In a notebook, there was a page that had dozens of circles drawn on it and hundreds of lines connecting them. Some of the circles were colored, obstructing the symbols written in them. This was the state of my notebook. Hundreds of projects completed and countless more on the horizon. A systematic way to grow, tailor made.

There were 3 projects that stood out. Well they only stood out if one knew the key to get past countless encryptions, symbolisms, abbreviations, metaphors, memes, slogans, names, books and references. And I made sure that whoever looked at it, would see nothing more than childish scribbles, not worth a second glance. But even if someone somehow deciphered it, there would still be no use besides a few neat ideas, just a way to store progress and to write down a few stuff.

The three projects were marked with the bare minimum of words. A translation would mean something along the lines of: “Minimizing intent”, “Detecting intent” and “Aura-light interference”.

All three projects would be of great use to me, both practically and to deepen my understanding of magic.

The third was about aura and light interaction. I have already tested that if I stand in a dark room, isolated from any light, I can still see aura. So this means that aura either emits light or something similar to it. And now the question is which. If it was light, it would be difficult, since any non nen-user could detect aura with far less advanced technology than if it emitted mystical unicorn waves.

But I doubt it was light, after all how can aura have color if it emits a wavelength of light? Is it because of the intent present in it? But that would mean that the natural aura, which is transparent, has no intent or at least no intent that the human eye can detect or evolve to ignore. But then again, there should be no evolution for aura detection, since there is literally no natural selection. The only way to pass on changes would be through random dominant mutations, which could be both positive and negative. Well unless there exists something other than DNA in this world, which I am inclined to believe. Maybe some intent is infused in the human bloodline? Well it would certainly make a good hatsu for a progenitor of a clan.

In any case, I have to test it out. While testing the possible wavelength of light, I could also try to measure its speed. I am confident that the light speed in this universe is far faster than in my previous world. For measuring the wavelength, I could use a diffraction grating and a sensor, while I could approximate the speed of light with astronomy, just as it was first measured. But the speed of light was probably measured a long time ago, so I wouldn’t need to bother. It was probably done using mirrors to be more precise, but I am not sure yet.

But I can see the reflection of aura through a glass lense and a mirror. How does this work? Does it create some sort of virtual photons? But then what is the speed of them? And what is the speed of information? Is it the same as the speed of light, or does magic somehow bypass it? It could break the very law of causality everyone was talking about so much in the 2030s. It would be really troublesome for my plans, if I couldn’t travel faster than light. Travel would become time consuming and galactic empires impractical. I really hope that light travels fast enough relative to the scale of this universe.

Now for the next problem, the length of the year. Everything is far larger in this universe, even this planet is the size of Jupiter, so the distances should be larger as well right? And if the length of a year is about the same, wouldn’t the speed of planets be insane? Does this mean that gravity is more powerful here? Just how many issues are there?

Well regardless of how many, I will uncover each and every one of them. I still don’t understand why the people in stories who didn’t explore such fundamental things? Knowledge is power and understanding of physics is a good way to gain more of it.

Well it was time for an experiment. An experiment, obvious, but difficult to perform. Well at least for my past self. It was about the influence of aura on its surroundings and the way it followed the orders given by the user. It would be very informative, just like the hundreds more that I have planned.

This particular experiment was about how a positive intent affects the growth of living beings, namely plants since I don’t have enough time for animals, nor do I have good enough conditions for microbiology. But in the future, I will undoubtedly repeat it on animals and even humans.

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The thesis was how does positive intent to grow affect plants lacking essentials, such as water, nutrients, oxygen, sunlight, and temperature.

In order to account for everything, I used two types of plants. A common weed and a flower particularly good at holding aura. There was another plant, far better at it, but it took forever to grow and the deadline wasn’t allowing it. I once found it near my usual training spot so it could sprout if a large quantity of aura was near. Or at least that was my theory so far.

Next I prepared 24 flower pots. There were 6 conditions to test on and groups A, B, C and D. Flower pots marked with A or C held the weeds while B and D held the flower. Groups A and B would receive the intent, while C and D wouldn’t. This was a robust test that shouldn’t fail. Just to make sure, I planted two sprouts in each pot, reducing the issues with bad plants.

***

While I waited, I tried to come up with possible outcomes. The simplest result would be that there was no effect. Besides that, the plants could live slightly longer before dying. Infused intent could increase the efficiency with which the plants gathered and used the essential requirements. This was it as far as I could think.

I tried to perform this experiment a few times before, but I didn’t have enough aura to spare, nor did it stick on things for too long. A thing I noticed was that as I grew stronger, aura would naturally gravitate towards me. Even without focusing, there was a cloud of natural energy around me, enough that I didn’t even have to concentrate to absorb it. The larger it got, the more I felt like a video game character with an aura bar. If I sat down and concentrated, I could absorb aura faster and recover sooner.

Pro tip: sit down and meditate to recover faster. I chuckled at my antics, before continuing.

Another thing was that it stuck to things better. My intent was gaining more and more sticky. The carvings and the drawings I made, started keeping aura around them. It was the first sign of aura retention, natural to nen geniuses, who were born without a membrane, holding aura inside of them. This probably resulted in a low survival rate. The ones who survived had a lot of talent and achieved much in their lives. So they should probably be quite rare.

So how many people are living in the known world? There shouldn’t be more than a few million. After all, both Gon and Killua were one in 10 million geniuses and there aren’t any other people like them running around. If there were a million people, only once every 10 generations, or 200 years. But if there were a billion people, there would be around 100 people like them alive at any time, which I find hard to believe, especially after feeling the monstrous disparity in talent. And an even more difficult thing to believe would be the hunters more talented than them.

So my estimate is around 15 million people, alive at this point in time. Quite a low number, when I am used to numbers in the billions. Earth’s population stopped growing when it hit 11 billion people and slowly decreased to 10 because all non developed countries, who had the most children per adult, developed to a decent technological level. All ‘modern’ and technologically developed countries had the average number of children per family less than 2, so the population was slowly decreasing. I remember reading about the fuss of overpopulation in the 2000s, yet I remember no one pointing out the fact that the lesser healthcare and standard of living there are, the more kids people have.

***

After all that thinking, three weeks had already passed [ : P ] and all of the experiment results were collected. Firstly, there was the sample in optimal conditions. The control group grew like it would normally. It wasn’t unexpected, but the plants that received positive intent grew a bit more, but only by a small margin.

The bigger changes were in the other groups. The ones that lacked sunlight looked obvious. The control group wilted after two weeks, while the ones with infused intent held on until now, but they were beyond salvation.

The group surrounded with ice didn’t fare too well. The test group’s leaves fell after a week, while the other plants survived three days longer.

The group that lacked water had the most obvious change. The control group wilted after four days while the rest survived until this day. There were still droplets of water on the leaves. They must have somehow attracted moisture in the air, but I am unsure why as of now.

The oxygen deprived group were doing just fine. Even the control group survived without any problems. Using water was the best I could do, since there was no other way to deprive plants of oxygen, but even water had some dissolved in it. Plants could easily survive in pure carbon dioxide, pure oxygen and there was no way I could get my hands on a relatively pure nitrogen, so the only viable solution would be to use water.

Finally, the last group. It had the least differences between the two. There seemed to be no way for aura to emulate nutrients. There was simply nothing in the worst quality soil, nor in the sand I poured in. So this meant that normal living beings cannot survive on pure aura, as far as I am aware of. But there probably are bacteria that can. Just thinking of magic bacterias brought me discomfort.

All in all, I would mark this experiment as a success.