*(A/N: I rewrote this chapter on 12.08.2023, so the paragraph comments before that date have unfortunately been lost. For your information.)*
I was excited in front of the majestic building. My heart was literally racing but I quickly entered through the entrance.
People in scrubs were everywhere. They were in enough of a hurry to make me wonder what was happening, but I ignored them and so I approached the reception desk. I waited in a fairly short queue and when it was finally my turn, I was greeted by a very pretty lady.
"Hello, what are you here for?"
"To prove a theory."
The receptionist looked at me with one eyebrow raised at my words. Honestly, it was not difficult to understand what she was thinking. Judging by the strange clothes I was wearing… I didn't look like a smart person to 'prove a theory'.
"What was the theory you were going to prove?"
I smiled slightly at the question.
Ah... I just realized that I've been smiling really often since I came to this world. Lunerra must really be where I belong.
I slowly handed her the file I had been holding, then spoke calmly.
"The processing of information into mana."
As the words left my mouth, the receptionist looked at me and the file I handed her with widened eyes. This was exactly the reaction I was expecting.
"Excuse me, are you aware of what you are saying?"
"Yes."
After studying me for a few seconds, the receptionist took the file in my hand and began to skim through it quickly.
With every second that passed, her eyes narrowed and her expression became more serious. It took her five seconds to close the file after opening it. She gave me one last glance, then motioned for me to wait and went to the back of the lobby with my file.
The staff had a short conversation among themselves and the employee who was to replace her had the same reaction when she heard what I had come to prove.
Well, it's quite normal for them to react like that. Because although the number of qualities that can be transferred to mana is quite diverse, what we call 'information' is at a different point.
For example, someone has given mana the quality of flame. In this case, mana imitates the characteristics of a flame and turns into it. In other words, the person has in a way reproduced the flame by using mana; in a way copied it.
So, what is 'information' apart from this? Information is quite different from 'flame', which has certain characteristics. For example, the fact that flame is hot is a characteristic of the attribute of flame, but apart from that, if the knowledge of 'heat' can be imprinted in mana, then whatever the mana imitates, it will be hot.
In other words, instead of giving the mana certain properties, such as water, air, or flame, one can directly imitate a completely unique attribute by imbuing it with properties that are determined by one's own imagination.
When you think of the combos you can do with it, the things you can do with it as long as you have enough mana capacity... It's really quite fantastic.
Of course, it's really 'fantastic'. That's, unfortunately, the case even here.
"I want to warn you from the beginning, if you're making a joke, it's best to turn around."
"No, I'm not joking."
I kept my stance, and the woman hesitated for a brief moment. I think she thought I was crazy or something, but I didn't really care.
After a slight sigh, the employee told me to follow her because of some security measures. Together we went upstairs, through the complicated corridors.
First of all, there was a significant decrease in the number of people around, and the people we saw now were wearing white coats and looked exactly like scientists. So, I couldn't help feeling like I was heading toward a place where I was forbidden to enter.
But why was I grinning even though I felt this way? Because seeing this environment that I had seen in the game before, now in first person, felt so different, so exciting, that if I didn't hold back, I might have shivered in a way that people could easily recognize.
"Please come in and wait. Your documents have to go through a verification first. So, you have to wait a little bit."
I only realized that the employee was addressing me after I had passed him a step or two.
Seeing me absent-minded in a place like this, coming here for such a purpose, made her look suspicious.
Well, I can't be unfair to her. If I were in her shoes, I would have found myself quite suspicious too.
"Sorry, the building is so beautiful that I got distracted."
After what I said, the employee looked at me even more strangely.
I'm sorry but I don't see things like that all the time... So please stop looking at me like that, I feel like a tourist.
I ignored the employee's stare and entered the room.
It was a small room, but it was one that I would have no problem waiting in because it was small but very full, from a holographic television to a table with treats on it.
So, imagining the hustle and bustle in the background and the chaos that was probably caused by me, I smiled and let myself fall into the armchair in the center of the room.
*******
An hour and a half... I waited for almost an hour and a half in this small room inside the building, and finally, especially when I saw the receptionist I had seen when I first entered the building, I knew it was time.
"Your files are still under review, but Lab Management would like you to submit an oral defense with these files. Please follow me."
Heh, I knew it. That's what I was waiting for.
"Sure."
I got up from the couch, which was almost too comfortable for me to leave, and followed the receptionist, just like when I first came here.
We passed through the intricate corridors once more, and this time we arrived at the door of yet another room. But the door to this room was different from any door I had ever seen. It was more... technological, big. It clearly led somewhere important.
We entered the room slowly.
The room behind the door, was literally a huge lecture hall. The first things that caught my eye were a stage with a huge digital screen in front of the ever-increasing rows of desks, and adults excitedly settling into the seats as if they had just arrived.
Each of them had their eyes on me, of course, but I didn't pay much attention to them. At least not yet.
But I could feel my blood boiling again at the same time because I was going to give a detailed talk in front of so many people about 'magic', one of my favorite things in life. That's why I repeated a few things in my head.
Calm down Aiden, calm down... You have been here before in the game, even if it was for a different purpose. You've lived the same scene, even if it was on a computer screen. Calm down and let your knowledge speak, and then get rich.
I walked as calmly as I could in front of the digital board and stood on the dais and waited.
*******
It didn't take long for the lecture hall to fill up. As I waited, more and more adults came in, each of them frowning as they saw me and taking their seats with an uneasy expression.
Of course, their uneasiness would only last until my presentation and theory were revealed. What would these scientists, who were trying to crush me with scorn, do with what I was about to tell them?
About ten minutes after I entered the lecture hall, when almost all the desks seemed to be filled, the digital board, which had been closed until now, suddenly opened and lit up. Then I saw the employee nodding at me from behind the seats and I took a deep breath.
A huge group of the most senior people in the building, no... on campus, are watching me right now. If I screw up here, there's a chance I could even get kicked out of the academy, but I'm confident. After all, I didn't come up with this theory out of thin air, and what I'm about to tell these people will be known almost six months from now.
"Ahem..."
After I coughed to draw attention to myself, all the adults chatting among themselves fell silent, all the eyes in the lecture hall focused on me and I was now the center of the stage.
"Dear seniors, I'm not very good at explaining myself, so I'll get straight to the point, assuming you've already heard why I am here."
I don't want to aggravate the atmosphere by messing up something I'm already not good at, so I approached the digital board directly and wrote two words on the screen first; Information and Attribute.
"The attributes we can transfer to mana are quite a lot."
I pulled down an arrow from the word qualities and wrote the most familiar attributes such as flame, water, air, earth, and electricity.
"All these attributes are things that already exist in nature, and we define them as 'attributes' because of all the properties they contain. For example, flame is an 'attribute' that is hot, amorphous, can spread when the necessary conditions are met, and has tons of other chemical and physical properties."
I took a step forward, cooled my gaze, and became calmer, because if I showed any weakness in front of these people, then they would try to exploit me. So I had to show them that I wasn't just someone who could talk, but someone who was tough and grounded. That was the only way I could take my first steps toward the future.
"Everyone already knows that when we use a skill through the system, the mana is actually processed and qualified by a rune created by the system."
I minimized what was written on the digital board and then wrote 'rune' in capital letters on the screen.
"So, what are runes? How do they work so that mana can imitate any matter, form, or energy in the universe, with or without shape, by passing through these runes?"
With my words, the eyes of everyone watching my presentation widened.
The environment I had aimed to create at the very beginning was slowly emerging. The general topic of what I was going to talk about today might have been 'the processing of information into mana', but there were actually a few other things I was planning to talk about, the most important of which were the runes.
Maintaining my calmness and composure as much as possible, I started drawing patterns on the screen. Lines, connections, and symbols that looked like calligraphy combined with each other to create a 'rune' that no one has ever been able to decipher but everyone knows what it is.
I pointed to the rune, which had taken me about six minutes to draw perfectly with the touch pen, and turned back to the crowd.
"This is the rune of the flame attribute that everyone knows. When it is engraved on an item, we transfer mana to it and the item catches fire, we engrave it on a campfire device and one can start a fire just by transferring mana from one's body to it. So, what does this rune actually mean?"
I drew an arrow from the rune to the side and this time I opened the connection points of the rune a little more and drew it wider.
"This is a flame rune, just like the one I just drew. Of course, it's a bit inefficient because the connection points and the path of the mana are longer, but in the end, we can still use it as a flame rune."
I drew an arrow from the second rune I drew and redrew the same rune again, this time opening the connection points further.
"This is also a flame rune, but I doubt anyone in the world uses it. It is extremely inefficient, and no matter how much mana we pour into it, it will produce a very small amount of flame, but I want you to pay attention to something else."
I crossed out six of the connecting points of the rune I had drawn and then circled and highlighted the area between the points, then erased all the rest of the rune and made sure everyone paid attention to this motif.
"It's a completely meaningless motif on its own that you can't see anywhere else... Right?"
No one broke the silence, so I kept talking.
"But let's open up these intertwined lines a bit more."
Without erasing the motif I had drawn, I made the lines a little more 'straight' instead of meandering, so that now there was another motif on the board, a combination of strange geometric shapes.
"It seems pointless, you all think it's useless. And you are right... As it is, no matter how much meaning you put into it, you will get exactly 'nothing'."
I took a breath and looked at the people listening to my presentation. They were all looking at me and the board with great interest.
"Let's leave this here for now and move on to something else."
I dragged the shape I had drawn with my finger to the edge of the board and started drawing the rune 'electricity' this time.
One by one, I applied each of the operations I had just applied to the flame rune to this rune and the result was again a strange interweaving of geometric shapes.
But unlike last time, when I did this, all eyes widened. Some of the adults, who had been sitting quietly until now, reflexively stood up. Because the part I had just circled and the part I had just removed from the electric rune were identical.
"The flame rune and the electricity rune both signify different attributes. They both transform mana into different energies and forms, but when we separate them with a method I have just discovered, a certain shape emerges."
I turned my back to the adults without compromising my expression or demeanor. I continued as if I didn't care about them at all.
"Now, you may think that this similarity is a coincidence. You can say that he found something and that he is shaking it to make money. Because even if we find this similarity, we still don't know what it means."
Of course, 'they' didn't know... For me it was different and now I was going to prove it to them.
"Well, let me tell you what this motif is. This motif indicates the state of matter that the mana will imitate: plasma."
The expressions became even more bewildered, the eyes even wider. I could feel it even with my back to them, but I continued.
"Technically, it is a language, and I discovered it, and I named it 'The Language of Mana', which I think is quite aptly descriptive, but if you approach what I discovered as a language, you would be making a mistake. Because this language does not contain any letters, words or sentence structure."
I paused a little to catch my breath.
"We should take the intertwined images of these geometric shapes not as a letter but as a 'meaning'. For example, these two motifs on the board… I just told you that these two mean 'plasma'. But this 'plasma' is not a combination of what we call 'letters' in words. On the contrary, this motif itself is 'information' in itself, which means 'plasma'. You can think of it as a kind of filter."
So I finished the first half of my presentation. I had more to say, but the topic of 'processing information into mana' ended here. Because whatever 'information' was, it could not be processed into mana on its own.
I was sure that everyone here understood what I was saying because just a few minutes ago I had said that if you give this motif mana on its own, nothing will happen.
"This is actually the end of the presentation, but I would like to continue with the runes."
The silence in the room had already given me the approval I needed.