Andric needed a target to use his magic on, and something easily-visible to produce. He looked up at the ceiling, laying in between during the hours between waking up and Wolter taking him downstairs, and saw the wooden boards that made up the second floor. Although they were a valid target, it wouldn’t be wise to go affecting the structural integrity of the house he lived in.

Instead of using his magic on the ceiling, Andric lifted his blanket off him and looked at it. If he used his magic to, say, rip the blanket in half, Wolter or Lieve could easily mend it. As such, Andric didn’t have anything to lose by testing his first use of real magic on the blanket.

He held the edge of the blanket above him, an arm’s reach away from his face, and pulled on a tiny fragment of the mana in his cerebrum. The action felt a lot like squinting, and it quickly became second nature to him.

In an instant, hundreds of threads that made up Andric’s blanket split apart, and a large tear formed on the blanket. Andric stopped his mana from exiting his brain, and the formation of the tear halted.

That action, though it only produced a tear of several inches, brought a small headache onto Andric. The same kind of headache would only happen if Andric used the nail-growing chant ten times. The result had been as Andric hoped it would be, but the resulting headache from using magic without the chant was intense.

At the moment, Andric thought he received a strong headache simply because he used magic without a chant, not that he received said headache because he didn’t have an affinity for thread magic. Of course, with no guidance beyond how to achieve initial mana controlling, Andric would have no knowledge of the intricacies of practical magic.

In less than an hour, Wolter came to carry Andric downstairs and saw the ripped blanket. He said, “Andric, it’s bad to rip things,” and repaired it, but couldn’t help but wonder how Andric’s small arms would manage to tear the sturdy fabric. He brought Andric into the sitting room and placed him on a chair, then went into the kitchen to cook breakfast.

In Wolter’s mind, having good food was the most important thing in life, and having someone to share that food with came right after it. When he started steaming vegetables and frying eggs, he kept one ear listening to Andric, but he devoted all his other senses to cooking.

In the kitchen, the Avantus family only had one pot, one pan, and three sets of eating utensils. With his magic, Wolter could shape the pot or pan however he needed, but he usually kept them a consistent size. As for the utensils, they could also be altered with magic. For all dishes and surfaces, magic worked better than any soap when it came to cleaning.

The stove Wolter cooked at didn’t have a burner. Instead, he supplied heat with magic. Water needed to be brought in from a nearby spigot if it would be drank or cooked with, but water for cleaning vegetables could be created with magic. The family didn’t need any knives to cut their meats or vegetables; they used magic to split everything into uniform sizes.

At Andric’s magician level, just making a small tear in his blanket used up all his mana. Wolter - a much more experienced magician - diced several carrots, potatoes, and broccoli crowns without feeling a hint of exhaustion. Their levels were vastly different, but so were their ages.

In the sitting room, only about a dozen feet away from Wolter, Andric thought up ways to test the proficiency of his magic. Classics such as fireball and wind blade were obvious, but Andric had seen so many more uses of magic in his short life in his new world; if he limited his understanding of magic to what he knew from his previous world, then he would be doing himself a disservice.

Indeed, as far as Andric knew, anything was possible with his new world’s magic. Telekinetic powers were ordinary for Wolter and Lieve, and Andric had seen countless people in the town eating food with the help of telekinesis.

Not long after Wolter began cooking breakfast, Lieve wandered down the stairs from the second floor. She took longer than Wolter to get dressed because she prepared for the entire day all at once. Wolter, on the other hand, needed to go back up and change for work. In the morning, he wore a simple shirt and pants.

Lieve joined Wolter in the kitchen and peeled fruit. Pears and oranges were common around Gallus Town, and their preparation was an art form. Though Andric ate the slices by hand, Lieve kept her fingers clean by cutting the fruit with magic, and she could carve fancy shapes into the pears. Because of their soft flesh, pears were very easy to work with, and they were a favorite for fruit decorations.

Wolter and Lieve could make breakfast without using any magic, but they didn’t need to. They had no reason to be stingy with their mana, so they used it without restraint.

When Andric was brought to the dining table and given a plate of breakfast, he sat in his chair without touching his fork. Wolter and Lieve ate with forks to save mental and because they didn’t want Andric to feel left out. A few bites into eating their food, Lieve stopped and looked at Andric, wondering what he was thinking.

Andric simply stared at his food. Looking at the diced potatoes, he realized that he hadn’t eaten mashed potatoes once since arriving in his new world. Though his headache from earlier in the day hadn’t settled down, he was still willing to test his magic on the potatoes.

He focused on the small pile of diced potatoes that laid on his plate, imagining them turning to mush, and activated the mana in his brain, like squeezing water from a damp sponge.

This time, unlike when he directly pull the mana from his cerebrum, the required mana from the desired spell freely slowed out. Hundreds of particle streams of mana dissipated around Andric’s skull, and the mass of potatoes softened. It lost its structure, and the pile of cubes melted into a single glob of potato.

This change didn’t go unnoticed by Lieve, and she quickly alerted Wolter. However, they both stayed silent as Andric used his fork to eat the mashed potatoes.

Amidst a stinging headache, now much more painful than it had been a minute ago, Andric savored his accomplishment.