The Genius's Training Method
“…This can’t be real.”
Serian clutched the report with trembling hands. She had heard that the 1st Special Mobile Battalion was composed of the finest elites gathered from across the empire. But—even so, this was truly impossible.
One hour a day. Just one hour of training, and the rest of the time they were made to sit blankly and meditate. Yet these numbers, these results?
“This doesn’t make any sense…!” Serian slammed the report onto her desk and shot to her feet. This had to be a fabricated report. Lieutenant Colonel Kaizen must have submitted false reports to hide his incompetence. If that were the case, everything would add up.
“How dare he deceive me?” Her eyes gleamed coldly.
“Fine. I’ll go right now and expose every last detail.” Fueled by anger, she stormed out of the lab.
Today happened to be the day General Clausewitz was visiting to inspect the training situation. When Serian arrived at the training ground, the general and other high-ranking officers—and even the development officers from the Armaments Bureau—had already taken their positions.
“Oh, you’re here!” Valentine spotted her and waved enthusiastically.
General Clausewitz also pointed at the training ground with a satisfied expression.
“Excellent. The report wasn’t exaggerated.”
Serian’s gaze followed his finger.
“Hyah! Chwaak—!”
Dozens of soldiers moved as one, in perfect unison. Every movement—cutting through the air, sharp turns, breaking through obstacles—was as natural as flowing water. It was on a completely different level from the clumsy first training session she had witnessed before; these were the movements of seasoned elite soldiers.
This… what on earth…
Serian stood there dumbfounded, mouth agape.
“…This can’t be real.”
The training had ended before she knew it, and Kaizen, drenched in sweat, approached her directly.
“Chief Development Officer! You’ve arrived?”
His eyes sparkled with childlike anticipation.
—His eyes were asking: Did you see? Thanks to the trust you placed in us, we’ve done it!
He wanted confirmation. That he had successfully implemented her profound teachings.
But—
Serian’s face was frozen like ice.
“…Lady Serian?”
There was no praise, no emotion readable on her expressionless face. Her mind was overloaded trying to comprehend the situation, but to Kaizen, it looked entirely different.
She was disappointed—that had to be it.
The confident smile vanished from Kaizen’s face in an instant. Disbelief and self-loathing crossed his features.
‘The Development Officer thinks it’s still… still not enough…!’
Just then, heavy footsteps approached from behind them, and General Clausewitz drew near.
Kaizen startled and immediately turned, clicking his heels in salute.
“You’ve arrived! Loyalty!”
“Yes.”
General Clausewitz returned the salute lightly, his expression satisfied.
“Impressive, Lieutenant Colonel Walter. To bring the unit to this level in such a short time.”
But Kaizen immediately shook his head, attributing all credit to Serian.
“No, sir! This is all thanks to the Mental Universe Realization Training Method that Lady Serian bestowed upon us!”
At those words, Clausewitz’s eyes lit up.
“Hoh…”
He looked at Serian with interest.
“I heard in passing that you developed it yourself by advancing the secret training methods of the Elhardt family. Is that true?”
‘…There’s no way our family has something like that.’
Serian’s mind went blank. If it was the Elhardt family’s secret arts, she had already received all of them long ago.
—At least as far as she knew, there was no meditation-based training method.
But she couldn’t deny it now.
“Yes? Ah… yes, that’s correct.”
Serian nodded in a daze. Of course, once again, no such thing existed.
“Perfect timing!”
Just then— Kaizen seized the opportunity to showcase their achievements.
“We were just about to begin the Mental Universe Realization training. Please witness it for yourself!”
*
His resounding command echoed across the training ground.
“All units, prepare for training! Take your positions and begin meditation!”
The soldiers who had been moving intensely just moments ago all set down their equipment and took spots throughout the parade ground. As if on cue, they all sat cross-legged and closed their eyes.
The rough breathing that had been panting from the heat of training gradually subsided.
Soon, only deep, even breaths filled the parade ground.
The soldiers’ previously calm faces changed, as if concentrating on something. Lips tightly shut, eyelids motionless. Tension filled their faces, as though they were locked in a fierce struggle on an invisible inner battlefield.
Then, a strange phenomenon began.
Crackle—
A faint blue mana spark flew from one soldier’s body.
Starting from there, the phenomenon spread across the entire parade ground.
Crackle, crackle-crackle!
Blue sparks began to rise one by one from the soldiers’ bodies in unison.
The soldiers remained motionless with their eyes closed—
But their bodies twitched minutely, as if they were actually wearing mobility gear.
The blue mana flames of the soldiers filling the parade ground.
Before this bizarre and wondrous sight, Clausewitz and the other officers were speechless.
But the one thrown into greater confusion and bewilderment than anyone was Serian.
‘What… why is this working?’
She had clearly just told them to space out.
But something was actually happening to the soldiers.
‘…Did they all get hit with hallucination magic or something?’
Her eyes quickly scanned the parade ground.
The mana waves flowing from each soldier one by one.
That mana flow wasn’t hallucination magic. It was clear, orderly, and showed a specific pattern.
The training that should have failed was succeeding in a way she couldn’t understand.
Everyone’s gaze turned to the ‘genius’ who had designed all of this.
Then, Clausewitz’s trembling voice was heard.
“Development Officer Elhardt. What on earth… what is the principle behind this? Training the body without using it, only the mind… I’ve never heard of such a training method in my life.”
The entire inspection party that had been marveling fell silent.
Kaizen too held his breath, gazing at her lips to hear even a fragment of the secret behind that training method he couldn’t understand, the genius’s insight.
A bead of cold sweat ran down Serian’s spine.
‘What principle! I don’t know either! I just told them to space out, so why is it working on its own!’
But this sense of crisis was all too familiar to her now.
In the chain of countless repeated misunderstandings, she had become a professional at this tightrope walk.
In a split second, she controlled even the finest muscles of her expression, perfectly erasing any sign of panic.
Instead, she looked at the general with a pitiful gaze, as if to say, ‘You don’t even know something this basic?’
“General. Have you ever heard of this saying?”
She opened her mouth languidly.
“That the brain cannot distinguish between imagination and reality.”
Everyone’s eyes focused on her.
“When you’re sleeping and dream of falling from a high place, you wake up startled. Everyone’s had that, right? Even though your body was lying still in bed, your heart races like mad, and you get goosebumps all over.”
She continued, gesturing toward the parade ground with her chin.
“Or the experience of your mouth watering just from seeing very spicy or sour food. Those are all simple proofs that the brain can trigger actual physical reactions through imagination alone.”
Even as she made excuses, her genius brain was spinning frantically, desperately searching for an answer.
‘Calm down. I need to find the variable. What’s the factor making this training succeed?’
Location? Just an ordinary parade ground.
People? Just ordinary… well, elite soldiers, but no signs of using magic.
Environment! Right, the environment. There’s something in this parade ground that isn’t elsewhere.
Right…
Her gaze landed on the aerial mobility gear the soldiers were wearing.
And—
The Moonstones embedded in each of those devices, which she had forced in to waste the budget. They were glowing faintly, resonating with the soldiers’ mana.
‘Could it be… because of those Moonstones?’
Nah, no way.
She let out a wry laugh at the ridiculous hypothesis. Those were just sparkling decorations she had embedded to waste the budget.
Moonstone. A substance that emits light when mana is injected.
She forcibly pulled out a paper from her mental library about the ‘light emission principle of Moonstones.’
The way it emitted light wasn’t a simple mana-to-light conversion.
It was the principle of guiding mana into the internal microscopic crystal structure—
Reflecting and amplifying the waves almost infinitely inside, then emitting them in the form of visible light.
The efficiency was extremely poor with high energy loss, but the light was so brilliant that it was only used for expensive decorations…
At that moment—
She heard a terribly fitting sound in her brain.
‘Infinite reflection… That means the mana doesn’t immediately dissipate, but “remains” inside the crystal for a certain period of time!’
Then—
The countless mana the soldiers had poured out during the previous mobility training! Those complex and precise ‘sensory mana patterns’ used for acceleration, rotation, and maintaining balance…
Had they been imprinted like “afterimages” inside all the Moonstones in the form of mana waves?
She looked back at the parade ground with horrified eyes.
‘Then those stones are now…’
They had become a kind of ‘infinite replay device’ that continuously emitted faint waves of the experience data from the previous training.
The soldiers were synchronizing their minds with those waves through meditation, continuously relearning the recorded experiences.
‘Because the brain can’t distinguish between imagination and reality— they mistake the data sent by the Moonstones for actual sensations… and the nervous system forcibly replicates those patterns, causing those mana sparks to fly…!’
Everything fit together.
Every element she had sown for failure had created a perfect synergy, producing a revolutionary training method she hadn’t even imagined.
Thud.
Strength drained from Serian’s body, and she nearly collapsed without realizing it.
Ella, who was beside her, startled and supported her.
“Kid! What’s wrong, are you feeling unwell?”
Serian muttered blankly, staring into space.
“…This… actually… works…?”
No one heard her small voice, but everyone witnessed the change in her expression.
Her dazed expression looked completely different to Clausewitz and Kaizen.
‘The expression of a creator’s ecstasy and anguish, witnessing the moment their theory is proven in reality!’
Serian barely managed to steady herself.
The situation was already irreversible.
With a face that seemed to have resigned everything, she began calmly explaining the terrible truth she had just realized, as if she had intended it from the beginning.
She naturally unfolded the theory she had just completed in her mind, as if speaking from long experience.
Words like ‘mana afterimage,’ ‘data imprinting,’ ‘synchronization relearning’—
Every time such profound-sounding words flowed from her mouth, the general and Kaizen’s faces were colored with admiration.
When the explanation ended, the conference hall was as quiet as if water had been poured over it.
A silence where not even breathing could be heard.
What broke that silence was the trembling breath of one person.
Elias, the chief of the Magic Engraving Team.
All the scattered clues in her mind were falling into place.
‘Right… so that’s why…!’
The image of Serian sleeping in the garden during her vacation came to mind.
Of course she had known, but it hadn’t been simple rest after all.
She recalled the principle of the ‘mana afterimage’ Serian had just explained.
The key was the Moonstone.
The principle of storing mana waves and amplifying them to emit as light.
Sunlight!
She had synchronized herself with the sun, the purest mana flow and source of light in this world—
And grasped the principle of the Moonstone!
That was the essence of the ‘Great Nature Synchronization Meditation’!
That realization spread like an epidemic.
Valentine, the Chief Development Officer who heard her muttering, was shocked.
Because there was a memory that flashed through his mind as well.
The sight of her sitting by the lab window, endlessly gazing into the void.
It had been the Mental Universe Realization Training where she simulated in her own mind’s vast universe how the mana waves emitted by dozens, hundreds of soldiers would interfere and resonate with each other!
And it was the same for Clausewitz.
He realized that all her eccentricities had been directed toward a single goal.
She had stayed at the Armaments Bureau throughout her vacation.
To verify the stability and risks of this revolutionary training method…
She had endured that grueling training, using none other than herself as the first test subject!
Everyone gathered at the training ground was thinking the same thing.
All her eccentric behaviors had actually been foreshadowing for this moment.
Everything was connected.
Everything had been planned.
Now, the gazes directed at Serian were no different from those of fanatics.
They were witnessing a turning point in history.
Clausewitz asked in a trembling voice.
“You… from the moment you first conceived the project, did you foresee all of this and plant the Moonstones in advance…!”
Everyone held their breath.
Because that was the question everyone was most curious about.
Serian did not answer.
Instead, she was only smiling faintly.
‘My… project to create a useless battalion…’
But those who saw that bitter, resigned smile interpreted it in an entirely different way.
Her quiet sigh—
Only appeared as the deep and heavy anguish of a genius bearing the empire’s future.