"Hold still, Lia!"
"I am! But it hurts, master!"
"Damn it. Can you feel it now, and does it hurt again?"
"No..."
"No, you can't feel it, or no, it does not hurt?"
"No, I can't feel it... and it hurts!"
"Ok, let's stop... well, that was a failure."
In a room sat a hatchling with a pup behind her. The hatchling sat on a chair, leaning forward on the chair back while Alexander sat behind her, pressing both hands on her back.
He let his arms fall down out of exhaustion and leaned back on his chair, breathing heavily. His tail was starting to get sweaty, and he hated the feeling, so he used a mix of air and heat to create a blow dryer to dry his tail.
Ocilia wasn't better off as she sweated heavily like someone dropped buckets of water on top of her. The disciple could swear that it was just a trick from her master to try out his new torture methods, which he learned from some slimy retainer fox-kin who usually followed the lord all the time.
It was when the lord came back. Sarusos took Alexander with him to teach him something. She remembered how her master couldn't eat the whole day after a teaching session and was pale white and sometimes murmuring about some candy called Geneva confection and how he needed it.
Well, there was also that the lady found it out and requested a sparring session where she beat him up so much that he barely hung onto his life.
Ocilia sighed heavily, slumping forward like a potato sack, "Master, it doesn't work..." her upper spider-kin eyes were a soft whitish blue, which showed tiredness.
Alexander reassured her, "Don't worry, it will work!"
Around them sat two healers around the desk, drinking tea and chatting about what they saw.
The toad-kin healer looked bored and spoke in a bored voice as well, "Is this really fine? I mean, not even the royal magic academy, Merlin, could do something like this?"
The other healer, a bat-kin mix, looked contemptuously at the hatchling and shrugged, "Yeah, I think so too. Usually, it is only a matter of bloodline and talent."
The toad-kin took a sip of his tea and thought for a bit before telling a story, "Hm, I knew of a couple of dragon-kins who had no talent for Mana and thus were disregarded as trash."
The bat-kin snickered slightly, "Duh, what do you want a dragon-kin to do if he can't even use magic? They are too weak for anything else."
A scream rang through the room, "SHUT UP! BOTH OF YOU!"
The healers flinched and looked at the puppy, who sweated heavily and tried to catch a breath. Beside him was his disciple, looking depressed and even more tired than before.
The toad-kin was a little nervous but tried to speak up regarding what this child was trying, "M... Mr. Alexander... nobody succeeded in gaining [Mana Sense] after their legacy, and even before, it all came naturally..."
Alexander stared at the toad, thinking how ignorant some people were. Impossible? Why? Because nobody achieved it and because some stupid academies couldn't do it either? A disgrace to anyone interested in development and science.
Even though Alexander himself was no scientist in his previous life, he knew of the importance of RnD and knew that even the slightest breakthrough could push a new age of technology, and this could better the lives of everyone.
Was not Medvedev mocked for his PSE at first? Was not Semmelweis ridiculed by his colleagues for his hygiene protocols? Fuck Galileo, what a prick, but he developed the fundamentals of scientific methodology.
Everything started at some point. Even though most stuff was wrong, the ideas, a spark, were enough to develop the theories he used on earth.
But Alexander saw the same problem at this place he read about in history books on earth. He somehow thought, in his ignorance, that because of the existence of magic, such a thing would not exist, not considering that it could be even worse because of pre-determined factors.
This was what he wanted to discover: Are these factors really pre-determined? Can you change them even after your legacy? He was probably not the only one who researched it, but where he was right now, geographically and status-wise, he needed to start at zero, without any fundament, as there was no way to find any research.
And who the hell knows? It could be known, but not in this part of the world. It wouldn't even be so outrageous since it was a world without an instant information transfer.
The more worrying thing was that it was widespread but held sealed, a secret only known to certain clans or families.
The former human understood this world as there was no way that the citizens had the knowledge that widespread knowledge could bring a snowball effect to the world.
Maybe they did, though, and perhaps it was better for them to hold unto secrets that made them who they were in the first place.
On earth, cycles between scientific breakthroughs became shorter. The more people worked on it, the higher the living standard became, and the faster information was transferred.
But now, things need time and a lot of trial and error.
Alexander's lips twitched, and his tail curled slightly up, "Disgusting. Nobody built R... Wolfsteeth in a day."
He was annoyed by them and all the stress which built up trying to get her this skill, but this he could ignore in the grand scheme of things.
This new world was like a playground for him, and he had more and more fun with it. Molding and discovering what he, on earth, thought would be pure fantasy.
His disciple's sighs brought him out of his thoughts of progressing the world into the modern age, and he recognized that his disciple suffered. He took responsibility for her and wanted to help her, too.
Furthermore, acquiring such a skill would be not only a boom for his research but also for his family and society as a whole.
There was no reason not to research it, especially since he was sure he could somehow unlock it and find a way to dig more fundamentally through it.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Thoughts suddenly streamed in his head as he thought about his father and how he sat in the small kitchen while mom cooked and tried to talk about his research with such a fanatical face, 'Is this how dad felt?'
He threw the thoughts back into his head as his disciple sighed so loudly that she could have a shield over her head that said: I want pity!
It was understandable. Ocilia was young, while Alex, young by physical standards, would be considered around thirty years old, so he was more composed when she had her phases.
If he was younger, mentally, he would undoubtedly have been frustrated without end. Well, he was even now, but he didn't show it.
The hatchling was downtrodden after listening to those morons' comments, "Master... I really can't feel it."
Alexander went off to a nearby table with some tableware, creating fresh water through magic and pouring some of it for his disciple, "Take a break... this makes no sense, really. We all use mana for our abilities, so you should be able to sense it..."
Out of nowhere, Alexander felt a spark in his mind going off, "...can you use your thread stuff?"
Ocilia was composed as the suddenness of her master was nothing new. There was sometimes a problem following his thoughts, though, as he jumped from topic to topic.
She turned around and nodded, she opened her hands, showing the threads she had created, and Alex could sense the mana she used.
Alexander strained his [Mana Sense] to find where the mana comes from directly and how it interacted with Ocilias body.
He started to sweat slightly while hearing a ding but chose to ignore it. His golden yellow eyes began to tint from the bluish mana as he tried to guide his mana beside hers in the threads to find something he oversaw.
He remembered his previous experiment with the insects. Through them, he could determine that mana, or rather the amount, is inherited.
Thousands of insects can become pregnant and breed in one day; in another, they would become adults.
Alexander injected them gradually with mana which could be barely felt, as too much would kill them. Generation after generation.
After ~forty-five increments, he created an insect with barely any mana and destroyed it when it became a success. Any more, and he could have made a plague that could devastate the world if one of his little buggers had fled.
Who the hell actually knows how it could develop? It could be an excellent food resource or devastate the whole world. Until now, he couldn't find any more insects with mana, at least ones that were the same size as the ones on earth.
Hearing the stories from his dad, he could find gigantic insects everywhere, and they would have more than enough mana.
Though he was realistic, it could be that they had so little mana that it was impossible for him to feel it, which means that he just learned in his experiment how to increase the natural mana over generations.
But he also learned something different: He could also inject mana into insects that had little or none before it. This was critical, as he could inject mana without killing someone, which could be the key to his current problem.
His intuition told him that he was on the right track even though he couldn't prove it methodically or objectively, not even with the insects he tortured. It would be a long shot to even conclude his hunch implicitly. It was pure intuition.
Alexander sweated buckets, carefully moving the mana around her threads and talking to her, "How do you feel when you create a thread?"
She tilted her head slightly, which was sweaty, too, as she needed to concentrate on stabilizing her skill as moving it around would disturb her master in sensing it, "I... it is like an innate feeling? Like using a skill. You know instinctively what to do and can follow through in a minimal sense."
Alexander got an idea.
He grabbed her hands roughly, which surprised Ocilia. It was not so bad, though. He was unlike other masters who would not share a thing with their disciples and ignore them thoroughly. Alexander, in contrast, always asked her opinions, calling the sessions brainstorming.
He was eccentric, and sometimes it overwhelmed her, like right now, "Ehm..."
The puppy with bloodshot eyes interrupted her, "Cut off your thread and slowly create a new one. Close your eyes and concentrate on the creation of your thread at their origin point and try to feel if anything is different!"
She sighed slightly but closed her eyes and just did it very slowly. While she was creating it, Alexander tried slowly trying to concentrate mana on her origin point.
It was much harder to manipulate mana directly than to direct it indirectly towards the idea of Atoms/molecules and create those abstract concepts in his head like fireballs with mana pushing those pockets of particles that then convert to his will, so to say.
Luckily for him, the more precise he was in imagining, the less mana it cost and the more accurate the spell became.
He tried once to create a more abstract version of a fireball or ice lance, but this cost him at least five times the mana, so he tried to memorize calculations and imaginations, which he would just recall.
If he could put it into a neat little drawer in his mind and recall it every time, it would be much easier than imagining it from new whenever he wanted to create a standard fireball.
He would lose flexibility but would win speed in conjuring up the spells.
Directing mana was unpredictable, as there was no flow or pattern. Even worse, the mana particles sometimes would have a temporary pattern, suddenly becoming erratic, killing Alexander's flow. Other times it was rebellious, like a little brat who needed to be dragged through the whole store because it didn't get the oreo special edition candy. They were unruly little bastards: mana and children.
As mana slowly settled onto the origin point where Ocilias threads materialized, she suddenly felt some burning on her fingertips. Still, she concentrated on all she had on the feeling she experienced, which invaded her deepest parts.
She really wanted the skill.
A week earlier, her master thought about how to learn the [Mana Sense] skill, something fundamental for everyone in wizardry but usually handwaved as talent.
Her master hated the notion of innate talent and thought that it didn't matter in most cases. She thought natural talent was most important, but when she heard what he wanted to research, she became erratic.
He talked about his ideas on bringing out this skill, and she wanted nothing more than to learn it. After the situation with her brother, she tried to regain her bearing and tried everything to get more brave and level-headed in cases similar to what happened with her older sibling.
But it also showed her that she was weak after she replayed the scene of her fight hundreds of times in her head. Pathetically weak.
So, when he started to write down his ideas on how to get the skill, she had the imagination to become more like her master, who could decimate other soldiers with his spells.
It wasn't even an overstatement as she saw him use spells to crush other soldiers and those too who used energy to shield themselves.
Every time she went home, she saw the heroic paintings of the Leonandra's and, even though she became more realistic, she still loved this notion of knights, honor, and praises by the populace whom bards would sing stories about her deeds.
She never told anyone as the youth was too embarrassed, so the chance to get stronger through magic was like a door that opened for her, and she begged her master to be his lab rat, as he called it.
He forewarned her that this could go on for months, his experiments, and even though it was the first day, she became frustrated, but she could not show it since it would kill her concentration. She needed to be on top all the time to find some ominous feeling she had never felt before. Even though she had such ambitions, this would be her last try for the day as her concentration reached the limit.
Alexander wasn't better as his mind, and his skills were slowly frying his brain as he worked through his [Mana Sense], [Mana Manipulation], and [Mana Emission]. He needed as slowly and carefully inject mana into her so she could somehow sense it without killing his disciple.
He thought a lot before he started this whole ordeal after Ocilia, again, almost broke her skull as she smashed her head against the floor, begging him to use her for this experiment.
Nonetheless, trying to formalize what a sense was in a world full of magic, with energy, he couldn't even comprehend it. Luckily, he didn't need to write a theorem, only to make a skill appear, which could be done with creativity and the good old brute forcing.
The other problem was that he only got this skill through his rather unusual birth and sensed it naturally since the environment felt so much different from earth. It was pure luck and/or intuition.
Before the experiments started, he went through his checklist, and while going through it, he needed to adjust himself, too, since the last time he injected someone with mana, it was himself, and he almost died. Fun times, but he got a skill, [Body Overload (Mana)], he wanted to use at some point. Preferably with an army of healers surrounding him.
But now it was time to experiment on his lab r... disciple.
Alexander tried to coat her origin point with his mana and slowly surrounded it while small strands of mana touched it.
This was an intimate feeling for Ocillia. Like something touched her deepest part, she could slowly feel it. She sensed it. Mana.
A sound resounded inside her head.
Ding.
She concentrated on this feeling even more, and suddenly something disrupted her concentration.
She heard sounds like someone was screaming through the water. Opening her eyes slowly, she felt something wet on her lips and chin. Everything in her sight was blurry and red.
"Oh..."