The steel table creaked as Anire moved the table, uncaring of how much screeching it would make, much to the annoyance of her two guests. Putting the heart back into her bag, she threw the bowls into an opened crate, and folded the table into a corner. The main room was clear and wider now with all the necessary tables along the walls, saved for Arlene’s seat and the hammock her test subject was swinging on.

  Her ear danced as she giddied to herself. She opened the steel cabinets containing rows and columns of sky blue vials. A small note printed onto shelf: For Daily Use :). One would assume the vials were taken out one by one, but Anire chose a different route. Her smile was wider than her usual one. The thought of finally experimenting excited her so much she took out the whole fullsize shelf. Surprisingly, the vials were still balanced on the way out.

  Sliding the shelf onto the metallic counter, she clapped her hands and turned toward them, toward Wattyson.

  “Right~ as for what I’ll be asking of you will be drinking all these vials!” Her voice was shaken and so was her ear. She shifted to the side and threw out her arms wide like she was showing off a product. “These are my own curated potions! Designed to refill a person’s mana! I drink every day, and they’re pretty easy to make personally. Just… a lot of distilled materials from monsters, animals, and floras~. Materials such as an Quezanous’s bones, Tituorasous’s meats, Rinza mushroom, Felii’s fin, a Hot dog—“

  She continued, almost like she was making a pitch. Arlene sat bobbing while listening in. Wattyson was idly swaying along with the hammock.

  “—few drops of red wine and five tablespoons of sugar for taste! Any questions~?”

  Arlene let herself chuckle at those last few ingredients. They weren’t needed in making potions, let alone experimental vials. That much she knew. Still, she couldn’t help but think of when Wattyson was chugging strawberry vials from Anire. Those last few ingredients were probably added to entice him in. Then again… Anire probably did it for herself too. She had to drink them every day if she wanted to use magic.

  Seeing Wattyson wasn’t sure of it, Anire took upon herself to cast a spell; to create light the same intensity as Arlene did. Her hand flicked and the light shone out like an awakening phoenix, blinding the entire room before dying immediately after.

  For Anire herself, her smile was gone, replaced by loud and heavy panting exhaled out as she gripped onto the table’s edge to stable herself. Her ear slumped and her expression was borderline nearing exhausted collapse. Her legs were quivering just trying to stand. Reaching out to the vials with haste, she popped off the knob and chugged down the sky blue drink. At least five vials were downed.

  Wattyson stopped swaying. His eyes focused on the pitch’s display. Arlene jolted up, her hands were already hovering to cast any holy magic to her. Her jaw tightened at the amount of stress Anire had to go through just to use magic. She was stopped by Anire’s halt before her arm went limp.

  Letting out a satisfied ahh~, she gradually loosened her grip’s strength. For a good minute or two, her shaky legs became still. Her ear straightened up, and her expression softened into a small smile. Her arms extended out to pose herself in a triumphant showcase.

  “See~,” she announced, “I used a spell way above my mana’s capabilities and replenished myself immediately after!”

  “Alright, I’m convinced,” Wattyson shrugged, “So what? Do you want me to just drink it?” Somewhat uncharacteristically for him, he widened his entire body out to stretch in a hammock, and drawn out a long winded yawn.

  “Not just that! Just drinking it won’t do~. First,” her smile curled as she took a few steps back, “How about you cast some magic?” She sat down on the white steel floor, crossing her legs. Leaned a bit to grab a fresh untitled notebook and a pencil. Her lined ruby eyes remained on him.

  She pointed at the center between them, “How about you do… I don’t know, cast some spells in there? I can see where we’ll go from here afterward~.”

  Arlene strode to her. “Are you sure about this? Doing it right here?”

  “Of course~ Nothing bad will happen!”

  She wasn’t convinced. Anire wasn’t the one who would do the casting, it was Wattyson. Her side eyes went to him who had just sat up on the hammock. “You better not do anything funny.”

  Taking small steps toward Arlene before joining Anire’s, sitting with legs curled up. Her head rested on her greaves.

  She softly whispered again to Anire only, “Are you sure about this?” She had to ask again for herself.

  “Yes yes~,” Anire replied hurriedly, “Nothing disastrous will happen.”

  The two suddenly felt a cold breeze gradually building up. Chill air seemingly out of nowhere began to swirl in the center, forming a small whirlwind. Crumbled notes, pencils and small knobs clattered and rattled. All of them were moving slowly rolling to the edge.

  First to fall was the few crumbled papers, then writing utensils then small plastic knobs. Some shards of glass teethed out from bottom of the counters, joining in the mess in the centre. Like a tornado, the chill’s swirl was sucking everything in like it was the central gravity.

  Arlene tapped her fingers along her knees as she watched the ordeal. She didn’t need to worry; those debris were never going to hit them anyway. The whirlwind was small. It had a lot of strengths yes, but all of them were focused very closely in the middle. Rather than an upside down cone as one would expect from a tornado, it was more like a straight line upward.

  For Anire, she wasn’t eyeing the real world. The connected dots in her ruby crimson eyes gazed into the metaphysical of reality—to the flow of mana. Previously she had noted Wattyson drew in mana from nearby entities—trees, rocks, grounds, the dead Gavituth, and other objects.

  Here there was none of the natural entities, just manufactured goods and people. The thought of his void nature siphoning hers did freak her out a bit internally. She barely had any mana. What if her mana was used as a substitute? That feeling died out into more of analytical mind. Would it be the same as her using spells far beyond her own capabilities? How would her mana be in someone’s else spell? She shifted closer around the centre, to be a bit closer to him. Curiosity outweighed self-preservation. It was likely due to Arlene being here and the shelf of mana vials close by enabling her.

  Arlene grabbed her shoulder and dragged her back closer this time. Her arm remained on Anire’s far shoulder to hold her in place. Whatever she wanted to do, it wouldn’t be worth damaging yourself. “Just focus on what’s going on.” She hushed the neko down.

  Anire’s ear flicked around following wherever her eyes darted to erratically. Her jaw gapped to the sight. Mana existed in everything, even if they were less in manufactured good, they would still embody some. The tables, the counters, the few scraps and messes caught up in the vortex sprawled out into thin threads. All of them routing back to the void across of them.

  She herself didn’t feel exhausted. There weren’t any lines to her. Glancing to Arlene was the same. There weren’t any lines. Look like the siphoning only took from inanimate or dead entities.

  Those lines connected then flowed through him, converging on where his hand was. A hissy breath emanating out of his hand to the vortex. There wasn’t any conversion happening. He was just spraying it back out.

  The running cold air then ceased into a standstill. Few debris fell down gently, but most was caught in the new structure in the middle. An ice sculptor of a pine tree stood half the length of an average person in the centre.

  The neko leaned forward, then crawled to the sculptor. Her head kept shifting and turning, getting ever closer till inch away from it. To her, it wasn’t the ice pine she was seeing. It was a clump of mana resembling the pine tree. She expected the mana to be of the same wavelength. Her light earlier was like that—transforming her own mana into something new, something illuminating. Magic spell was after all a will and a wish of the user onto the world, to shape mana into form. The pine tree wasn’t.

  Arlene rolled her eyes. “The pine tree again?”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Wattyson only shrugged.

  Anire rolled back next to Arlene and lied down. Writing furiously onto the notebook as if fearing the newfound discovery would be washed away. A person’s mana pool couldn’t be increased at all. People were stuck with what they were born with. They could optimize their own understanding of magic and mana, to squeeze out and probable use of incantation or chant or their own imagination to lessen the cost.

  School of Magic were made for this. Either general school or specialization one, those institutions were made to help any aspiring magic users to become fully flesh mages. Their teaching involved how to chant, best way to chant, and how to optimize it using their understanding of the world. A glorified scientific school dealing with imagination. Only a small margin had succeeded to be proficient magic practitioners, and even smaller became established mages or wizards.

  She had assumed Wattyson would be the same as other mages. Despite his void’s nature, he would absorb all that mana in, convert them into his own and optimized them for his own use despite no chanting at all. That was another mystery, but one she didn’t need to bother with.

  Her writing was interrupted by pokes from Arlene, a persistent one. “So what did you see? Don’t leave us hanging.”

  Arlene saw the neko gazed up. Her smile was crooked like it was confused between joy and horrifying curiosity. Her eyes were a mismatched of connected lines. They weren’t straight, but more of a mangled mess.

  The writing wasn’t much better. They were all words so leaned it became children’s scribbling. Though she could understand they were the common language. It was just hard to read.

  “Anire?” She asked again as the neko stared on to her.

  “R-Right,” Anire returned to the notebook. “I had assumed Wattyson would converted the mana into his own and utilize it that way. Seems like my own thinking was wrong.”

  She rolled onto her back then sat up. “Wattyson,” her eyes sat on him, “You don’t utilize mana at all. I don’t mean absorbing those to be your own. You take them in and forcibly mesh them together before throwing them back out as your spell.”

  “H-He does?” Arlene’s voice stammered.

  “I do?”

  “What do you mean you do? You don’t know this?”

  “I just found out a few days ago I had none. Why would I know this?”

  Anire sighed before lying down again. “I assumed it was the same as any magic users. Normally when you cast a spell, your own mana went out into the world and merge with reality to become whatever you’re trying to cast. I didn’t expect a recycled mana stitched together like that.”

  Her gaze went to the shelf of vials. Those sky blue mana potions sat idly. It was her hope to make Wattyson drink it and study him further. But…

  “I guess there goes my first plan~. I had spent years researching into increasing one’s own mana’s threshold. I thought through you I would make a breakthrough, but turned out you don’t even convert them~”

  She turned to Arlene, her smile softened into a smaller one. Her red eyes softened with the lines finally disconnecting. “I guess… the only way to increase one’s own mana pool is through divination~.”

  Arlene wanted to say something, but anything would be in deaf ear. She was born with boundless mana potential, unleashed by her mentor. She didn’t go through the hardship of using magic before that. Not wanting her to fee down but also not to feel patronized, she only patted her on the shoulder.

  Wattyson leaned from his hammock, nudging at the shelf to him. The vials almost feel over the plastic rack. He took one thin vial out. The sky blue potion reflected himself back.

  “So I just need to drink this right?”

  Anire shrugged upon hearing this. It couldn’t hurt to go through anyway. She sat back up and leaned on Arlene’s shoulder. Her eyes connected the lines again. She already had the notebook ready to write.

  She then grinned and let out curious chuckles. “Yes~, can you drink all of them?” Maybe brute forcing them would yield some results. There were twenty-one of them total.

  “I’ll think about it after this one,” he took a small sip before lifting the vial up higher and chugging it down, “Hmmm… the sweetness should be toned down a bit.”

  It got Arlene to roll her eyes. They were doing experiment and here he was doing a critique like it was a soft drink. “So? Are you going to drink all of them?”

  “Mhmm.” He drank them up one by one. Lazily swaying on the hammock, he chugged them like they were cups of ale. Such an act got Arlene curious. She eyed to the mana vials. Were they really that good? Anire would’ve made it as a chef if she could make something that was normally bitter like a potion into an energy drink.

  At first, nothing. There weren’t any reactions at all from the first few vials. Anire gulped down as her focus remained. With each vials, the dead end to her hypothesis loomed larger, like a guillotine. She didn’t notice her own lip trembling. She didn’t want to be proven wrong—not now, not relating to this!

  By the tenth, still nothing. Her only way out of this mana threshold’s hellhole—the hard limit she could ever wield—was collapsing. Her hope slowly dimmed out.

  Arlene saw her grips intensified with each vials downed. They were crumbling her new notebook. Arlene threw her arm around to her shoulder, embracing her closer, to ground her down. Dragging her closer was when she could see the neko’s lip trembling, leaving afterimages.

  Please, whatever you’re seeing. Let it be what you want.

  By the thirteen, Anire saw something. Her pupils sharpened at the sight—a small glow of light. “Wattyson!” Her voice cracked with urgency. “Drink faster!” Her voice was one of commanding mixed with fears and desperation.

  He couldn’t drink faster. Those vials may be thin, but they were long. Gravity was the one controlling the flow of liquid, not him. To compensate for this, he utilized methods of the ancient even kids knew—drinking two vials at the same time.

  That light was growing, beating and pulsing with each down vials. Anire brushed off Arlene’s hand to crawl out to another counter. She pulled out another shelf and slid it to him. There were twenty-six more vials.

  “What the—“

  “Drink more of these, Wattyson!”

  The light pulsed. With every beat shot out like a wave in his body. He didn’t feel any of them, but Anire could see it. There was mana! There was mana! There was mana!

  Her grin grew wider as she went back to Arlene’s side. Her hands began moving at lightning pace, writing everything down. That there was mana in the void. That there was something growing out from her potions.

  “Is that all,” Wattyson lazily spoke out, “I don’t think I can drink any more of this…” He stopped swaying the hammock. Anymore and he’d be too dizzy.

  The ice pine tree in the centre soon dissolved into a mist of cold air then blown away by the wind, accompanied by Anire’s small laughter to herself.

  That light beat harder inside like it just came back to life… too hard—too frantic and chaotic. Eventually it stopped. The void encroached onto the light, glacially dimmed. The sparks of mana inside of him vanished.

  It didn’t deter her though. “It seems like it wasn’t for nothing~.”

  The comment didn’t catch Wattyson’s. He was… feeling bloated. It did catch Arlene’s. “Explain.”

  “I was going the wrong route all along~. I had thought he was void of mana because he had no mana. Well,” her voice stammered trying to gather her thought, “He has no mana, but the hard limit is there—th-like the others, he had one too.”

  Her voice kept jumping. “I had thought he was able to use magic, because he didn’t have any threshold to begin with. W-With the whole siphoning aspect, but it’s there!”

  She kept repeating, emphasizing the fact it existed. “Statistically speaking from the other nineteen, he had about 0.0001% of mana threshold. And you know what happened?”

  The darted lines kept switching, unsure whether to connect or not. “My mana vials did it—my potions break it!”

  She opened her notes for Arlene as she spoke higher in pitch, her ear dancing along. “The other nineteen people I tested this on never had a breakthrough like he did.”

  She leaned toward Arlene, causing the latter to stammer back. “At the thirteen vials, there was mana. That’s why I told him to drink faster! There was mana, Arlene! It was there. I saw it!

  It was probably because he could use magic that such a thing happened! The light grew more and more like a solar flare! The others couldn’t do so because they can’t use magic—they had no mana. Do you know what this mean?!”

  She didn’t wait for Arlene to answer. “It is possible… yes… Yes! It is possible to break the threshold. It is possible to increase one’s own threshold!

  The entire magical world had been looking at this wrong—I was looking at it wrong! We’ve been trying to break through it by refilling our own mana threshold—thinking the excess amount might increase it.”

  She pointed to Wattyson. “It wasn’t that at all! It did break in a sense, but then like a flame, it died out! I need to search another alternative. Something that could stabilize the excess flow!”

  Arlene’s voice crept out softly. “T-T-That’s great. Can you back off a bit?”

  For the first time, Anire regained her focus and flustered. She was inches away from Arlene’s face. “S-Sorry,” she backed out and sat crossed legs. “I-I just got excited. I—“

  “I know. No need to explain.” Her lip twitched, but she kept the smile to herself. She felt pride for her newfound friend. She saw the fire lit behind those ruby eyes.

  It wasn’t just there, one of the things that bugged her a lot was how did Wattyson use magic without chanting. Perhaps Anire’s research could shine light on it. She could just ask him, but he was always evasive. Either he was hiding something or he genuinely didn’t know. No matter the reason—he wouldn’t tell her anyway.

  She stood and offered Anire a hand. “So, what now? What are you going to do?”

  Taking her hand, Anire stood. “Hmm~ Research obviously.” She strode to her counter near the balcony, bending over to one of many crates in between. “I’ll see you in a few days. I’m going to be lost in this research now~” She pulled out a giant flask the size of her head.

  “I see.” Arlene stepped to Wattyson. She wasn’t offering her hand; she took his hand instead. “Come on Watty, we need to go now.” She shifted her feet as she pulled him out.

  Wattyson finally stood up with a large exhale. He limped immediately to the door. His skin coiled from how narrow the path was.

  “Thank you, Wattyson.” Anire said out just before he left. It wasn’t the usual playful tone or scholarly one. It was soft and warmth. It was genuine.

  “Don’t make me drink tons of vials again.”

  “I make no promise~.”

  He grunted and left. The glass door clicked as it closed. Both could see him still just outside the door as he waited for Arlene.

  Anire bowed slightly to Arlene. “Thank you too, Arlene~ For… well the whole thing today.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be travelling together from now on, partner.”

  “Oh~ I’ve been promoted to partner?”

  “Shush it you.”

  Arlene strode out and joined Wattyson, leaving Anire alone to conduct her research.

  Outside on the lonely street, Wattyson groaned. “Can we go back to the inn for today?”

  “What?! Of course not!” She grabbed onto his sleeve, pulling him with her. “We’re going to go to a dungeon! I heard there’s one nearby. Maybe there’s something hidden about my prophecy, so let’s go to the Adventurer’s Guild first and register for that dungeon’s quest!”

  “Ughhh…”