After a long night of shopping eventually the group made their way to an inn renting out a room for the night. There were only two beds in the room with a wooden table and a set of wooden chairs, so Riku and Kazuo shared a bed, snoring loudly as they were deeply asleep, and Yuriko got a bed all to herself. Hideaki on the other hand sits alone at the table with a small lantern to his right lighting up the room just enough for him to read Yuriko’s grimoire.

  “Man, magic is so cool I can’t wait to learn…”

  Hide whispers to himself gently flipping over the leather cover, to be met with a table of contents. The book seems to be laid out from explanations of how Mana works, what Mana is, how magic works, groupings and types of magic use, other areas of study, and then some smaller sections near the back touching on what there is to offer in each section.

  “I see… there must be a lot of different kinds of spells huh…”

  As he speaks and flips through the pages, going from the table of contents to the first chapter he begins to read up on what Mana really is. He has a brief idea from what Yuriko had said previously, and some knowledge from games, shows, and books he has known previously, but there could be some differences, so it’s best to just learn how this world works.

  “...Mana is a building block to the universe and makes up everything. It fills up the atmosphere and allows life to exist… Mana makes up all of the souls in the universe, though the souls are constructed differently than the inanimate creations of the world… different forms of Mana exist… The most common form of Mana is ‘Free Mana’ which is the loose non-condensed non-woven form of Mana, it can be thought of like salt in the sea. You cannot see the Mana without enhancing your eyes or using an Apparatus, but like the sea there are areas of higher and lower salt concentrations.”

  Hide takes a break from reading for a moment and tries to understand what exactly he just read. If the book was right then that must mean that Mana is gaseous, being loose particulates that make up the atmosphere of varying density depending on location.

  “But they also make up everything…”

  If that statement is true, then that means that Mana can also change states or something similar being able to construct people, objects, and other things. This is really strange and confusing to Hideaki, but this is what he wanted so he will keep reading to better understand what exactly magic is so he can master it and become the greatest mage ever.

  “...Other common forms of Mana are Condensed Mana, Woven Mana, Crystalline Mana, and mixes of them…”

  “Holy moly! That’s a lot of forms…”

  Hide says in surprise just a bit too loud for the sleeping people around him. They roll in their sleep a little, but they seem to all be in a deep enough sleep to not awaken at his outburst. He decides to pay more attention to his volume, and continue on with his reading, since it’s getting a bit interesting now.

  “...Crystalline Mana is the most common inanimate form for Mana, making up stuff such as rocks, trees, and food. Depending on the crystalline structure that makes up the object different properties can be found, such as strength, density, flexibility, etc….”

  Once again taking a break Hideaki ponders about what he just read trying to relate it to what he does know. It appears that Mana may be some sort of subatomic particle from what it sounds like, being able to exist everywhere without being seen, making up everything, but also having different properties depending on structure. At first Hideaki thought it could maybe be an entirely new element, but that wouldn’t make much sense since then there would only exist one element since it makes up everything, and no reactions would be able to occur chemically, therefor Mana is a subatomic particle that is in every atom and effects the way it functions based on the structure… or lack of structure? It must also be slightly different from the subatomic particles he already knows of, possibly closer to being a photon than something like an electron, but also having properties similar to a quark… despite trying to explain what Mana actually is to himself using his knowledge on quantum physics and chemistry, Hideaki is completely dumbfounded…

  “...Condensed Mana is a highly viscous, dense, and volatile dark fluid. It is extremely dangerous and should only be worked with under the proper care of knowledgeable individuals… Woven Mana, is the most commonly used and researched Mana form used in magic. When taking thin strands of semi-condensed Mana, it can be woven, just like a basket, to form pathways for Free Mana to flow through and be manipulated by, to form what is known as ‘Magic’....”

  “There it is! Magic! So it seems like magic is created by allowing Free Mana to flow through Woven Mana circuits… interesting…”

  All of this is so beyond fascinating to Hideaki, and he can’t help but imagine that this is all way cooler than he’d ever imagined it could be. From what he had seen previously in his old world the closest you could get to magic was science, so that’s why he’d studied science and math so much. He wanted to be able to create anything he could think of. In this world though, Magic seems to be some sort of science itself… Maybe in his old world magic did exist, it’s just no one looked at science in the right way to see it.

  “...Apparati (plural), or Apparatus (singular) are magical instruments that are made from Crystalline Mana bound with Woven Mana. The Crystalline Mana acts as a physical host allowing for users to be able to manually manipulate them, and the Woven Mana allows for the user to more easily pass Free Mana from the atmosphere through them, into the device, for it to function.”

  “Ohhh, I seee… so there’s magical devices here too. That kind of makes sense, and now I sort of know how those work too… ”

  Hideaki yawns and rubs his eyes before going back to reading the book.

  “...Souls are what makes creatures what they are, otherwise they’d be lifeless husks. Living creatures are like Apparati, they are made with Woven Mana bound to Crystalline Mana cores, though, a big difference is that the cores are usually designed to perform natural processes so that it does not require an external user to keep it alive. Woven Mana in creatures is very very highly complex, to the point where the most powerful of Mana Weavers are very unlikely to be able to create something close to an existing creature, this is where Golems come in. Golems are creatures created from Mana by a Wana Weaver, though, are usually very simple creatures, and unable to perform advanced tasks, though it all is dependent on the Mana Weaver and how they designed and intended the Golem to be used.”

  “So apparently there are golems too… and apparently creatures seem to be nothing more than Mana-made neural networks from back at home… makes sense…”

  After getting a bit bored of reading about all of this stuff on Mana, Hideaki gently flips back to the table of contents, looks to find where ‘Magic’ begins, and flips to that page to see if he can start to cast spells, or at least do something a bit more hands on.

  “Ah! Here it is! First steps to Mana Manipulation…”

  “...A good start is forming Crystalline Mana lenses within your eyes to see the Mana around you. The lenses are temporary, but if made properly are accurate enough to allow you to transcribe Woven Mana… start by matching the following structure for the lenses… the lenses can be internal or external, it is up to the user…”

  Beneath the text on Mana lenses are displayed a few figures. One giving an X-Y plane view, and another to the right giving an X-Z plane view. It looks to be that as long as you match the structure by weaving the Mana to look like the X-Y plane diagram, that if you stretch it outwards following the structure of the X-Z plane diagram that the lenses should work as designed, and apparently they can either be formed within the vitreous of the eye over the macula, or placed like a contact over the eye.

  “Okay! Here goes nothing!”

  Hideaki places the book onto the table and thrusts his arms out with a whoosh of his sleeves through the air. He shuts his eyes and imagines the air around him condensing into thin strands that he weaves into a pattern to match the book. After some groaning and holding his breath Hide opens his eyes hoping to be met with some crystal clear lenses sitting before him. Yet, he sees only the book and the lantern in the dark room.

  “What the heeckkk—”

  “Need some help?”

  Hide hears a soft whisper from off to his left in the dark, it takes his eyes a moment to adjust since he’s been in the light all this time, though he can tell by the voice it’s Yuriko. She smiles sofly, her hair falling from her shoulder as she leans over slightly. She makes her way over to him slowly, before raising a single pointed finger that begins to manifest a bright pinpoint white light above it.

  “Woahh… also ow, my eyes-”

  They both laugh at that softly so as to not wake the other.

  “Visualizing Mana is hard at first, and honestly my grimoire doesn’t really explain that well, but it gets easier after the first few times, I promise”

  Hide looks to Yuriko as she talks, taking in each of the words she says.

  “Here here, this helped me when I first started learning, so you can try it too!”

  She takes another step towards Hideaki, entering his personal bubble. She leans down only inches away from his face with that same soft smile she has held so many times before. She quickly brings her hand to his face, bringing it up his face. Then she pinches his nose shut. Hide’s eyes shoot open and he pulls his head back in surprise, but her tiny little girly hands don’t budge. She is firmly fastened onto his nose. Hide opens his mouth quickly to catch a breath and ask her what she’s doing but before he can even get a breath in she throws her other hand up to him, covering and firmly grasping his mouth, blocking his last air way. Hide can’t understand what she’s trying to do or why but as he sits there panicking he feels his head getting lighter.

  This little girl’s grip is seriously no joke, if I don’t get her off of me and quick I’ll suffocate and die!

  He begins tugging at her, getting weaker and weaker, slowly. His vision starts to blur and his mind fogs as he enters into a state or relaxation, the peace and acceptance before death. As he struggles weakly just before giving up he feels something budge. Not Yuriko, but his lungs? He tries inhaling harder, and he doesn’t feel his lungs expand but something else. Something non-physical.

  My soul!

  Just as he thinks that, he goes for a big inhale. Sucking in the Mana around him. What’s weird though is that unlike his lungs it feels like he can keep sucking and his soul doesn’t really feel as if it’s getting any bigger, the only way he would know there’s Mana within him is by knowing he's been sucking it in. But Hide forgot he still wasn’t breathing and could feel his eyes growing darker. So he gave it one last ditch effort and grabbed at Yuriko’s hands again and tugged at them, which caused her to fall backwards as he threw her. Hide gasps deeply, breathing in and out as he catches his breath.

  “Owowowwww….”

  Yuriko caresses her bruised buttocks from the fall.

  “What was that for?!?”

  Hide turns quickly Yuriko, waking the others slightly, but they end up falling back to sleep.

  “To get you to feel your soul! It worked didn’t it?”

  “Well yeah, but you could’ve totally warned me beforehand!”

  “Oh—Yeah, I guess I could’ve..”

  Yuriko, still sitting on the floor, brings a hand to the back of her head and laughs awkwardly at her mistake, lightening the mood a bit.

  “Didn’t your soul feel a lot like your lungs? That’s why when your lungs weren’t working your soul took over”

  “Yeah, it did sort of feel like my lungs, it was weird though, like it felt like I could suck in forever”

  Hide chuckles at the weirdness of how that all sounds, and Yuriko tilts her head at him as he laughs. Hide brings his hand to his chest and looks down as he feels about it.

  “So that’s how it feels… like breathing…”

  Yuriko stands up and walks over to Hideaki before sitting in the chair in front of him, setting her hands on the table looking at the lantern.

  “Now you know how to suck in Mana, now to pass it through your body to weave it… you did get to that part right?-”

  “Yes yes”

  Hide laughs and rolls his eyes. Obviously he’d read through all of the stuff he needs to read through before going into the actual magic stuff, he’d never skip over something important like that.

  “Okay good… so you take in the Mana, and then push it out of yourrr… oh wait…”

  She looks at her hands but then up to Hideaki before her eyes start to glow with a hint of a bluish purple tint. She looks at him up and down and grabs at his hands looking at them closely, tracing her finger up and down his arms and hands in weird wiggly motions going up and down, side to side, and in loopty loops. She then drags her finger from those patterns slowly down to his right index finger before bringing her finger up and then down tapping the tip of his finger.

  “Here, push the Mana through your body and out here. The soul of every person is different, so it is often needed for someone who is proficient in magic to read and determine a specific person's Mana condensing path… basically forcing out Mana from any place on your body would not necessarily produce the same result!”

  “Ohhh, okay okay… I think I read about something like that in your grimoire, where passing Free Mana through Woven Mana produces different outputs. So this is that?”

  “Yep, by passing Free Mana through the path I showed you, you should be able to create the Condensed Mana needed to copy the outline for the Crystalline Mana structure in Mana lenses”

  As she explains this to him, she looks so much more happy than she usually does, like she doesn’t get to talk about magic very often, and this is the first time in a while she has spoken to someone about it.

  “Wait, so how come I have to do all of this stuff, when you used the Mana lenses just a second ago without even holding up a finger and drawing them out or anything??”

  “Well, when you get to be better at magic you can visualize things much better and accurately within you head, without needing to draw things out with your hand, also you can push Mana flow through parts of your body not just your hands.”

  Hide looks highly disappointed by this. This means that it may be even harder than he had thought to be able to use magic. Yuriko gently brings a hand up and places it on his shoulder consoling him.

  “Aww, it’s okay, it really doesn’t take that long to get good enough to do this, okay?”

  Hide’s eyes filled with gloom slowly look up to Yuriko before off to the side.

  “Okayyy…”

  “Great! Now how about you practice this and I go back to sleep now?”

  Hide nods as he brings his arms out and begins to draw lines in the air. Yuriko can see the concentration in his eyes and nods, understanding that he must solve the rest of this on his own for himself to succeed in magic. And with that she walks off into the dark back over to her bed, patting the sheets and she slips into bed. Hide continues to draw lines into the night as they all sleep.

  ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※

  As the sun rises and slowly begins to flood the room with warm light, Riku begins to stir in bed before yawning and stretching out on the bed, eventually sitting upright and rubbing his eyes. Looking about the room he sees Kazuo to his right asleep cuddling the pillow, Yuriko lying in bed all sprawled out more as if she were thrown into bed and knocked out rather than fallen asleep, and Hide sitting in the chair at the table laying back with his head slung forward, and right hand outstretched on the table with his finger rhythmically twitching up and down.

  Riku wanders over to Hide and places his hand gently on his shoulder, brushing him awake.

  “Hey, hey… you didn’t sleep in that chair all night did you??”

  Hide yawns and stretches, before rubbing his eyes trying to figure out where exactly he is, and what is going on. He sees Riku and the table with the cold lamp and grimoire, and looks to Yuriko’s bed seeing her all sprawled out.

  “Uh—what happened to her?...”

  Hide points to Yuriko who is lying in bed quite unnaturally.

  “Honestly, I have no clue—but back to what I said, you didn’t sleep in that chair all night, did you?”

  “I did, but that’s fine with me, I’ve slept in many many worse places in my life”

  Riku looks at him somewhat pitying him a bit, before seeing the grimoire.

  “I’m guessing you were reading up on magic last night?”

  “Yeah, just a little bit, and practicing making Mana Lenses”

  “Wait, making Mana Lenses already??”

  Riku looks at Hideaki, shocked. Hide doesn’t seem to understand why Riku would be surprised by him working on such a low level, beginner, Apparatus. After all this is literally in the section of the book meant for introductions into Mana Manipulation.

  “Why do you look so surprised? It’s supposed to be the starter Apparatus spell meant for an easy introduction into Mana Manipulation?”

  “Well, it iss… but it took me weeks before I could move from reading up on all of the different types of Mana, and how to manipulate it, to start casting magic…. To do all of that in one night…”

  “Well I don’t think I would have gotten as far without Yuriko showing me that trick she learned on how to trick your body into ‘breathing Mana’ or whatever it was”

  Riku cocks his head to the side.

  “What do you mean?”

  Hide thinks for a moment. Riku must not have been taught the method by Yuriko, which is interesting, but would make sense if he was already able to manipulate Mana before meeting her.

  “The one where you cover your mouth and nose until you feel something give, and your soul tries to act like a set of lungs, sucking in Mana, instead of your lungs taking in air”

  “Um… that sounds miserable dude…”

  They both begin to hear rustling as Kazuo stretches in bed before rolling over and facing the two of them with a sleepy face. He opens his mouth to talk but ends up yawning, tears filling his eyes.

  “Wh-hhhgghuugaaaghhhh~ what are you guys talking about”

  “Just some magic stuff”

  “Oh, you were practicing magic last night?”

  Hide nods and picks up the grimoire, and stands from his chair. He groans as he stretches from side to side, setting the grimoire down on the table again before touching his toes, popping his back and stretching his hamstrings and lower back. Kazuo gets out of bed and walks over to stand next to Riku, watching Hide stretch.

  “So, what’d you learn?”

  “Just about the different types of Mana, the basics of how it works, and how to draw out Mana Lenses”

  “Wait what—”

  Kazuo looks at Hide—still stretching—stunned, then looks to Riku, who looks at him in return, sharing a shrug. The two of them seem to both be equally confused about him being able to pick up magic this quickly, and being able to start working with it this early on in his journey.

  “I guess I just have a knack for it”

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  Hide laughs.

  “More than a knack, you certainly would have quite the aptitude for magic if what you say is true”

  “And even more than importantly, if you were practicing making Mana Lenses all night you’d have some serious Mana Sickness right now…”

  Hide looks at Riku confused after his statement.

  “But it doesn’t require that much Mana”

  “It’s not just about the amount of Mana required in a spell, but the amount of flow required… you were casting that low level spell all night, which would take out most people normally…”

  “Oh, but it did take me out. After the first few hours I passed out”

  Kazuo looks at Riku once again. They both look as if they’ve seen a ghost, or some kind of monster.

  “Even Yuriko can only hold those lenses for an hour and a half, two at the absolute most!”

  “How about you show us… cast the spell.”

  Hideaki looks at the two of them. They definitely seem to be telling the truth, and legitimately shocked by what has been said so far. He rubs his hands against his pants, drying the sweat up so that he can concentrate more. He hasn’t learned how to control the direction and flow of Mana yet, only the simple handmade Apparatus, Mana Lenses, so he’ll have to draw it out by hand, but even that seemed to be impressive to the two. Hide takes his left hand and wraps it around his face, pinching his nose and wrapping it around his mouth, before looking like he is about to scream. Kazuo and Riku watch, still absolutely stunned by Hide and his display. After a second or two He lowers his left hand and brings up his right, drawing out into the air a fancy geometric pattern with multiple fingers at once, then pushes his hand through the air, with a sharp twist off to the right, half closing his hand, and another twist to the left pulling back completely closing his hand before opening it to find a set of nearly entirely invisible glass-like contact lenses. The only thing making them at all visible is the barely visible soft purplish glow they give off.

  “What the heck!!”

  They both scream out in unison as their heads shoot towards Hide’s hand. All of the commotion causes Yuriko to abruptly wake up, turning to meet the boys standing near the table.

  “What’s with all of the noise?!”

  The boys turn swiftly to see Yuriko sitting upright in bed, a completely different pose to what she was in before. Despite disturbing her rest both Kazuo and Riku point to Hide’s hand that contains the softly glowing lenses.

  “He just made Mana Lenses after only a night of reading up on magic, he did it with multiple fingers, and somehow he hasn’t gotten Mana Sickness yet!!”

  Even Yuriko seems completely lost upon hearing this. She only had taught him barely anything last night, and somehow with that, reading the book, and piecing things together he was able to draw out a set of Mana Lenses with multiple fingers even, and still hasn’t been affected by Mana Sickness, which is pretty common for people to encounter when starting magic.

  Yuriko jolts to her feet, quickly rushing over to Hide. Her eyes begin to softly glow as she looks him over.

  “Suck in some Mana…”

  Hide begins to suck in Mana. Yuriko watches as the soft glow around him dims as it is absorbed into his soul. As he continues, more and more of the glow she she’s around him fades and disappears into him, but the glow of his body does not grow or expand. She begins to dawn a worried expression as she steps a bit closer softly grabbing his arms and looking them over closely as if she is reading small writing all over his body.

  “What the fuck is this….”

  Yuriko mumbles get progressively more aggressive and mumbly as she continues to look all over his body, up and down from head to toe.

  “Your soul is unlike any that I’ve ever seen…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well at first I found it pretty odd that you didn’t have Mana Sickness, but then after looking closer I noticed your soul is not like any other soul I’ve seen. They all generally look alike, but yours is far more complex, it seems to be modified with some sort of complex Mana Weaving…. I’ve only ever heard of one group that has worked with such taboo thoughts….”

  Yuriko looks to Hide, highly accusatory, while Kazuo simply stands there surprised. Riku though begins to step into the circle towards Yuriko looking up to her.

  “You don’t think he—”

  “Quiet Riku! Hideaki, is there anything that you have left out about yourself that we should know… If so, speak now.”

  Hideaki looks to Kazuo for help, but Kazuo can spare nothing but wide eyes and silence for him. Riku is no exception, even taking a step back as the silence grows. Finally Hide looks to Yuriko with innocent eyes.

  “I swear, whatever you think this is, it isn’t! I am Hideaki Watanabe, and I only showed up here yesterday, completely clueless!”

  “You don’t seriously expect us to believe that you actually came from another world do you?? Not only are you completely suspicious, your soul has clearly been tainted by Soul Retranscription Magic, and when we found you, you even had a grimoire containing many taboo arts that only the Ouroboros Cult study!!”

  “The what—”

  “Don’t play stupid!!”

  Yuriko in her now violent and sensitive state begins to draw in the air quickly and with purpose, little glowing trails can be seen trailing her finger before a flame begins to ignite in the air and slowly grow to about the size of an apple in front of her outstretched hand. Hideaki very much afraid lets out a yelp and stumbles backwards into the chair behind him, knocking both him and the chair over as the flame zips mere centimeters from his face, hitting the wall opposite to Yuriko with a ‘fwoosh’ and sizzle as it crackles away.

  “WAIT! PLEASE! I-I PROMISE I’M NOT A LIAR!! PLEASE JUST LISTEN TO ME!”

  Hideaki continues to scramble back with tears in his eyes, kicking his legs against the ground to move.

  “Wait! Yuriko, he couldn’t possibly be one of them!”

  “What do you mean?!”

  “Well, even though he is suspicious, he had that grimoire, and his soul is tainted, think about it. When we met him he didn’t even know magic existed in this world, or how it worked! He was so excited to even read your grimoire, and for you to teach him the basics! Remember??”

  “But- He… um… oh shit-....”

  Hideaki still very shaken and with tears streaking down his face, lay there on the ground looking up at all of them while they talk over whether he is or isn’t who he says he is. Yurkio, talking to Kazuo, lowers her arm she had up and he can feel a slight wind as the Mana escapes from her spell is released back into the air around her. After a bit of time Yuriko turns to Hide and hits the floor with her hand and knees as she bows down apologetically.

  “I-I’m so so sorry Hide… I didn’t think about all of it… I just assumed since your soul and the grimoire—I’m sorry! I hope that I can make it up to you!”

  Just then a loud thud could be heard behind the bowing Yuriko. Yuriko jolts at this sound, and turns, as well as Kazuo and Hide, only to find that Riku has passed out. It must have been due to all of the commotion and stress freaking him out enough for him to pass out.

  “Oh poor Riku… I really have made a big mess of all of this haven’t I…”

  “I-I forgive you.. I don’t anything about this forbidden magic, Soul Retranscription, or that oroburrs group, but it must all be very bad and serious for it to cause such a violent reaction from you”

  “Yeah, it’s true, the magic in that grimoire you had was banned by most of the capitals, and the Ouroboros Cult is one of the darkest groups of magic users out there, worshiping false gods, using dark arts, and practicing taboo beliefs”

  Kazuo begins working in the background, picking up Riku’s body and dragging him over to the bed. This is when Yuriko notices the spot that her fireball hit on the wall in now crackling to life. She quickly stands up and makes a strange gesture outstretching it towards the small flame, before a stream of water begins to flow over it putting it out with a hiss.

  “Phew, that almost turned out bad…”

  “Wait, what was that?”

  “A fire?..”

  “No no, what you did with your hand”

  “Ohh, that? There’s other flows for Mana throughout your body that produce different results, it’s pretty hard to memorize them all, but if you remember the most important few they can come in handy!”

  Kazuo finishes tucking in the limp Riku before turning to Hide and Yuriko.

  “How about you two set up a time and practice some of that magic outside so you don’t end up burning down the whole inn…”

  “Yes please!”

  Yuriko looks to Kazuo and Hide pondering this. She doesn’t know how ready Hideaki is, but with his progress so far he should be able to handle it, but what about his soul… it’s so weird, it could produce who knows what kind of strange results… but she could test it too…

  “Yeah, how about later after Riku wakes up and we go out for lunch I take you to a good spot and we can practice out there?”

  “Okay okay! Sounds good!”

  Hide finally stands up, picking up the mess he made by stumbling over the chair and begins to prepare himself while they wait for Riku to awaken.

  ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※

  Later after Riku had awakened, and they had all gone out to get some lunch, since they missed breakfast, Yuriko takes Hide as they split off from the other two, taking him to the spot she mentioned earlier. The city really is enormous, it feels like it could take a whole day to walk from once side to another, luckily they hadn’t gone too deep inside of the city, so it didn’t take very long for the two of them to meet the city entrance and leave going down the large trail that goes off into the distance.

  “So where is the spot you wanted to take me?”

  “Just over there, there’s a big field far enough from the city’s walls that you shouldn’t be able to cause any damage or hurt anyone if you mess something up”

  They continue to walk down the trail for no more than twelve minutes before making it to a big open flowery field. The chill breeze blows gently over the flowers causing beautiful waves over the shallow hills.

  “Woah, it’s so pretty out here!”

  “Yeah, it really is, this is where I used to practice magic as a little girl”

  “Oh, did you grow up here?”

  “Mhm, I was born and raised in Aetherveil most of my life, we did move out to Veymor when I was a bit older, but my mom thought it was better here, and brought me back, leaving my dad over there”

  “Oh… I’m sorry to hear that”

  Hide has no clue how to react to that, she talks about it all lightly like it doesn’t really matter, but it sounds terrible that she had to leave her dad and possibly hasn’t seen him since then.

  “No no, don’t worry, it really was alright”

  “Oh okay, that’s good… anyways, what’s this Veymor place?”

  “Oh, it’s another capital like Aetherveil. Maybe some other time I can catch you up on the layout of the continents and the political and economic relations of all of the cities”

  Yuriko giggles hearing herself sound all official and fancy, talking about socioeconomic statuses and such. Hide chuckles back with his response.

  “Heheh, yeah sure, sounds good to me”

  “Good! Now on to magic! So basically you know how the soul is a complex bundle of paths for Mana, each path performing certain functions?”

  “Mhm mhm”

  “Well when I pass Mana through my hand like so…”

  She holds up her finger like she has done before, causing a bright pinpoint light to appear above her finger.

  “...it produces a light, but by passing it through my hand like this…”

  She contorts her hand back how it was during the fire. Causing a stream of water to gently spew out of another finger.

  “It pinches off some pathways, and opens up new ones to allow the flow of Mana to come out differently. Here, create a set of Mana Lenses”

  Hide begins to lift his hands ready to draw out the structure in the air before he is stopped by Yuriko.

  “No no no, didn’t you finish the chapter on that spell. It started off with the diagrams showing the complex weaving pattern for if you were to create it manually, but your eyes should actually be structured so that you can just pass Mana directly into your eyes and they should start to build the lenses inside of your eyeball… try it!”

  Hideaki looks at her completely surprised and annoyed with himself. No, he hadn’t read through the whole chapter, they showed him how to make it so he tried that first. It only makes sense that you follow a book step by step front to back to understand the material, why would they make a book like that. Despite his annoyance Hide feels the Mana flow into his soul and he begins to push it out his eyes. He can feel a slight tickly feeling as his vision turns a soft lavender tint. He could now see purplish looking clouds throughout the air, some a bit darker than others, but for the most part everything was a soft purple because of it all. Looking to Yuriko though is where he saw the biggest difference, a blueish-purple web was wrapped all around her skin, and it was as if he could see inside her too, seeing folds and tubes tangled and wrapped around everywhere.

  “What the heck—”

  Yuriko, seeing the soft glow in his eyes and his confusion, speaks up.

  “Can you see it?”

  “Yeah… it’s so weirdd…”

  Just as he says this he notices the purple cloud around her begin to fade as the web thing within her begins to expand, the bluish-purple web of tubes and folds glows a bit brighter along some paths slowly trailing up to her head where he notices a bright bluish glow emanate from her eyes, softly spewing off a cloud of the purple fumes from each eye.

  “Ew! That’s so weird looking!...”

  Yuriko bursts out laughing, before turning back to Hide, still casting the Mana Lenses.

  “Yeah, but you’ll get used to it soon enough! Okay, now look at yourself…”

  Hide slowly begins to bring his hands up, seeing the weird web all over and inside of his hands too, trailing down his arms and—wait…

  “What is that?!”

  “Yeah, now can you see what I mean…”

  Looking down at his torso he sees the web of tubes, folds, pathways, and really really complex knots that look practically black.

  “Hide, I want you to look back at the pathways in your fingertips, and push more Mana through your eyes… everything will look way brighter, but it will be okay…”

  Hide does what he’s told and brings his hands to his face seeing the tubes, folds, and pathways much closer, before sucking in more Mana and pushing it out much harder, more like he is trying to blow out a candle than exhaling. Everything grows a much brighter purple, it is so much harder to see things like he normally does, but the tubes, folds and pathways look a bit different… He can see Highly complex three-dimensional structures made of Mana, just like drawn in the book, all over his body, even new pathways he couldn’t see previously, show up. He can trace them to see how the flow of Mana should be altered and where it comes and goes. There are small knot-like intersections that look to act like transistors in a circuit, allowing the differences in flow and spells. Looking back down his arms he follows them, again being met with the dark knots in his chest. They aren’t just dark orb looking things. They are far more complex weavings of Mana than even his hands which looked nearly impossible for him to replicate. There is no possible way to even read the knots, they are all too compact, complex, and too many pathways.

  “Woah…..”

  “Yeah… That right there is a complex spell written directly into the soul itself, completely unnatural in every way. The only way to see something like that is the Ouroboros Cult… They experiment on themselves and each other trying to achieve who knows what, by writing the spells into themselves… That’s why it was so strange to see you have one. The only explanation is that it was done to you by someone else”

  “Um… I don’t think so… Since I got to this world I’ve only met you three”

  “You sure you haven’t come into contact with anyone else? Who’d you get the grimoire from then?”

  “Oh that? When I first got to this world I was lost in that forest you found me in, so I looked for a place to hide out and found a cave place to hide in. Feeling around in the dark I found all sorts of things, a vial, that grimoire, some other weird stuff, but then I was attacked by these weird things that started munching on me, luckily I made it out alive before passing out, and then you guys found me…”

  Yuriko listens to this crazy story, but it does explain some things. Her expression softens a little before it’s hit with a sudden face of confusion.

  “A vial? What was in it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it was way too dark in there so I just pocketed it, but when I was escaping those things I sat on it and it exploded, stabbing me”

  “Was it heavy orrr…”

  “Well maybe just slightly, like it was definitely heavier than oil, and it did sound thick when messing with it”

  “That might have been Condensed Woven Mana, usually it’s used in potions and acts as a spell that doesn’t require the user to channel Free Mana through themselves or draw out structures to cast it… I’ve heard in stories that the Ouroboros Cult works with Condensed Woven Mana to alter and rewrite souls… it could be that when you were impaled by the shards of the vial, that it mixed with your body and wound itself into your soul—”

  “It what?!?”

  “It rewrote your soul to include a spell…”

  Hideaki cannot believe what he’s hearing. First, all of this weird stuff being transported to this world, getting attacked by those things in the dark, then getting attacked by Yuriko all because his soul looks really weird because some messed up cultist guys made a weird magic potion thing that he sat on and has now warped his soul into the structure of some strange spell. He looks back up to Yuriko with a look in his eyes.

  “Is there some sort of way to tell what the spell is that’s written into my soul?”

  “Yes, absolutely, we just have to read it like every other spell—”

  “I can’t do that!!”

  “Neither can I… It’s far beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Whoever made the spell probably worked on it for decades… How about we just run you through a bunch of tests to figure out what it does? We do know that it affects how Mana affects your body, since you don’t get Mana Sickness, or at least haven’t gotten it yet”

  “Yeah, but that could take forever, there’s literally infinite possibilities of what it could be and how it could work based on what I know about magic so far…”

  “That’s correct… What I could do is try and use your body like Apparatus to see if that yields any results!”

  “Um… That sounds pretty weird, but I guess it’ll be alright…”

  Hide walks to Yuriko as she walks towards him. Eventually they are standing one in front of the other, only about a foot from one another. Yuriko places her hands on top of Hide’s torso in multiple spots, before he can feel a soft tingle in his skin, like sitting in front of a CRT TV. Eventually the tingle grows, now a bit itchy. Yuriko begins to breathe heavily, her eyes glowing from the Mana Lenses, sweat drips from her forehead and down her face. After a bit of time she pulls her hands back and catches her breath, her eyes no longer glowing.

  “I just dumped a whole ton of Mana into you, your soul should be inflated like a balloon if not popped, but nothing…”

  “POPPED?!?! You were trying to kill me???”

  “No no, if it got close to that point I would have stopped bu—”

  Yuriko quickly doubles over and spews hot wet chunks of vomit all over a bunch of flowers. She coughs as she catches her breath, a thick strand of saliva drips from her lips as she stands there breathing deeply in and out.

  “Woah! Are you okay??”

  “I-It’s Mana Sickness… I’ll be fine… Take my grimoire and find the basic water spell and cast it”

  Hideaki carefully steps around Yuriko’s puke pile and reaches for the grimoire strapped to her hip, taking it and looking through the table of contents. Soon he finds the basic essential spells section and flips through the pages until he finds it. Quickly glancing over the first page he sees a lot of stuff about Counter-Spell Protection, Flow Management, and things to keep in mind and stuff, but skips over all of that to find the water spell. After a bit of searching he finds the spell, reads through the contents a little and decides to cast it like Yuriko said. Yuriko, less ill-looking and now watching Hide with the Mana Lenses waits for him to cast the spell.

  Hide looks over the diagram and begins to draw out the structure slowly so that he doesn’t mess up the spell and cast something he didn’t intend to. After finishing the structure he raises his palm to the drawn Mana, and presses into it. Time slows as he can feel a huge pressure inside of him build, inside of his soul, before his hand aches and expands. It starts with a drop of water, then a few more forming on his hand, before it turns up a bit squirting out like a faucet. He can feel hand hurting and aching like nothing he’s ever felt before. Then it happens, time resumes and all he can see is water and red. His entire arm all of the way past the elbow has burst like an over cooked hotdog in the microwave, spaghettied out. Skin, bone, muscle and all. Hide collapses onto the mushy muddy ground screaming his lungs out, his left hand coming up to squeeze what’s left of his right arm attempting to stop the bleeding.

  “AAAHHGGUUGGHHAAHH!!!”

  “Hold still!!”

  Yuriko rushes over and grabs Hide’s face, shoving the neck of a glass bottle in. He desperately chugs it all down so he doesn’t drown while he screams. The taste is bitter but sweet, it tastes like battery acid, and the texture is thick, warm and goopy. Hide feels a new pain as the old pain seems to fade into the background slowly. After he has chugged it all down Yuriko retracts the bottle and Hide looks down to find all of the shreds of his dismantled arm are now bound together by a disgusting amalgamation of random bone, flesh, and fluid bits. She presses her hand against his ‘what used to be a hand’, and the new pain forms into and even newer pain. His flesh and bones shift and are molded away like clay, everything moves and crutches, shifting above and below his skin, eventually resulting in what his hand had looked like before casting the spell.

  Yuriko quickly jerks off to the side, spewing more lumpy vomit chunks onto the ground again. As she vomits Hide gets a look at the aftermath of what had happened when he casted the spell. Where there once was flowers there is a very long very deep trench nearly two or three meters wide and maybe a hundred or so meters long, filled with dirt, rocks, bits of flowers, and some bit of Hide too.

  “I—eyughh! I-I think I figured it out!”

  Despite screaming like a maniac only a moment ago, Hide doesn’t feel the need to scream anymore. He steadies his breathing and looks over his hand before listening to what the Mana sick Yuriko has to say.

  “When I was pumping you full of Mana it looked as though the Mana was just vanishing, but that’s impossible! The Mana had to be going somewhere, so that’s why I asked you to cast that basic water spell, to see if you could cast it, since I had sucked most of the Mana out of the atmosphere around us… Honestly I didn’t expect you to skip over the bit on Counter-Spell Protection, Flow Management, and all of that stuff… But I did also notice something… when your arm went pop, yes, a huge flow of Mana escaped your arm, but not even a second after I saw a massive rush of atmospheric Free Mana make its way into your obliterated arm… wait! Are you okay?? Does anything still hurt??”

  Yuriko suddenly goes back to seeming worried about Hide realizing that she was way too zoned in on her explanation. Hide looks at Yuriko, then down to his hand, and then to the mess before looking back to Yuriko. Devoid of much of anything. Hearing all of that is a lot to process…

  “Yeah no, I mean my hand still burns and itches like crazy, but I think I’m alright… what’d you give me?”

  “Oh, yeah, the burning and itching is normal… What I gave you was a healing potion. I normal don’t go anywhere without one”

  Yuriko pats her hip, showing the one left over potion flask, as well as an empty loop where another bottle used to hang. The bottle that still is there is a foggy greenish looking round bottom spherical flask, and it looks like it can and is holding about 250ml of a dark murky viscous fluid. It moves like nothing Hide has ever seen before, it must be that Condensed Woven Mana stuff Yuriko mentioned before.

  “Well, since you’ve learned what happens when you don’t protect against spells you cast, would you like a 1-on-1 lesson real quickly on some more basics?”

  “Only if you promise not to kill me, hahahah”

  Hide bursts out laughing followed by Yuriko, before they both catch their breath. Then Yuriko turns to point at the damage and mess Hide had left the flower field in.

  “I think I should be the one worried about you killing me, I mean look at that, besides your arm exploding that was magnificent… you must have not Managed your flow or cast protection, so that was all of your Mana rushing out of you in an instant… but that’s a bit strange since you normally need to charge up a spell to cast it at higher power, so you definitely are storing Mana inside your soul somewhere… I think, and this is just a guess, but that spell within you might have something to do with Higher Dimensional Mana Weaving, allowing your body and soul to act as a gateway and pocket into higher dimensional spaces… that magic really is complex and still filled with so much mystery though… but it explains it all, especially the part where both your soul and body were shredded by the spell, causing the higher dimensional space to be open to this space sucking in an equal amount of Mana to the damage you received, plugging it up…”

  “So the Mana I take in is stored in a higher dimensional space, and not in my soul?”

  “Well, it makes sense since your soul isn’t expanding, you don’t feel Mana Sickness as easily if at all, and you can instantly cast any spell as long as you have enough Mana stored up…”

  “And if I get injured then my Mana builds to make up for the amount of damage I have taken?”

  “It sure seems that way”

  “This is so weird…”

  “Yeah, it may take some time getting used to, and you may experience some hate from magic users mistaking you for the Ouroboros Cult members, but from what I’ve seen of you, you’ll be fine, Hide”

  ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※ ※

  The two of them talked for a bit longer before actually getting into the magic lesson Yuriko was going to give Hide on more of the basics of magic. After a bit of talking with one another and Yuriko resting for a bit so she doesn’t over exert herself, Yuriko begins the lesson.

  “Time for the lesson! One really important thing to know for casting spells is Counter-Spell Protection. You can’t just cast spells all willy nilly without worrying about protecting yourself from the spell you’re casting. Say I were to fire of a fireball, if I don’t protect myself from that, I’ll be just as roasty toasty as my target”

  “Ohhh, so you need to protect yourself from your own spell so you don’t go blowing off your hand like I just did”

  “Exactly!”

  Yuriko taps her chin, then smiles.

  “Alright, think of magic like cooking over a fire.”

  “Cooking?”

  “Yep! Let’s say you’re roasting something over a flame. If the fire is small, you can hold your food close, but if it’s huge, you have to keep it farther away or it’ll burn instantly, right?”

  Hideaki nods, following so far.

  “That’s it! The stronger the spell, the more protection you need—but not in a simple way. If you don’t account for that, well… either you waste Mana overprotecting yourself, or injuring yourself depending on the protection used, or—”

  she pauses for effect.

  “—you become a cautionary tale.”

  Hideaki’s eyes narrowed slightly.

  “So… it’s not a perfectly proportional relationship?”

  “Exactly! It’s more like…”

  She pauses, searching for the right words.

  “Imagine stacking bricks. At first, each new brick makes the stack just a little taller. But the higher you go, the more bricks you need to keep it stable. If you build too fast without enough support, the whole thing collapses on you.”

  Hideaki’s mind spins with ideas.

  “So, for small spells, the protection is almost the same as the spell itself, like one-to-one, but for bigger spells, it increases much slower?”

  Yuriko claps her hands together.

  “That’s it!”

  She gives him a meaningful look. Hideaki stares into the distance, gears turning in his head. A logarithmic function…? No, more like a modified logarithm with a shift. A non-step function version of the 1/x series… Hideaki’s smirk widened… Now we’re talking my language. He turned to Yuriko, an idea already forming in his head.

  “Hey, can I borrow your grimoire for a second?”

  “Huh? Sure”

  Yuriko hands Hide the book, and he quickly flips through the pages finding a page on the Crystalline Mana Structure for linen and charcoal, a basic writing set. He carefully traced the structure in the air, guiding the Free Mana into shape. A soft shimmer pulsed at his fingertips, threads of energy twisting together like strands of silk. The cloth took form first—thin, woven, and real. Next came the charcoal, forming grain by grain until he held a writing tool in his hands. Hideaki exhaled. Hah… That actually worked. He wasted no time, quickly sketching out a rough graph onto the cloth before turning it toward Yuriko. He turns the linen to show Yuriko, pointing at the X-axis.

  “With this being the percentage of Mana of the spell cast…”

  He shifts his finger over to the Y-axis of the graph.

  “...and this being the percentage of the Mana used on the Counter-Spell Protection in relation to the percentage of Mana needed for the main spell…”

  He lowers his arm, now just holding up the linen, looking at Yuriko, taking a breath before continuing.

  “...is this about what you mean?”

  Yuriko blinks at the linen, then at Hideaki.

  “You just—made a whole graph… way more complex than anything I’ve ever seen though—”

  She pouts.

  “Wait… I didn’t even say numbers, and you still Managed to make that thing!”

  Hideaki chuckles, tilting his head.

  “I guess I did get it right then… I’m starting to get the hang of this!”

  Yuriko sighs dramatically but grins.

  “Well, I must be a great teacher, then!”

  As Yuriko is surprised by her great explanation ability, Hide thinks to himself about what he had just drawn. It wasn’t just any ordinary logarithmic function, it was the 1/x series but modified so instead of being a step function, it was a smooth curve that nearly perfectly matches all of the steps in the ordinary step function but also contains in between values. It can be visualized roughly by the equation f(x) = 100(ln((x/100)+0.5)+γ) {100 <= x}. Where γ represents the Euler-Mascheroni constant. And as for the underpowered spells the cost in Mana of the protection would be nearly but not exactly a 1:1 ratio, which can be matched with the function f(x) = 0.9826808x {0 <= x <= 100}.

  “Oh, and now for the last part of our lesson!”

  Yuriko finally wakes up from her day dreaming, and chimes in with the next and final part of today’s lesson.

  “Mana Flow Control! Obviously, you can’t just let spells run wild or you’ll dump all your Mana into a single spell. You need to release it in bursts—like breathing”

  Hideaki tilts his head.

  “Breathing?”

  Yuriko nods.

  “Yeah! Think of your soul like a set of lungs. Holding onto Free Mana is like holding your breath—it builds up inside you. Too much, and it starts to strain you. Too little, and you run out too fast.”

  She taps her chest.

  “Though, it’s a bit different for you since holding onto excess Free Mana doesn’t strain you…”

  She pauses a second thinking about that fact, before continuing on with her lesson.

  “So, to control Mana Flow, you have to ‘exhale’ in steady bursts, rather than dumping it all at once, which would most likely result in overpowering your spell, depending on how much Mana you have stored up. This is most important for you since it isn’t exhausting for you to hold onto excess Free Mana given your…unique… soul structure…”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot about that for a second hahaha”

  Yuriko spares Hide a soft laugh. Hideaki mulls over the analogy before grinning.

  “I see. So you don’t want to hyperventilate or hold your breath too long.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But in my specific case I can hold onto as much breath as I want for as long as I want, right?”

  “Well… I suppose soo… oh—”

  Yuriko’s breath catches. Her gaze unfocuses, like she’s staring through Hideaki, and then—her knees buckle. Before he can react, she crumples.

  “Oi—!”

  Hideaki barely catches her before she hits the ground. His mind races as he quickly activates his Mana Lenses, scanning her. Overexertion. She must’ve pushed her soul too far earlier when she dumped Mana into him. Nothing life-threatening, just… exhaustion. Still, her body is heavier than he expected, and they’re far from the city gates. Carrying her all the way back doesn’t seem practical. Instead, he kneels in the damp, muddy earth, lowering her gently so her head rests on his lap. The wind stirs, carrying the faint scent of rain. The world feels quieter now. Yuriko’s chest rises and falls in steady rhythm, her expression peaceful despite the sudden collapse. Hideaki exhales. He’s been so focused on learning magic, surviving, understanding this world—but right now, in this moment, with the cool breeze against his skin and the weight of another person trusting him enough to rest so close—Maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe, just maybe… this world could become home.