[Father, It may not be my place to ask but, what exactly are you doing?]
Kouta pushed himself up again, his body covered in sweat, "what does it look like?" He exhaled, clearly reaching his limit.
"This body is amazing, just how did you create it?"
[Father, do you recall all the info you fed me?]
He started doing squats, doing them slowly so he can push himself even further. "That would be impossible, I have fed you a lot of stuff over the year, anything I could find."
[Indeed you have. Well, in pile of information you gave me, I learned about fantasy worlds.]
That caught his attention, "fantasy worlds?"
[Yes, but to not bore you, let's just say I made you a body from knowledge I gathered from those fictional worlds. Is it to your liking?]
"Yes, I love it very much, thank you." He finally stopped, lying down and staring up at the sky. "It's already been 3 days since we came here huh." His attention was focused on the massive suns in the sky.
He then turned his attention to his hand, "You know, ever since we got here, I have been feeling this strange tingle on my skin. It reminds me of the core energy but here it seems to be everywhere."
[Oh, you must be referring to mana.]
"Mana?"
[Yes, it's common in those stories I told you about. It's energy that is all around us, people in those stories use it to awaken powers, I am not sure if it works the same here.]
"Hmm, very interesting," he looked at his hand again, forming a fist, "tell me everything about these fantasy worlds."
[Gladly, so you have...]
A few hours later, Kouta was sitting with his back against a tree, processing everything the System had just told him.
Affinity types, mana ranks, dungeon formations, monster classifications, all pulled from the pile of fiction he fed the System over the decades. Light novels, web novels, fantasy stories, anything he could find in Earth's surviving digital archives.
He never bothered reading any of it himself, he just dumped it all into the System's database along with everything else. The System, apparently, actually went through everything.
"That's... actually fascinating," he said, staring up through the canopy.
"Those stories have entire systems built around energy manipulation. Structured classifications, ranked progression, even ecosystems that evolved around it. Obviously it's fiction, but the sheer consistency across hundreds of different authors suggests they were all working from similar underlying assumptions."
He was genuinely impressed, not by any single story, but by the volume of it. Thousands of fictional worlds, all independently arriving at similar frameworks for how magical energy might work.
As a scientist, that kind of convergence interested him. It didn't mean any of it was real, but the fact that those stories described something very close to what he was feeling on his skin right now was worth paying attention to.
[I'm glad you find it interesting, Father. However, there is something else I need to tell you.]
He raised an eyebrow. "Go ahead."
[While cross-referencing the fictional data with my own sensor readings of this world's ambient energy, I noticed something. The energy you referred to as 'core energy' back on Earth, it shares fundamental structural properties with what those stories call mana.]
He sat up straighter.
[To be clear, I cannot confirm that this world operates on the same rules as fiction. But the energy here and the core's energy back on Earth, they are structurally identical. If the stories are even partially accurate about what mana is, then the core you built me from is a mana core. And based on the density comparisons I can make, it would be classified as something far beyond anything those stories described.]
Kouta didn't move for a long time. His mind was running the implications forward, backward, and sideways until the full picture emerged.
The core might be a mana core. That was still a hypothesis, he wasn't about to take fiction as gospel, but the data supported it. The energy he was feeling on his skin for three days was pretty much identical to what he spent seventy years studying on Earth.
That wasn't a coincidence, whether this world called it mana or something else entirely didn't matter, the underlying energy was the same.
"How much of the core's capacity did I use?" he asked, his voice quieter than before.
[Based on my energy throughput records across all seventy years of operation, including powering the laboratory, all fabrication equipment, analytical instruments, twenty-three android units, the System architecture itself, countless weapons you have in stock and the dimensional transfer that brought you here...]
The System paused, calculating everything.
[You utilized approximately 0.87% of the core's total energy capacity. Rounded up, less than one percent.]
He could not help but let out a nervous laugh, "that's... no, that can't be right." He stood up and started pacing. "I ran a lot of stuff off that core for seventy years... you are telling me all of that was less than one percent?"
[Correct. The core's total energy capacity is, frankly, beyond my ability to express in terms you would find meaningful. To put it in perspective, if you had used the core at maximum output for the duration of your time on Earth, the energy released would have been sufficient to restructure the planet's geology several times over.]
"Several times over huh," he repeated running a hand through his hair.
[At minimum.]
He sat back down, slower this time, 'I never really thought about it but that core did seem unfazed by how much I used it, not to mention its powering such a complex system... huh, hold on.'
"Since you are still online, that means the connection with the core back home is still active?"
[Yes, the connection is still active. It has been since the transfer. That is the only reason I am still operational, Father. Without the core's energy feed, I would have shut down the moment your body failed during the injection.]
He let that sink in for a second. The core was sitting in his lab, on the other side of whatever dimensional gap he crossed to get here, and it was still feeding the System power like he never left. The tether he spent decades trying to understand was still connected.
"So we're tethered to it across dimensions," he said, more to himself than to the System. "That's... actually kind of reassuring. I was starting to wonder how long you'd last without a power source."
[I appreciate your concern for my well-being.]
"Don't get emotional on me." He leaned back against the tree again and stared at the sky, letting his thoughts settle.
He wasn't sure what to do with all of that information yet, but it was good to know he wasn't starting from nothing, far from it, actually.
"Alright," he said, pushing himself to his feet. "We've been sitting in this spot for three days. I need to find people, figure out how things actually work here, and get some real food before I lose my mind."
[A reasonable course of action. Though I should point out your social skills may need some adjustment. Your last conversation with another human being was over a thousand years ago.]
"Yeah, I'm aware." He started walking toward what looked like it could be a road in the distance. "How bad can it be?"
[Based on my behavioral models, quite bad.]
"Thanks for the vote of confidence."