Even after hearing Alice’s explanation of how her energy manipulation magic worked, Serena remained silent for several minutes.

Most likely, Alice had overdone it by talking a little about the true nature of matter with those little blocks called atoms that could form more complex structures but, at the time, she felt like she had to since it explained how some forms of energy like kinetic energy or thermal energy could be transmitted and how the pseudo-annihilation worked.

She did not know how to deal with this silence since Serena had never been silent for more than a minute. Then, the instructor finally looked at her pupil.

“I’m not gonna lie, I have trouble accepting what you told me. As a scientist, I should be open-minded and embrace new theories, but that’s just too much at once…”

“I guess you are right… This is partly why I was keeping that to myself.”

“I think I understand most of what you are saying though. I mean, it makes sense that mana, electricity, light, and heat are somehow similar in nature since a mage can transform their mana into them in the first place. But I can’t figure them being the same as the power of motion or even matter… I do think you’re onto something though, since your magic works just as you say it does.”

“Does it prove I am right?”

“Not necessarily, but it’s a strong hint. If all you said was completely false, your mana probably would barely react.”

“Well, if you believe me, it is good. Now, I think you should get some sleep in the guest room. We will get you to Lucius tomorrow so he can look at your left eye.”

“There is still time before the end of our lesson, so I still want to discuss your magic.”

“What do you want to talk about? I think I told you as much as I know.”

(Well, besides the fact that this knowledge comes from another world, but that’s hardly something I should say on the first day…)

“Would you be able to convert another person’s mana into heat or light too? But what I really want to know is, would you be able to convert another person’s magical attack back into mana? If you could, would the mana signature be that of the original caster, or would you overwrite it with your own?!”

Serena was getting way too excited again. Turning magic back into mana was something Alice had wondered too, but it did not sound really feasible.

“Huh… converting foreign mana into something might be possible, but it would be another story for converting magic back into mana… It would depend on the magic, I guess. I might be able to convert the heat from fire magic or the light from light magic into mana, but the type of conversion would be totally different. Also, converting something into mana takes me some time, so I do not necessarily have the leeway to do it before something makes contact with me. For the frequency thing, I do not really know since I have never fought another mage.”

“How about starting with me?”

“You do not have offensive magic, do you?”

“I manipulate my mana’s refraction directly, without really turning it into something else. You can just try to steal it from me for today.”

“I can give it a shot.”

Once again, they left the mansion to go towards the training ground. This time, at least, the instructor didn't run. Maybe this little light incident had calmed her down a bit.

Then, she changed the way she was breathing and started to make ample movements with her right arm. Alice couldn't see it, but Serena was probably manipulating her mana in the air.

“Alright, do it!”

“I obviously cannot see your mana… Transform it into a lens or something."

“Ah, right…”

Serena concentrated her mana into an enormous ball with a diameter of about two meters and activated her refraction magic at the surface of it so that Alice could make out where the mana was.

“How about this?”

“That is huge! How much mana did you put in there?”

“About half my mana pool?”

“Is it not way too much? Well, now that it is done, I will just try to hijack this… Please put it as far away from you as you can since it might get hot.”

When Serena was just manipulating her mana in her surroundings like any mage did, Alice couldn’t see or even sense her mana. But when she transformed it into a lens kind of thing, it became somewhat visible.

As Alice tried to manipulate this mana in this current state, she quickly confirmed that she couldn’t, as expected. She could now barely see it, but she didn’t feel it at all. This mana really had a different frequency. Alice trapped the gigantic ball with her own mana by forming two bigger concentric spheres around it.

However, these bigger ones were hollow and composed of sparse mana. Mana could technically be compressed or uncompressed to any volume, but magic would become less effective with small densities of mana.

Alice slowly started converting the outer surface of Serena’s mana into heat with the first sphere and converted the heat back into mana with the second one as it started to dissipate in the air.

Alice had chosen a mana-to-heat conversion for the first sphere so that even some of the conversion's heat loss would be converted back into mana by the second sphere. Of course though, with such sparse mana, a portion of the heat still traversed the second sphere without being converted at all.

As the instructor's ball was decreasing, however, Alice's second sphere's density was increasing and therefore was becoming more and more effective.

Serena’s mana was slowly but surely disappearing and being replaced by Alice’s and, after about thirty seconds, all that was left was Alice’s mana. A lot of the original mana had been lost but, in the end, Alice had gotten back many times her mana investment.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Serena had not said a word during the process, and she still looked speechless after it was done.

“... It really worked. I saw my mana disappear and then reappear, but I can no longer manipulate it…”

“Right, I really can control it and sense it as my own mana now...”

As Alice said this, she moved the two spheres of mana back into one big ball.

(So it does have my signature... Isn't it kind of cool?!)

However, to Serena, the most shocking part wasn’t even the fact that Alice had stolen her mana: it was that she did this so easily. From the moment the two spheres started their conversion, Alice had seemed like a spectator.

“... And I imagine you’ll say that doing this did not require much thinking?”

“Um… It certainly was a little bit harder than just throwing a ball, but yeah… It is my magic type though, so is that not normal?”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Alice. You seem to have a slight misconception about humans’ magic."

“W-what misconception are you talking about?”

“We’ll talk about it later. I’m not even sure my theory about you is right.”

Serena was still looking at Alice with suspicion. Her glare was kind of scary.

Alice then looked in the direction of the huge ball of mana that was invisible but that she could feel. It had lost about 40 centimeters in diameter, but it still was big. Although Alice did not really know how to accurately quantify mana in joules just by looking at it yet.

“If you say so… Now, what do I do with all this mana?”

“Just absorb it back. It’s yours now.”

“Eh? But I think it's too much. I have not lost much mana, so I surely can’t absorb all of it into my mana pool… Well, I’ll just get rid of it, then.”

“Yep, do whatever.”

“I do not think turning it into heat is a good idea, though. I cannot manipulate this mana from afar, so it might get too hot in this area if it is released in one go. I guess I will turn it into light.”

“N-no, not light please.”

Serena twitched when she heard Alice make this proposal. She still wore the makeshift eyepatch from earlier.

“Then I will use it to throw a ball like I did earlier.”

“In that case, I want you to try something. Your throw from earlier was weird because it looked like a delayed activation of your magic. If I’m right, you should be able to apply this power, energy, or whatever directly as the ball leaves your hand too.”

(That sure would be cool. I do want to throw a true fastball for once.)

So, Alice tried focusing on enveloping the ball with all this mana to apply it from the start.

She had to condense the big mana sphere for it to fit the small projectile. Even though there was some resistance during the compression, this density seemed manageable compared to the time she accidentally turned air into mana.

This was the reason why Alice let her guard down and didn’t take the time to think about how much energy Serena meant by ‘half my mana pool’. She was ever so slightly underestimating it.

To recall, the existence of mana in this world made people eat more than on Earth. In order to power up mana, be they a man or a woman, a human adult consumed every day at least a few dozen more food calories than in the other world. And that was just for commoners with mediocre mana pools. As such, at the very least, Serena had put the equivalent of a dozen large calories of mana into the original sphere.

Even by taking into account the consecutive losses from the conversions, there was quite a number of joules of mana enveloping the ball Alice was about to throw.

Alice did not realize this, however, since she could control it without much of a problem. While this mana contained several times or even dozens of times more energy than the pseudo-annihilation Alice performed in the past, its volume was a few billions of times larger, so its density was extremely lower and thus way more stable. The density of the mana was the only reason Alice could manipulate this mana now but not then. She did not think it through, however, and just thought there was not so much energy around the ball after all.

Anyway, Alice threw the ball while thinking hard about creating kinetic energy from the start. As usual, though, the ball was slow and weak when it left Alice’s hand. However, the ball suddenly started accelerating explosively. In a second, a sonic boom could be heard from the ball as it broke the sound barrier. With this much mana, the ball might have gone at many times the speed of sound if it had not burned in the atmosphere from both the heat loss of the conversion and the friction from the air.

They both looked at the empty air. Even if the ball didn’t burn to ashes, it would have been kilometers away by now. Serena failed to follow the mana that was enveloping the ball, but it had probably continued its course through the air.

“... It sure was different from before. Your mana did not wait for contact with a target to activate this time...”

“... It’s fortunate that I messed up and made the conversion gradual instead of converting everything into kinetic energy and heat at once...”

(Oh god… I might have burned like the ball with just the heat loss, now that I think about it…)

“I… I didn’t know my mana was so dangerous… I usually only use it to manipulate refraction so… Sorry.”

“No, this is my fault. It was stupid of me not to think it through…”

(I should not forget that energy easily becomes lethal when it’s about motion and works…)

Alice was right. After all, the energy needed to make a liter of water boil was the same as the energy necessary to lift an adult African elephant about eight centimeters above the ground and was several times greater than the kinetic energy of a bullet.

Even though this violent incident should have rekindled Alice’s trauma, she was actually feeling well. This day had been the first time she did something with her mana after several months, and it felt great. She really liked the magic of this world, and her instructor’s enthusiasm was contagious. It might have been wrong, but Alice was now under the impression that getting the gist of mana manipulation and mana densities would in fact prevent a reenacting of the pseudo-annihilation. Now that she even had a teacher who was able to see the flow of her mana, she was starting to look forward to future training sessions.

On their way back to the mansion though, Serena was still giving Alice the side-eye as if she was abnormal.