There was a very peculiar play, one that had persisted through history in the form of an endless performance that depicted the dance of the universe. It was still ongoing, even at this very moment.

Like a broken record, the actors repeated the same act over and over again, offering the spectators a stale, repetitive story. Yet, just like those long-running TV dramas that sold well despite showing for decades the same boring patterns of romance over and over again, the unchanging aspect of this play had ended up being taken for granted and felt natural by now.

It was as if the play were stuck in a loop. The characters always interacted in the same way, with no development whatsoever and no self-awareness.

So to speak, the dynamics didn’t change much as the playwright had already found an optimal scenario and no longer saw any reason to introduce novelty. If anything, making a change at this point would be strange.

To be fair, there was a bit of variation here and there when the characters got somewhat excited, but the overall structure of their inter-relationships never changed.

To be even fairer, the entire dynamics had vastly shifted once in the distant past, about a trillionth of a second after the play had started. One of the characters, Higgs, had spontaneously started to act differently from the others and took a pivotal role, which led the behavior of all but a handful of them to drastically and abruptly change forever. This dramatic event had even killed some characters and led to the birth of a few others.

It should technically count as a plot twist, but it happened so early that it might as well be considered part of the exposition scene since no one witnessed this event in the first place.

The reason why this big twist was introduced this soon in the story was because the playwright had been too ambitious in the expansion of the stage. The rest followed naturally when the energy density plummeted, which was bound to happen.

Well, as bad as the writing seemed, the current status quo was quite stable. By now, it had outlasted the previous one by about twenty-nine orders of magnitude. That was hundreds of billions of billions of billions of times longer, even with the stage growing in size at an absurd and still-accelerating rate. Not only was it awfully stable, but the way it allowed even this much complexity in the story seemed too perfect, almost fine-tuned. Indeed, there were strong arguments that the current character chart was the only viable one because any change beyond a tiny margin in the way any character interacted with any other would render the entire story sterile, empty, and pointless.

Some people considered that it undoubtedly showed intention and was proof the playwright was an all-knowing genius who was able to foresee the future and had planned everything out, while others invoked the anthropic principle and said it was merely a fortunate coincidence that this story worked. The idea was that if this play had been one that failed from the beginning, no one would be here to argue about it, and this whole debate was therefore biased from the start. That was probably fair.

Some other people suggested that the playwright had written an absurd amount of different scenarios that were all being played in parallel somewhere we couldn’t see, each with a unique character chart, and only a limited number of those plays — including this one — ended up succeeding in the long run. This hypothesis reinforced that same anthropic principle by introducing a potentially infinite number of random draws.

Because this play was the story of the universe, its characters were the quantum fields. These intertwined layers of reality, that homogeneously permeated the entire universe, were each the home of one type of particle. Whichever system we considered and however small it was, it was sure to intersect all of those fields and interact with at least some of them.

The various interactions between the quantum fields were the basis of the Quantum Field Theory. While it was quite possibly the closest thing to the Theory of Everything we had, it was still a matter of debate whether it truly reflected the fundamental nature of reality or was just a convenient tool to predict things. It worked mathematically, beautifully so even, but accepting the idea that invisible and superposed entities bathed the whole universe could be challenging.

For all I knew, maybe a more ontological description of reality was closer to the String Theory formulation with its little strings that made up everything by vibrating in several extra dimensions, although it wasn’t particularly easier to picture that.

No matter the theory, though, one had to agree that the balance of particle interactions was fragile. For instance, the difference between having matter happily exist thanks to the harmony of the quantum fields and getting said matter to disintegrate in pure chaos was so thin it made me want to cry for personal reasons.

Fortunately, usually, changes in the fundamental laws and constants didn’t occur.

In fact, the laws of conservation for energy and momentum ensured that the rules were invariant in time and space, respectively.

This meant that, whether right here and right now or at one billion light-years away from here in a million years, the rules would remain the same.

And since the particles they homed were identical wherever we were in spacetime, the quantum fields were a great example of this invariance.

Particles were inherently fungible, and there was likely no place in the universe where some bizarre photon would naturally interact with a gluon. This was equivalent to saying their fields were not coupled together.

To my understanding, this natural immutability of the laws was where my magic type played a key role. Namely, it locally redacted the script of this perpetual representation and thus arbitrarily altered the emerging dynamics. By simply imposing the desired change, the progression of the story shifted and eventually converged toward my specification.

Now, even though the universe was unable to completely prevent the rules from changing, it still managed to make the divergence smoother by introducing more or less in-between states that the target had to transition through.

It was a given that some compromises had to be made. If the playwright was forced by a tyrannical director to alter the script and comply with an imposed conclusion that differed from what they had envisioned, they at least retained the right to gradually lead the story toward this new conclusion by adding intermediary acts and scenes, making the progression as seamless as possible.

Similarly to the unity of action, a rule that dictated that all scenes existed to maintain coherence and to contribute to the main plot and its resolution, these additions to the story were artifacts of the Principle of Least Action that guided the changes and softened their intensity. It checked out.

Even so, the director could further reduce the number of these scenes in the acts by applying even more pressure on the playwright, rushing the story to its conclusion even more and making the progression much less organic.

Drawing meaningful parallels between physics and theater was certainly satisfying and it did help structure my thoughts. With that said, however, using these metaphors might as well have been armchair philosophizing without something more tangible.

Fortunately, the concept of dynamics in physics was well-defined. Whether we were talking about a quantum system or a classical one, we could encode its dynamics within the same mathematical object: the equation of motion.

It was generally in the form of an Euler-Lagrange equation, a powerful college-level alternative to Newtonian mechanics. It seemed a bit redundant to learn another paradigm just to arrive at the same results as Newton’s laws of motion would have given us, but the idea of distancing ourselves from the concept of forces and focusing instead on energy levels had its charm. Plus, this equation could be declined into many alternative forms while remaining relevant in quantum theories, like Maxwell’s or Schrödinger’s equations. They were in nature the same, but they introduced a new level of complexity with operators and imaginary numbers.

If that play’s equivalent in a more general sense was the formula that described a system’s motion, then the acts and scenes that served as snapshots of the story’s current state were Lagrangians. Described as the difference between kinetic and potential energy, a Lagrangian was the function from which the equation of motion was derived, and it essentially gave information about the system’s energy balance at a given time when it was time-dependent.

These mathematical constructs, as far as I could tell, were an integral part of the intermediary elements added for consistency throughout the motion. For any parabola, there existed a sequence of Lagrangians that described the history of the trajectory.

It may have been a bit backward, but distorting the dynamics of a system in a particular way by defining in advance its final state could therefore lead to a specific combination of Lagrangians that was mostly deterministic and predictable thanks to the Principle of Least Action.

I was now certain that every kinetic manipulation I had been performing these past three years had been just that: a sequence of Lagrangians that gave the illusion of ‘Energy Conversion’.

In particular, making a ball fly at the speed of sound wasn’t done by directly converting mana into kinetic energy, somehow uniformly distributing that energy throughout the projectile and continuing to do so until it built up enough energy to achieve that speed. Rather, the ball’s impossible journey started and was already fully determined before even being thrown. The redefinition of its motion was such that the Lagrangians it would pass through would indicate an acceleration until it ultimately ended up traveling at the speed of sound. Again, it was backward.

Altering these energy levels was of course not free, and that process just so happened to drain the available mana in the same proportions as if I had been converting one form of energy into another, giving this false impression of Conversion magic. That was only a natural consequence of the Conservation of Energy.

This at least explained why it always felt strange to propel myself into the air with magic. By construction, after all, the entire path with all the accelerations and decelerations would already have been replanned by the universe or whatever by the time my feet left the ground. As such, I would only be throwing the pre-determined trajectory off-balance by consciously trying to adjust my velocity in real-time via these “conversions”.

At first glance, besides a few inconsistencies that were resolved, this new interpretation didn’t seem like a deal breaker when it simply gave an alternative explanation for phenomena that I could already produce before. In reality, however, controlling Lagrangians — even indirectly — meant that I had much finer control over motion and potential. This was sure to open up several new ways of using my magic type.

Huh?

As soon as I started preparing myself to implement in the real world a new spell that would illustrate this new way of thinking, my mind just... blanked out. I had expected this, but this potent awareness of my magic that I believed was related to Clair’s spell disappeared just like that.

... So it really was short-lived.

I did remember all this train of thoughts about dynamics and such, but I was now wondering how I even arrived at this interpretation to begin with. It no longer seemed that obvious to me, and it felt like I had been raving for an indeterminate amount of time.

It made sense, though…

This whole formulation still seemed reasonable to me, and I had to agree that it explained a thing or two that had bothered me until now. It was just that my intuition was gone, and it didn’t emotionally click as much as it did before.

While I felt like I could trust my past self from merely twenty seconds ago due to how sure I had been, it wasn’t a very rational thing to do considering I had been under a strange mental condition whose nature I couldn’t identify for sure. I conjectured that it came from Clair’s magic but, at the end of the day, it was only a wild guess.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Ngh… What should I do?

As I looked at the whole chain, I thought I might as well reverse-engineer what I had been planning to do at the very end. I hadn’t fully outlined the project in my mind, but I had definitely thought of something since I had preemptively put up multiple mana barriers around me to contain anything dangerous happening inside. More specifically, something a bit taboo that would pay tribute to the original conversional interpretation of my element while surpassing it.

As I saw it, the taboo in question was breaking down matter to steal energy from it. It was by far the most available source of energy out there, after all.

Yes, it was that…

Even if I had been certain to be correct, that was a seriously questionable project. Well, the goal here was not to do it the same way as that pseudo-annihilation did. This time, the idea was to liberate only a fraction of the energy trapped within the bonds of matter. Matter wasn't a singular concept after all, but more of an aggregation of quite a few different forms of interactions that all contributed to the overall mass. Frankly, thinking of it as a single package all along had been an oversimplification on my part, although doing so was fairly consistent with the idea of a one-time conversion toward mana.

When I approached this problem with dynamics, however, there were several feasible ways I could extract energy from matter.

The catch was that there were many of those approaches that I needed to avoid at all costs. Essentially, any strategy that had to do with the strong force, this fundamental interaction that confined quarks into protons and neutrons and thus allowed the existence of atom nuclei, was prohibited. By itself, this interaction accounted for more than 99% of the total energy contained in matter, and messing with this force was sure to release way too much energy. There didn’t seem to be any safe way to manipulate that energy or even contain it after it was freed, as even when it emerged as mana, a form of energy that barely reacted to anything, it had acted as a death ray for surrounding life.

In any case, this strong force was by far the main contributor to mass. It was considerably greater than all the other kinds of interactions or mechanisms at play even when they were all combined. For this very reason, interfering with atom nuclei was a complete no-go. Fortunately, some of these other interactions were promising candidates.

In particular, the best alternative to targeting the strong force was likely to focus on the electromagnetic bonds within matter. There were plenty of options on that front, for instance the links that bound molecules together, such as Van der Waals interactions, or the ones that made atoms combine into molecules like covalent bonds.

An even better target yet was the binding of electrons to their nucleus within an atom. Just the removal of an electron from the attraction to its nucleus, a process known as ionization, needed plenty of energy to be added into the system to overcome the potential and free the electron. It even got incrementally more difficult for each consecutive electron to be removed.

Given that this confined energy was quite hard to reach as it was gatekept by that powerful potential barrier, it sounded at first like a bad candidate for stealing energy from the atom. And frankly, the fact that it amounted to less in the overall mass than the strong interaction by about six orders of magnitude was aggravating.

And yet, if that new interpretation of my element wasn’t just the result of my delirious self, it was by far the best candidate. That was because distorting the dynamics of the quantum fields in the small region in front of me would in theory give me much more precision than what I was used to. I didn’t exactly remember what the exact plan was, but I could easily deduce where it was going.

Specifically, since the goal was to free the electrons from atoms without having to supply the energy to overcome the potential, I simply needed to create a situation where electrons would by definition no longer bind themselves to their nucleus.

That is, a no-photon zone.

Virtual photons were artifacts that arose from the quantum electromagnetic field and they carried the electromagnetic force. By messing with this field's couplings directly, it was theoretically possible to create so much drag that it would stop any activity within the field and render this fundamental force inactive. This was essentially the same thing as removing the very concept of electric charge, and essentially making electrons electrically neutral.

That way, the electron clouds orbiting atom nuclei would naturally detach themselves to become a bunch of free electrons, and I would simply have to redirect the liberated potential energy of their former interaction.

When applied to a lot of air molecules as they enter this no-photon zone, it ought to produce a constant, powerful, but manageable stream of mana.

That could work.

If it truly was all about dynamics, this would make ‘Ortu Solis’ or my photon-style mana armor work in more or less the same way, at least on paper, which was frankly a scary thought. Just thinking that I had been playing around with spells that could disintegrate me in a second if the mana was dense enough was sure to give me nightmares.

… Should I go through with it?

It sounded a bit dangerous, but it might just work out. Even if I had been wrong about everything and just happened to imagine it from the beginning, this spell wouldn’t do anything. Probably.

While I considered if I should go along with my enthusiasm and look for a way to perform this new spell, however, I noticed something that stood out from the flat horizon, in the direction we had been heading before our stop.

“C-carriage…!” I tried yelling, but I realized soon after that sounds were muffled by the mana barrier that surrounded me too.

Huh.

In the eventuality that the carriage was full of bad people, increasing my mana sounded like a sound idea, although doing it in a rush with this experimental spell was a terrible one.

In these conditions, I believed 'Ortu Solis' was a much more appropriate spell to use in terms of control and safety. In addition, there was this effect analogous to a sonic boom when a large amount of mana manifested too quickly. It could happen when I freed too quickly the mana contained in my now-departed pendant, or when the output of 'Ortu Solis' exceeded a threshold after some time. Even if this new spell was cast on a microscopic area, it would probably trigger this boom and scare the carriage away.

No, not with only a residual emission.

For obvious reasons, one of the layers of this barrier around me was specialized to deal with any mana that tried to leave. Even if some managed to escape, it likely wouldn't be enough for them to register.

Before I even had the time to deactivate my barriers, however, I froze.

...Eh?

This feeling was similar to what someone would feel if they realized they would have been crushed by a bus had they not stopped to tie their shoes. That was the feeling of a near-miss.

Residual...?

Though I may have realized it right before putting this magic into action anyway, I felt like I owed it this time to the serendipitous arrival of this carriage that interrupted me. There was a flaw in my reverse-engineered plan. To be more exact, the principle was correct, but the conclusion I made wasn't. As things were, even though avoiding any alteration of the strong force was the most important rule, that spell was bound to indirectly mess up one of its derivatives.

I would probably have noticed this fact in that state of enhanced awareness, but my dumb present self had forgotten about the residual strong force, which was another name for the strong nuclear force.

Removing electric charges would be all well and good if I targeted only electrons, but that wasn’t the case. As things stood, if I had gone forward with that flawed plan, I would have removed all electric charges, including protons’.

It didn’t seem like a big deal at first. There were as many protons as there were electrons in each atom, so that would merely double the potential energy released in the field. That remained reasonable and manageable. I planned to disassemble matter anyway, so why would I care if protons no longer repulsed each other via the Coulomb force?

Well, it turned out that the stability of atom nuclei highly depended on this electromagnetic repulsion from protons. That interaction opposed this so-called strong nuclear force, which attracted the protons together thanks to a different kind of charge. There were even neutrons that were added to the mix to fully counter that Coulomb force, as protons and neutrons also attracted each other.

But if this electromagnetic repulsion was suddenly removed, there would only be an attractive force left, one that would become more intense the closer protons got to each other.

Uh…

Similarly to what happened inside a neutron star, the degeneracy pressure of neutrons and those exotic protons would likely have stopped the compression of the nuclei at some point, preventing them from collapsing further into tiny black holes. That was at least that.

Still, the difference in potential caused by the partial collapse of nuclei was sure to release a great amount of energy, possibly as much or even more than nuclear fusion. By adding in the equation the cascading effect of air rushing in this distorted region of space, that would have released a tremendous amount of energy. That would still be a lot less than the actual strong force, but since I would only have prepared myself to capture the energy from changes in the electromagnetic configuration, I would have failed to deal with that one.

That was indeed a near-miss. This made it clear that performing this spell right now was a bad idea.

It was a letdown, but I was convinced there still existed a clear path toward the correct formula for a working version of this spell. I just had to incorporate that residual strong force into the mix now that I was made aware of it.

And, once that goal was achieved, I would have a worthy successor to ‘Ortu Solis’ thanks to the new spell’s near-instant setup process and most importantly the sheer quantity of mana it would generate for the same initial wager. Given the ridiculously large increase in efficiency, even getting an output on par with my mana pool would bring both the size and costs of the spell to virtually nothing. I only needed to take my time working on it, or patiently wait until my mana affinity rose once again. Both, in the best-case scenario.

Even though I was playing on very thin ice, I could feel that I was hooked given how I was grinning.

Was it twisted to find excitement in barely avoiding certain death? For sure.

Like a drug addict, I was using the very thing that annihilated my hopes for a happy future to temporarily feel alive and forget everything else. The difference was that, in my case, another mistake wouldn’t claim only my life.

If I was being honest, though, this despicable inclination had started way before I broke. I had been like that for years, trying out unsafe spells with barely any safeguards and punctuating these eras with traumas. Even though the torment I felt worsened exponentially with each trauma, it didn't stop me from hyping myself up again and going even further than before. Maybe a world-destroying accident would finally stop me.

Well, acknowledging it might have been a good start.

“Carriage!” I repeated for the two elf sisters after reabsorbing all my mana.

Alright, what will it be this time?