Chapter 9: 09 – Development

I successfully became a magic user, creating electricity from nothing but my mana. Creating electricity wasn't my intention, but instead, an accidental result brought about by my lack of magical experience. Gilda had repeatedly warned me that clear visualization was the key to successful magic. However, I never expected that you could end up with totally different results from using the wrong mental image. That seemed very strange to me. Normally you'd expect something to fail if you mess up.

Gilda said this is why you test everything. If you only do what you already know works, you could miss golden opportunities to make discoveries.

Regardless, I was happy to have gained a feel for using mana, which seemed to be the highest hurdle to learning magic. Now, I needed to find ways to use magic to support my body in combat. I wanted to make use of the martial arts I had learned, so my first experiment was testing what would be the effect of enhancing my strikes with mana.

For safety's sake and because I'd already had unexpected results, I didn't test this concept while fighting Gilda. I wouldn't want any weird magic resulting in injuries to her. So, I chose to work on my theoretical magic using a makiwara, which seemed more resilient to me than a punching bag.

At first, I had a problem moving my mana and my body at the same time. It took a few hours of constant effort to get the hang of it, like learning to move new extra limbs. However, once I figured out the trick to it, the results were explosive, literally. The first time I pulled it off, the makiwara exploded with a single punch, which wasn't exactly what I had expected. I was glad to have had the foresight not to test new magic on Gilda.

After that, we went through several more makiwara. Lots of trials and errors later, the magic fighting technique I had worked out based on visualizing the concept of Chi worked out better than I could have imagined. My strikes became augmented with what I thought of as life energy passing into the target upon impact. The point was to deposit all the kinetic energy upon impact while using the life energy to insulate my body from any backlash, creating a one-way flow of damage. Theoretically, allowing me to hit even rocks without so much as skinning my knuckles.

I wasn't sure what the limits of magic were or even if there were any limits. It seemed to break my understanding of the laws of physics. Not that I was an expert on physics. I was sure there must be some hidden way magic made scientific sense, but I hadn't found it, and Gilda wasn't explaining things that would just go over my head anyway. The best way I could describe magic was that it was like living in a dream. Magic made your imagination overcome reality.

But having experienced it myself, I could see why Gilda's people couldn't fight magic head-on. Relying only on science and physics, you would have no chance. Magic ignored common sense, physics, and reason. I'd realized the undeniability of what Gilda had been trying to tell me. That magic was limited only by the user's will, imagination, and mana capacity. The danger a skilled magic user presented to a regular person was far greater than any gun, tank, or airplane used by the military back on Earth.

I now truly understood how the horned rabbit had destroyed me so quickly. But after my intense training, I was almost ready for a rematch.

I still wanted to refine my control in combat. I was worried about the possibility of wasting more mana than was necessary for my strikes. Carelessness could find me with depleted reserves during a fight, leaving me open to another humiliating defeat.

I also needed to learn magic resistance to lower the damage from any magic-empowered blows I did receive.

Once I had enough control over my Chi-empowered attacks to be sure of myself, I returned to hands-on matches with Gilda. However, this time I didn't attack at all. Instead, my sole focus was figuring out how to absorb her attacks without taking damage.

For the first few hours, it wasn't looking good. Gilda started worrying about my safety and wanted to stop, but I convinced her to allow me to continue. Eventually, I felt something shift in my perception. I could almost feel the impact before her strikes connected. Once I developed a sense for that, I tried moving a small amount of extra mana to protect that spot.

At first, I tried imagining my interventions as oil, which helped deflect glancing blows a little, but damage still passed through depending on the angle of impact. Thinking I could do better, I tried imagining a soft pillow absorbing the strike, with better results. But, after brainstorming with Gilda, I found the most success by visualizing a deep pile of sand receiving the blow. I was thinking of a backstop they use at shooting ranges, which completely absorbs the incredible power of speeding bullets with no damage. Using that visualization, I found I could use mana to absorb almost all the kinetic energy from even Gilda's most powerful strikes.

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Even with the accelerated healing provided by my nanites, I was pretty beat up by the end of that day, so Gilda decided I should rest for the night. I got up the following morning as good as new and ready to work.

The last magical skill I wanted to develop was using magic to reinforce a weapon the same way as my body. I'd already seen the value of increasing my striking distance. If I could make my magic flow through something else, I could strike at a safer distance or parry incoming strikes.

After thinking about it, I figured a wooden staff would be a weapon I could find anywhere, so I decided to practice with that. However, flowing my mana into an object that wasn't part of my body was more difficult than I'd imagined. At first, I tried to force my mana down the length of the staff. However, that only resulted in fracturing it, as if I had been attacking the weapon itself.

Eventually, after reconsidering the martial arts concept of Chi as more of a life energy force, I hit on the idea that maybe the wood, being alive once as well, had preexisting incompatible mana. If that were the case, I just needed to sense the mana in the staff and synchronize my mana so there would be no incompatibility. That sounded easy as a concept but accomplishing that seemingly easy task was more difficult than anything else I had attempted.

It took four additional days of testing and training before I had a breakthrough.

Eventually, I came across the concept of auras when researching Earth mysticism related to lifeforce. It seemed like a long shot, but I tried visualizing mana as an aura anyway, and I was shocked when it worked. Once I could see the faint color of mana in the staff and that my mana had a noticeable difference, I understood the incompatibility. So, I tried to visualize my mana aura shifting colors until it matched the mana of the staff.

Once I synchronized my mana with the staff, I successfully allowed my mana to flow into it. However, there was a shocking revelation. I discovered the wood was somehow aware of me and communicated wordlessly through the mana flowing between us. But it wasn't an unpleasant feeling at all. I mostly got a sense of cooperation and support, as if it recognized me as part of itself, perhaps because of the mana synchronization.

I was stunned. That which I had thought of as only an inanimate object instead possessed an awareness and communication ability. Suddenly I felt guilty for the previous staffs I had accidentally destroyed while testing. Using magic was changing my worldview in ways I could never have foreseen. How should I act ethically in a world filled with self-aware objects?

I tried looking up any information to explain the phenomenon and found something called The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness, which seemed somewhat close to what I had discovered. I thought about the consequences of this development for a while. Then I tried to communicate my concerns to the staff, but an unexpected answer came. Essentially, the response I got was, "I fulfill my purpose. There is no other meaning to my existence."

Maybe a tool just wants to be used?

What the hell? Now I'm talking about the meaning of life with a wooden staff... where did my life go wrong?

As a result of all these strange events accumulating, I started feeling overwhelmed. There was a lot of new information to digest. I'd been training hard, and a lot had happened. I decided that maybe I needed a break.

My eighteenth birthday was the next day anyway, so I let Gilda know I would take a day off for rest, then take on the horned rabbit the day after. She seemed fine with that decision and maybe even seemed a little interested in celebrating my birthday with me.

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