Chương 453: B7—Chapter 33: The Bridge Between Science and Magic

Following my partial success in reconciling my meager scientific knowledge with mana to achieve a hint of flight, I headed to my library to look for books on subjects connected to Earth Magic. Not magic books, but books from Earth. I didn't know enough about the actual substance to do anything with it. Yes, I succeeded in demolishing a couple of castles, but that had been brute force and stubbornness more than actual knowledge. It was time to fix that gap.

I browsed the shelves, running a hand over the spines as I looked through the titles. I bought a lot of books on Earth on every subject under the sun, mostly by clicking titles on Amazon, but now I was ecstatic with my past self. My library had books on geophysics, mineralogy, materials science, solid-state physics, seismology, electromagnetism, gravitational physics, geochemistry, topology, and field theory. The stack kept growing and growing. Mahya walked in and eyed the stack on the table.

"What are you doing?"

"Collecting books that would help me understand the earth better. Hopefully, they would help with my earth affinity." She furrowed her brow and stared at me with a very confused expression.

"How?"

"Understanding gravity helped me detach from the ground for a minute, so I'm adopting the same approach."

"Why not magic books?" I shuddered, thinking of the wizard books, then sighed and nodded.

"I will read those too, but right now I want to understand earth better from the physical aspect before I touch the magical aspect. I have a feeling it would help." She inspected the books I had put aside one by one, then went to the shelves and looked through the rest. After a few minutes, she added books on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and acoustics. I looked at the books she added, then at her, then back at the books and back at her again. She laughed softly.

"Don't look so confused. Those books might help and might not, but it's better to be thorough." I sighed deeply again, slumped, picked up the books, and headed downstairs to study about earth. This reading was boring to the point that my mind grew numb. Lines blurred together, paragraphs dissolved into noise, and more than once I caught myself drifting off for a few minutes before snapping back awake. Still, I powered through.

Every piece of new knowledge I managed to retain, I tried to turn over in my head, poking at it to see how it might apply to mana, magic, earth affinity, or whatever else seemed even vaguely compatible. It didn't always work, but a few solid ideas did stick. From geophysics, I considered how mana could follow the same underground flows as magnetic or tectonic lines, and how I could use those as natural channels to do something with earth. I didn't know yet what exactly, but the initial idea was growing.

Electromagnetism gave me the thought that mana could behave like a charged field, letting me pull metal toward me and, of course, stabilize flight using polarity, like the Earth Wizard wrote about. Seismology made me wonder if I could detect or send vibrations through stone the same way sound travels, maybe even use that to map underground spaces or strike weak points precisely.

Materials Science suggested that reinforcing stone or metal with mana wasn't just about pouring energy into it, but about aligning its internal structure, like heat-treating or tempering steel. It reminded me of the mana pulses Payan sent into my swords while working on them, and I was pretty sure that was exactly what she did. It lowered my fascination with that form of art a bit, removing the veil of mysticism from her actions, but I was still impressed with metal shaping. Even Topology weirdly made sense.

The way space folds and connects could explain runic circles and why some formations amplify mana flow. At that point, I dropped the books. There was a limit to how much new information I could comfortably absorb before it all turned to mush in my head, even with my high Intelligence and a much improved ability to retain knowledge. Apparently, that limit sat somewhere around forty-something books written in a painfully boring academic language.

The only bright side was that my reading speed and ability to absorb new material had grown to frankly unbelievable levels. Now I only had to test everything. The snow finally stopped, but after a week of it falling nonstop, the drifts were higher than the door. The last couple of times I left the house, I had to do it through the balcony after melting the snow off it with the Heat spell. Rue refused even to glance at the windows, as if just seeing the snow could make him feel the cold or something.

Mahya and Al stood by the windows, both staring out at the white wall that had swallowed the world. Their reflections looked as miserable as the weather. Al wasn't exactly glum—that would have been too much of an emotional display for him—but his lips were pressed into a thin, disapproving line. Mahya, on the other hand, made no effort to hide her frustration. She alternated between sighing dramatically and muttering curses under her breath, fogging the glass each time she leaned to peek outside.

"We can always relocate to the underground city," I suggested. They both turned to look at me, scandalized at first, but their expressions slowly shifted as the idea sank in. Mahya tilted her head, frowning at the thought, and Al's usual calm turned more focused, his gaze sharpening. Rue jumped up from his beanbag, tail wagging.

"John very smart."

"Are we confident in our ability to access the entry point?" Al asked.

"Heat spell," I said. Mahya wrinkled her nose in obvious disapproval.

"It's dark and spooky,""Spooky good. Snow bad," Rue declared, stomping his paw on the last word for emphasis, ears perked and eyes full of hope. Mahya looked at him with an exasperated sigh.

"I know you hate the snow, but come on. With all that fur, it's not a problem. You're just spoiled." She pointed at his paws.

"And you have snowshoes." Rue huffed and turned away, clearly deciding that ignoring her was the best form of protest. I went to make coffee to warm up. Later, after dinner, Mahya said, "All right. Let's relocate." It turned out to be much easier than I expected. A protruding ledge above the entrance had caught most of the snow, so we only needed to melt the pile blocking the way to the opening.

When we reached the end of the tunnel leading in, I saw no reason to go back up and place the house on one of the upper terraces. The bottom was as good a place as any, and I hoped it would suit my earth experiments better. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. Back in the dark and spooky underground city, Mahya and Al disappeared into their respective projects.

Rue wanted to watch a movie— Ratatouille, for the fifth time—and I went to play with Earth. I stepped outside the house and stretched, my breath forming faint clouds in the cold underground air. The silence of Ashara's ruins pressed down, broken only by the distant drip of water. I closed my eyes and sent my mana sense into the ground, feeling for the mana in the stone and earth. It took a while, but I could feel it now, faint but present, like vibrations at the edge of hearing.

When I focused fully, they became clearer, threads of quiet energy pulsing through the rock. My Light Ball floated at shoulder height, dim enough not to ruin my night vision, bright enough to keep me from tripping over rubble as I moved deeper into the ruins. The first test was simple. I knelt and pressed a hand to the ground, channeling a small amount of mana downward as a conduit for my awareness, trying to sense the underground layers the wizard book had described. The stone felt dead at first, unresponsive.

Then, when I focused on the subtle vibrations, the mana within the rock formed faint impressions. I felt shifts, cracks, and faint echoes where the ground wasn't solid. That was something.

"Okay, let's try this," I said, and jumped in surprise when my voice echoed off the walls, much louder than I expected. I shaped the mana into a pulse and sent it out in a short wave. The vibration bounced back almost immediately, dull and blurred. I adjusted the frequency, trying to mimic sonar or seismic mapping. This time, the return was sharper, more defined. I could sense a cavern below, an empty space about thirty meters down. That was my first success. I fist pumped. Seismology for the win!

Of course, my damn curiosity was driving me crazy to go investigate. I almost succumbed to the temptation but stopped myself at the last moment. This was magic training, not underground exploration. With a sigh and a solid talking-to with myself, I went back to practice. The next logical step was doing the same thing without pouring my mana into the ground, the way I could sense the water. This part was much harder.

With water, I could easily feel the surrounding flow, the gentle motion of currents and density changes, almost like hearing with my mana and skin. But the earth was stubborn. I had to focus much harder. Even when I sensed water, it only worked well in my close vicinity, and to reach farther, I needed concentration. With the earth, my range was much smaller, and every bit of progress felt like carving awareness out of stone. I stayed still, hand on the ground, eyes closed, shutting out every distraction.

At first, there was only cold stone and silence. Then, faint details emerged—the coarse texture of the rock, the packed layers beneath, the subtle changes in weight and resistance that hinted at hollows or denser patches below. It wasn't sound or movement, more like a quiet knowing that grew sharper the longer I focused. I let my awareness sink deeper, tracing the grain of the earth, following the way pressure shifted between one patch and another.

The shapes beneath me slowly came into focus, rough and uneven, like feeling a landscape with my palm through a thin cloth. Sweat poured down my face, but I kept going, stretching that awareness inch by inch until the world under me was almost visible, like in an X-ray image. By the time my head started pounding, the circle I could sense had widened to about twenty meters around me, and at least fifteen meters deep.

A few thin tendrils of mana slipped out of my control, guiding my focus through the ground, but the rest came from pure awareness. Maybe it wasn't yet at the level the wizard described in his book, but for a first step, it was solid progress. My temples throbbed and my shoulders ached, yet I couldn't help smiling. For once, the earth started to talk back. When my headache subsided, I tried something bigger. Literally. I focused on a nearby boulder half-buried in the rubble.

The goal was to raise it without brute force, to coax it upward the way Pelphonion described in his book. I channeled mana into the rock, picturing the stone rising gently from its resting place. The earth shuddered faintly, and the boulder trembled, dust trickling down its sides. Slowly, it lifted a few centimeters, then settled back with a thud and a new crack in the floor. Not a failure, but not quite a success either. I exhaled, rubbing my temples.

"Alright. You're old, you're heavy, and you don't like moving. Got it." Shifting focus, I tried the same technique on a smaller rock. I touched a pebble and channeled mana into it, with the intention of making it rise. This time, the result was instant. The pebble shot upward, hit the ceiling, and bounced off my head. Ow! I rubbed my abused scalp. It was a success, but my precision still needed work. I rested for a bit, then started smaller.

At first, I tried lifting pebbles in short, controlled bursts, adjusting the pressure beneath them instead of channeling mana into them directly to make them move. Most of them barely twitched, and a few just rolled in place. Still, each tiny reaction helped me understand the balance between weight and push, between mass and mana. After a few minutes, one pebble actually lifted, hovered for half a second, and then plopped back down. It wasn't much, but it was progress.

I repeated the process, focusing on precision, learning how to counter mass rather than overpower it. It wasn't flashy work, just slow, patient tinkering until the rhythm of it started to make sense. The next challenge was to affect the pebbles without touching them. I tried to do it through my mana sense field, reaching out like an invisible hand. Nothing. Not even a tremor. I adjusted, tried again, and again, and again. After what felt like a hundred attempts, the results didn't change.

I sat back and rubbed my temples, refusing to give up. Then a new idea formed. Instead of trying to push mana directly from a distance, I channeled it down through my legs, into the ground, and from there into the pebble itself. That worked. The first success was clumsy. The pebble jerked once and rolled a few centimeters. The second time, it jumped. The third, it spun in place before skipping off the ground. I kept at it, slowly refining the flow until I could make a pebble slide smoothly across the floor.

With practice, I affected stones over ten meters away. When I had the "on the ground" motion relatively under control, I returned to moving them off the ground, without touching them. It wasn't easy. The same method of channeling down my legs and through the ground worked here as well, but the only problem was control. I could guide their motion only while they stayed connected to the ground and to my mana flowing through it.

The moment a pebble broke contact and started its flight, it was gone from my reach, flying wherever momentum decided. Still, watching that tiny stone arc through the air made me grin. It was a minor victory, but a victory nonetheless. In my book, that counted as a tremendous success. For the next few hours, I alternated between practical science and wild experimentation. I used mana to amplify sound waves, making a low hum resonate through the chamber like an echoing gong.

I tried fusing soil grains together into solid stone using heat and compression principles, and it actually worked, though the result was a chunk of oddly glassy rock that smelled faintly of ozone. By the time I tried flight again, I felt confident in my new knowledge. I grounded myself, channeled mana through my legs, and visualized gravity lines like curved ribbons of force around me. I loosened my weight from the planet's grip and tried to align with the magnetic flow. For a brief second, it worked.

My boots lifted off the ground, lighter than air. Then the polarity shifted, and I slammed sideways into a column.

"That's new," I muttered, dusting off my clothes. Rue, who had apparently wandered in, snorted from the doorway.

"John fly funny," he said, wagging his tail.

"John fall funny," I corrected and glared at the ceiling.

"One day, gravity's going to regret messing with me." I went back to the more successful experiments and spent some time playing with pebbles again. Slowly but surely, I reached the point where I could control the direction the pebble shot off most times. Not all of them, but most. Sometimes small, almost invisible protrusions or slight changes in the ground's surface affected the flight path, and I couldn't adjust it once the pebble lost contact with the ground and my mana. Still, I was getting good at it.

That gave me hope, and I moved on to the next stage described in the wizard book: shaping weapons from earth. But I used the same method as before, combining his ideas with what I learned from mineralogy, materials science, and geophysics. That part didn't go nearly as well. I emptied my mana pool, earned myself a pounding headache, and the only result was a single chip of stone breaking off from the main rock. Once. By the time I was done, the air in the cavern smelled of dust, ozone, and faintly burned mana.

My hands trembled from strain, and my hair was full of grit, but I couldn't stop grinning. I had mapped underground shapes and moved stones with magic. Flight, though, that stubborn bastard still refused to cooperate. It reminded me of my days trying to fly with wind magic—same obstacle in a different form. Back then, the problem was intention. Now, it was being too firmly attached to the planet's surface. Still, based on past experience, I knew I would crack it if I kept at it.

I sat down on a slab of rock and leaned back to regenerate.

"Alright, gravity," I said, staring up at the cracked ceiling.

"Round one goes to you." Rue padded over and plopped down beside me, tail flicking lazily.

"John learn."

"Yeah," I said, smiling.

"John definitely learn." And best of all, Earth in my Personal Information finally had [Novice] beside it.