Over these sixty blackouts, my control improved quite noticeably. I could release far more misty mana than at the beginning. Hold it longer. Move it more confidently.
There was progress. Slow. Painful. With regular loss of consciousness. But progress.
And recently, a thought visited me.
If misty mana exists… it's logical to assume there should be liquid mana too. And solid.
Why not? If it's a substance, it should have states. On Earth it's simple: the difference is energy and atomic structure. The problem is, I can't change either energy or structure. I don't even know whether mana has atoms. Maybe it's pure magical abstraction. Maybe it's a mathematical function pretending to be fog.
And yet.
If I can calmly release misty mana… why not just try releasing liquid? Or solid? Without deep understanding. On intuition.
The idea felt brilliant.
Right up until the moment of the experiment.
I focused. Imagined the mana denser. More compressed. More… liquid.
The next second, the world shut off.
When I woke up, the state was familiar: my head splitting, my body heavy. Pure mana exhaustion.
"Got it…" I muttered in my head. "Not enough mana."
Which, honestly, made sense. If you take water: when it turns into steam, its volume increases by roughly 1,600 times because of the distance between molecules. If magic obeys even some analogy with physics, then changing state is a question of quantity.
I let out a heavy sigh.
Please let mana not work like water, I prayed.
---
About… six hundred and sixty blackouts later.
Yeah. At some point I also stopped considering this normal.
Over that time, my mana volume grew dramatically. Looks like exhaustion really does work like strength training: tear, recover, get stronger. Not the healthiest method—but apparently effective.
On the one hundred and eightieth blackout, there was a sharp jump. My mana capacity literally spiked. No warning. No pretty effects. Just one moment where I realized I could release far more than before.
What caused it—I have no idea. A threshold? A development stage? The body's age? The bloodline?
No answers.
Despite the growth in volume, I still couldn't create liquid mana. I tried recently. The result was predictable: blackout.
But the larger reserve gave me another advantage: I could train longer.
And my control grew significantly.
To avoid getting stuck in a comfort zone, I started complicating the practice. I released more mana than at the beginning, split it roughly in half, and forced one part to take the shape of a circle and the other—a square.
Not a filled shape.
Just the outline.
That turned out to be much harder. If you fill the shape completely, mana naturally wants to settle into density. But holding only a thin line along the edge—
I only understood that through practice.
Somewhere around the hundredth blackout, I got bored of just "moving fog." That's when the idea appeared: switch from mindless repetition to targeted training.
First: simple 2D shapes.
Then: holding the form longer.
Then: reducing the outline thickness.
Sometimes I caught myself thinking I was enjoying not the blackout, but the control itself. The sensation of chaos obeying.
Once I moved from the meaningless "release—wiggle—black out" to deliberate practice, my control started growing much faster. Which makes sense: if you're going to suffer, you might as well do it with a plan.
By around the five hundredth blackout, I was consistently holding outlines, not filled silhouettes. Thin mana lines no longer smeared out after a second. They trembled, yes—but they no longer behaved like jelly on a vibrating table.
And by the six hundred and sixtieth, I'd reached an important conclusion: multitasking in magic might be the key—or at least part of it.
If I can split mana into two equal parts and hold two different outlines at once, then sooner or later I'll be able to do three. Then four. Then ten.
I started splitting the flow in half and forming different shapes: circle and square, triangle and hexagon, spiral and… something that looked more like the scribbles of a nervous architect.
Minimum plan: get the number of independent shapes up to at least ten.
I wonder what the standards are in this world. If they teach arithmetic from six months, maybe by age three kids are already doing differential calculus?
Though honestly, comparing myself to locals is probably unfair. My body is clearly valuable. Either they want to turn me into a potion… or a genius.
Great options.
But today something happened that mattered more than all my training.
I felt a change.
Like a switch clicked in my head. The "thought → speech" connection suddenly became… available.
I cautiously opened my mouth.
"Ah…"
A sound came out.
I froze.
It was both familiar and strange. Speaking is natural. But after a year of silence, your own voice feels like a new ability.
I was happy. Genuinely happy.
And then a question immediately followed:
Who am I even supposed to talk to?
The nanny hadn't come in for ages. She didn't need to—I fed myself with that strange plate. Nobody appeared. Nobody checked on me.
Wait.
She said a year and a half and Level Three.
So… if I can talk, the body is about a year old.
Which means I've been training for a year.
A year in a windowless room.
A year of blackouts.
A year with the equation "2 - 1 =."
I looked at the blocks.
The equation still read:
2 - 1 =
After a year.
Did they really just… wait?
I snorted.
"Well then."
I quickly slid the block with the number 1 onto the green area.