Chapter 24 – Academy (10)
By the time morning training rolled around, I regretted every equation I'd tried to scribble in candlelight.
My eyes felt like sand. My mana channels still tingled from forcing flow through that stupid little copper coil. When Garen's whistle split the air over the training field, the sound drove straight through my skull like a spear.
"Line up!" he barked.
We shuffled into position.
Rion yawned wide enough to dislocate his jaw. Lyra was blinking in that way that said she'd stayed up reading. Tamara, infuriatingly, looked put together, although I could see the faint stiffness in her shoulders from yesterday's "not official" sword practice.
Garen walked down the line, hands clasped behind his back, sharp eyes flicking from face to face.
"You all look like you tried to fight the sun and lost," he said. "What did you do, stay up comparing mana cores with Staff brats?"
His gaze landed on me and lingered.
"Milton," he said. "You look worse than most."
"Couldn't sleep, sir," I said. "Nightmares."
His eyes narrowed, weighing whether that was an excuse.
Then he grunted.
"Good," he said. "Nightmares mean you still understand you can die. Hold on to that. Fifty push-ups. Then we run."
A collective groan went up.
By the time we finished the "warm-up," my muscles burned in a very real, very non-theoretical way.
As we ran laps around the field, Rion edged over to me.
"So," he panted, "nightmare, huh?"
"Mm."
"Monsters? Exams? Garen's face getting closer?"
"Bullet," I said, before my brain could lock my mouth.
He glanced sideways.
"Right. Old life," he muttered. "You know, one day you're going to tell me the full story and I'm not going to believe a word of it, and then some System window will pop up and prove you right."
"Probably," I said.
We ran in silence for a while. My breathing settled into a rhythm. Footsteps pounded the dirt. Somewhere behind us, Tamara and Lyra were arguing about something even while running, because of course they were.
The day's classes blurred together after that.
Sword drills.
Common arithmetic (pointless when you'd already done calculus in another world, but the Academy insisted).
A Staff campus guest lecture on "Basic Mana Control," which consisted mostly of a Tier Four mage telling Tier Zero students not to accidentally explode themselves.
By afternoon, my body was moving on habit, my mind somewhere else entirely.
Back at the whiteboard.
Back at the coil on my desk.
Back at the feeling of mana humbling itself to Maxwell.
During "Applied Natural Philosophy," the teacher droned on about levers and pulleys. I took notes out of reflex — diagrams, terms, the kind of thing this world considered cutting-edge mechanics.
But between lines, my quill wrote other things.
Mana potential difference.
Magical conductivity.
Coupling coefficient between mana and charge.
Once, in another lifetime, I'd have needed grant approval and lab time to even start on this.
Now?
Now I had a desk, a nail, some wire, and a System that seemed perversely interested in watching me struggle.
And, for the first time across *all* my lives, I had something else.
Time.
***
That thought didn't really land until evening.
After dinner, Rion wandered off to a card game. Lyra headed toward the library, mumbling about assignments. Tamara disappeared in the direction of Staff campus, probably to remind someone she existed by shouting at them.
I went back to our room.
The coil was where I'd left it, sitting on the desk among scraps of parchment. The mana crystal beside it was a little duller than before — discharged.
I sat down and stared at it.
In the first run… I wouldn't have been able to do this.
Back then, everything had been fire.
No System. No warnings. No soft "routes."
Just a boy named Erynd, born to a loyal knight and a dead mother, stumbling through a world that didn't particularly care if he lived or died. The Academy had been a blur of survival — trying to keep up, trying not to get crushed between noble politics and monsters beyond the walls.
There had been duels. Assassination attempts. That whole mess with the undercity the first time around. By the time I realized how much the Empire was rotting underneath the Emperor's crown, it had already been too late to do anything but fight and die.
The second run had been worse in some ways.
Knowing where some of the dangers were just meant I ran faster.
I'd spent it shoring up power early, grabbing every advantage, grinding strength like a madman in a game. I'd poured myself into swordsmanship, optimization, exploiting the System as hard as I could.
Science?
Equations?
Unifying mana and physics?
Those had always been on the "if I somehow don't die in the next five years, maybe I'll think about it" list.
Spoiler: I never got that far.
In every old regression, I'd been too busy tearing the world down or holding it up to ask how it actually *worked*.
Now, sitting in a quiet dorm room with a primitive electromagnet on my desk, I realized how strange this timeline was.
I wasn't being hunted.
The Emperor was still alive — and more than that, attentive.
Father was not a corpse, not disgraced, not missing. Viester Milton was out there in the city, still the man who had carved a Derivation into reality with his sword.
I had friends.
Annoying, loud, dangerous friends — but friends.
And for the first time, the noose around my neck wasn't tightening yet.
Not that danger was gone.
The world was still crawling toward some disaster. The Moon God-king cult would still be somewhere out there. The Undercity would still seethe.
But the rhythm was different.
There was space.
Space to run experiments that didn't involve stabbing something.
Space to look at mana and say, "You will obey at least *some* of my old rules," instead of just slamming it into spell forms someone else wrote centuries ago.
"I didn't have time for this before," I muttered. "Old me would be jealous."
Old me.
Old me'.
Plural.
Eren, the professor.
Erynd, the panicked first-run survivor.
Erynd, the over-optimized second-run monster.
Now Erynd-who-remembers, sitting in a children's bed with a candle and a nail, trying to stitch three lives together into something that might not die screaming.
[ System ]
[ Passive Effect: "Regression Memory" – Perspective Bonus Active. ]
[ Note: You are now explicitly aware that earlier loops never reached this point of research. ]
…Thanks, I guess.
I reached out, picked up the mana crystal, and rolled it between my fingers.
"Let's see how far we can push this before the universe notices," I said.
***
Instead of forcing mana straight through the wire this time, I tried something different.
On Earth, changing currents created changing magnetic fields, which in turn could induce currents elsewhere. Transformers, generators, wireless chargers — all just clever ways of making electrons dance in loops.
If mana really coupled to electromagnetism, then changing mana flow might create a changing electric field in nearby space.
In other words: magic that worked like an alternating current.
I closed my eyes and pulled mana into the crystal again, filling it until it hummed softly against my palm.
Then I held my other hand over the coil, fingers not touching, and pictured the flow not as a steady stream, but as a pulse.
On.
Off.
On.
Off.
A square wave, crude and choppy.
But it was a start.
I pushed.
Mana flowed… stopped… flowed… stopped… following the rhythm I set, bouncing between my core, the crystal, and my palm.
My channels complained.
A faint headache started behind my eyes.
I ignored both.
Instead, I focused on the space around my hand. On the hair on my forearm. On the tiny disturbances in the candle flame.
Nothing obvious happened at first.
Then, very faintly, the loose end of the copper wire lifted.
It bobbed up, down, up, in time with the pulses.
My skin prickled.
I grinned.
"Hello, induced field."
It wasn't strong. It was laughably weak, actually. But the pattern was unmistakable — mana oscillation in one loop was creating some kind of push on charges in the conductor nearby.
I grabbed a scrap of parchment and scribbled.
– Mana AC → Time-varying field.
– Field couples to charges in conductor → micro-current.
– Efficiency terrible. Need better focus, better materials.
If I could refine the control, I could:
— Charge objects at a distance.
— Jam or disrupt certain activation patterns in enchanted items.
— Maybe, *maybe* create spells that generated specific frequencies, useful for sensing or communication.
Magic radio.
The thought made me pause.
Communication in this world was mostly magic mirrors, courier birds, and very expensive long-range spells.
If I combined mana AC and some basic knowledge of modulation…
No. Slow down.
Baby steps first.
Don't invent radio before you figure out how not to fry your own nerves.
I let the mana flow ease and die.
The wire fell still.
My whole arm buzzed with a pins-and-needles feeling that reminded me unsettlingly of the time I'd accidentally touched an exposed connection in a lab and been thrown backward.
"Okay," I muttered. "So that's probably my limit for tonight."
[ System ]
[ Mana Circuit Theory – Progress: 12% → 19% ]
The percentage ticked up.
"Old regressions didn't have time for this," I said softly. "This one does."
And that scared me a little.
Because time was double-edged.
When you were always running, you didn't have to think too hard. You just reacted, did whatever you had to do to survive, collapsed at the end of the day, and did it again.
Having time meant I had room to ask dangerous questions.
Like:
*If mana and electromagnetism were linked… could someone exploit that on a large scale?*
Could you sabotage whole formations by inducing currents in their enchanted armour? Could you silently kill a mage by resonating their core at the wrong frequency?
Could *someone else* be doing that already?
What if the disasters in my past loops hadn't just been "mana anomalies" or "ancient rituals"?
What if they were badly designed magic machines blowing up reality's electrical grid?
I shivered, even though the room was warm.
"I really hope I'm wrong," I said.
Because if I wasn't, then the kind of threat waiting at the end of this regression might make the previous ones look like warm-up runs.
***
The nightmare didn't come back when I finally lay down.
No gun.
No lecture hall.
No bullet.
Instead, I dreamed of lines.
White lines on black, like chalk on dark glass. Some lines were straight. Some curled. Some looped back on themselves, forming coils. Mana flowed along them like glowing water.
Every time a line curved, a faint halo appeared around it — fields spreading outward, touching other lines, tugging at them.
Somewhere in the middle of it all walked a man with a sword.
Sometimes he was Eren in a lab coat.
Sometimes he was Erynd in training armour.
Sometimes he was something between both.
He walked along the lines, touching them, redirecting them, cutting some, strengthening others.
In the distance, something pulsed — a vast, ugly pattern of lines twisting together into a knot that made my teeth ache just to look at it.
I reached for it.
The knot pulsed back.
My eyes snapped open.
Darkness.
The faint glow of a dying candle stub on the desk.
"Right," I whispered to myself. "Sleep now. Panic later."
I closed my eyes again.
For the first time across all my lives, I fell asleep not just planning how to swing a sword harder, but how to redraw the laws that sword swung under.
Old regressions hadn't given me that luxury.
This one had.
Which meant, whether I liked it or not, I was going to use it.
After all—
If the universe was rude enough to give a physic professor a second chance as a regressor in a magic world, the least I could do was finish the equation I died halfway through writing.