Oliver's mind went back to some of the earlier displays of magic he'd seen, pieces clicking together now that he had a moment to think and was no longer suffering under the illusion he'd been subjecting himself to thus far.

Most of the magic he'd seen had been grossly inefficient. Never mind that he knew nothing about the rules of how it worked or the underlying mechanics, it was simple physics.

For example, the dude with the glowing wings that had been flying around fighting the harpies? Massive waste of energy on making the wings glow, on making them at all. It would have been so much more efficient simply to levitate up, rather than simulate muscle, bone, and feather structure and also learn to fly with that simulation. It was cool looking, but ultimately made no sense.

Oh, there was a reason for it, he was sure – a military couldn't afford to invest in useless technology for simple reasons of cost efficiency – so there were assuredly limitations he wasn't aware of.

But he had a hypothesis.

One that was also supported by the glowing rope of light that he'd been first captured with. Again, much of the physical effect could have been easily simulated simply by suspending gravity and lifting him into the air – he would have been somewhat effectively restrained by that. Or simply by knocking him unconscious, or blinding him, or – well, he didn't know all the binding did. Maybe it also had suppressed his magic. He didn't have enough information to be sure.

But what he'd empirically observed was that he'd been tied up with a glowing rope of light, and a good amount of the energy of that spell was no doubt going to light and the funky looking loops of energy.

Same for the beams of white light that the harpies had seemed to shrug off. Why shoot lasers when you could just heat the harpies directly? Or set their feathers on fire, or cast a cleaning spell to "clean" their insides right out of their bodies? Or just accelerate arrows at them? The amount of energy that had to have been dissipating into the air over the distance those magical lasers had been traveling was, no doubt, stupendous. It was shockingly inefficient.

His hypothesis was that these people did not have an advanced – or perhaps any – understanding of physics, of the way the world truly worked.

Why, he couldn't guess – but it was clear that he was living in a more primitive age. He'd not seen much of this world yet, but it was clear that they were far behind Earth in terms of intellectual advancement, and that magic was to blame.

If you could rain down fire from the sky and clean a person and a room instantly with a mere conjuring, there wasn't much reason to learn how to build a fire with sticks, or even to invent brooms and showers.

And even if for some reason you did eschew magic for technology for a solution, furthering the collective understanding of physics, you probably also got pretty good at killing each other with magic, which would also prevent the dissemination of knowledge and cause frequent regressions. Would reset the scale, so to speak.

As Einstein had supposedly said, with regard to the atomic bomb, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Oliver could easily conceive of a world in which any material advancement was destroyed and reset with such destructive capabilities as what he'd seen so far of magic seemed to suggest as possible.

But despite the reasons, the results were clear: these people did not have a thorough understanding of physics, and the magics they used probably interacted with the world at the level of the abstractions they conceived of it as, resulting in limitations they couldn't even see.

He was under no such limitations.

A structural engineer spent a good amount of time studying physics in school. Didn't apply that much to his current day job right now, but he'd always had an excellent memory, and much of what he'd learned in his classes he could still recall.

He was going to apply the modern world knowledge of physics to this medieval system of magic.

In other words, he was going to hack magic, ascend to godhood in this world and then force his way through the whatever barrier lie between worlds – space, time, dimension, or else – and return home. If he could be brought here – and he suspected he had been – by magic of this origin, he could send himself back.

But in the meantime, he shivered in the cold, waiting and hoping for the dawn.

Between his physical discomfort and the mental and emotional recalibration he was undergoing, it took him an embarrassingly long time to recall the new status screen he'd summoned.

He brought it before him again, teeth chattering as he tried to make heads or tails of what he was looking at.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The first column, Mana, had grown a little more complicated. Where before it had shown only a static number it now displayed a list of transactions that appeared to correspond with the Log column to its immediate right.

He looked over to the log for context, read the whole thing from top to bottom. Between the log and the mana column, he was able to put together a picture of what had happened to him over the past week, from a system perspective.

Unknown soldier killed. +119 mana.

Unknown soldier killed. +218 mana.

Interface initializing...

Interface initialized.

Interface calibrating...

Interface calibrated.

Class chosen: Fighter.

Skill initiated: Second Wind.

Skill completed: Second Wind. -97 mana.

Harpy killed. +12 mana.

Interface calibrating...

Interface calibrated.

Skill initiated: Second Wind.

Skill completed: Second Wind. -172 mana.

It was a pretty dry way to sum up the whole "almost die five times," and he found himself unimpressed, on the whole. But there were several things that stood out.

He'd only gotten a piddling twelve mana for slaying the harpy. He felt the achievement deserved rather more than a pat on the back and a handful of mana. The soldiers had netted him far more. But he supposed he'd take remaining alive as a consolation prize.

The "interface calibration" messages referred to the times he'd caused the system to change appearances. Calibration was an interesting word. He wondered if it was a word he'd chosen on some subconscious level, as he'd done to the overall appearance of the system, or if the system itself had determined these messages. And then somehow translated them into English for his benefit.

Second Wind was appallingly costly. He didn't understand how it worked, but apparently it burned through mana like no tomorrow. And the cost seemed to be dependent on how badly he'd been injured. How much it cost to get him back on his feet.

And after all of that, the final entry of his Mana column should have showed that he had a total of an even 80 mana. Instead, it showed 91. There was an error in the math somewhere, but it wasn't visible on the sheet. A rounding issue?

In any case, the safe assumption was that that wasn't enough for another use of Second Wind. In other words, he was on his own.

He still didn't know in what unit mana was measured, but he presumed that the amount of mana he'd taken from the soldiers was a decent baseline to work from. And apparently they each only carried enough mana for a single use of Second Wind? That didn't seem right for professionally trained and armed soldiers, especially if mana was what fueled their combat ability.

Perhaps he had only acquired a portion of their total mana. He still had no idea how or why the transfer of mana worked.

Or maybe they simply had a means to use it more efficiently than him. That caused him to wonder about why the mana cost what it did, about more efficient means of healing. Perhaps there were different degrees or methods of healing.

What if the ability he'd somehow called up, "Second Wind", was just an inefficient way of healing? It wasn't specifically a healing skill, after all, it was a more general purpose pick-me-up, like a stim shot.

There was more to consider, much more, but his mind kept tracking over the same thoughts, the discomfort causing him to lose his focus time and time again.

He put the unhelpful speculation on hold to examine his inventory. There wasn't really anything new there besides the sword, which registered as a "steel longsword". So, either it was made of steel, or he merely thought it was made of steel. Interesting, but not particularly useful.

He wrapped his arms about him, let himself shudder against the cold. Shuddering was good. It was his muscles twitching to keep him warm, doing what they were supposed to do. If it caused his shoulder and his side to ache – that was all right. It was going to be fine.

It was going to be fine.

It was all going to be fine.

–

When the dawn finally came it revealed a gray sky above. The rising suns were obscured by a cloud layer that drifted higher above than the one that had been around the previous night. But obscured as it was, the weak and watery sunlight served to illuminate the landscape that stretched out before Oliver well enough.

It was a feeling of crushing disappointment that overwhelmed Oliver as he realized that however far he'd been carried, it was farther than he'd thought. Before him stretched a vast and majestic landscape – largely trackless forests before him, mountain peaks behind him.

A silver coin of a lake glittered in the distance, but one thing he didn't see was any kind of civilization. This was an abandoned, desolate region, the haunt of harpies and ghosts and little else.

But his moment of despair was behind him, and so it was with a grim resolve that Oliver stood, stretched out his stiff limbs and worked his sore shoulder. He had a lot of walking to do.

It seemed he'd already descended the steepest part of the mountain in his headlong flight of the previous night, and the greatest risk to him was the wide open stretch of boulder and rock that lay between him and the trees some several miles below.

He'd have to move quickly, yet with care, for the terrain between here and there was mostly bare rock, with the occasional hardy tuft of long grass sticking out from between rocks where rubble gave way to dirt. There were plenty of smaller rocks that could shift under his weight easily. A turned ankle would be more than an inconvenience – it could spell death here.

He watched and waited for some time and after seeing no tell-tale signs of birds circling above, decided that now was a good time as any to get a move on.

Oliver started off at a brisk walk, only just restraining himself from breaking into a jog.

He felt horribly exposed out in the open light of day, near the harpy nest, but there was little he could do. He couldn't move at night and couldn't afford to wait for more cloud cover to roll through.

All he could do was walk, watch, and hope he made it to tree cover before being spotted.