Chapter 14: Chapter 13: Safety measures and solar panels

“Good morning, Alice. I am surprised you did not arrive here earlier. How was your first lesson with your practical instructor?”
“Ah… Good morning, Maximilian. I had to quickly see Lucius…”
“Mmh? Wait… Why would you need to do that? Don’t tell me you hurt yourself again?!”
“Well, it was not me this time…”
“But someone was still hurt? As I have already told you, be more careful! Think about the people who are worried about you!”
“I-it will not happen again!”
“I sure hope so.”
“I hope so too…”
“What did you just say?”
“Oh, the tutor is here! If you need clarification about today's lesson, just ask me later!”

Alice sat a little further away from Maximilian, seemingly avoiding eye contact.
After the morning lesson, he came to ask Alice about some parts he did not understand. Now that he had all the basics thanks to Alice, he really did not need as much help as before.
When he was done asking questions, they both went to have a meal with the Marquis and the Marchioness. Serena was not having her meal in the same building as them since she was staying with Lucius and the other attendants for the day, although Alice and she had promised to meet up afterwards.

As soon as Alice thought it was appropriate to leave the table and the room, she ran off outside.
Seeing this, Maximilian sighed. She was totally about to experiment again with her dangerous strengthening-like magic. Actually, the more Maximilian heard about the ways incidents happened when she used it, the less it sounded like strengthening.

***

“How rude of you to make a frail lady like me wait alone on a dirty training ground.”
“Please do not call yourself a frail lady when you deliberately chose to keep your eyepatch…”

After Lucius had finished examining and treating her left eye, Serena had indeed insisted on keeping it. She thought it looked cool, like she was a pirate. This reason was ridiculous, but at least Alice learned that there were pirates in this world too.

“Alice, today I’m having you manipulate your mana in the air again!”
“... Did we not say only once yesterday?”
“Eheh, your face seems to say that you're actually looking forward to that! I did not come without a plan, anyway.”
“Hmph. If you have one, I will at least listen to it.”
“Yesterday, you explained to me that you could turn matter into energy, right?”
“Matter IS a form of energy, so I did not really turn it into energy. I simply converted it.”
“Don’t sweat the small details. Anyway, you lost control of the resulting mana, right?”
“I did. What is your point?”
“What I mean is actually pretty simple. If you fear losing control of a very dense mana, just get rid of it.”
“That is what I tried to do once and it still exploded in my face…”
“Nah, not like that. You can transform matter into mana, so just do the opposite if you are losing control of it.”
“Huh. For someone who learned about all of this one day ago, you are actually making a pretty good point.”
“Didn’t I already say that I am a genius? So try it now!”
“While I theoretically could, it might be incredibly hard to do it in practice. Destroying things is easier than building things, and that is especially true for this power.”
“How can you tell if you haven’t even tried?”
“Matter is made of absurdly complex particles with configurations that I do not even know perfectly. It might be far too complex for me.”

(Well, maybe I already have a spell that would help me do this, but it would be dangerous try it on an important quantity of mana.)

Alice did not even know what would result from such a conversion. In nature, there was already a phenomenon called a pair production that could create matter from energy. More specifically, a high-energy photon could turn into a pair of matter/antimatter particles, typically an electron-positron pair, that might annihilate together right after.
Having something similar happening to an enormous quantity of mana would be... pretty bad.
Still, Serena’s idea was interesting, so Alice closed her eyes and tried to envision everything that could happen if she tried to turn absurdly-compressed mana into a one-kilogram block of matter. While doing so, she consciously blocked her mana veins in order to prevent any dangerous passing thought from triggering a catastrophe.

(Turning mana into antimatter would definitely be disastrous…)

Yet, the first and the second possible outcomes she could think of both included the production of antimatter. Just like a pair production, the first would consist of the great quantity of mana turning into 50% of matter and 50% of antimatter that would immediately annihilate together, producing extremely lethal gamma rays and an enormous explosion. This would be a true annihilation, this time.
The second was pretty much the same, but twice as worse: maybe the mana would completely turn into 100% of antimatter, that is, one kilogram of it, and would annihilate with the same mass of air or dirt. Everyone would meet their end as well.

The third outcome would be the best one: a one-kilogram block of regular matter would take all the space taken by the extremely dense mana. That probably wouldn’t trigger an explosion, although Alice had no idea if the block would be composed of the exact same atoms and molecules, minus those lost during the consecutive conversions.

(Mmh… Maybe it would turn into solid hydrogen? Would it immediately sublime into gas? Or maybe I could choose a specific configuration for the new particles…)

In which case this would be akin to transmutation, one of the ultimate goals of every alchemist along with immortality: if she had such a spell, she might very well be able to turn lead into gold.

Anyway, these were the only three possible outcomes from a mana-to-matter conversion Alice could actually envision. There were also more mysterious types of matter such as exotic matter or dark matter, but it wouldn’t be as easy to produce them since even the greatest particle accelerators on Earth could not observe them. To begin with, exotic matter probably didn’t even exist.

At the end of the day, Alice didn't think this mana-to-matter conversion would be useful to defend herself against pseudo-annihilation. Just the heat loss from the matter-to-mana conversion might be lethal, and it would start violently dissipating before Alice had the time to decide to apply her mana-to-matter conversion. Even the latter would create a disastrous second heat loss. Right now, if she pseudo-annihilated only five grams of matter, just the first heat loss would be on par with a nuclear bomb like Fat Man.

(Though I could try on an extremelly small volume of sparse mana at first. That way, even if it turns into antimatter, that should not be enough to hurt me. This type of conversion is a bit risky right now, but it sure has some potential.)

Alice tried to convey those thoughts to her instructor and promised she would try it out some other time. However, Serena was looking at her with the same eyes she had had when she was quietly theorizing Alice’s multiple spells.

“Say, Alice, I did not want to preach too much yesterday but… How do you know all of this?”
“I imagine you would not believe me if I said that I read a lot?”
“Well, I certainly have not read every book in existence so it would not be absolutely unthinkable. However, unless you are referring to ancient books that were hidden underground by an advanced civilization from the past, I am not buying it.”
“Huh. For now let us say that it was indeed thanks to ancient books that I know all this.”

(I am not even lying since my former self did read books from great scientists who were already dead when she was born.)

“If so, share them with the kingdom.”
“... I will definitely share this knowledge one day to help future mages of Ouronia.”
“That doesn’t sound like a lie… Fine, then.”

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(Those books don’t exist in this world though… Will I have to write them myself in the future? But I don’t really want to take credit from them since I did not discover a single thing myself...)

***

“By the way, you gave me an idea when you blinded me yesterday.”
“Please, drop this subject! I already apologized several times…”
“It’s alright, don’t worry. My point is, have you tried to convert light into mana yet?”
"Well, I have not. There is no light mage in the mansion. Though I probably could make concentric spheres like yesterday and create the light myself."

Serena quizzically tilted her head and smiled at Alice with her finger directed to the sky. Alice looked up and saw Hiphus, this planet's star. Surely, this was a more reliable source of light. 

“Would the light from up there be enough to overcome the mana consumption of a light-to-mana conversion?”
“... I need to make some calculations.”

Just now, Serena had just casually invented the concept of a solar panel in this world: borrowing the power of a star to generate a more useful and practical form of energy. This was something Alice had somehow never thought once, and she wanted to slap herself for that.
In order to reproduce something similar to Earth’s solar panels, Alice would simply have to create a panel by shaping up her mana with a certain density and orient it towards Hiphus.

(Hiphus seems to be a yellow dwarf star so, assuming it is similar to the Sun and this planet is at around the same distance as Earth is to its star, it should produce something like 1,400 watts per meter square. Considering the mana cost of this magic and the heat losses, it would probably still produce about a thousand joules of mana every second. If I had to estimate the size of my mana pool… yeah. That sounds broken.)

“By using Hiphus, I… should be able to recover the entirety of my mana pool in minutes.”
“... What? Is that not a cheat? My mana potions aren't nearly as effective!”
“T-that is only in theory! I am not sure that I can pull it off, and to begin with I would have to be constantly casting this conversion the whole time.”
“That is, if you have not already unconsciously prepared a spell that would let you constantly cast this magic without you doing anything like yesterday. Still, even one hour for a full charge would be absurd... You should definitely not talk about this to anyone.”

What Serena said made Alice uneasy and she reflexly gulped. She had already guessed months ago that the production of mana by using magic was taboo and that it would certainly attract danger.

“I am not planning to reveal all of this to anybody else but, what do you think would happen to me if I did?”
“As you are from a former baron family, you do not have an incredible mana pool. But with this magic, some would say that you actually are at the very least on par with a royal. Some might even consider it to be almost infinite. I can say with conviction that you would be kidnapped by more powerful nobles and forced to charge up artifacts all day. Even I want to use you for making mana potions right now.”
“Well, thank you very much for the warning…”

(H-her eyes are scary! She was not joking when she said that last part!)

“As long as you understand. For now, don’t focus too much on this light conversion. You need some basic training before that.”
“Do you have any idea about what I should do?”
“Your control of mana is pretty good, but I would say that you probably waste too much mana. By working on your casting speed, you might increase your mana efficiency too.”
“I guess you are right. When will we start this special training?”
“Now!!”

Just as she said this, she produced a baseball sized mana sphere that she threw at full speed at Alice who gasped when she saw her instructor suddenly move. Alice saw nothing so she started to relax, but just then she received the mana ball in the face.

“Gaah! What did you launch?! I feel weird!”
“Ah, I forgot you cannot see mana.”
“Of course I cannot! You are the odd one for being able to see it! So… It was mana? It feels strange…”

(So that is what the mansion’s attendants have to go through when my room is saturated with my mana in the morning? I-I’m sorry, everyone…)

This disturbing feeling was just as she had heard from the magic tutors. Curiously she also felt something tingling inside of her, although Serena's mana had surely not traversed her.

“Yes, it was mana. It felt weird because your body picked up on the foreign mana at the last moment before impact. I guess it is as creepy as suddenly hearing a whisper in your ear when you’re supposed to be alone. Well, since you cannot see it, I guess I will alter the refraction of the mana so that you can defend against it.”
“Hmph. So you want me to increase my casting speed by making me fend off your mana with conversions?”
“Is it not an excellent idea from your smart and cute instructor? On top of this, my magic is not offensive so it is totally safe!”
“I guess you are smart.”
“Eh? Just smart?”

(I’m not gonna call you cute when you're willingly wearing an eyepatch…)

“Alright, I am ready, you can launch your mana!”

Serena grimaced and reluctantly made the ball somewhat visible by changing its refraction. The two of them trained like this for a few dozens of minutes before the start of Alice's afternoon lesson.

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