“………”

Shaden closed History of Magic I and leaned back on his chair.

He wasn’t sure what to think. He had only read one volume, and now he had more questions than answers.

The current system of magic was created by the gods, yet it was mortals that discovered the use of mana. This had been a major idea that the book had centered around. The phrase still puzzled him. The system was created by the gods, yet mortals discovered it…

All in all, the book was—just as its name implied—a history of magic. It told of how the elves were able to set up the greatest nation in the world through their use of advanced magics, how knowledge was withheld from those who weren’t elves, and so on. It had even mentioned some beastman warlords that had roamed the south but then had been continuously driven upwards by the elven union.

The races had sort of been isolated then. Humans had been busy making war with each other like flies, while the dwarves had secluded themselves behind the Cantsebil mountain range.

This had been around twenty thousand years ago until an unnamed destroyer came by and caused the elves to seclude themselves in Naerathim. The destroyer had laid waste to the land, creating a short-lived kingdom that ended up blowing up in smoke that could be visible from hundreds of leagues away.

Volume I of the history books was based solely on elven texts. It told of their connection to Naera, how her wisdom was passed down to those who had been enlightened, how those apostles developed the Tower and spread knowledge to the elves of Naerathim.

The modern system of chanting and symbols used for magic circles had its roots in elven magic. It would not be an exaggeration to say that elves had discovered the way of using magic with their connection to an ancient god.

However, the book did not explain the spells developed in the absence of elven knowledge. Judging by the loose way the book concluded, it would be explained in the adjacent volumes.

Then how about himself? How had he used magic without chanting? Was he like that destroyer who blew up his city?

More questions. Well, it was just meant to be supplementary to the facts he had been set on from the beginning.

He tossed the book on his bed and eagerly set A Series of Discoveries before him.

He flipped to the first page.

“The progress of humanity without the interference of unaccountable beings, the pure sensibilities in which humankind have been able to discover their command over mana; here are their recordings from the old days of men.”

Oh. Shaden’s eyes lit up. He continued reading.

“To understand magic, one has to begin from its roots. The power that dwells in all living creatures, what exactly is it?”

What exactly indeed. Shaden knew that the book he had wanted—was there for him to read.

He couldn’t contain his excitement. It had been correct to trust Eilae, after all.

His eyes glued to the pages, he embedded each sentence to the depths of his memory.

〄 〄 〄

Demund stood still while his teacher read the forms he had prepared, according to the submission guide. She looked at the listed topic, and her puzzlement was clear on her face. The clock was ticking by at the corner of the office, reminding Demund that every second passed was another level of uncertainty added to his project.

He just wished his teacher wouldn’t be disappointed.

“This is…interesting,” she finally said after what seemed like hours. “But still too vague. Creating a way of using SAP for people of the E class? What do you mean?”

“I’m still thinking about it,” Demund replied.

“You must have your final project done by the Friday after October break. The school has to pick the winners from the submissions.”

“I know.”

“But I didn’t expect you to choose so quickly. And such an unexplored topic too,” his teacher said while sliding Demund’s forms to the side of her desk. “You’ll have a harder time finding resources.”

“I’m aware. They didn’t have anything on the internet.”

“Is there a reason why you chose this?”

Her voice had a hint of concern mixed in it. Or was it pity? Discontentment?

“I had a revolutionary dream,” Demund joked.

“A dream.”

“Yes.”

The teacher’s stare made Demund feel embarrassed, but he didn’t turn away. He was confident in his topic.

“You’re a smart student, Demund,” she said. “Try your best.”

She was definitely disappointed. Demund said his thanks and left the room, feeling a little down from his teacher’s reaction.

Who could blame her? SAP wasn’t taught in schools, nor was it something that could be explored easily. Demund had tried to find anything about it during the weekend, but his searches had ended in vain. The only articles he had found were, ‘What does your rank say about your personality?’ or ‘Take this short quiz to find the affinity between you and your crush,’ and so on. SAP was more or less treated like magic, not a topic of genuine research.

Normal web searches hadn’t been able to bring him anything. If information on SAP existed, it was difficult to discover.

Demund clicked his tongue. Not that he would need them. The information he required was already inside of his brain.

He had a good idea of why he couldn’t use magic and why chants didn’t work in this world. He had also discovered something peculiar about his ability to understand all languages as Shaden. Magic was like an infinitely complex code, and Shaden had been able to understand it.

The question was, why did his other self possess such power? Maybe because he was in a dream. But it wasn’t a dream; it was another reality. He wasn’t completely sure of it himself.

Oh well. His other self was still young and would have a lot of time to explore. He’d simply work on his project as Demund for now. There were so many experiments he had succeeded in replicating in the other world, and he was excited to reproduce the results in this world.

There was just one problem. One jarring problem that could make everything fail.

He lacked mana crystals.

〄 〄 〄

Demund concentrated. He concentrated with all his might while circulating, enough to make spots of color appear in his vision. He poured his energy into his hand as he did as Shaden, trying to squeeze out the power within him to form a crystal of energy.

He failed.

It had never worked as Demund. Rather, the energy was at his fingertips, refusing to come out and solidify.

He could insert what he thought of as threads of mana into objects. That’s what he did with his prosthetic leg to make himself walk better. Maybe he was pushing mana out of his body—it was just that he didn’t produce enough of it. It didn’t clump together, and he couldn’t force it to crystalize like Shaden.

Just one, tiny crystal. That was all he needed.

He wished he were at the Islands. Jothan’s letter had mentioned monsters, and he could obtain his fuel from them. He could probably take on a few small ones if he had a knife. Only to the extent of a large dog, though.

If he were at the Islands, there would be crystals galore. Demund wasn’t the one to call out the government for all the things they did wrong, but he smelled a conspiracy. Monsters and superpowers, SAP and an enclosed area. Something was fishy.

It gave him more reason to win this contest. He wanted to see the place for himself. Yet, here he was, lacking the most important item that would allow him to win.

He tried again, this time enclosing the air within his palms. With every ounce of concentration he could muster, be began to circulate and pour out mana from his palms.

Please, please, please—

He couldn’t feel anything forming, so after a while, he released his hands.

Something like gas emerged for a split second before disappearing. The room in his light had obscured his vision, but he had detected something.

Finding hope once more, he attempted to create a crystal again. This time, he turned off the lights in his room.

After what seemed like a century of concentration and cold sweat rolling down his back and face, something flickered within his hands. Resisting the urge to look inside, he tightened his hands together and continued to produce mana.

Tick-tock, tick-tock went the clock. Demund held his breath. His arms were shaking. He felt so, so tired. In the darkness, he resisted the urge to plummet.

His head hurt. His whole body ached. He released the air in his hands.

A faint blue aurora lingered like smoke before Demund, dancing with the currents of air. Then it vanished, thirty minutes of concentration and pain gone in an instant.

Demund limped to the wall and switched on the lights.

This was never going to work. There was a tremendous difference between gaseous mana and liquid mana, and an even greater one between liquid mana and solid crystals. His head hurt, and he felt like throwing up.

Was this what people felt if they overused magic? He had never experienced it as Shaden.

He blinked and breathed slowly. His vision had become blurry for a few seconds, forcing him to lean against the wall.

How was he ever going to obtain a crystal?

The bed greeted his face with a puff. He had to study too. He couldn’t afford to force his body to train every day like this. He didn’t even know if his mana capacity would increase.

So much knowledge, but the lack of resources made everything impossible.

Come to think of it, what would his rating level be now? He had essentially circulated every day during his study sessions. Had it done anything to develop his mana pool?

Maybe he should call it an SAP pool. Sapool.

He inspected the texture of the ceiling for no reason, then closed his eyes. His head still hurt.

………Wait. How did they measure SAP in the first place?

Shaden shot up on his bed and abruptly fell back down from a dizziness attack.

But how did they measure SAP?

The machines weren’t crystal balls. Mana-detecting balls were created from empty mana crystals. The various glyphs etched on them would suck out a portion of the person’s mana proportional to their total capacity, converting it into brightness, color, shapes, or whatever it had been programmed to do.

Crystalsmiths were essential in Exarria as they could change mana crystals into various shapes and sizes without shattering them into dust, which usually happened when a crystal’s mana was depleted. That was how staffs, wands, balls, lights, and a variety of other items were created.

There was no other way to measure someone’s mana other than using the crystal ball or detection magic—none which existed in his waking world.

It was common sense. Something like mana couldn’t be measured with electronics, right?

There was only one explanation.

The measuring devices contained crystals.

〄 〄 〄

“I haven’t seen you since last year,” said Ms. Clarn.

She still had her tired look with bags under her eyes. With fights occurring every day at the club, she was a necessity to the school. But after the accident, Demund hadn’t pushed his body to the limits every day, ending his already infrequent visits to the nurse’s office.

“Hello, Ms. Clarn.”

“So? Are you hurt?”

Demund shook his head.

“Is there a way to measure my SAP level?” he asked.

“Oh, you’re curious. Sit down, it’ll be quick.”

The nurse got up, put down her cup of coffee, and strolled towards the many drawers of medical equipment. As Demund sat down, she returned with a needle and a small vial along with some disinfectant swabs. The scent of alcohol filled Demund’s nose when she opened the container.

“You’re not the first to ask for it,” she said as she cleaned the needle with a swab. Setting it carefully on the table, she reached into her pocket and produced a long rubber band. “Stretch out your arm. It won’t hurt, I’m an expert.”

“Wait, wait. Ms. Clarn, isn’t there a machine that can detect SAP?” Demund asked.

“Do you mean the full-body scanners?”

“Yes! Those.”

“Sorry, our school doesn’t have those. They’re only brought in during the Selections.”

“Ah.”

“Stretch out your arm.”

Demund let out a depressed sigh and put his arm out. The needle went inside of him soon after, taking out a small sample of blood. It wasn’t that he was against the pain. It was just that this didn’t satisfy his original purpose of coming to the nurse.

“Did it hurt?” the nurse asked while applying pressure to his arm. “Here, hold it.”

“Not really,” he mumbled.

He watched her fill the vial with the blood from the syringe with a sense of loss. A meaningless sacrifice. He shouldn’t have come to the nurse.

“Come here,” she told him, waltzing away into another room. Demund, still holding his pierced arm, followed her to the next room.

The nurse walked a few paces forward and inserted the vial of blood into a small machine at the end of the room. It was the size of a box. Demund watched as the nurse pressed a button. There was a kind of faint whirring noise, and after a few seconds, a slip of paper came out from an opening at the bottom with a beep. The nurse took it and handed it to Demund.

He took a look at the slip. A large C- was stretched across its white surface. Just one letter, and the number 1847 below it.

“How is it? Has it changed at all?”

His ranking was the same, but his SAP concentration value had risen by a few hundred. But he didn’t care about those.

“Not really. Ms. Clarn, does that machine measure potential from the blood?”

“It does,” she said massaging her cheeks. “It’s less accurate but measures roughly the same.”

“Can I take a look at it?”

“At the machine?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

With the nurse’s permission, Demund carefully approached the device and examined its structure. There was the hole where the blood sample went into and three buttons to the side.

He placed his hand on it and felt the machine using his threads of mana. From the opposite sides of the box, he felt a vacuuming sensation that tugged on his threads and made them vanish.

There were crystals inside. But his joy was short-lived. The device was tightly sealed and lacked anything that could be considered an opening to the crystals within it.

What had he been thinking? Even if he could open the device and see the crystals, it wasn’t as if he would be allowed to take it home.

He thanked the nurse and left the room, his footsteps heavy while heading towards the Club. Perhaps he could ask Enariss to squeeze out some mana for him, but he doubted it would be possible. Did she even know how to circulate? Even if she did, condensing mana was…

Impossible. He had tried because his other self could do it, but it was impossible. He was the anomaly. Even Lytha couldn’t condense mana like him, nor the Headmistress, nor anyone he knew. If it was that simple, the Adventurer’s Guild wouldn’t be necessary.

Another day of failure.

〄 〄 〄

Shaden blasted a ball of fire and stared into the flames as they vanished into thin air. He was bored and so tremendously stuck by the lack of resources. Or rather, his lack of mana crystals in the waking world.

Roughly three weeks. It had been twenty-two days since he had done absolutely nothing to advance the details of his project. The problem wasn’t where or how to begin; he had plenty of information in his brain for that. Day after day of reading the four books he had bought had engraved them into his mind, and he found himself muttering theories or experiments randomly throughout the day to himself.

No, there wasn’t a single problem with the project outline. He just lacked the material to begin it. Maybe that was why he felt depressed when he imagined the experiments taking place.

He was currently outside of the city, away from the prying eyes of scholars and students who might distract or hinder him. Before him was a large, empty plain littered with the experiments he had carried out.

A magic circle here, a line of symbols there. He realized how absurd his power of understanding language was.

Magic was a program that was intertwined into the world. He finally understood what the history book had meant when it had stated, “The system of magic was discovered by gods, but magic itself was founded by mortals.”

Creating spells was like coding. Before a system had been put into place, all spells had to be manually learned and developed, similar to using binary code to create a program. Needless to say, it would take years just to form a single spell.

Once the spell had been mastered, it could be taught. It would take a long time, but now that the master could use the spell, all the student had to do was feel the essence of the spell, like what Shaden had done for Eilae but much, much more difficult.

Consequently, a master-student relationship would be very intimate, spanning decades of teaching and transferring knowledge. Magic was very scarce and hidden from the world.

This had been a very long time ago. But then (according to the elves), Naera established the greatest programming language of all time. She, with the use of incantations, sigils, symbols, circles, and the like, imbedded her magic into the world so that anyone who could establish a connection with the system could use magic.

Naturally, the elves kept it hidden. It was also the reason why they had been able to prosper through the ages. The other races—with their primitive understanding of magic—could only hone their weapons and circulation.

The books hadn’t explicitly mentioned it, but Shaden assumed that it was the case. In the place of magic, martial arts had been developed. Instead of using mana to create a physical outcome, martial arts used mana to affect the body and the objects touching it—meaning it was simpler to teach and understand.

Saiton had changed all of it. He had understood magic without the help of an established system, instead creating his own system for the common people. The elves had reconciled with him after seeing his influence, agreeing to release their information on magic in exchange for knowledge of his new magic. Their magic, being so ancient, had come to a halt in its development.

The Language was the manual for the elven system of magic, while Spellcraft was the newer system that Saiton had developed. (Shaden had read both and understood both. Only the first volumes, though. His knowledge was elementary.)

Thus, a new calendar, a new treaty, and a new city had been put into place.

But how exactly was a magic programming language embedded into the world? It would require an infinite amount of mana for it to be available everywhere.

Shaden recalled the stupendous pillar of light that had lit up the skies. Now that he knew exactly where it was, he could spot it even from where he was at. That shimmering, white, impossible, endless pour of magic into the atmosphere was the only explanation of how a magic language could be maintained.

Then how about Naera’s language?

So far, the old system of magic was superior. It had more spells, developed patterns, and most importantly—it required no pillar of light. According to The Language, the system was maintained by the goddess herself, requiring no source of mana.

The topic was still much debated. Had it truly been Naera who had created the language, or someone else? Did the source truly not exist, or was it hidden somewhere?

To the west, there lay unexplored territory too dangerous to venture upon. Saiton, the greatest and most powerful mage of his time, had gone and failed to return. Perhaps the answers were there. But no one knew.

Shaden blasted another spiral of fire, this time large and more concentrated. The flames were whiter this time. It was relaxing to see the fires vanish so quickly in the air along with their heat. Mostly, it was just to blow off steam.

He lay down on the grass. He was stuck. He didn’t know what to do anymore. Maybe he’d just have to submit his project without the results and only the theories.

The sky was cloudy like always, without a hint of birds. The wind touched his face gently once every few seconds, easing his anxiety.

So much time, but so little progress. As a test, he formed a mana crystal between his fingers. It was small, around the size of a pebble.

It was so easy for Shaden but so impossible for Demund. Every day he spent testing out his knowledge of magic, the greater the dread within him became.

Who exactly was he? How could he use magic so simply?

Incantations had blown his mind. He had thought he had been speaking the common tongue, but according to the book, there was a specific language different from the elven language that was used in magic. So every time Eilae had chanted a spell, or he had read it off from a book—he was speaking the god’s language.

Then what was he speaking? What exactly was he hearing or reading? He couldn’t tell. He just understood it—there was no other explanation. It was a weird feeling. Had someone cast translation magic on him? Since birth? That didn’t make sense.

Then…was he truly in a dream? You could do anything in a dream. Was that why he was so…abnormal?

But this world is real. This world is real!

It’s definitely real.

He didn’t want to try anything further, anything that would break his sense of reality. It scared him. If this indeed was his dream self, how would he feel?

He blasted another cloud of fire into the air. The heat it radiated made him feel alive and real. The pain he felt was a reminder that the life he was living was indeed real.

Shaden got up and laughed as loud as he could. He was always overthinking things. He could do things he wanted, so what was the problem?

With a flick of his hand, the earth came out and swallowed all traces of the experiments he had been doing for the day. With a snap of his fingers, the upturned land flattened to its original shape.

“Seeds within the earth, sprout forward – Growth.”

The empty soil was quickly filled with grass at Shaden’s command. The land was good as before, without any evidence that it had been used by someone.

When he spoke those words, which language was he speaking? When he drew the elven symbols into the earth, what exactly was he drawing?

The shapes were clearly different. The sounds were clearly different. Yet he understood them. Yet when he awoke as Demund and repeated the same words with his mouth—

He couldn’t understand it. It sounded like gibberish that he had memorized. The symbols he drew—he couldn’t recognize them.

It terrified him. Was Shaden actually…him?

It was an absurd thing to think.

He got up and began to jog towards the city. There was an exercise he had prepared for Eilae, something he had learned from Lytha. His thoughts of existence drowned inside of him, dissolving into the soul that had begun it all.