Chapter 2
Translator: True Detective
Chapter 2: I'm a Physics Student, Though?
At my words, the senior researchers around me stared blankly at my face.
"Just now... I think the mana injection amount was less than 80% of the usual? But the firepower is more than double."
"There was no vibration or noise either. The mana transmission efficiency... exceeded 50%? This is impossible according to modern magic theory!"
Director Barman's hands trembled.
He looked alternately at the blueprint I modified and the target, then grabbed my shoulders as if to crush them.
"Sir Rihan... What on earth did you do? You made the mana feel good? What does that mean? Did you communicate with the mana's will? Did you reach the pinnacle of the mana language!"
What kind of nonsense is he talking about all of a sudden?
I just reduced the resistance a bit.
I stepped back in bewilderment.
"Ah, I mean... I reduced friction when mana flows and minimized entropy... No, not that, I just paved the road a bit. Like going for a stroll. Haha, it's nothing special."
At my embarrassed answer, madness beyond awe dwelt in the Director's eyes.
It seems he is convinced that I am a hidden master who penetrates the essence of mana.
"I have committed a great rudeness! You weren't incompetent! You were keeping your mouth shut because the existing crude magic system was laughable! This is a revolution that will shake the paradigm of magic from its roots!"
'No, it's not to that extent. It's just Introduction to Physics level...'
"I will give you the title of Chief Researcher starting tomorrow! I'll raise your salary three times, no, five times, and assign you a dedicated laboratory! Please, just do not leave our institute!"
"Thank y... No, wait, Director?"
Wait a moment.
If I become a Chief Researcher, won't the workload increase tremendously?
I just wanted to live a long and thin life while receiving a moderate salary.
Recalling the memories of my previous life, I urgently waved my hands.
"I just like being quiet and idle like I am now..."
"Don't worry! Would we entrust menial tasks to a treasure like you! We will keep your identity a top state secret and quietly assign you only national conundrums on which the fate of the Empire depends!"
"Yes?"
'Oh shit! What does that mean!'
National conundrums.
Doesn't that mean, in other words, incredibly difficult overtime work material!
'Plus, if it's top secret, it means I can't even resign as I please.'
Son of a bitch!
My honey-sucking life, my four-day workweek, and my peaceful cafeteria tours were flying away.
And with very flashy and overwhelming magical fireworks at that.
"Whew...... I'm melting...... melting. What on earth is this sofa made of?"
Imperial Strategic Magic Headquarters, 2nd Laboratory, Chief Researcher's Office.
The sofa that hugged my body as if to swallow it was terribly soft.
Thinking of the days on Earth when I lived with my butt glued to a hard plastic chair in the corner of a lab.
This is comfort at the level of human rights violations.
If I close my eyes like this, forgetting the Empire's peace or magic revolution, it feels like I could enter eternal rest.
But in front of me, instead of rest.
Bundles of papers named reality are piled up like a fortress wall.
That damn old snake-like bastard.
These are the difficult problems Director Barman threw down, saying, "Sir Rihan, I brought these in case you get bored!"
'Ah...... so annoying.'
It's so annoying.
It's so annoying, but.
There is no way around it.
If I have to do it, I have to do it.
I risked the annoyance and picked up one document.
'If I just apply the principle of Adiabatic Expansion to this, the cooling efficiency will jump three times.'
'For this fortress wall, if I just reinforce the Truss structure in terms of structural mechanics, it would hold up even using half the mana.'
They were problems I could solve relatively simply.
But I didn't pick up the pen.
No, rather, I threw the pen far away.
Because one of the painful lessons from my graduate school days was tattooed on my brain.
"To the guy who finishes quickly, the next task is given instead of a reward."
This is akin to a law of the universe.
A truth as certain as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
If I solve all these documents today and bring them to the Director?
Then it's obvious that monstrous projects like 'Development of Ultra-Long-Range Magic Weapons for Repelling the Demon King's Army' or 'Construction of Transcontinental Mana Railways' will be on my desk tomorrow morning.
"No way, absolutely not. Never happening."
The key is to do the work as late as possible, but look competent.
I opened my personal research notebook first.
First of all, the most important thing is my survival.
To live a long and thin life in this harsh other world with mana the size of a rat's tail, I have to be a thorough efficiency freak.
Ah, and above all.
"First, I must absolutely, absolutely not become a field agent."
Field work is absolutely declined.
Imperial Strategic Magic Headquarters.
The Central Library, lined with knowledge from various fields.
The library's characteristic smell of old paper and the fishy scent of magic ink prick my nose.
"Is magic a lower compatibility of physics?"
As a result of analyzing the magic theory books of this world for the past few hours.
I reached one conclusion.
The energy called mana in this world is a kind of universal conversion medium.
Magic in this world consists largely of three steps.
First is Energy Generation.
Consuming mana to generate pure energy such as heat, light, or electricity.
Next is Material Realization.
Converting energy into mass or rearranging surrounding elements to compose matter.
Finally, Momentum Assignment.
Assigning a vector (direction and magnitude) to the generated energy or matter.
The problem is that this process is excessively primitive.
Local mages are obsessed with encrypted commands called Chants.
That is like having a state-of-the-art computer in front of you, but instead of using a mouse or keyboard...
You tear open the main unit and attach and detach wires one by one, manually inputting the machine code of 0s and 1s.
"That's why the efficiency is a mess. Eating up mana in bulk while the result is the size of a rat's tail. Energy is being wasted as disordered heat in the middle according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics."
First off, for a human with a small mana pool like me, Chant Magic is a luxury.
With a method that uses 100 mana to produce a result of 1, I can't even reach the toes of an ordinary mage in my lifetime.
But I have a powerful weapon they don't know.
The blueprint that supports the bottom of this world.
Physics.
"In other words, it's worth a shot."
Am I not a physics student in name and reality?
A corner of my heart began to pound with academic zeal.
I sat in a chair in the corner of the laboratory and closed my eyes.
The first priority is to discard Chants.
"Because it's perfect for getting stabbed by an enemy while saying something like 'Oh, spirit of the burning flame'."
Whew, it was enough to shake off such cringy lines at the age of 15.
Therefore, I drew formulas in my head without chanting.
The goal is the 1st Circle basic magic, Fireball.
Usually, mages struggle to convert mana into the form of fire, but I took a different approach.
'Heat is the kinetic energy of molecules.'
It was an eternal law and a sentence expressing the essence of physics.
I poured mana into the narrow space above my palm.
But I didn't try to make fire.
Instead, I pictured the air molecules trapped in that space accelerating insanely.
Trapping particles in a narrow range and exponentially increasing the number of collisions with each other.
Mana is used only as a catalyst to eliminate frictional resistance and amplify energy in that process.
It's like implementing a sort of particle accelerator on my palm.
Whooosh—!
In an instant, a fist-sized flame flared up.
"Oh, it works?"
Ignition caused solely by pure physical causality.
Since it could be solved with basic formulas, I succeeded much more simply.
It is much faster than shouting chants one by one.
"Shall I try the next one?"
Gaining confidence, I moved on to the next step.
Waterball.
From what I've seen.
Mages in this world usually use two methods.
Condensing surrounding water vapor.
Or transmuting mana into water molecules altogether.
The former is a bust if the humidity in the air is low, and the latter consumes extreme amounts of mana.
So I decided to choose a smarter method.
Oxygen is already scattered in the atmosphere.
It means there are free materials scattered everywhere that don't need to be newly transmuted by consuming mana.
Ultimately, what is needed to make water is Hydrogen and Oxygen.
If Oxygen is abundant, it is much more economical to manufacture only the lacking Hydrogen molecules and combine them.
"Combine."
I made Hydrogen molecules with mana and induced bonding with Oxygen molecules.
I controlled the electromagnetic force between atoms to forcibly mold the form of .
Sizzle—!
A transparent water sphere formed on my palm.
But the condition is a bit strange.
"Ah, hot! Fuck, what is this!"
At the pain feeling like my palm was burning, I threw the water sphere away.
Steam was rising from the water that fell to the floor, boiling vigorously.
"Ha...... This is driving me crazy."
A typical mistake.
"I didn't think about binding energy."
When Hydrogen and Oxygen react to become water, tremendous Reaction Heat occurs.
This is the so-called principle of hydrogen explosion.
I should have released the surplus energy generated during chemical bonding to the outside or reduced it to other energy.
Because I was obsessed only with the result of making water molecules.
The generated water ate up that reaction heat intact and became boiling water at 100 degrees Celsius.
"It's not a Waterball, but it became boiling water throwing magic. Well, in terms of lethality, this might be better......"
Cooling my palm, I laughed hollowly.
But I feel a strange beat in a corner of my heart.
"This is insanely fun? This is totally a real-time simulation game."
It's much more thrilling than staying up all night holding onto a thesis that doesn't make money in my past life.
As expected, a physics student feels most alive when facing a problem.
Realizing the principles of basic magic gave me confidence.
"Maybe I'm the strongest?"
The formulas that tormented me throughout graduate school are now about to become the Empire's strongest weapons.
"Wait a minute......"
I had a fun idea.
My eyes flashed.
'What is much more efficient and overwhelming than something like a firework-like Fireball is, of course, kinetic energy.'
I conceived the essence of electromagnetism, the Railgun.
The principle is simple.
Flowing current between two parallel conductor rails and applying Lorentz force () to the projectile between them to eject it at ultra-high speed.
It is a method of converting mana into electricity and magnetic fields to accelerate metal fragments.
If I only succeed, the destructive power would be enough to use as a practically lethal move.
My heart is pounding.
I constructed virtual parallel rails with mana in the air.
The formulas in my head interlocked and turned like cogwheels.
I float a tiny metal fragment that was in the lab in the center of the rails.
"Good. Lastly, accelerate...!"
The calculation formula is perfect.
The intensity of the current, the density of the magnetic field, and even the mass of the projectile.
But I was overlooking one fatal fact.
Physically, a railgun might be efficient, but the electrical energy required for ultra-high-speed acceleration is exponential.
And the fact that my mana pool barely handles the energy of a cup of coffee.
"Uh...?"
In an instant, the back of my neck goes cold.
Every single brain cell screamed and sent a shutdown signal.
The sensation of mana inside the body being sucked out without leaving a single gram.
My vision suddenly turned black and white, and the power to my consciousness snapped off.
System messages like that do not appear.
Because reality is cold.
All I hear is the sound of my heart and the futile resonance spat out by an empty mana pool.
"Blargh—"
Along with dizziness as the world spun round and round, my vision flashed white.
Before I could even see sparks flying from the muzzle of the railgun.
I collapsed to the floor like a freshly caught fish.