The next day, when Alice went to the docks for work, she was caught off guard.

The reason for this was simple. The broken mana in the docks had, rather naturally, built up over the time she had been working there. [Kinetic Mages] moved things around, [Organic Mages] occasionally popped in to heal injuries on the dock workers if needed, and on rare occasions enchantments would also be used in the area. All of these things would naturally cause Broken Mana to build up. Alice had grown used to the fog of broken mana that hung over the docks even before she had gained the ability to see the rainbow fog that hung over the entire world. And after she gained the ability to see the rainbow mana, she had started to forget about the broken mana at the docks entirely. After all, she was Baptized by Broken Mana, so it wasn’t like any density of Broken Mana was ever going to harm her. And she simply had more interesting things to focus on.

The amount of broken mana at the docks had never reached the critical point where it might start causing harm to people, of course. The other Mages that worked in the area weren’t that careless. However, Alice had grown used to seeing a little bit of it here and there.

However, today, the broken mana near and above the docks had shrunk by a noticeable amount. And as Alice watched, it was still continuing to shrink. Alice also noticed that the rainbow mana in the area seemed to be behaving a bit abnormally, although she didn’t have a very good view of what exactly was going on.

Intrigued, Alice stepped into the area to see Milo and some of the other Mages waving mana tendrils around. Wherever their mana tendrils went, broken mana disappeared.

The non-magical workers weren’t around that day. It was just Mages right now. There were even a few Mages Alice recognized as being part of the town, but who didn’t have jobs at the docks. Near the water, for example, was one of the town’s [Organic Mages] who specialized in healing. Standing next to him was an [Organic Mage] who specialized in healing herself while fighting that Alice vaguely remembered taking part in the Expedition. A wide variety of Mages from around town were all joining together to clean up the broken mana at the docks.

Milo finally noticed her, and gave her a cheery wave. “Good Morning, Lady Alice! It’s cleanup day for the docks.”

“Cleanup day?” Alice felt somewhat baffled. She didn’t remember a day like this happening so far in the two and a half weeks since she had started working here.

“Whenever the broken mana buildup gets bad enough, we flush out the area. Some of the dock Mages usually handle smaller regions regularly, but we also have a ‘full clean’ day. Just to make sure no one gets hurt. On that day, all of the Mages in town get together to clean up everything in the area,” said Milo as he gestured towards a cloud of broken mana. “That day is today. How about you take that area near the entrance, and start working your way towards the river? I’ll help you after we finish this area up.”

“Unfortunately, I still don’t know how to clean up broken mana,” said Alice, feeling more than slightly awkward.

“Illa never showed you?” Milo seemed surprised.

“No. She kept mentioning she would get to it at some point soon, but the Expedition came up, and then the hunting party for the Vinebears… overall, we just somehow never got around to it. The training room Illa uses is also mostly used by her and occasionally me, and she said it would be easier to see whenever there was more Broken Mana in the area. I was originally planning to bring it up again next week if I still didn’t know how to purify broken mana by then.”

“Huh. Come over here, then. It’s actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and it doesn’t take too much effort to learn. I’ll give you a quick tutorial. I don’t know much of the theory behind it, but I can do the practical bits. Illa can teach you about the more theory-oriented bits behind it whenever she gets around to it,” said Milo, shrugging. Alice quickly obliged, heading over to the area where Milo and the other mages were standing.

“So, the gist of cleaning up broken mana is just a visualization exercise. Most usage of mana relies on pushing mana out of your Mana Seeds through Tendrils, right? You guide mana out of your seed, through a tendril, and into a target, thus making the target do something. Mana purification is sort of the opposite.

“Take a mana tendril and push it into a broken mana area – like this,” said Milo, as he moved one of his mana tendrils towards a particularly dense cloud of broken mana. “Then, what you want to do is to imagine drawing the broken mana towards the mana tendril. However, you don’t want to actually suck it into your mana seed – after all, that way you might give yourself broken mana poisoning. Instead, you want to draw the mana into the tendril and then leave it there – like this,” said Milo. As Alice watched, Milo’s mana tendril seemed to start acting like a vacuum cleaner. Mana from their surroundings was slowly, but surely, drawn into Milo’s mana tendril. Alice realized that all of the Mages around her were also drawing mana into their mana tendrils over and over again – they were just doing it much more quickly, since they didn’t need to bother teaching someone what was going on.

Once it was inside of Milo’s mana tendril, the mana just… stopped moving.

“Once the mana is contained inside of one of your mana tendrils, imagine returning it to a state of nothing. You don’t need to focus on any image in particular, but there are a few different ones most mages find helpful. I personally like to imagine a blank sheet of paper, but the image people use to purify mana can be pretty much anything. Some people prefer to imagine air, or sunlight, or any variety of other things. Then, guide a little bit of mana out of your mana seed and into your mana tendril while holding on to this image. Over the course of a few seconds, the broken mana you’re in contact with will slowly break down. See?” As Alice watched, the broken mana inside of Milo’s mana tendril did indeed start to dissolve.

A few things started happening at the same time. Totally unnoticed by Milo, rainbow mana rushed towards Milo’s mana tendril from the air around him. This was the second time Alice had ever seen the rainbow mana actively move towards someone else’s mana. The only other time she had witnessed the rainbow mana interact with human-controlled mana was when Alice had evolved her class.

The rainbow mana seemed to act as a sort of filter again this time. Milo’s mana touched the rainbow mana, where it seemed to change into a sort of… whiteness. It looked kind of like broken mana, but not quite like broken mana at the same time. Before Alice had time to get a better look at it, it touched the broken mana inside of Milo’s mana tendril.

And then both the not-broken mana and the broken mana just vanished into thin air.

One moment it was there. Over the course of the next minute, as far as Alice could tell, there was nothing there at all. No purified mana. No light or heat. It didn’t look like the mana had broken down into anything at all.

The broken mana was just… gone.

It was like someone had hit the delete button on the chunk of broken mana, leaving nothing whatsoever behind.

What?

Alice stared blankly at the patch of air inside of Milo’s mana tendril.

Alice started to get a very weird feeling about this.

One of the experiments she had been hoping to finally finish exploring this weekend involved one of her earlier questions. Specifically, the question of where Mages got mana to use magic from. She had tried a variety of things to see if it influenced how much mana Mages had. For example, messing with the amount of food Mages ate, the amount of mana inside of each food… heck, she had even tried looking into things like sunlight. The only thing she had yet to try was cutting off mana from the air around a Mage, since she had only just finished building her manaless room last weekend.

This was based on the idea that conservation of energy probably still applied in this world. So far, everything seemed to indicate that was the truth, at least. Enchantments needed mana cores as fuel. Rainbow mana seemed to somehow or another convert airborne mana into Stats and Levels, plus or minus some details. Even if she wasn’t really sure what exactly the details were, she had been working with the assumption that conservation of energy was still working behind the scenes.

However, as far as she could tell, Milo seemed to have literally deleted a chunk of broken mana from existence by using a chunk of his own mana. Maybe she just couldn’t see whatever it had turned into, but…

What if it hadn’t turned into anything at all?

She felt her eye twitching as she looked at the empty spot of air previously inhabited by Milo’s mana tendril.

Did Conservation of Energy somehow not apply sometimes? Was she missing something?

Alice took a deep breath before trying her best to ignore her thoughts. First, she wanted to purify a piece of broken mana on her own, to get a better look at what was happening here. She did as Milo had instructed, first sucking up a little bit of broken mana before thinking of the concept of ‘purifying light’ and pushing out a small wisp of mana from her Kinetic Seed.

Then, using her second train of thought, she carefully observed the broken mana. Just as it had when Milo poofed away a chunk of broken mana, rainbow mana filtered a chunk of her kinetic mana into the weird white mana. Then, both the weird mana and the broken mana poofed into thin air. Since it happened right in front of her face this time, Alice was absolutely sure that there was no change in heat, or light, or leftover normal mana. It was just… gone.

Alice glared at the empty chunk of air, feeling more than slightly miffed. She had felt that she was on the verge of another breakthrough in her study of mana and the System. That she was assembling all of the pieces of information together into a larger, coherent whole picture.

That might still be true for the most part. However, her assumptions about Conservation of Energy might… need a slight rework.

“Fuuuuuuuu-“ Alice cut herself off, before finally, she just sighed. “You know Milo… do you ever get the feeling that reality just has it out for you?” She asked, staring at the empty chunk of air where a chunk of Broken Mana had previously existed.

“No. Though, given how frustrated you suddenly seem, I find myself suddenly curious to know what has you upset.”

“I think I might have just accidentally broken one of my really big assumptions about how Mana works, and I might need to revise some things.”

“Isn’t that usually grounds for realizing you’re on to something big?” Asked Milo, sounding suddenly amused. “I heard one of the professors at my Magic University say that something taking you totally off guard is the hallmark for a big discovery. Of course, the guy had a penchant for talking about his ‘amazing’ research that never produced any results, so I have no clue how correct he was.” Milo actually chuckled at the memory, before giving Alice and even wider grin.

“If I’m right, I might be able to build a larger and more coherent model for how Mana works that might give me a huge leg up in figuring out how everything works together. But I’m also a little frustrated, you know? I thought I was on the right track for one of my earlier experiments, and then this nonsense comes along. Say, Milo… have you ever heard of something called ‘Conservation of Energy?’” Asked Alice. Surely there was no harm if seeing if the locals already had some research on the topic, right?

“I’ve never heard of it before!” Answered Milo cheerily.

“Figures,” muttered Alice. Then, she sighed.

“I’ll be excited once I stop being frustrated, especially if I turn out to be right this weekend, but… I’m going to stew in my irritation for a few minutes longer.” Alice said.

Milo chuckled again. “You know, somehow your expression reminds me a little bit of my sister. She looks like a kid when she pouts like that, you know? She’s starting to get a little older than me, but somehow the ‘kid’ impression always comes back whenever she makes an expression like that.”

Alice just sighed, continuing to stare at the empty chunk of space in front of her. On another day, she would have given more thought to what it meant in this world that someone’s younger sister was now older than them, but she was already tired now.

Finally, after a few minutes of stewing in her irritation, she got back to cleaning up the docks with the rest of the Mages. She tried asking some of the Mages if they knew what Broken Mana turned into once it was purified, and had only received blank looks in response.

Apparently, nobody had ever thought about this question. Because apart from Alice, nobody seemed to carry the innate assumption that everything must turn into something even after breaking down. Alice had just decided to turn her brain off for now, and settle her questions this weekend. For now, she had cleaning to do.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Broken Mana Purification: 0->6

* * *

Alice reached the weekend while still feeling a strange mixture of irritation and excitement. Previously, she had considered the ‘can Mages use magic with no mana in their surroundings’ to be more of a side note. She had basically considered it to be an afterthought to the main experiment – seeing how lack of mana influenced Milo and Cecilia. She had assumed that she would find out what she had already assumed – Mages would probably fail to use Magic without Mana, and that would be that. She would still test it, because one of the fundamental needs of Science was to put your model where your mouth was and prove your assumptions. However, she had considered it to be a done deal.

Now, she checked one of her old notebook entries. It had been written quite a while ago –before the Expedition, even. It had originally been simply a set of thoughts inside of her head, but she had later transcribed it onto one of her precious pieces of paper, because she had felt it was worth writing down. While her memory was vastly improved compared to when she had lived on Earth, it wasn’t yet perfect enough to forgo paper notes entirely.

The sheet of notebook paper detailed her hypotheses on how Mages got energy to use magic.

1) Hypothesis: Mana is actually digested from extra food somehow – as in, Mages eat a lot more than regular people (not that I have observed, based on my own eating – possibly [Survivor] reducing food requirements or something though). Magic seeds might actually be converting extra nutrition into mana. (Do mages eat more than regular people? Check this later. If all mages consistently eat more food than this is good evidence for this, and if mages don’t eat more this hypothesis is unlikely.)

Alice had already done her best to test this hypothesis, and had eventually come to the conclusion that it was incorrect. Mages seemed to have no dietary needs that were unique to them. They did eat more than average people – however, that was mostly a difference based on income, rather than actual need. If a Mage was on the brink of starvation, they could still use Magic just fine, and similarly, nobody had ever found a single difference in dietary needs among Mages. While Alice definitely felt this world had some major flaws in how it explored scientific questions, she was pretty sure that over the few thousand years of recorded human history in this world someone would have noticed something as obvious as ‘mages need lots of food to do magic.’ The fact that nobody had ever picked up on a difference here was a pretty good indicator that there probably wasn’t anything to find.

2) Hypothesis: Mages absorb mana from their food somehow. I have noticed that food itself contains mana on this planet – all living things seem to contain at least a bit of mana, and this includes plants. Maybe mages are just somehow digesting this energy and then spitting it out using magic seeds? Check to see if the amount of mana in the diet changes mana recharge rate).

While it has only been an experiment involving two people, Alice and Cecilia had already tested this. The net change in mana regeneration rate was… nothing. Eating no mana in each meal or super mana-rich food with every meal changed absolutely nothing about one’s mana regeneration rate and Magic ability. While there was some small potential for the two individuals involved in the experiment to have gotten some weird results due to sample size, Alice felt that she could at least dismiss this train of thought for now. She had a preliminary result indicating this line of thought was probably just a waste of time, and while she would still do some follow up experiments eventually, for now she was comfortable ignoring it.

3) Hypothesis: Mana is filtered from mana in the air, and mages just absorb when they aren’t absorbing mana to improve their stats (assuming that’s why people ‘naturally’ absorb mana). (Do I absorb more mana than usual when I use magic? Have not checked yet.) (If it’s safe to cut myself off from mana, see if I can keep using magic if I sit in a room with no mana for multiple days.)

Alice looked at this question for a moment, before she nodded. This was currently her primary assumption for how Mages got Mana. She would be putting it to the test today, along with Cecilia and Milo. If the two lost their ability to use magic after being cut off from mana for a while, that would be a good indicator that this line of thought was on the right track.

4) Hypothesis: Mana is somehow condensed from sunlight, and mages are doing the same thing plants do without mitochondria or something. (Idea kind of vague, but maybe? See if cutting myself off from sunlight causes me to lose magic abilities or something. I don’t think this one is correct, but still. The sun is a big, obvious energy source, and it would be dumb not to at least check later).

Alice had already determined this one wasn’t it. Again, nobody had ever found anything to this effect. Even just looking at the town around her, there were a few Mages that were, to put it bluntly, near-agoraphobic. Cecilia herself rarely ventured outside after news of her father’s death was brought back to town. When she had been a little more willing to talk about the following period, she had mentioned to Alice that she had zero problem using magic even after staying indoors for almost a week straight. Thus, sunlight probably wasn’t the solution here.

5) Mana does not give a shit about conservation of energy, and is just doing whatever it wants. Unlikely, but it’s magic after all. Who knows what it’s capable of?

This was now Alice’s second most likely Hypothesis. Which was unfortunate, because she had mostly written this down as a joke originally. She hadn’t actually expected that it had any real chance at being correct. Something which made her more than slightly twitchy, because if this hypothesis proved to be correct…

Well, it would toss out a lot of other assumptions Alice had. About how reality worked. If Conservation of Energy wasn’t, well… true, then Alice would really be looking at an alien world. One in which many of her previous assumptions would need to be tossed aside, and she would need to restructure the fundamental root of her understanding of reality, at least to a degree.

Which was why she hadn’t seriously considered it before seeing how broken mana was ‘purified.’ She had written it down more as a way of covering all of her bases. A conclusion that she didn’t really think she would come to.

Conservation of Energy was one of the building blocks of reality. It was a fundamental, inescapable of fact of life. It was part of the idea that every component of reality could be broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks of mathematically provable and identifiable chunks of matter and energy. It was one of the greatest hallmarks of human progress towards understanding the universe. The notion that, every single gram of matter and every joule of energy had always existed and would always exist in some form.

Even when matter and antimatter collided, something was left behind.

If Alice’s growing speculation turned out to be right, and she learned that it didn’t work here…

What did that mean?

Honestly, Alice had no clue.

Which was why she was hoping she would discover she was jumping to conclusions earlier. Being wrong never felt good, but when the alternative was just directly throwing half of her understanding of reality out the window, Alice kind of preferred the notion that she was just wrong this time.

Still, that didn’t stop her from quietly writing in a new set of notes into her notebook.

1) Check whether conservation of energy is still correct when magic does… magic stuff. Measure things wherever possible – Mariums of mana when fueling enchantments is a good place to start.

2) Investigate in great detail how purifying Broken Mana actually works. This needs much, much more investigation.

Alice closed her notebook, before she began walking to Cecilia’s shop. The weekend was here.

It was time to test some hypotheses.