Let's Learn Mana! (Handle with Care)
"...Huh? What was that? Just now, something went all tingly—!"
At that very moment, Felix Evergarden, eldest son of House Evergarden, cocked his head in his room, feeling a peculiar sensation skim across his scalp.
It was like a tiny spark had gone pop and bounced off the top of his head.
"No way… Have I already started awakening to mana?! Whoa, that's insane!"
Still dazed by the strange, wondrous feeling, Felix seized the mana stone resting in his palm as if he'd just had an epiphany, and let out a cheer that was practically a shout.
Felix Evergarden.
But the soul currently possessing his body belonged to Kim Hanhee—a brand-new college freshman who had only just escaped the hell of senior-year exam prep and was blooming with anticipation for university life. She was also the one who had force-fed her family the romance-fantasy novel Starlight of Dawn, the very world into which she had now been reincarnated.
"Okay… let's look again. How to sense mana…"
After that little victory cry, Felix sat back down at his desk and began focusing once more, reading through the open pages of the book before him.
The Fundamentals of Mana
In the early chapters of the world of Starlight of Dawn, the character known as Felix Evergarden held the position of Honorary Professor at the Academy.
Of course, he possessed neither exceptional swordsmanship, nor outstanding scholarship, nor any remarkable mana or magical ability.
What he did have, however, was one talent that outstripped everyone else's: an extraordinary gift for flattery, and a truly remarkable knack for quietly slipping something into a sleeve.
Backed by a count's household, Felix would meet with various high-ranking figures at the Academy and slide a jingling pouch of gold coins—one gold coin being worth roughly a thousand dinars—into their sleeves with such elegant grace that the officials would later recall snapping out of a daze only to find their own sleeves suddenly heavy. He was a man who had truly blossomed in a rather peculiar direction.
Having secured the title of Honorary Professor through connections, flattery, and bribes, the subject he was assigned to teach was none other than the fundamentals of mana.
Not that "fundamentals of mana" meant much. Most students entering the Academy's magic department already had a talent for magic, and most of those had already mastered the basics before they arrived. So what passed for Felix's "teaching" amounted to vaguely opening a book and telling them to self-study, free periods, and copying pages out of the major textbook—strange, incomprehensible lessons that made no sense to anyone.
Which was only natural, since Felix didn't know the first thing about magic.
It wasn't that he lacked talent for it entirely. He simply couldn't stick with anything for long, so he avoided the tedious study of magic and preferred to spend that time honing his flattery and sleeve-stuffing skills instead.
It hadn't been a problem so far, and he'd figured it wouldn't be a problem going forward either… except!
"Right at the start, the protagonist finds out he has zero magical talent and gets him kicked out…"
Their protagonist would see through Felix's rotten nature, publicly expose the fact that he was teaching magic classes without knowing the first letter of the word "magic," and Felix's precarious sandcastle would come crashing down.
And so, before that disaster could strike, Kim Hanhee—now possessing Felix—had begun studying magic in earnest to prevent the catastrophe.
"Magic… actual magic…!"
Beyond the practical need, the whole reason she'd fallen for Starlight of Dawn in the first place had been its dazzling depictions of magic and its rock-solid worldbuilding. Felix was a full-blown magic otaku, so thoroughly immersed in the subject that dodging the crisis was almost secondary to simply drowning in the joy of it.
And since Felix's room already held books on the fundamentals of magic—kept for appearances, given that he'd snagged an Honorary Professor post without being able to cast a single spell—there was no way a magic-obsessed Hanhee was going to let an opportunity like this slip by.
As for the timeline: the point at which their family had been reincarnated into Starlight of Dawn was still about three months before the Academy arc where the story properly began.
It was the Academy's break season, just like the vacations of her previous life, before the new term started.
Which meant that in three months, Felix—who held a post at the Academy—would have to report for work.
Having bought himself those three months, Felix was seizing the chance: locking himself in his room, clutching magic textbooks, both to prepare for the original story's magic-less predicament and to satisfy his own craving.
"Well, it's not like there's anything else I can do right now anyway…"
The problems of the Evergarden territory were something his parents, Freya and Darian, had said they'd handle, so he didn't need to worry about that side of things either.
Especially Freya—his dad in his past life, now his mother. Felix knew exactly how formidable she was, so once she'd spoken, he hadn't fretted at all.
If even Freya couldn't solve a problem, there was no point in him sticking his nose in. He knew that perfectly well.
"Focus again. Magic starts with sensing mana—that's the most important thing. Mana… mana, huh…"
Clearing away the mental clutter, Felix turned his eyes back to the text, where the method for sensing mana was written out.
"Let's see… For anyone who isn't born with innate mana, awakening to it is a mage's first task. Methods for sensing mana: first, living in a place where the natural mana concentration is dense and awakening that way. And the second one is… this, right?"
As he recited the passage, Felix's gaze drifted naturally to the mana stone in his hand.
A mana stone.
A gem imbued with mana. Naturally, they formed when rock in mana-rich land absorbed mana over long periods; they could also be obtained from the hearts of magical beasts.
Their discovery had led to the development of magical tools that used them the way modern electronics used charged batteries—functioning as a kind of power cell that even ordinary people who couldn't use magic could rely on to operate magical devices.
In the present day, artificial mana stones could be manufactured by refining mana and packing it directly into processed gems. Compared to natural stones, which varied wildly in size and total mana capacity, artificial ones provided a consistent, abundant supply—but because they were made from rare gems, they were far more expensive than naturally occurring ones.
And of course, Felix owned one of those pricey artificial mana stones.
According to what he'd read, one method of awakening to mana involved sensing the mana radiating from a mana stone and thereby awakening the mana flowing through one's own body.
Of course, not just anyone could awaken simply by holding a mana stone. The original Felix had grumbled that he couldn't concentrate for the life of him and had only wasted money—but the current Felix was different.
"Alright. Focus. Focus…"
Closing the book he'd been reading, Felix carefully set the mana stone on the desk.
"Hoo…"
Then he picked up the small hammer he'd left beside the desk and closed his eyes for a moment.
The structure of a mana stone was designed so that the mana inside wouldn't scatter, remaining fully contained within.
If people went to the trouble of obtaining mana stones only for the mana to leak out in streams, magical tools that relied on them would never have been developed in the first place.
Because of that, the amount of mana that naturally seeped from a stone was so faint and weak that sensing it was nearly impossible. A mana stone only became truly useful when paired with a magical tool.
In other words, a battery couldn't just spit out electricity on its own—it had to be installed in a machine before power could flow. Even so, it did radiate a tiny current into its surroundings.
So did that mean you had to sense that meager trickle of mana in order to awaken?
For that to be possible, you'd need to be something like a dragon—a legendary creature at the absolute top of the food chain. For a human, a creature only a few evolutionary steps past a monkey, it was the kind of thing you couldn't manage even if you died and came back. The book itself drove the nail home: theoretically possible, but practically impossible.
"Just a little. Just a tiny tap…"
If the book was going to drive a nail into the idea, then fine—he'd drive a nail of his own. Muttering as if scolding himself, Felix had gone and fetched a hammer and a nail.
A mana stone, sealed tight so its mana wouldn't escape.
But what if you forced a wound into it—scratched it so the mana could leak out?
A mana stone filled with pure natural mana had the mana woven into the stone itself, so a scratch simply let it seep away little by little.
An artificially processed mana stone, however, was made by slamming highly condensed mana into an ordinary gem. Scratch it, and the compressed mana would amplify and go off like a balloon bursting—bang.
That was why artificial mana stones weren't just expensive; mishandling them could cause accidents, so their distribution was extremely restricted.
And right now, Felix had set a nail against that artificial mana stone and raised his hammer.
If the result was a storm of mana powerful enough to explode… wouldn't that make awakening to mana that much easier?
After long, careful consideration of every method he could think of, that was the conclusion Felix had reached.
He'd remembered Chapter Three of Starlight of Dawn—the Siege of Crenatan—when Ailen, the novel's protagonist, used artificial mana stones as booby traps against the demon army's vanguard.
The demons, charging forward with no idea a trap awaited them, had been caught in the blasts and sent flying. In that moment, the narration said, Ailen had felt countless waves of mana.
It was the kind of act that made you want to scream, Are you out of your mind?—brutish and hideously dangerous. Unfortunately, Felix's hunger to understand magic had long since outstripped his common sense. And thanks to Darian and Freya leaving him unsupervised, never imagining that even after something as absurd as reincarnation his passion for magic would run this deep, there was no one around to stop this secret, carefully prepared, and thoroughly hazardous experiment.
If he'd at least had a single attendant nearby, someone might have said, "Isn't this a bit dangerous?" But most of the servants currently employed by the count's household were, under Freya's orders, sweating buckets as they hauled valuables from place to place. So even that wasn't an option.
The one silver lining, perhaps, was that the gem he was using was far, far smaller than the artificial mana stones from the siege.
"Okay… gently… gen… tly…?"
Tap-tap—tap-tap-tap—
Lightly tapping the head of the nail he'd set on the mana stone that would mark his first step into magic, Felix cracked open the eyes he'd squeezed shut in preparation for a mana explosion and tilted his head in confusion.
"Huh? Why isn't it breaking?"
He'd been babying the hammer as if handling an infant, all in the name of explosion preparedness—and even with the nail, the mana stone didn't have a single scratch on it.
"Ah, maybe I need to hit it harder to get a reaction?"
It was exactly like a cooking novice trying to make a fried egg: egg in hand, never having cracked a raw one before, tapping it tap-tap without knowing how much force to use, then staring in bewilderment when it refused to break.
And in most situations like that—
"Then I'll just hit it hard—"
KRA-BOOM—!!!
—it ended with a blank stare at the raw egg that had exploded in your hand because you'd misjudged the force.
Where before he'd tapped too lightly, this time he brought the hammer down far too hard. Instantly, cracks raced across the mana stone's surface like lightning strikes. The gem blazed with a light so fierce it was like a flare going off—too bright to keep your eyes open—then shattered catastrophically. The condensed mana within went berserk, sweeping through Felix's room like a storm.
At the same time, Felix—wearing a vacant expression, still unable to process what had just happened—began to fly through the air.
Caught in the blast, his feet left the ground. In that instant, Felix felt not so much that he was flying as that he was floating, suspended in midair.
Ah. I can feel it.
In that moment, as if gravity itself had vanished and the room had become outer space, Felix murmured inwardly.
The moment the mana stone burst, a storm of condensed mana—woven from countless threads—wrapped around him.
Something like soft cords brushed and struck his fingertips, his toes, his entire body as they passed through.
Mana was flexible and yet rigid; it was there, and it wasn't.
In that instant, Felix was seized by countless strands of mana and yet felt them merely graze past him—and at the same time, they gripped him so tightly it seemed they might tear him apart.
In that brief span of being hurled through the air by the mana explosion, Felix felt eternity and an instant cycle over and over. And he could clearly sense something being carved into his heart.
He was gaining enlightenment through that mystical experience—but the moment did not, in fact, last forever.
Thud—!
Felix felt his back slam into something hard and snapped back to reality.
Only then did he realize that the explosion had flung him from his desk all the way to the bed—a distance of a good twenty adult male strides.
"Ha… haha…!"
Even though he'd clearly smashed his back hard against the side of the bed, Felix didn't even notice the throbbing in his lower back.
"Mana. So this is mana."
He simply felt the thick, vivid movement of mana—of magic itself—with every beat of his heart, and smiled as brightly as a child.
"What on earth is going on in—KYAAAAH!!!"
"Ow, ow ow ow… h-hang on… my back hurts so much…?"
It was only when the servants, drawn by the tremendous explosion, burst into his room, took in the storm-ravaged wreckage and the sight of him leaning against the bed with a madman's grin plastered across his face, and started screaming that Felix finally registered the insane, throbbing pain in his back.