The next morning dawned gray and heavy, as if the sky itself hadn't slept.
Rebecca swept the bakery steps, but her eyes kept flicking toward the small, forested hill to the east — the same direction where the beast had appeared yesterday.
Nothing moved there now. Just mist.
But she couldn't shake the image of Lencar standing between that monster and her family, his eyes sharp and cold, like he had calculated the entire fight before it even began.
Inside, Lencar was cleaning the counter — not because it was dirty, but because he needed his hands busy.
His mind, however, was elsewhere.
The battle data replayed in his head in measured intervals. Every motion, every mana pulse, every mistake.
> Compression 98%. Displacement successful. Leak rate 0.6% above projection.
He opened his grimoire.
The pages glowed faintly — not golden like clover grimoires, but a dull silver-white, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.
He flipped to the section labeled [Replication Core: Type-Ω]. Dozens of runes and notes filled the page — equations that resembled both magical formulae and scientific blueprints.
He muttered, "Replication consumes structure… not energy. That's the flaw."
The data he had copied from Finral's magic — and from every grimoire before — existed in perfect form inside his own. But it wasn't infinite. Every replication reduced something unseen: the stability of the internal mana matrix.
In simpler terms — his grimoire remembered too much.
If he didn't find a way to offload data safely, it would eventually collapse under its own weight.
He looked out the window toward Rebecca and exhaled. "I need an anchor."
By afternoon, the village returned to its usual rhythm. The Magic Knights didn't come back, and the locals had decided the "monster" was just a strange landslide or wild animal.
Rebecca, however, hadn't stopped thinking about it.
She brought Lencar a plate of warm bread and honey. "You've been up since dawn," she said. "Are you always like this?"
"Usually," he replied, eyes on his notes. "I don't sleep much."
"I noticed." She leaned on the counter, watching him scribble complex symbols across parchment. "That doesn't look like a recipe."
"Research," he said.
"Research for what?"
He hesitated. "Mana replication limits."
She frowned. "Replication… like copying?"
"Exactly. I can replicate magical phenomena, but the cost scales non-linearly. If I keep pushing without compensating, I'll eventually destroy the original source."
Rebecca blinked. "That sounds… bad."
"It is," he said simply. "That's why I need to understand the structure better."
She tilted her head. "What happens when you copy too much?"
Lencar looked at her — the kind of look that weighed the value of truth against safety. Then he said quietly, "Something disappears."
That night, he tested it.
He went to the old construction site again — the same one where he had tested [Spatial Link] weeks earlier.
He set three objects on the cracked concrete floor:
A copper coin.
A rock.
A torn scrap of Rebecca's old apron (she had let him take it for "alchemy tests").
He opened his grimoire.
"[Spatial Magic: Fold]."
The air distorted. One by one, he teleported the objects ten meters away, watching for flaws.
The coin reappeared — slightly melted around the edge.
The rock reappeared whole.
The fabric, however… didn't reappear at all.
Lencar frowned. He repeated the cast. Same result.
The fabric simply vanished. Not destroyed — not burned — gone.
"Mana residue: zero," he muttered. "Spatial distortion: negligible."
He stood silently for several seconds. Then, slowly, he whispered, "So that's the paradox."
He sat down, opened his grimoire, and began writing furiously.
> Replication Principle Hypothesis: Each copied object shares a link to its mana pattern within my grimoire's internal structure. The moment I replicate or transport it again, the original pattern competes with the new iteration, resulting in quantum overlap. The weaker pattern is erased to maintain conservation.
In simpler terms — every time he copied something new, something old risked deletion.
He'd already experienced small signs of it: faint distortions in his early Wind Magic runes, symbols occasionally fading from pages he hadn't touched.
But this… this was proof.
He leaned back, staring up at the cracked ceiling. "Absolute Replication is flawed because it consumes its own record. To create infinitely, it must destroy equally."
He closed the book with a soft thud.
If he continued devouring grimoires at this rate, one day, one magic type would erase another. His own system would collapse under paradoxical self-consumption.
Unless…
He rubbed his chin, thinking of the word Rebecca had used yesterday — reversing things.
Reverse Replication.
He didn't fully understand it yet, but if the process could invert the link — allow duplicated data to give back the original pattern instead of overwriting it — then balance might be possible.
But he needed insight. And for that, he needed to see how natural mana handled coexistence.
The Heart Kingdom's rune arrays were based exactly on that.
He smiled faintly. "Looks like I'll be studying more than recipes soon."
Later that evening, Rebecca noticed he hadn't come back from his "research walk." She sighed, set down the broom, and walked toward the eastern field.
She found him sitting alone at the edge of the ruins, staring at a small metal plate etched with strange runes. His grimoire hovered beside him, pages turning on their own.
"You'll go blind if you keep staring at glowing pages all night," she said softly.
He didn't look up. "Testing stability."
She stepped closer. "You're not… planning to bring more of those monsters here, are you?"
"No." His tone was flat but not cold. "This is different."
Rebecca folded her arms. "You know, you could at least pretend to be normal once in a while."
"I'm not good at pretending."
"I noticed." She crouched beside him, looking at the metal plate. "What's that?"
"Rune anchor," he said. "It lets me measure feedback when I replicate a spell."
She frowned, tapping one of the runes. "This one's inverted."
He blinked. "You noticed that?"
She shrugged. "My mother taught me a little pattern work when I was a kid. That rune there — if you flip it, it changes the flow direction. Instead of storing energy, it reverses it back into the source."
Lencar froze.
Rebecca looked at him, confused. "Did I say something wrong?"
"No," he said slowly. "You said something right."
He stared at the inverted rune.
Reverse flow. Return of energy to source.
In magical theory, that was impossible — replication inherently drew power from the original, never the other way around. But if natural mana accepted inverse flow patterns… if he could integrate a feedback loop…
He could build a reversible replication cycle.
He stood abruptly. "Rebecca."
She blinked. "Uh… yes?"
"Thank you," he said. "You might've just solved the paradox."
She stared. "What paradox?"
But he was already walking away, muttering equations under his breath.
"Wait—Lencar! You're not even gonna explain?!"
He didn't answer. His mind was moving too fast. Every calculation, every failed experiment, every erased sigil — all of it aligned now.
If he could construct a second replication layer that allowed mana return, he could not only prevent erasure but also create dual-linked grimoires — each existing as a mirror of the other.
If one was destroyed, the other would restore it.
A system of endless creation — balanced by its own reversibility.
The first draft of Reverse Replication.
That night, back in his room, he wrote a single line at the top of a blank page:
> Spell Concept: Reverse Replication.
Beneath it, he drew the inverted rune Rebecca had pointed out, surrounding it with stabilizing formulas and directional arrows.
He whispered, "With this, I can return what I take. A perfect loop."
But even as he said it, a sliver of doubt crossed his mind.
> If every copy gives something back… what does it take instead?
He closed the book, uncertain. The light dimmed.
Downstairs, Rebecca and her siblings were laughing faintly — sounds of simple life, echoing through the quiet house.
He listened to them for a long while before whispering, almost to himself, "Don't get caught up in their peace. You'll have to leave again soon."
Still, he didn't move. For one night, he stayed.