that the excitement is over. My suspicions about the setting’s power level are confirmed when all of the crates are heaved up and hauled off by workers with bulging arms and tree-trunk-looking legs. A standard Gift around here?

Agnes heads off once I’ve stopped shaking enough to hold the book and start relaxing. I settle into a nice groove soon enough.

I decide to only read the chapters that are indicated as being critical. I can read more later if necessary, but between chapters titled “Philosophy of Power” and “A Mage’s Honor” and my historical experiences with technical books printed with 1850s tech I’m not too hopeful about the contents of the book. As such, in between long breaks staring at the sky, looking at the people of the town around me, and grumbling at the book and its author, I blow through the required reading in under half an hour.

The first few chapters explain to me that magic is the manipulation of mana for the alteration of reality. Mana, it claims, is a strange immaterial fluid that only interacts with reality in high concentrations, which are usually only achievable by spellcasters or magic items shaping mana to cast spells, by certain accidents of natural geography. The book has a very low opinion of what it calls “martial adepts”, which it claims are spellcasters that just don’t know that their “artes” and “stances” are spells.

Me, I’m wondering how a wizard’s thinky-meats or gestures or runic circles interact with mana to allow the wizard to control and concentrate mana for spellcasting. The mana doesn’t start out concentrated and therefore shouldn’t be affected by anything material, including the spellcaster’s diagrams, hands, or other tools, right? Maybe part of the Gift is a standing pattern that raises the necessary concentrations to work as an “interface”, like an ongoing spell that detects the user’s motions and turns them into spells? Maybe particular patterns of matter can amplify those tiny effects to macroscopic scale? Or maybe the book is flat-out wrong and mana “understands the caster’s intent” or something. I know that I’m doing the “Isekai Protagonist’s Burden” thing and being all arrogant about knowing better than the people of the setting I’m now in, but this feels like a basic omission!

The next couple chapters list several hundred “elemental aspects” that mana can take on, changing how it flows and how it interacts with itself and matter. The book fails to go into any detail here whatsoever, claiming that the interactions between different “aspected mana” should be “self-evident”. I am not impressed and I don’t bother memorizing any of it.

I take a break at this point to stare guiltily at an iridescent blue bird-person who comes out of the building opposite me and walks off down the street. I know it’s rude, but seeing a person covered in feathers “in real life”, instead of in a video game or movie, is something else entirely. Can they fly? If so, does that capability take up their Gift slot, do they have to give up flight if they want magic, does their Gift support capabilities other than flight? I realize that this is the only person I’ve seen that’s not at least human-looking on the surface. Do other places have different demographic balances, or is the bird-person a Visitor and the only one of their kind on the planet? Are there elves and dwarves elsewhere? There are plenty of birds in the sky, suggesting to me that the town I’m in isn’t very large and so could plausibly be all-human by chance.

I do notice that one of the birds up there must be absolutely huge, judging by the way it’s still visible despite being so high it’s dipping in and out of the puffy white clouds. At some point I should figure out if this place has the standard monsters-everywhere setup that LitRPG and Xianxia settings depend on for progression.

I finally get past the background information and pure theory and start looking at example spells. Unfortunately, they appear to be almost entirely unprincipled. I flip back to the “elemental aspects”, then forward to the “introductory spellbook” section at the back of the book, and find a huge gap between basic theory and working knowledge. Somatic components and mana-flow diagrams are accompanied by at best perfunctory explanations. A section on spell failures outright says that the cause or result of a miscast spell, ranging from fizzle to fireball, is entirely unpredictable. This all suggests to me that the practice of spellcasting is advanced entirely by trial and error and that the theoretical knowledge I just read through is only vaguely accurate. What’s really odd is that reductionist theories throughout history have tended to have fewer fundamental units than reality has. Biology was reduced to the humors, chemistry was reduced to the Aristotelian elements or the Wuxing or the Mahabhuta, etcetera. This theory instead smells like it’s multiplied a relatively simple underlying system into endless edge cases. The best comparison that comes to mind is the Ptolemaic Epicycle, a gnarly set of nested circles that allowed geocentric crystalline-heavenly-spheres systems of astronomy to approximate Kepler’s equal-swept-area ellipses by way of a primitive, unprincipled fourier decomposition.

Hopefully there’s an extensive body of literature out there by researchers with the same Gift, and the Bureau of Isekai Affairs only chose this grimoire for reasons related to field practicality or some weird mechanic of Gift transfer. If not, I’m going to have some work on my hands.

I ask the BIA agents if they’re carrying any more material in the grimoire’s Gift paradigm, but they say that they didn’t have weight to spend on stuff past the emergency grimoire. Heather promises that I can hit a library while I’m at Isekai Police boot camp. Liv theorizes that nobody’s ever actually used the emergency grimoire so the need for updates has gone unnoticed. Agnes just slaps me on the back and reaffirms her belief that I’m a good fit for the grimoire’s Gift.

I’m getting a few odd looks from the townspeople, I think mostly because I’m still wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of nice modern hiking boots. My hair fits in fine, black and short and curly. No glasses, thankfully, they’d probably have broken earlier. I already checked and my pockets are empty, which is a real shame - it probably wouldn’t have been too hard to rig up a way to charge my phone and then I could’ve used it to keep notes and maybe help with spellcasting. I’ll just have to hope this magic system can do information technology.

I finally get to the exercises. They start by asking me to form a set of hand poses and finger movements while holding on to certain simple geometric visualizations. The poses are both described in prose and shown by sets of block-printed illustrations from multiple angles. The prints aren’t fantastic but they do show the important parts, like when my fingers have to touch in certain places or not touch in others. I contort my hands through the poses until I feel confident I’ve got them, then move on.

I have to admit that I’m legitimately impressed by the next exercise set, which asks me to chain poses and gestures together in a way that quickly reveals that I’m doing several of them wrong. It’s sort of like a checksum, the way a book’s ISBN is chosen so the digits of the ISBN multiplied by their positions sum up to a multiple of 11. If you have an ISBN with digits that don’t sum up that way, you’ve copied it wrong. In the case of the book’s hand-poses, a misplaced finger will stay misplaced in the next pose, or it won’t match some intermediate pose that the book describes for you to check against, or your fingers will try to do something outright impossible to move to the next pose. I idly spend a few minutes trying to figure out how flexible the system is, eventually deciding it’s surprisingly robust to interpersonal variation. It only fails when I consider extreme changes like multiple extra finger joints or D&D-rakshasa backwards hands; the check poses would catch errors even if I had longer or shorter fingers, missing fingertips, bandages, gloves, heavy gauntlets, bad arthritis, talons instead of fingertips, or very long fingernails. It’d have worked for every single person I’ve seen since I landed here.

It also occurs to me that these exercises don’t require anything other than an empty hand, even though the book made a big deal about using diagrams and sculpted artifacts to guide mana around. Maybe that’s why this book was selected by the Bureau of Isekai Affairs, so agents could switch Gifts if they were out in the field with no other gear? I can imagine Heather trapped in a dark cave going through these poses to learn to conjure air and water.

Hand poses as perfect as I can get them, I finally move on to where the book says magic could start happening. Continuing the theme of the exercise being a tour de force in practical magic despite the book’s poor theoretical basis, the next exercise involves staring at a particular diagram while visualizing mana and doing the hand gestures. The diagram has elements of a couple different optical illusions that I recognize, crawling on the page without moving and shimmering around the corners. I envision “lighting up” my fingers during some of the hand-poses. I wiggle my hand around and nothing happens. Then I imagine my fingers heating up as dilute fire flows into and through them. I’m not sure what “dilute fire” would be, but it’s one of a dozen different exercises in this section, so maybe it’s having me test multiple options and that one doesn’t work as well for me? I go through the hand-poses and nothing happens.

Then, half an hour after I finished the theory and started moving my hands around, I imagine my fingers leaving expanding ripples in a viscous fluid as they move between poses. This time I swear I feel something under my fingertips, just on the edge of my perception, like a tiny scratch in a pane of glass, so small that you have to confirm that you’re feeling a scratch instead of a speck of dust or a bit of your own fingertip.

The optical illusions in the diagram on the page crawl more aggressively. My eyes water.

I make the last hand-pose.

A small violet orb, about an inch across, blooms into the air.

I touch it. It’s cool, solid, and glassy smooth, like a marble. I poke it. It doesn’t budge, hanging there as if it’s nailed to the air. I poke it harder, almost disbelieving, and it eventually pops like a soap bubble. I feel a tiny vibration in my fingertips when the bubble pops, like I’d been touching a speaker. I feel it in all of my fingertips, even the fingertips that hadn’t been near the bubble, on my other hand holding the book.

I start to imagine the mana-fluid and the ripples and cast the spell again, staring at my hands in fascination, and realize that I don’t have to imagine because I can definitely feel my fingers dragging through the mana as I shift from position to position.

It takes me four more tries to get it to work again. I can tell something is different halfway through the fourth cast, a vibration that I didn’t feel the other times. Another violet sphere pops into existence.

I grin hugely. I’ve probably got the Gift, which presumably indicates that I’ve built a sufficiently accurate understanding of the Gift’s underlying paradigm for it to transfer itself to me. Or something else entirely, depending on how this works. I ignore the hysterical voice in the back of my head shrieking about how my choice of visualization mattered and how it means the book’s theory about mana concentrations is at best incomplete. I have the Gift, which means it’s time to go introduce myself to the team and get to work.

Or, I find myself giggling in disbelief, I could take another half hour and try out one of the real spells in the back of the book. Spells. Magic. I just cast a spell! Decades of reading science fiction and fantasy books and playing tabletop RPGs and throwing fireballs in video games, I learned to program because telling the computer to do things felt like reciting arcane incantations, I took a bunch of robotics electives during my undergraduate because it made the magic just a bit more real, and… I just put up a little tiny shield bubble. Scale that up and I’m invincible. Well. Scale it up and strengthen it. And make it faster. And maybe make it a plane instead of a sphere! Or a bunch of planes, layered for ablative protection! And make it pre-castable and reactive! And-

My hysterical giggles turn into gleeful laughter at some point. Magic! Someone passing by my bench grins at me and gives me an energetic thumbs-up, apparently inferring that I’ve just gained a Gift. My clothes stand out and I’m laughing maniacally while casting spells in the street.

I should probably get that under control before someone reports me to the Isekai Police.

Oh wait.

I AM the Isekai Police!

…This is probably what going mad with power feels like.