At my words, the senior researchers around us stared fixedly at my face.
“Just now… I don’t think the mana input was even eighty percent of the usual amount. But the firepower was more than double.”
“There was no vibration, no noise. The mana transmission efficiency… exceeded fifty percent? That’s impossible according to modern magical theory!”
Director Bareuman’s hands trembled.
He looked back and forth between the blueprint I had modified and the target, then grabbed my shoulders so hard it felt like he might crush them.
“Sir Rihan… What on earth did you do? You made the mana feel good? What does that mean?”
I just reduced the resistance a little.
Flustered, I took a step back.
“Ah, well… when mana flows, I reduced the friction and minimized the entropy… no, not that, I just sort of paved the road for it. So the mana could feel like it was taking a stroll. Haha, it’s nothing special.”
At my bewildered answer, a madness beyond reverence settled in the director’s eyes.
It seemed he had become convinced that I was some hidden master who had seen through the very essence of mana.
“I have committed a grave discourtesy! You weren’t incompetent! You had simply remained silent because the existing crude magical system was laughable to you! This is a revolution that will shake the very roots of magic’s paradigm!”
‘No, it’s really not that big of a deal. It’s just introductory physics level….’
“Starting tomorrow, I’ll give you the title of chief researcher! I’ll raise your annual salary threefold—no, fivefold—and assign you a private laboratory! Please, don’t leave our research institute!”
“Thank you very mu…… No, wait, Director?”
Hold on.
If I become chief researcher, doesn’t that mean I’ll have a mountain of work?
I just wanted to receive a decent salary and live a thin, long life.
Recalling the memories of my previous life, I hurriedly waved my hands.
“I’d rather just stay quiet and useless like I am now…”
“Don’t worry! As if I’d ever entrust menial tasks to a treasure like you! I’ll keep your identity as a first-class state secret and have you quietly take charge only of national-level difficulties on which the fate of the empire depends!”
“Pardon?”
‘What the fuck! What is that supposed to mean!’
National-level difficulties.
In other words, they were insanely hard overtime fodder, weren’t they?
‘And if I’m a first-class secret, that means I can’t even quit whenever I want.’
This is fucking bullshit!
My cushy-post life, my four-day workweek, and my peaceful cafeteria tours were flying away.
Along with a very brilliant and overwhelming flame of magic.
****
“Ugh…… I’m melting…… melting. What the hell is this sofa made of?”
Imperial Strategic Magic Headquarters, Second Research Institute’s chief researcher’s office.
The sofa, which enveloped me as if it were about to swallow my whole body, was ridiculously soft.
Considering the days I spent on Earth with my butt glued to a hard plastic chair in the corner of a lab.
This comfort was practically a human rights violation.
If I closed my eyes like this, the empire’s peace or the revolution of magic or whatever could go to hell—I felt like I could enter eternal rest.
But in front of me, instead of rest.
Piles of paper called reality were stacked up like fortress walls.
That damned slippery old fox.
They were the difficult problems Director Bareuman had tossed down, saying, “Our Sir Rihan might get bored, so I brought these!”
‘Ah…… This is such a pain.’
Such a pain.
It was such a pain, but.
There was nothing I could do about it.
If they tell me to do it, I have to do it.
Despite my reluctance, I gingerly picked up one of the documents.
[Document 1: Cooling Noise Problem of the Fourth Outer Barrier]
‘For this, if I just apply the principle of adiabatic expansion, the cooling efficiency will triple.’
[Document 2: Structural Defect in the Dual-Alloy Fortress Wall]
‘As for this fortress wall, from a structural mechanics standpoint, if they just reinforce the truss structure a bit, it’ll hold even with half the mana.’
They were problems I could solve rather simply.
But I did not pick up my pen.
No, rather, I threw the pen far away.
Because one of the bitter lessons from my graduate school days had been engraved into my mind.
“The guy who finishes quickly is given more work instead of a reward.”
This is practically a law of the universe.
A truth as certain as the second law of thermodynamics.
If I solved all these documents today and offered them up to the director?
Then tomorrow morning, my desk would obviously have monstrous projects piled on it, like “Development of Ultra-Long-Range Magical Weapons for Repelling the Demon King’s Army” or “Construction of a Transcontinental Mana Railway.”
“No way. Yeah. Absolutely not.”
The key is to do the work as slowly as possible, while still looking competent.
First, I opened a personal research notebook.
For now, the most important thing is my survival.
If I’m going to live a thin, long life in this harsh otherworld with my tiny little mana pool, I have to become a thorough efficiency freak.
Oh, and above all.
“First of all, I must absolutely, absolutely avoid becoming field personnel.”
Fieldwork is absolutely off the table.
***
Imperial Strategic Magic Headquarters.
The central library, lined with knowledge from all sorts of fields.
The distinct smell of old paper and the fishy scent of mana ink pricked my nose.
“Is magic a lower-compatible version of physics?”
After analyzing this world’s magical theory books for the past few hours.
I reached one conclusion.
The energy this world calls mana is a kind of universal conversion medium.
Magic in this world is largely made up of three stages.
First is energy generation.
By consuming mana, it produces pure energy such as heat, light, and electricity.
Next is material manifestation.
It converts energy into mass or rearranges nearby elements to construct matter.
Finally, momentum assignment.
It assigns a vector—direction and magnitude—to the generated energy or matter.
The problem is that this process is far too primitive.
The local mages are obsessed with incantations, which are basically encrypted commands.
It’s like having a state-of-the-art computer right in front of you, and instead of using a mouse or keyboard.
You rip open the main unit, attach and detach the wires one by one, and directly input machine language in zeros and ones.
“So of course the efficiency is a complete mess. They gobble up a ton of mana, but the result is tiny. All the energy is being wasted midway as disorderly heat according to the second law of thermodynamics.”
For someone with a small mana pool like me, incantation magic is a luxury.
With a method that uses 100 mana to produce a result of 1, I’d never even reach the feet of an ordinary mage in my lifetime.
But I have a powerful weapon they don’t know about.
The blueprint that supports the foundation of this world.
Physics.
“In other words, this is doable.”
I am, after all, a physics student in name.
A corner of my chest began to throb with academic enthusiasm.
***
I sat in the chair in the corner of the laboratory and closed my eyes.
The first priority was to abandon incantations.
“Because, well, saying things like ‘O spirit of the burning flame’ is the perfect way to get stabbed by an enemy.”
Ugh, it was enough to have shaken off such cringe-inducing lines at fifteen.
So, without an incantation, I drew formulas in my head.
The target was the first-grade basic magic, Fireball.
Ordinary mages struggle to transform 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 that expressed the essence of physics.
E=(3/2)kT.
I poured mana into the narrow space above my palm.
But I did not try to create fire.
Instead, I pictured the air molecules trapped in that space accelerating like mad.
I confined the particles within a narrow range and increased the number of collisions between them exponentially.
Mana was used only as a catalyst to amplify the energy in the process.
It was like implementing a kind of particle accelerator on my palm.
Whoosh—!
In an instant, a fist-sized flame bloomed.
“Oh, it works?”
Ignition brought about solely by pure physical cause and effect.
Since it could be solved with a basic formula, it succeeded far more easily.
It was much faster than shouting an incantation word by word.
“Shall I try the next one?”
Gaining confidence, I moved on to the next stage.
Waterball.
As I saw it.
Mages in this world usually used one of two methods.
Condensing the surrounding water vapor.
Or synthesizing mana directly into water molecules.
The former was useless if the humidity in the air was low, and the latter consumed an extreme amount of mana.
So I decided to choose a smarter method.
Oxygen is already everywhere in the atmosphere.
Meaning it’s free material scattered all around that I don’t need to consume mana to newly synthesize.
In the end, what is needed to make water is hydrogen and oxygen.
If oxygen is everywhere, it is much more economical to manufacture only the lacking hydrogen molecules separately and combine them.
“Combine.”
I used mana to create hydrogen molecules and induced their bonding with oxygen molecules.
By adjusting the electromagnetic force between atoms, I forcibly formed the shape known as H2O.
Hissss—!
A transparent sphere of water formed above my palm.
But its state was a little strange.
“Ah, hot! Fuck, what is this!”
At the pain that felt like my palm was burning, I threw the water sphere away.
Steam was rising furiously from the water that had fallen to the floor.
“Ha…… This is driving me crazy.”
A textbook mistake.
“I didn’t account for the bonding energy.”
When hydrogen and oxygen react to become water, an enormous amount of reaction heat is generated.
That is the very principle behind what’s called a hydrogen explosion.
I should have released the surplus energy generated during the chemical bond to the outside or converted it into another form of energy.
But because I had focused only on the result of making water molecules.
The created water had swallowed all that reaction heat and turned into boiling water at 100 degrees Celsius.
“It became boiling-water-throwing magic instead of Waterball. Well, in terms of lethality, this might actually be better……”
Cooling my palm, I let out a hollow laugh.
But in a corner of my chest, I could feel a strange pulse.
“This is fucking fun, isn’t it? It’s basically a real-time simulation game.”
It was far more thrilling than staying up all night in my previous life clinging to papers that didn’t make any money.
As expected, a physics student feels most alive when facing a problem.
***
Once I understood the principles behind basic magic, I gained confidence.
“Maybe I’m the strongest?”
The formulas that had tormented me throughout my graduate school days were now about to become the empire’s strongest weapon.
“Wait a second……”
A fun idea occurred to me.
My eyes flashed.
‘What’s far more efficient and overwhelming than some firework-like Fireball is, of course, kinetic energy.’
I conceived of the essence of electromagnetism: the railgun.
The principle was simple.
Run current through two parallel conductor rails, then apply Lorentz force (F = Ii x B) to the projectile between them and launch it at ultra-high speed.
It was a method of converting mana into electricity and a magnetic field to accelerate a metal fragment.
If it succeeded, the destructive power would be strong enough to use as an almost certain-kill technique.
My heart pounded.
I constructed virtual parallel rails in the air with mana.
The formulas in my head meshed and turned like gears.
I floated a very small metal fragment from the laboratory in the center of the rails.
“Good. Finally, acceleration…!”
The calculations were perfect.
The current strength, the magnetic field density, and even the projectile’s mass.
But I had overlooked one fatal fact.
Even if a railgun is efficient in terms of physics, the electrical energy required for ultra-high-speed acceleration increases exponentially.
And the fact that my mana pool could barely handle even a coffee cup’s worth of energy.
“Uh…?”
At that moment, the back of my neck went cold.
Every one of my brain cells screamed and sent a shutdown signal.
The sensation of the mana inside my body being sucked away without leaving even a single gram behind.
My vision suddenly turned black and white, and the power to my consciousness cut off.
No system message like,
[Warning: Mana Backflow and Overload]
appeared.
Because reality is cruel.
All I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat and the hollow echo emitted by my empty mana pool.
“Uweeeek—”
Along with a dizziness that made the world spin, my vision flashed white.
Before I could even see sparks fly from the muzzle of the railgun.
I collapsed to the floor like a freshly caught fish.