“This is strange,” I let out.

I felt like I could understand anything I focused on. Just as I had been about to cast a trivial spell such as a mana-to-light conversion, I saw my mana in a completely novel way for a split second. For a moment, I pictured an invisible 3D grid with a sort of lattice structure whose nodes might just be the smallest bricks of mana. When I gave the order for my mana to move in the air, each node synchronized with the others, resulting in an emergent behavior propagating through the entire grid. It felt as if I had peered directly into the mechanism that made mana go from an inert state to a system in which supernatural phenomena could manifest.

While I wouldn’t say that said mechanism was a complete surprise to me, it was strange that I had sensed it so clearly.

This state of clarity…

I was certain it was the same thing that had happened to me the day before when I perceived a minute detail about my mana and put light on an inconsistency. Currently, I felt like I was able to discern the very structure of magic. It was as if I were a mana expert. In that sense, this sensation was similar to my near-death experience from back then, minus the warped perception of time.

I wondered if I felt this way because I had just been released from the seal, like how lukewarm water felt hot after being exposed to cold water for a while, but it persisted.

No, there’s something special about it.

Even without considering my generic spells and tricks for displacing large amounts of mana with minimal movements and efforts, I would say that I had always had good control skills as well as a more-than-adequate mana output. I should probably thank my noble lineage for that. In comparison, however, my mind was entirely synchronized with my mana, to the point where I felt like I could do anything mana-related with a single thought, no matter how complex the task was. There clearly was a peculiar phenomenon at play here.

But why would “unsealing” me produce such an effect? Frankly, I was questioning whether Clair was even unsealing anything in the first place. I had already pondered before whether her spell was a continuous type or more of a condition-inducing one, and given how Clair would periodically re-deprive me of my magic, it was likely the latter. As the period between her interventions varied, my conjecture was that the debuff duration depended on external factors, possibly the amount of mana she used for it.

However, assuming it truly was a condition-inducing spell, it didn’t make a lot of sense that she could stop it with the snap of her fingers. And yet, she could avoid waiting for the natural decline of the spell and suddenly remove that condition. That was the second time she did that to me.

I didn’t like piling up the conjectures, but this was leading me to think Clair could either remove an already-declining condition or overwrite it with another. Considering the trance-like state I was in, I started to lean toward the latter, with potentially a new condition that mirrored the usual debuff in the form of a short-lived boost to my mana affinity.

Getting rid of someone’s magic was already incredibly powerful, but being able to considerably augment the magical abilities of an ally might actually be even more valuable.

Well, that would be a cheat.

If true, it would make this ordinary elf an even better fit for a group of fakers like the oracles than her hybrid sister.

Now, even if I were right, the process Clair used to make this happen would still be unknown to me. It could be that both opposite phenomena were included in one unique spell that let her alter the mana affinity of her target in any direction, or it could be that each effect came from their own spell. She was an elf, after all, although she was probably too young to start unlocking additional spells.

Whichever it was, I would assume that she was completely aware of what she was doing with her magic.

Therefore, as much as I wanted to confirm these hypotheses to build further on them, I believed it would be unwise to ask Clair now. If she intentionally didn’t disclose this part of her magic, she probably wouldn’t like being told that I was reverse engineering her spell.

No, wait! I have to focus on myself!

While this topic definitely interested me, it wasn’t the time for me to consider how to address it with diplomacy, especially when I was racing against time. After all, even though she had given me an hour to test out things, this off-the-charts ability to gauge magic would surely subside within a few minutes at best if it was really similar to what she did to me the day before.

I should be using every second to decipher my magic, dammit. Let’s see…

My eyes locked onto a lone rock on the side of the road.

Yep, let’s start by replicating what I did yesterday.

Maybe I could reproduce the sensation I had when I threw my artifact, I thought. So I squatted down with difficulty because of my injuries, grabbed the stone, and then stood back up.

Huh?

I honestly wondered if it was some kind of magical rock for a second, but I quickly withdrew this stupid conjecture. That was definitely a random rock.

I tried moving it in all directions as if I were writing in the air, and it kept getting weirder and weirder.

What the heck? Am I too tired or something?

I could swear I was seeing the trajectory this rock, possibly limestone I reckoned, was following.

Who cares what kind of rock it is?! What’s going on…?

I was confused, but I could tell all of this was happening in my head and wasn’t actually reaching my eyes.

For a bit, I kept playing with the stone by lightly throwing it up with one hand and catching it with the other. Even though the trajectory was always pointing down during the air time, it seemed to update upon contact with me.

While I was finding it quite informative, I eventually had to stop after I glanced back and saw Clair judging me from the distance. I could understand that it was irritating for her to have actively given me back my magic just to watch me play with pebbles on the side of the road like a child, though.

In the end, just the act of picking up the rock had been enlightening to me.

And I haven’t even started my magical experiment…

Yet, it had helped me grasp a crucial aspect of my magic. During each of the rock’s flights, I repeatedly felt like I was watching a story crafted by the universe, whose scenes were woven together by a thread. A figurative one, of course.

Perhaps I was able to analyze the rock’s motion at such a level thanks to Clair’s affinity boost, which supposedly brought me closer to my magic.

“Well,” I mumbled, “I suppose converting energy really isn’t the extent of it, after all.”

Stolen novel; please report.

If anything, I’m now convinced it was nothing more than a side effect.

Was my magic related to energy? Of course it was. Well, to be fair, pretty much anything in the universe was related to energy as it made everything in existence. Still, there was definitely a strong connection between energy and my magic. Did it mean my magic consisted of directly manipulating energy, though?

Nah.

To me, it was a bit like naively believing that a mage had control over magnetic fields just based on the fact that they could make an object levitate over something like a magnet. Well, it was probably a fair assumption, but there surely were a few other ways to make that happen.

Superconductivity, for instance, was one of them. It was a property that made certain materials expel all magnetic fields via a phenomenon called the Meissner effect, among many other interesting and useful things like completely nullifying electrical resistance. Most often, it was this Meissner effect that was at play in those cool videos where some ceramics were cooled down with liquid nitrogen and then started levitating above a magnetic track. Theoretically, Superconductivity may be able to make a material a superconductor, causing it to exhibit this effect and thus reproduce the levitation feat without needing any Magnetism magic.

This might have been a niche example, maybe nonexistent in this world, but my point was that what could be interpreted as magnetism manipulation under certain circumstances may in reality have been a mere side effect of a different kind of manipulation altogether.

Considering my temporary clarity and all the doubts I already had about my magic, chances were that the spell I saw as ‘Energy Conversion’ was similarly a mere illusion, a byproduct of a different phenomenon.

If so, what was the equivalent of superconductivity in my case? In a way, I felt like I had approached it now and then when I used concepts like change or motion. I believed they were both fitting in some ways, although the notion of change intuitively made the most sense to me.

For the first time, I tried to truly relive in my head all the sensations I had felt back then when I witnessed that death sphere gulping enormous amounts of matter and turning it into mana. At the time, it had been as if the universe was responding in accordance to some fundamental changes, and I believed this forceful adaptation to these new directives had been what I observed as the convergence of all forms of energy into mana.

As such, the fundamental interrogation was about the nature of these directives, but the answer wasn’t necessarily straightforward. To be more precise, it seemed to vary depending on the system I was considering.

For simple kinetic manipulations at a nice, understandable, classical scale, the change seemed to manifest itself in the form of virtual forces that changed the magnitude of the target’s momentum. In that respect, this was similar and yet opposite to Rina’s ‘Momentum Lock’, which played with the concept of immutability.

For other types of conversions that didn’t involve kinetic energy, the change that was produced was quite different. If I had to describe it, it was more like the very laws were bent and adjusted so that it led to unnatural transfers of energy.

As much as I despised the use of quantum mechanics to explain anything remotely magical in fiction, I had to admit there was undoubtedly something quantum to these alterations since particle physics was involved. Rather than saying my magic itself was quantum, however, it was more accurate to say it could be applied to quantum objects just as effectively as to a regular rock, although the results differed quite a lot.

Still, the produced changes might express themselves in different manners, but they were two aspects orbiting a singular concept that would direct me to what the heck my magic was once and for all when identified.

As for that concept, it was that same thread binding all those “scenes” that composed the motion of that rock. Its identity was the Principle of Least Action, which went from explaining why the snowflake was the optimal configuration for water molecules during the process of crystallization, to giving the illusion that light knew in advance how to be refracted between different mediums so as to eventually minimize its time of travel.

It was a broad and incredibly robust principle. It functioned as a guide set up by the universe in a way, and all systems in existence were by construction forced to follow it in the name of optimization.

It was this ultimate force of the universe that dictated how objects should move and how particles should interact. Even my magic was constrained by it.

No, that’s not a good way to put it…

Indeed, it felt more like it was making use of the principle instead. My magic was leveraging it.

While the Principle of Least Action did limit the amount of “change” I could conjure in one go, it also acted as a stabilizer that kept everything consistent and compatible with a working universe. The more arbitrary and extreme the change was, the more gradually the transition went. Perhaps this prevented the very fabric of reality from being ripped.

Once the universe’s role in this grand masquerade was uncovered, putting all the pieces together was relatively easy.

If the universe’s task was to provide the blueprint of the story as a playwright would, mine was to reinterpret all or part of the script to make it fit with my own artistic vision right before the performance.

That’s more like it.

Envisioning the process within this new framework was surely the way to go if I wanted to get the full picture. This one worked fine because it described the effects of my magic and even included my struggles in using it.

I want to put it into action.

I could lose this state of clarity any second now. So that it wouldn’t just be brushed off as a passing frenzy by me later, I wanted to try it out and prove it was real. Preferably, this run test would include a much more intricate kind of manipulation than usual. This way, it would demonstrate that my magic was different from just being able to convert one form of energy into another.

After searching for a moment, I settled on a new type of spell whose structure was inspired by another one that I had used a couple of times now.

Yikes. I’d better be right about it.

I took a deep breath and released all the mana in my body. I was planning to use only a fraction of it for the actual spell, but I needed the rest to put up a robust barrier all around me. One that would stop any mana, heat, sound, pressure wave, or even shrapnel from escaping.

As the curtain was about to rise, I glanced one last time at the area I was about to target. There was nothing but air, and yet, I could perfectly picture it in my mind.

All I had to do was wreck the status quo by stirring up trouble, even if that meant breaking one or two symmetries to force the universe into a corner.

Here I go.