Three days in, Yuki stopped trying to make sense of it and started treating it like a science experiment.
He'd spent the first two days after waking up in a fog — sitting in the dust, staring at dead trees, cycling between disbelief and something close to panic. He'd accidentally blasted wind from his hands a few more times. Cracked a boulder by touching it too hard. Nearly gave himself a heart attack when he sneezed and a shockwave flattened a ring of withered shrubs around him.
But panic had a shelf life, and Yuki's expired on day three. Not because he was brave. Because he was bored.
There was nothing to do in the dead zone but he was too afraid to enter the forested area where he could hear roars and monsters moving in the brush. No phone. No people. No distractions. Just grey dust, skeletal trees, and the constant, suffocating pressure of energy packed behind his ribs. If he was going to be stuck here — and he was, until he figured out enough to not be a danger to anything alive — then he might as well understand what was happening to him.
Step one: figure out what this energy actually is.
He sat cross-legged in the dust and closed his eyes. The pressure was always there — that dense, hot knot in his chest and upper abdomen, thrumming with every heartbeat. But when he focused on it — really focused, tuning out everything else — he could feel more than just the knot.
It had texture. Layers. The densest concentration sat in his core like a compressed sun, but thinner currents of the same energy ran through the rest of his body. Down his arms. Along his spine. Into his fingertips. Like a second circulatory system running parallel to his blood.
And it wasn't just inside him.
He pushed his awareness outward — tentatively, like reaching into a dark room — and felt the same energy in the air around him. Thinner. Cooler. But unmistakably the same substance. It drifted in slow currents, pooling in some areas, flowing through others. The ground had traces of it. Even the dead trees held faint residue, like the memory of what they'd once contained.
It's everywhere. Inside me and outside me. The whole world is soaked in it.
Mana. That was the word his brain supplied, pulled from a thousand fantasy stories. He didn't know what this world called it. Didn't matter. Mana was the label that fit, so mana it was.
He spent the rest of day three just sensing it. Mapping the currents around him. Feeling the reservoir inside his chest — which was staggeringly large. He couldn't find the bottom of it. Every time he pushed his awareness deeper, expecting to hit empty space, there was just more. Dense, compressed, seemingly endless.
How much did I absorb during the chain reaction?
He didn't want to think about that too hard. The answer, judging by the kilometres of dead forest around him, was a lot.
Day four. He started experimenting.
The wind thing was his baseline — he'd already done it by accident, so it was the easiest to reproduce. He held out his palm and pushed mana toward it, thinking about air moving.
A gust shot out. Too strong. Dust everywhere.
He tried again. Softer. Gentler. Pictured a light breeze instead of a gale.
Better. A mild current flowed from his hand, enough to ruffle hair but not demolish anything. He held it for ten seconds, then let it fade.
Okay. So it responds to what I'm thinking. Stronger image, stronger effect.
He tested this. Thought about heat — felt mana shift in character, and his palm grew warm. Thought about cold — the warmth vanished, replaced by a chill that frosted the dust beneath his fingers. Thought about push — and an invisible force shoved a dead trunk sideways.
Each time, the process was the same. He formed an image in his mind — wind, heat, cold, force — and directed mana into that image. The mana became the thing he imagined. Not metaphorically. Literally. The energy reshaped itself to match his intent.
Intent is the key. Mana is the medium. My mind is the mould.
He spent hours on this. Fire was easy to create, harder to control — it wanted to spread and grow, and his early attempts produced bonfires when he'd aimed for candle flames. Water was slow; he had to pull moisture from the air and condense it, which took concentration and patience. Earth was heavy — moving stone required significantly more mana than air or fire, like the difference between pushing a shopping cart and pushing a car.
But none of it was impossible. Everything he tried worked, at least in some form. The only limit seemed to be how clearly he could picture what he wanted.
Which led to the breakthrough.