After rejecting a paper that claimed magic could be explained through physics, a Korean physicist awoke in another world as Aether—a golden-eyed girl with no natural mana who had already been sold into slavery.

A mysterious grimoire offered her one way back to Earth: master every branch of magic. To win her freedom, Aether set her sights on the empire’s foremost magic academy. There, status mattered less than talent—but for someone incapable of casting even the simplest spell on her own, admission should have been impossible.

What Aether lacked in mana, however, she made up for with a lifetime of scientific knowledge. To her, spell formations were circuits, magical particles obeyed physical laws, and the supposed limits of fire magic were merely unsolved engineering problems. Lasers, plasma, nuclear theory—if the mages of this world had never imagined them, she would build them herself.

What began as a desperate attempt to escape slavery and return home soon drew Aether into dungeon expeditions, deadly epidemics, noble conspiracies, mechanical monsters, and a war threatening the entire world.

In an age convinced that fire magic had reached its limit, one physicist began researching nuclear fusion.