Magical Power Training Method via Magnetic-Field Reversal

The nice stoat who knows my tastes sent Okutama a document compiling the magical power training method and the circumstances of its discovery.

I was grateful to read it, and found it quite interesting.

The Department of Mutation at Tokyo Magic University researches mutations in monsters and humans.

Immediately after the Gremlin Disaster, people whose bodies were electrically charged became witches or wizards. Some animals also began transforming into monsters. If the principles behind those mutations could be elucidated, it might be possible to artificially create witches and wizards or prevent animals from becoming monsters.

Conversely, there might be a way to restore people like the spider witch, who suffer from having become witches. The possibilities are endless.

Until now, however, the Department of Mutation had been rather overshadowed.

The Department of Gremlin Engineering had achieved remarkable results, creating general-purpose wands and inventing anti-backflow mechanisms.

The Department of Linguistics had also been remarkably active, not least with its various bypass incantations. The Nameless Epic and similar works were also enormous and important research topics.

The Department of Combat conducted military training based on practical data from security forces across the country, refining mage combat while producing dozens of skilled mages every year.

The Department of Monsterology had devised the A, B, and C classifications for monsters, advanced research into monster ecology, and delved into the beast-taming techniques brought by the Hokkaido Magical Beast Farm. Its importance was considerable.

The Department of Magical Medicine was extremely important. Its main focus was mushroom disease, but it also prepared response manuals for outbreaks of unknown magical diseases. Research into the medical applications of magic and monster-derived products had even helped me when I had appendicitis.

The Department of Mutation had not produced any particularly conspicuous results, but that was only because its work had not yet led to results. It had been steadily accumulating data all this time.

The discovery and practical application of the magical power training method was the culmination of that painstaking data collection.

The magical power training method was derived from three phenomena that caused a decrease in maximum magical power.

The first was a decrease caused by fainting from magical-power depletion.

The professor in the Department of Mutation was quite eccentric—and a little strange.

He was normal during lectures. However, any student who said they wanted to join his laboratory was given the trial of becoming a test subject once.

He said, "Anyone unwilling to become a test subject themselves has no business experimenting on other living things!"

What was that, some kind of bushido? That wasn't something a researcher should say... right?

Taking classes in the Department of Mutation was perfectly normal, but trying to join its laboratory meant clearing a very high hurdle.

At the Department of Mutation's laboratory, volunteer students who wanted to join were used as subjects in research into the principles behind fainting from magical-power depletion.

When all your magical power is used up, your maximum magical power decreases. What exactly happens then? Witches and wizards gained enormous amounts of magical power when they mutated. Therefore, a decrease in magical power must also be a kind of mutation.

After investigating by every method imaginable, they discovered that a magnetic field change occurred when magical power decreased through depletion-induced fainting. A weak magnetic force was emitted, centered on the head.

Magical power and gremlins are closely related to electricity.

And electricity is closely related to magnetism.

So it was entirely plausible that changes in magical power would be accompanied by magnetic forces.

Witches and wizards can perceive and control magical power, but they cannot perceive magnetism. Without the Department of Mutation's human experiments, the magnetic field changes accompanying a decrease in maximum magical power would never have been discovered.

The Department of Mutation's laboratory attempted to reverse this magnetic field change.

They reasoned that if they could apply, around the head, the reverse of the magnetic field change that occurred when magical power decreased, perhaps magical power would increase.

They quickly built a dedicated laboratory, gathered magnets, created a magnetic field in the room, and conducted an experiment in which one of the students was exposed to the reversed magnetic field change.

As a result, the student suffered terribly.

The student was hit with the full set of brain disorders: severe headaches, nausea, dizziness, hallucinations, reduced attention, aphasia, agnosia, memory impairment, and more.

The experiment had been brief, which helped keep the student from dying, but the student was left suffering from aftereffects.

It was a negative result, but a change had certainly been observed.

As far as the Department of Mutation was concerned, this meant they wanted even more data!

But the experiment was far too dangerous. The fact that the student had not died in the first experiment was pure luck. The professor of the Department of Mutation conducted a follow-up experiment on himself and was left paralyzed on one side as a result.

Professor Ohinata, the university president, also objected and issued an order against conducting excessively dangerous experiments. Apparently, he did not ban them too forcefully because the Department of Magical Linguistics had produced an appalling number of deaths from failed experiments in its early days. They could hardly criticize others for something they had done themselves.

The second phenomenon that caused a decrease in maximum magical power was gremlin implantation.

Implanting a monster gremlin in the body caused maximum magical power to decrease by an amount corresponding to that gremlin.

Unlike the fainting-from-depletion example, this decrease progressed slowly over several days, making it easier to observe what was happening.

Gremlin implantation also produced observable magnetic field changes, just like magical-power-depletion fainting.

However, the manner of that change differed from what occurred during magical-power-depletion fainting.

After a tug-of-war with the Department of Magical Medicine, the Department of Mutation secured a death-row inmate as a research subject and conducted a magnetic-field-reversal experiment. Numbness on one side of the body, visual impairment, fainting, cerebral hemorrhaging, and other symptoms appeared, and the subject died.

Because research subjects were difficult to secure and dangerous experiments could not be conducted without them, the troubled Department of Mutation spent some time analyzing the data it had obtained, building theories, and testing hypotheses.

The Department of Mutation's view was that something in the head was unquestionably deeply involved in increases and decreases in magical power.

The evidence was "magnetic field changes in the head," "magnetoreception," and "mushroom disease."

First, both magical-power-depletion fainting and gremlin implantation produced magnetic field changes centered on the head.

Next, humans possess magnetoreception in the head, allowing them to sense magnetic fields.

According to a paper published in 2019 by a joint research team from the University of Tokyo and the California Institute of Technology, all humans possess the ability to sense magnetism.

Magnetoreception—the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field—is found in many animals that travel long distances, such as migratory birds and salmon.

Humans possess this sense too, albeit in an extremely weak form. According to the paper, when an experiment was conducted on thirty-four men and women by magnetically stimulating their heads, their brain waves showed different responses depending on the direction of the magnetic force.

This reaction occurs entirely unconsciously and is so subtle that people cannot even realize they are sensing magnetism.

But without a doubt, humans possess a sixth sense located in the head—a magnetic sense unlike taste, touch, hearing, sight, or smell.

Finally, there was mushroom disease.

The mushrooms in the Mushroom Pandemic always grew on the head.

Every single one grew there—on the head.

There had to be a reason for that. During incantation, magical power was also always released from the mouth—in other words, from the head.

There had to be something invisible and important to magic in the head.

The Department of Mutation carefully verified its data and worked diligently on its theories, proposing numerous hypotheses, but there were simply too few cadavers! Magnetic-field-reversal experiments were too dangerous to conduct often.

As a result, research in the Department of Mutation advanced at a snail's pace.

Then magical power drugs and five hundred low-ranking Arataki-gumi prisoners were dumped into their laps.

The Department of Mutation went wild.

A third phenomenon that caused a decrease in maximum magical power!

A huge supply of test subjects they could use up without the slightest pang of conscience!

With this incredibly exciting new research material, the Department of Mutation immediately moved forward with dozens of experiments for which it had previously done nothing but develop theories.

They consumed a huge number of cadavers to compare the three phenomena that reduced maximum magical power and determine the rules governing brain damage during magnetic-field reversal.

This led to the establishment of a magical power training method that could increase maximum magical power by applying an appropriate magnetic field change to the head without causing brain damage.

According to the patterns discovered by the Department of Mutation through its tireless efforts, the magical power training method required two things: magnetic field changes and meditation.

The magnetic field change was produced with magnets. A person was put inside a coffin that had been stood upright and covered with a large number of magnets; the coffin was then slowly rotated at a constant speed. This provided the appropriate magnetic field change to the head.

However, the magnetic field change alone was insufficient. It increased magical power, but caused devastating brain damage.

That was why meditation was necessary.

Put simply, if you thought about anything extraneous during the magnetic field change, your mind would break down and you would die.

There were various neuroscientific explanations for this, but it also seemed to involve unexplained phenomena beyond the reach of neuroscience. The Department of Mutation had only managed to determine the part that amounted to, "We don't know why, but this works."

That was meditation.

You must not move during the magnetic field change, because the point from which the magnetic force radiates would shift.

And you must not think about anything.

You had to empty your mind. You had to enter a state of calming the mind without thinking about anything, known as "clear mirror, still water" or "the state of no-self."

If you disturbed your mind even slightly or thought about something, it would manifest in your brain and cause brain damage.

It sounded like a very demanding requirement, but anyone could learn this meditation through training, while some people could do it without training.

The high priest invited to the university as a meditation instructor entered a meditative state on his first try and increased his magical power without suffering even the slightest brain damage. The professor of the Department of Mutation also succeeded on his first attempt.

The students in the Department of Mutation's laboratory took different amounts of time, but they learned to enter a meditative state in roughly three to twenty days, and every one of them increased their magical power without suffering brain damage.

Even if the meditative state broke during magnetic-field reversal, headaches would gradually worsen as a warning sign of brain damage. If the process was stopped immediately after the headache began, no harm would result.

However, meditation did not allow one to avoid damage perfectly, so the medical recommendation was to leave an interval of twenty-four hours after each session of magical power training. Performing it consecutively increased the risk of brain damage.

In other words, magical power training was limited to once a day.

Magical power training required a properly constructed and operated magnetic field, and the Meditation Skill was essential as well.

It was not something just anyone could do easily.

However, with the proper equipment and the Meditation Skill, anyone could do it, even if it was difficult.

One magnetic-field reversal during magical power training could increase maximum magical power by 0.2K.

There was no individual variation in this figure. It was still unknown whether witches and wizards could increase their magical power, since nobody at the Tokyo Witches' Gathering could meditate. (Though someone had already started training.)

It was also still unknown whether there was an upper limit to magical power growth—in other words, a point where one could grow no further.

For now, all the students in the Department of Mutation had completed five meditation sessions, and none of them had stopped growing. It seemed safe to assume that anyone could increase their maximum magical power by at least 1K.

As a special case, it was known that beast tamers could not increase their maximum magical power with this training method. Instead, their implanted gremlins apparently grew slightly larger. It was an interesting phenomenon.

But if that was how it worked, I couldn't undergo magical power training. Doing so would require a troublesome procedure.

I had a fire-lizard gremlin implanted in the back of my left hand. It had been implanted in the best possible position, carefully placed so as not to interfere with the movement of my fingers. If it grew and changed size, it would affect my dexterity.

In theory, I could have the implanted gremlin removed, increase my magical power through training, and then have the gremlin implanted again. Apparently, one of the Department of Mutation's students—a beast tamer who raised Fukurozuzume—had successfully increased their magical power that way.

But while the gremlin was removed, my bond with the fire lizards would be severed.

I lost about 45K of magical power when my fire-lizard gremlin was implanted. At a rate of 0.2K per day, it would take more than half a year just to recover what I had lost.

There was no way I could go half a year without interacting with the fire lizards.

Who would feed them during that time? Who would polish their scales? I couldn't rub their soft bellies or go walking with them.

I couldn't bear it. Impossible.

Still, I wanted to learn meditation.

Using the materials Professor Ohinata sent me as a reference, I would make seven wands, use my abundant funds to buy magnets, and try building a meditation room at home. The magnetic lines with magical significance created by complex magnetic fields seemed like they might prove useful when making wands.

However, I probably would not increase my magical power through magical power training.

Humans have very little magical power. There are many spells that we can pronounce but cannot use because we lack the magical power to cast them.

The magical power training method was an unimaginably important discovery that could smash through that wall of limited magical power.

Now that the research had been published, magnetic-field-reversal mechanisms would be mass-produced, and the number of people who learned meditation would grow.

For now, safety had only been confirmed at the laboratory level, and all they had done was collect data.

If the more than two million citizens living in Tokyo began magical power training, the amount of data would increase dramatically, and new discoveries would surely follow.

Even if nothing else became clear, it was almost certain that anyone could increase their magical power by at least 1K.

In other words, people who until now could not even use the basic shooting-magic incantation "Fire!"—or, more accurately, "Aah!"—would be able to use magic.

Humanity had reached the point where everyone could use magic, as long as they trained.

It was the dawn of a new era.

Perhaps people who were ordinary until then would keep training their magical power until some of them acquired an astounding 10,000K of magical power! The thought made my blood run hot.

Since I effectively couldn't undergo magical power training, I wouldn't be able to ride this big wave.

But I might be able to do something for the people who did ride it.

I would think about whether I could create some new kind of magic wand by applying the theory behind magical power training...