The Inversion of Mana
“Obsidian?” Hyung-jun stared at me, his eyes wide with disbelief. “You mean volcanic glass?”
“Yeah. You saw Master Sergeant Bull’s amulet earlier, didn’t you? That turned out to be obsidian.”
Upon hearing the true identity of the mana stone I had been searching for, Hyung-jun wore an expression of complete astonishment.
“How could obsidian have been the one thing we never... No, wait. Actually, it makes sense. No wonder it never came up on our radar; who would’ve thought a standard material sample catalog wouldn’t bother listing it? Talk about being blind to what was right under our noses. What a massive blind spot.”
Hyung-jun grumbled under his breath as he processed the revelation.
In modern civilization, obsidian had virtually no practical utility. At best, it was carved into cheap handicrafts or polished into black Go stones. Even for those niche purposes, cheap synthetic substitutes had largely taken over, steadily shrinking its market into obsolescence.
“It’s so useless that there isn’t even an active mine dedicated to digging it up,” Hyung-jun explained, shaking his head. “There’s zero commercial viability.”
“Which means getting our hands on it should be a breeze.”
“True enough.”
Hyung-jun dropped into his desk chair and his fingers danced across the keyboard with a rapid clatter. In an instant, countless results flooded the screen with online vendors selling raw obsidian chunks and decorative specimens.
“There’s a ton of people selling this stuff,” Hyung-jun muttered, scrolling down. “Should I just buy out every single listing?”
“Contact the sellers and get sample verification first. Keep in mind that stones unearthed from older geological strata are far superior.”
Mana stones functioned by passively drawing in ambient mana from their environment. Naturally, the longer a stone had been absorbing that energy over geological epochs, the denser the reserve it contained. Obsidian was an amorphous, vitreous mineral born from violent volcanic eruptions; depending on the era in which it formed, the internal mana volume varied wildly from piece to piece.
Hyung-jun nodded firmly. “Got it. I’ll run background checks on the origins and place the orders.”
Over the next several days, we swept the globe for every batch of obsidian we could secure.
“Is that... finally the last one?”
“Yeah. That’s all of them.”
“Aaaaagh!”
Hyung-jun hurled a stack of order invoices into the air and let out a bloodcurdling wail. For the past few days, his entire waking existence had been reduced to a grueling, unending loop of ordering, verifying, ordering, and verifying again. To make matters worse, fraudulent imitations and slag glass had been mixed into several shipments, turning my job of sorting and inspecting every sample into pure agony.
When the dust settled, stacks of categorized obsidian filled an entire corner of the workshop. They stood arranged neatly by quality: Discard, Low-grade, Mid-grade, High-grade, and Special-grade.
I reached into the low-grade pile, picked up a dark, glassy stone, and curled my fingers around it. A faint, subtle tug brushed against my senses as the stone slowly drew in my mana. Left as it was, it remained nothing more than an inert rock that greedily devoured ambient energy.
“Hmm.”
I focused my will and seized control of the ambient mana cloaking the obsidian, severing the flow of energy seeping into its surface. By cutting off all surrounding feed, I established an absolute mana vacuum around the stone.
Flash!
The fundamental nature of the obsidian violently inverted. The stone ceased its absorption entirely, and in the next heartbeat, it began gushing forth the immense reservoir of mana it had accumulated over countless millennia. A property that once swallowed energy had flipped into one that expelled it.
With that, the preparations were complete. All that remained was for me to absorb the pouring tide of mana into my own body.
Hyung-jun stared in fascination as the pitch-black obsidian shifted before his eyes, taking on a luminous, crystalline azure glow.
“Is that... it?”
“Yeah. Luckily, the stones in this world react the exact same way.”
I tightened my grip on the glowing mana stone. “Let’s get started.”
Dusk gave way to the deep, silent velvet of night.
I arranged the inverted, activated mana stones in an unbroken circle across the floor and sat cross-legged in the center. What I was about to attempt was extraordinarily hazardous: forcing a breakthrough to higher circles by channeling a volume of mana far beyond my current threshold of control. In the terminology of martial arts novels, it was no different than practicing a perilous demonic technique.
Closing my eyes, I attuned my senses to the ambient pulse of energy. Stones that had swallowed mana for tens of thousands of years were now violently venting their hoard into the air. I seized those wild, thrashing currents of mana and drew them directly into my flesh and meridians.
Simultaneously, I plunged my consciousness into the deepest depths of introspection.
Magic was a discipline that began by perceiving lower dimensions and systematically expanding outward into higher realms. At the 1st Circle, my mental plane was tethered to a two-dimensional surface—a modest, flat circle etched into the canvas of my soul.
The moment that flat circle made contact with the raging deluge of mana, it expanded without restraint. It broadened, surged, and stretched wider and wider, effortlessly shattering the boundaries of the 2nd Circle, tearing through the 3rd Circle, and barreling past the 4th Circle in a single, unbroken breath.
My mental plane expanded until it collided against the very horizon of my cognitive perception. Unable to stretch outward any further, the trapped mana began to compress, its internal density spiking exponentially.
Now begins the real trial.
The hyper-compressed mana boiled within my veins, tearing through my physical vessel. Rather than suppressing it, I forced even more energy into the crucible. The lake of my mental plane was filled to the absolute brim, swelling under staggering pressure.
And at the exact moment I forced one final drop of mana past the breaking point—
Now!
The dimensional boundary shattered. Breaking free from the flat constraints of the two-dimensional realm, the mana surged into three-dimensional space, expanding relentlessly to occupy the newfound volume. A quantity of energy that had been more than enough to overwhelm a flat surface suddenly felt sparse inside a vast, three-dimensional expanse.
As I felt the energy settle evenly throughout the freshly carved depths of my mental space, I slowly opened my eyes.
In a single bound, my mana reserves had leaped from the 1st Circle straight to the threshold of the 5th Circle. An intoxicating sensation of near-omnipotence circulated through every fiber of my being, fundamentally distinct from anything I had felt before.
I cast a brief glance at the ring of spent mana stones—now drained of their light and reduced to dull, muddy grey pebbles—and rose to my feet.
“...Did it work?”
“Yeah.”
Hyung-jun, who had been watching anxiously from the safety of the office doorway, let out a held breath as I gave him a calm nod.
“It was a complete success.”
“Honestly, you don’t look any different from the outside.”
“Want a demonstration?”
Seeing was believing. Experiencing it firsthand was always far more convincing than a thousand words.
My newly expanded mental domain boasted a radius of ten meters. In other words, every single inch of this building rested entirely under my absolute dominion.
“Whoa—whoa, whoa?!”
Hyung-jun, along with every desk, chair, monitor, and loose piece of paperwork in the room, gently lifted off the floor and floated into midair. Thrashing his limbs in total disarray, Hyung-jun flailed like a stranded turtle and shrieked.
“Hey! What the hell did you just do?!”
“How do you like the zero-gravity experience?” I asked with an amused smirk.
“This isn’t zero gravity! I can’t even steer myself where I want to go!”
“Tsk, tsk. Once you’re liberated from the shackles of planetary gravity, that qualifies as zero gravity by definition.”
“Cut the philosophical crap and put me down right now!”
“Fine, fine.”
I eased my control, gently lowering Hyung-jun and the floating furniture back to the floor. After staggering for a second to regain his footing, Hyung-jun stared at me with a dazed, completely hollowed-out expression.
“Even after experiencing it myself, this is utterly absurd. You produced a zero-gravity field right here on the surface of the Earth without a single piece of machinery?”
“To be precise, it’s an applied form of Anti-gravity Magic.”
“Going straight for the endgame boss right off the bat, huh? What the hell can’t you do?”
“Well... pretty much anything you can imagine is fair game now. As long as it doesn’t cross into four-dimensional concepts like spatial severing or spatial compression, anyway.”
“So in other words, there’s nothing you can’t do. Does this mean we can finally walk out of this bunker?”
“That’s right.”
At my answer, Hyung-jun closed his eyes and let out a long, heavy sigh of relief.
“Finally. Our long days of enduring this lockdown are over.” His eyes snapped open, gleaming with sharp ambition. “Time to crack open that vintage wine we’ve been saving.”
Pyeongtaek.
Inside the vast semiconductor cluster of Suseong Group, Chairman Lee Chang-ryong had paid a personal visit to the research institute under Suseong Electronics to inspect the results of integrating the ‘Magician’ into their manufacturing lines.
Clad from head to toe in an immaculate cleanroom bunny suit, Chairman Lee listened attentively to the report delivered by the head of the research division.
“To begin with, we applied the Magician to the contact points of the interconnect wiring and the gate stack interfaces.”
“Is that so? And what were the results?”
“We immediately confirmed that products fabricated on our 4-nanometer node demonstrated an operating clock frequency enhancement of at least one hundred to one hundred and fifty percent. Power efficiency more than doubled, and data bandwidth expanded anywhere from two to four times.”
“Astonishing.”
“That is not all. Most crucially, our yield rates have surged. While the net improvement currently sits around fifteen percent, considering the dire state of the foundry market, this is nothing short of a miracle.”
Lee Chang-ryong nodded slowly at the division head’s words. The foundry business he had aggressively championed had gradually devolved into the group’s most notorious white elephant. Yet with the introduction of the Magician—a single, decisive strategic gamble—the ugly duckling was on the verge of transforming into a magnificent swan.
Lee Chang-ryong turned to the CEO of Suseong Electronics standing beside him. “What are your thoughts on this?”
“At this level, it is safe to say we have established an insurmountable super-gap over our competitors. Rather than sinking additional capital into the development of 2-nanometer or 1-nanometer nodes right now, would it not be wiser to secure more Magician units and solidify our mass-production supremacy?”
“I agree. Let us reach out to Arcane Technology immediately.”
Just then, Lee Chang-ryong’s chief of staff approached with hurried steps and leaned in to whisper into the chairman’s ear. Lee Chang-ryong stiffened for a fleeting moment, but his expression smoothed back into its practiced corporate calm almost instantly.
“Let us conclude our inspection here for today. Excellent work, everyone.”
Dismissing the executives, Lee Chang-ryong strode briskly toward the executive conference room situated inside the cluster complex. Taking his seat at the head of the long conference table, he loosened his silk tie by a fraction.
“You say Arcane Technology called a press conference?”
“Yes, Chairman. They notified reporters that the briefing would take place shortly in front of their abandoned research facility.”
“What on earth could they be scheming?”
Lee Chang-ryong rested his chin on his hand, sinking into deep contemplation. Ever since the raid, Arcane Technology had holed up inside Camp Humphreys under the protective wing of American military figures, refusing to take a single step outside. What sudden change of heart had prompted them to volunteer a public press conference?
Well, I suppose watching the show will give me my answer soon enough.
Having avoided any direct friction with Arcane Technology, Suseong Group had nothing to lose; they could simply sit back, enjoy the spectacle, and reap whatever collateral benefits came their way.
In a thoroughly relaxed mood, Lee Chang-ryong opened an elegant, luxurious display case resting on the table before him. Nestled inside was a sleek, cylindrical canister wrapped in specialized protective film.
“And this is the solid-state battery sample produced from the recent run?”
“Yes, sir. It is a prototype manufactured against mass-production tolerances rather than sterile laboratory conditions. According to the preliminary reports, thermal generation has dropped by eighty-five percent compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries, while energy density and charging speeds have improved by three hundred percent and one thousand percent, respectively.”
“Magnificent.”
It was a parade of numbers even more staggering than the semiconductor breakthrough. In the blunt parlance of modern internet users, all it took was buying a few Magician units and giving them a single ‘click,’ yet Hwaseong had failed to manage even that simple task and was now drowning in total chaos.
My decision was indeed the righteous one.
For years, internet trolls had sneered that his nickname was ‘Chang Dragon’ because he dragged the group’s stock price into the gutter. Remembering how public sentiment on financial forums had completely flipped into worshipful praise like the post he had read earlier, a faint smirk curled the corners of his lips.
Quickly composing his features before anyone could notice his vanity, Lee Chang-ryong posed another question.
“Does this mean we have secured a definitive super-gap in the battery sector as well?”
“I would hesitate to go that far, sir. We must factor in whatever sorcery Teslam is currently conjuring with the one hundred Magicians they acquired.”
“Hmm. That is unfortunate. In that case, let us expedite our official announcement. We must ensure Suseong claims the prestige of unveiling the world’s first commercially viable solid-state battery.”
“Understood, Chairman.”
As soon as the order was given, the massive display screen mounted on the conference room wall flickered to life. A live video feed illuminated the room, displaying the exterior of Arcane Technology’s research lab. Still strewn with debris from the assault weeks ago, the site looked more like a war zone than a corporate facility, surrounded by an eager swarm of reporters holding microphones and cameras.
Moments later, Kim Hyung-jun and Park Ji-hyuk emerged through the ruined entryway and stepped before the microphones.
“One month ago, Arcane Technology was subjected to a violent intrusion by unidentified armed assailants.”
Kim Hyung-jun’s expression as he read from the statement was stoic and composed.
“Fortunately, no lives were lost. However, our internal facilities suffered devastating destruction, and the profound anxiety stemming from further security threats has entirely paralyzed our corporate operations.”
“Those boys certainly know how to lie with a straight face,” Lee Chang-ryong chuckled dryly. Suseong had received a fresh batch of Magicians from them just days ago, after all.
“That anxiety remains an ongoing reality, and the damages incurred have yet to be resolved. Therefore, we hereby announce the following:”
Lee Chang-ryong had been watching with detached amusement, but the words that followed instantly froze the smile on his face.
“Arcane Technology will completely suspend all new supply contracts for the Magician until our research facilities are relocated and an entirely new production environment is established.”
“Wait... hold on! Does that mean we’re cut off too?!”
Just moments ago, he had finalized plans to aggressively acquire more Magicians after verifying their miraculous performance. And now Arcane Technology was refusing to sign any new contracts? This threw a massive wrench into Suseong’s expansion timeline.
Lee Chang-ryong whipped his head toward his chief of staff and barked urgent instructions.
“The second this press conference ends, contact Arcane Technology immediately! Find out if this freeze applies to existing partners, and if so, exactly how long the suspension will last! Every single detail!”
“Yes, Chairman!”
On the screen, the two founders concluded their prepared statement and began taking questions from the clamoring press. From Lee Chang-ryong’s perspective, the Q&A session offered little of practical value. He leaned deep into his leather chair, his mind rapidly calculating the balance sheet of profits and losses.
A delay in scaling up their production lines was undeniably a negative. However, when he considered that competing semiconductor giants rushing to adopt the tech after seeing Suseong’s results would be locked out, and that Hwaseong remained utterly incapacitated, this wasn’t necessarily a losing scenario.
In fact, this gives us the perfect window to widen the technical gap in utilizing the Magicians we already possess.
Just as his racing thoughts reached that conclusion, his chief of staff rushed back into the conference room, out of breath.
“Chairman! China has just officially placed Hwaseong on its sanctions list under the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law!”
“Hahaha!”
A burst of unrestrained laughter erupted from Lee Chang-ryong’s chest. There was no sweeter nectar in the corporate world than the unmitigated misfortune of a bitter rival. Watching catastrophe after catastrophe rain down on Hwaseong brought a thoroughly vindictive smirk to his face.
If only you had reined in your filthy greed, Vice Chairman Jeon. Keep wallowing back there in the mud you dug for yourself. I’ll be sprinting far ahead.