### Chapter 4: A Single Mana Bolt
A day had passed since the night of the explosion. The meeting with Headmaster Theron had been a more formal, more intimidating echo of his encounter with Instructor Valerius. The old mage, with eyes that seemed to hold the weight of centuries, had listened to Su Yuan's fabricated tale in suffocating silence. He'd asked a few pointed questions, his gaze sharp enough to peel back lies, but Su Yuan, holding fast to his role as the terrified, lucky fool, had weathered the storm.
In the end, they had no choice but to accept his story. The alternative—that their most talentless student had spontaneously manifested the power to vaporize magical beasts and solid stone—was far too ludicrous to entertain. He was issued a stern warning, a month's worth of demerits for 'improper handling of volatile magical artifacts,' and a bill for the damages that, without a single coin to his name, he had no hope of ever paying.
He was a pariah, a walking cautionary tale. The other students now looked at him with a new blend of fear and contempt. They didn't see a survivor; they saw a reckless idiot who had endangered them all. The nickname 'Empty Vessel' was now often accompanied by 'The Walking Disaster.'
Su Yuan couldn't have cared less. Their opinions were irrelevant noise. He had spent the day acquainting himself with the two pillars of his new existence. First, his [Infinite Mana Core], a silent, boundless ocean within him that felt as natural as his own heartbeat. Second, his infinite supply of sand. He'd spent a quiet hour in his new, doorless room, experimenting. He learned to summon a single grain on his fingertip, to create a silent, suffocating cascade that could fill a bucket in seconds, and to project a high-speed jet of grit with a flick of his wrist. It was a crude but surprisingly versatile tool.
Now, as the moon reached its zenith and the academy fell into a deep hush, he waited. His eyes were fixed on the corner of his vision, where the ethereal System interface would appear. The sand was a joke, but a useful one. What would today bring? A legendary grimoire? The scale of a dragon? A single, perfect Philosopher's Stone? The anticipation was a physical thing, a thrumming in his veins that rivaled the power of his core.
Right on cue, as the clock tower in the main quad chimed for midnight, a soft chime resonated in his mind.
[A new day has begun. The midnight cycle has reset.]
[Now drawing your daily random item…]
The mental screen flickered, a spinning wheel of unseen possibilities. Su Yuan held his breath. This was the moment. This was the roll of the dice that would define the next twenty-four hours of his life.
[Item successfully drawn.]
[Your item for today is:]
`[Item: Rusty Spoon]`
`[Quantity: ∞]`
`[Description: A bent, rust-pitted spoon of common iron. Low in both nutritional and aesthetic value. May cause tetanus.]`
Su Yuan stared. The anticipation that had filled him moments before drained away, leaving a hollow, echoing silence.
A spoon.
Not a spoon blessed by a god of feasts. Not an enchanted spoon that could stir the very currents of fate. A rusty, disgusting, utterly mundane spoon.
He closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath, the gamer in him fighting down a surge of primal frustration. This was a bad roll. A trash drop. Yesterday, he'd gotten infinite sand. Today, infinite spoons. At this rate, he'd have enough useless junk to build a new continent by the end of the year.
With a mental command, he summoned one. It appeared in his hand with a soft *thud*. It was exactly as described. The metal was cold and slightly damp, pitted with reddish-brown flecks of rust. The handle was bent at an awkward angle, as if it had lost a fight with a particularly stubborn bowl of porridge.
He summoned another. And another. Soon, a small pile of identical, rusty spoons lay on his desk, clattering softly. He could summon a rain of them, a river of them. He could fill the Headmaster's office to the ceiling with rusty spoons. The mental image was so absurd it almost made him smile.
But what good was it? He couldn't fight with a spoon. He couldn't learn from a spoon. This day's gacha was, for all intents and purposes, a complete bust.
A familiar voice whispered in the back of his mind. Not the voice of the frightened boy he now inhabited, but the cold, calculating voice of 'Void,' the Archmage. *If you can't rely on luck, rely on effort. If the game doesn't give you good loot, you grind.*
He couldn't control the gacha. It was a chaotic, unpredictable force of nature. But his Infinite Mana Core? That was a constant. That was the foundation. The spoons were a distraction, a joke from the cosmos. His real power lay in the boundless ocean within.
He had survived the night by brute-forcing a cantrip, turning [Glow] into a makeshift cannon. It was crude, messy, and inefficient. He needed control. He needed technique. He needed to build his skills from the ground up.
His gaze fell upon a thin, worn textbook on his desk: *Foundations of Arcane Theory: Year One*. The original Su Yuan had read it cover to cover a dozen times, dreaming of casting the spells within, only to be stymied by his thimble-sized mana pool.
Su Yuan picked it up, his fingers tracing the faded title. He flipped past the chapters on mana theory and somatic components, his eyes landing on the first offensive spell every apprentice was taught.
[Mana Bolt].
The description was simple. The caster was to gather a small quantum of mana in their palm, compress it into a stable, spherical form, and project it towards a target. The textbook was filled with warnings: over-channeling could lead to mana burn; improper compression could cause the spell to fizzle or even detonate prematurely; repeated casting would lead to rapid exhaustion.
For Su Yuan, these warnings were meaningless. Mana burn? He had an infinite ocean. Fizzling? He could try again a microsecond later. Exhaustion? The very concept was alien to him now.
He had the infinite resources. Now, he needed to grind the skill points.
***
The academy's training grounds were a series of open-air courtyards behind the main lecture halls. They were dotted with weathered wooden practice dummies, stone targets etched with runes, and shimmering wards designed to absorb stray spells. At this early hour, with the sun just beginning to warm the stone, the grounds were mostly empty.
Su Yuan found a secluded corner with a single, battered-looking dummy. It was a thick log of ironwood, scarred and chipped from countless practice spells. It would serve its purpose.
He took a deep breath, calming his mind and focusing on the instructions from the textbook. He extended his right hand, palm facing the dummy fifty feet away. He reached into his core, not drawing, but simply *allowing* a stream of mana to flow into his palm.
A small, shimmering ball of blue energy materialized, wavering and unstable. It felt like trying to hold water in his fist. He tried to compress it as the book instructed, focusing his will on it. The ball pulsed erratically.
"Mana Bolt," he incanted, forcing the word out. It felt clumsy on his tongue.
He thrust his palm forward, releasing the energy. The blue ball shot forward, wobbling through the air like a poorly thrown rock. It traveled for about twenty feet before losing cohesion and dissipating with a soft, pathetic *pop*, like a soap bubble bursting. It had missed the dummy by a laughable margin.
Su Yuan stared at his empty palm, then at the distant target. There was no frustration, only cold analysis. His mana supply was perfect. His control was atrocious. It was the difference between having a quarry full of marble and being a master sculptor. He had the raw material in spades; now he needed to learn the craft.
So he began.
He cast it again. Another wobbly, short-lived bolt.
And again. This one flew a little straighter, but still fizzled.
And again.
And again.
The process was monotonous, a simple loop of will, form, and release. For any other student, this would be an exhausting ordeal. They could cast perhaps twenty, maybe thirty [Mana Bolt]s before needing to sit and meditate for an hour to recover their spent mana. Their training sessions were dictated by their limits.
Su Yuan had no limits.
The sun climbed higher in the sky. Other students began to trickle into the training grounds. They saw him there, the infamous 'Empty Vessel,' standing in his corner, tirelessly casting the most basic spell in the curriculum and failing spectacularly each time.
A group of senior apprentices walked by, their robes a cleaner, crisper grey than his. They saw his fizzling bolts and snickered.
"Look, it's the Walking Disaster."
"Trying to learn a real spell? He'll be at it all day and still won't hit the target."
"What a waste of space. He should just give up and go sweep the kitchens."
Their voices were sharp with derision. Su Yuan didn't even glance in their direction. Their mockery was a faint buzzing, an irrelevant distraction from the task at hand. He was in the zone, the hyper-focused state of a top-tier gamer grinding a crucial skill. The world outside his spell and his target ceased to matter.
*Cast. Analyze. Adjust. Cast again.*
His one hundredth bolt finally struck the dummy. It hit with a soft *thwack*, leaving a faint scorch mark no bigger than his fist. It was a pitiful amount of damage, but it was a success. He had found the baseline.
His five hundredth bolt hit the center of the dummy's chest. The form was still clunky, the energy still unstable, but he was building consistency.
His one-thousandth bolt was faster, tighter. It struck with a sharp *crack*, splintering the wood slightly.
Kael, the same brawny apprentice who had tormented the original Su Yuan, swaggered past with his cronies. He saw Su Yuan, sweat beading on his brow despite the cool air, his arm extended in the casting motion again and again.
"Still playing with sparks, Empty Vessel?" Kael sneered, his voice loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. "I heard you got lucky with some scroll. Don't think that makes you a real mage. Look at you. Trying to fill an ocean one drop at a time. It's pathetic."
Su Yuan's arm didn't waver. He completed the cast. The bolt, his one-thousand-and-first, slammed into the dummy. He ignored Kael completely, his entire being focused on the flow of mana, the feeling of the energy condensing in his palm. To him, Kael was just another non-player character with scripted, repetitive dialogue. Unimportant.
Seeing he was being ignored, Kael scoffed and moved on, looking for more entertaining prey.
Hours bled into one another. The sun reached its apex, beating down on the courtyard. Students came, practiced until they were drained, and left. Instructors led small groups through complex spell forms, their voices occasionally drifting over.
And Su Yuan remained. A fixed point in the shifting tides of the training ground. A living metronome of magical practice.
His ten-thousandth bolt was no longer a sphere. Through trial and error, he'd discovered that a more conical, arrow-like shape offered less air resistance. It was faster, more stable.
His fifty-thousandth bolt was silent. He'd refined the energy release to such a degree that it no longer wasted power on sound or excess light. It was a sliver of pure, focused force.
His one-hundred-thousandth cast was no longer a spell. The incantation was long gone, an unnecessary training wheel. The complex sequence of gathering, compressing, and projecting had become instinctual. It was no different than clenching his fist. The thought and the action were one.
He was no longer just casting [Mana Bolt]. He was deconstructing it, understanding its fundamental principles on a level its creators had likely never intended. He felt the push and pull of the mana, the precise pressure needed for optimal density, the exact rotational velocity that granted it perfect stability. He was rewriting the spell in the crucible of infinite repetition.
The sun began to dip towards the horizon, painting the sky in hues of orange and purple. The training grounds were once again deserted, save for him. He had been standing in the same spot for nearly twelve hours, casting the same spell hundreds of thousands of times without a single second of rest. It was a feat so monstrously impossible that no one would ever believe it.
He felt it then—a subtle shift. A final cog clicking into place. The barrier between his intent and the manifestation of the spell simply dissolved.
He slowly raised his left hand, a hand he hadn't used all day. He didn't focus. He didn't concentrate. He simply *willed* it.
A bolt of energy formed at his fingertip. But it was not the wobbly blue sphere from that morning. It was a thin, needle-like lance of crystalline white energy, no thicker than a knitting needle. It didn't hum or crackle. It was utterly silent, absorbing the ambient light around it, its very presence a violation of the evening calm. It radiated a cold, lethal focus.
This was his [Mana Bolt]. Forged through a hundred thousand failures and a universe of energy.
His eyes locked onto the practice dummy fifty feet away.
He released it.
There was no sound of casting, no flash of light. The air did not stir. The needle of white energy simply ceased to be at his fingertip and appeared at its destination. It crossed the fifty-foot distance in a timeframe so short it was effectively instantaneous.
There was no impact, no *thud* or *crack*.
For a split second, nothing happened. Then, a perfectly circular, cauterized hole, the exact diameter of the bolt, appeared in the ironwood dummy's chest. The bolt didn't stop. It continued on, unhindered, and struck the thick stone ward-wall behind the practice grounds.
*CRACK!*
The sound was sharp and violent, like a thunderclap right next to his ear. A web of deep fissures instantly spread out from the point of impact, and a shower of stone dust and magical sparks rained down. The powerful ward, designed to absorb spells from senior students, flickered violently, struggling to dissipate the focused, penetrative power of a single, perfected apprentice-level spell.
Su Yuan stared, his breath caught in his throat. He looked at his hand, then at the hole in the dummy, and finally at the shattered ward-wall.
This was the power of infinity.
It wasn't about casting the biggest, flashiest spells. It was about taking the simplest, most fundamental tool and sharpening it to an impossible, god-slaying edge through effort that no other being in existence could ever hope to match.
A slow smile spread across his face. It was a cold, confident expression that belonged to 'Void,' the archmage who had conquered worlds.
He had infinite mana. He had a lifetime of grinding ahead of him.
With a final thought, he summoned one of his daily items. A single, bent, rusty spoon appeared in his hand. He idly began to scrape some mud from his worn-out boot with its edge.
The gacha could give him trash. The world could call him trash. It didn't matter. With a foundation of infinity, he would polish the most basic skills into legends. Today it was a Mana Bolt. Tomorrow, it would be everything else.