After iron, he went looking for more. His mana sense reached deeper, wider, cataloguing what lay beneath the dead zone. He found more iron — lots of it. Copper, in smaller veins. Something that resonated like silver but with a strange harmonic he couldn't identify. And deeper still, in pockets so compressed they barely registered, traces of metals he had no name for. Denser than anything he'd felt. Harder to extract. Stranger.
He pulled up samples of everything. Refined them. Tested them. The unknown silver-like metal was lighter than aluminium but harder than steel. One of the deeper metals had a faint blue sheen and hummed when he pushed mana through it — conducted mana, like a wire conducts electricity.
A mana-conductive metal. That's... that's incredibly useful.
He stockpiled everything. Ingots of iron, copper, silver-stuff, blue metal. Sorted by type, refined to varying degrees. He didn't have a specific plan for most of it yet, but materials were materials. Better to have them and not need them than the reverse.
Weapons were the natural next step.
He started with mana constructs — blades made of pure condensed energy. The same principle as mana weaving, but shaped into something lethal instead of something wearable.
A sword was his first attempt. He pictured a katana — because of course he did, he was a Japanese teenager — and condensed mana into the shape. It formed in his hand, glowing faintly, weightless, with an edge that split the air as he swung it.
He slashed it across a dead tree trunk. The blade passed through the wood like it was warm butter. The trunk slid apart in a clean diagonal, the top half toppling slowly into the dust.
Okay. Mana blades are sharp.
He made more. A straight double-edged sword. A spear — long shaft, leaf-shaped point. A set of throwing needles, thin as pencils and harder than steel. A heavy cleaver for butchering whatever he hunted. Each one formed from condensed mana, each one effectively indestructible and sharp enough to cut stone.
The downside was maintenance. Mana constructs required a constant low feed of energy to stay solid. Cut the supply, and they slowly dissolved. He could sustain several at once without strain — his reserves made the cost negligible — but it meant his weapons were tethered to his concentration. If he got knocked out, everything he'd made would vanish.
Until I figure out how to make mana weapons more permanent, I need physical weapons too. Ones that exist whether I'm conscious or not.
That's where the extracted metals came in. He heated iron in a floating crucible of compressed force, shaped it with mana like a potter shapes clay, and cooled it with precisely controlled air. His first physical sword was rough — the balance was off and the edge was uneven. His tenth was better. His twentieth was something he was actually proud of.
The blue mana-conductive metal changed the game. When he folded it into a blade's edge and pushed mana through the weapon, the entire sword lit up with energy. The mana coating made it sharper, harder, and capable of cutting things that raw steel couldn't touch.
Mana-infused physical weapons. Best of both worlds — they exist without my concentration AND they channel magic.
------
He made a full set. A primary sword — single-edged, slightly curved, blue metal folded into the edge. A short blade for close quarters. A dozen throwing spikes. A heavy polearm he wasn't sure he'd ever use but liked the look of.
He stacked them in a neat pile next to his growing collection of metal ingots and monster parts from the dead zone's edge.
Which brought him to the storage problem.
He couldn't carry all of this.
Weapons. Metal ingots. Monster parts — hides, bones, claws, organs from the creatures he'd been hunting at the forest's edge. Food supplies. Water. Spare mana-woven clothing. Crafting materials. Fuel. The pile was growing daily and it wasn't going to fit in his pockets.
Dimensional storage. Inventory system. Hammerspace. Whatever you want to call it — I need a pocket dimension.
He'd thought about spatial magic before. It was a staple of the genre — every isekai protagonist worth the name had some kind of magic bag or inventory system. The concept was simple: fold a section of space into a pocket, anchor it to yourself, store and retrieve objects at will.
The execution was anything but simple.
Yuki spent the first three days just trying to bend space. Not fold it, not pocket it — just distort it slightly. Warp the air in front of him so that a straight line became a curve. Basic spatial manipulation.
Nothing happened. Mana flowed out, hit the air, and dissipated. No warping. No bending. Nothing.
Why isn't this working?
He sat with the problem for a full day. Every other type of magic had responded to clear visualisation. Fire looked like fire. Wind moved like wind. Stone behaved like stone. His imagination provided the template and mana filled it in.
But what did folded space look like?
That was the issue. He'd never seen it. Not really. Games and anime depicted dimensional storage as a glowing portal or a magic circle — visual shorthand, not actual representations of spatial distortion. He had no mental image for what bending space should look like because humans couldn't perceive spatial geometry directly.
I can't visualise it because I can't see it. And I can't cast it because I can't visualise it.
He was stuck for a week. It drove him insane. He could level mountains and freeze lakes but he couldn't make a magic backpack.
The solution, when it finally came, arrived sideways.
He'd been lying on his back, staring at the stars, thinking about nothing in particular, when a stray thought crossed his mind: Space isn't something you see. It's something you feel.
He could feel mana. He'd been sensing it for weeks — currents in the air, deposits in the ground, the vast reservoir in his own body. Mana existed in space. It occupied volume. It had position and flow and density.
What if he could feel the space itself through the mana?
He closed his eyes and extended his awareness. Not looking for mana this time — looking for the container the mana sat in. The structure underneath. The fabric of space itself.
It was there. Faint. Incredibly subtle, like feeling the glass of a fishbowl by sensing the water pressing against it. But he could detect it — a kind of tension in the background, a framework that everything else existed within.
He pushed against it. Not with force — with intent. Like pressing a finger into a stretched sheet of rubber.
Space dented.
His eyes flew open. The air in front of him looked normal — no visual change at all. But his mana sense told a different story. There was a shallow depression in the spatial fabric, right where he'd pushed. A tiny dip. A wrinkle.
He pushed harder. The dip deepened. He pushed from the other side simultaneously, folding the wrinkle over on itself —
And space folded.
A pocket opened. Not visible — he couldn't see it with his eyes. But his mana sense lit up with it. A small bubble of enclosed space, folded away from the normal three dimensions, anchored to the point where he'd made the crease. About the size of a shoebox.
He picked up a rock and pushed it toward the fold.
The rock vanished. Not dramatically — no flash, no portal, no special effects. It just... wasn't there anymore. His mana sense confirmed it was inside the pocket, sitting in a tiny bubble of folded space.
He reached in with his intent and pulled.
The rock reappeared in his hand.
Yuki stared at it. Stared at the empty air where the pocket was. Stared at the rock again.
Then he threw both fists in the air and shouted at the empty sky like he'd scored a winning goal.
DIMENSIONAL STORAGE.
It needed work. A lot of work. The pocket was tiny and unstable — it collapsed after about ten minutes. Making a permanent, large-scale storage space took another two weeks of practice. Reinforcing the fold so it didn't degrade. Expanding the interior — which didn't follow normal geometry, since the space inside a fold could be larger than the fold itself. Anchoring it to his own mana signature so it moved with him and couldn't be accessed by anything else.
By the end of those two weeks, he had a dimensional pocket roughly the size of a small room. Stable, permanent, accessible with a thought. He loaded it up.
Weapons went in first. Then the metal ingots — iron, copper, silver-stuff, blue metal, sorted and stacked. Monster parts from his hunts. Cured hides. Cleaned bones. Organs he suspected might be valuable. Food — smoked meat, dried fruit, roots that kept well. Water in mana-woven containers. Spare clothing. Tools he'd fashioned from wood and metal.
He stood in the dead zone, surrounded by nothing, carrying an entire workshop and armoury in a pocket dimension folded inside his mana.
Not bad for a high school dropout.
He wasn't a dropout. Technically he was a missing person. But the joke landed in his own head and that was all that mattered these days.