Elara's hands moved with practiced grace over the central console, her fingers plucking at shimmering threads of light. "I'm trying to establish a diagnostic link," she murmured, her brow furrowed. "If I can sync the Nexus to your world's natural ley lines, we can stabilize the coordinate drift..."
Her voice trailed off. The holographic map of Earth, which had been flickering with a dull blue light, suddenly turned a cold, hollow grey.
"Akhtar," she whispered, her voice trembling. "The feedback is... zero. There are no ley lines. There is no ambient resonance. There is no mana."
Akhtar leaned over the console, his massive frame nearly eclipsing the light. "That's impossible. Even a dying world has a lingering pulse." He looked at me, his eyes wide with a new kind of fear. "Your world... it's a void?"
I looked at the grey sphere. To me, it looked like home, but to them, it looked like a corpse. "We have physics," I said, trying to bridge the gap. "We have electricity, gravity, atoms. We just don't have... whatever it is you use to light your sticks."
"This changes everything," Elara said, her panic replaced by a sharp, clinical intensity. "The reason the invasion is slow isn't because of our interference. It's because the monsters are suffocating. They are accustomed to breathing mana; on Earth, they have to carry their own 'oxygen' until the portals bleed enough energy into your atmosphere to make it habitable for them."
"So they're... struggling?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
The image of the port, the fire, and my father's face flashed through my mind. If these monsters were essentially holding their breath while trying to fight, then the "annihilation" I saw might not be the end. It was a beginning. A slow, agonizing crawl rather than a swift execution.
"Exactly," Akhtar said, his hand resting on the console. "On Avulum, a Lesser Drake could level a village in minutes. On your world, without ambient mana to refuel its lungs, it might only manage a single breath of fire before needing to retreat or weaken significantly."
Relief washed over me, cool and steady. It was the first bit of good news since the sky tore open. My father, the people on the shore—they had a window. It wasn't a large one, but in a war of survival, a window is everything.
"We don't just need to send a messenger," Akhtar realized, his voice dropping an octave. "We need to build a mage from scratch. You have no natural resistance to mana because your body has never touched it. You are a blank slate—a vessel that can be filled with a purity we haven't seen in centuries."
But that relief quickly sharpened into something harder. If the world was a "blank slate," and I was the only one here, then the responsibility wasn't just a burden—it was a weapon.
"You said I'm a blank slate," I said, stepping closer to the central summoning circle. The runes glowed brighter as I approached, as if sensing the void within me. "If Earth has no magic, then I don't have to 'unlearn' anything. I don't have to fight against the natural flow of a world that's already saturated."
I looked at my hands. They were trembling, but not from fear anymore.
"If I'm going to be the bridge, I don't want to just 'learn' magic," I told them, meeting Akhtar's gaze with a newfound intensity. "I want to master it before that 'mana-pressure' on Earth levels out. I want to be the reason those monsters realize they made a mistake anchoring to my world."
Akhtar looked at me for a brief moment then nodded and stepped toward a heavy iron cabinet, his fingers tracing a sequence of glowing symbols on the lock. With a low click, the heavy door swung open, revealing a single, translucent vial nestled in velvet. Inside, a liquid that looked like liquid starlight swirled with a slow, hypnotic rhythm.
"This is 'Refined Essence,'" Akhtar explained, his voice hushed. "It is mana stripped of its elemental properties—pure, raw potential. For an apprentice in Avulum, this would be a daily supplement. For you... it is a shock to the system."
Elara positioned her staff over the central circle, creating a shimmering containment field around me. "We need to see how your 'void' reacts. If you absorb it too fast, your capillaries could burst. If you don't absorb it at all, it will simply evaporate into the atmosphere."
I held out my hand, palm upward. My heart was hammering against my ribs—not just from nerves, but from a strange, magnetic pull. As Akhtar uncorked the vial, a scent like ozone and rain filled the small space. He tilted it carefully, letting a single, glowing bead of light fall toward my skin.
The moment it touched me, the world didn't just change—it inverted.
It didn't feel like a liquid. It felt like a needle of pure heat followed by a rush of absolute cold. I gasped, my lungs seizing as the energy surged up my arm. It wasn't just in my veins; it was in my bones, my nerves, my very thoughts. For a split second, I didn't see the laboratory. I saw a network of gold and silver threads connecting everything in the room—the glass vats, Elara's staff, even the stone floor.
I collapsed to one knee, my vision blurring. The "Sip" wasn't a drink; it was an awakening. I could feel the "void" Elara talked about—a hollow space behind my sternum that was screaming for more.
"He's not just absorbing it," Elara whispered, her eyes wide as she checked her diagnostic displays. "He's... consuming it. The mana isn't just sitting in his system; it's being integrated into his cellular structure."
I looked up at them, my skin still tingling with phantom electricity. The relief I felt earlier was gone, replaced by a cold, sharp focus. "Again," I rasped, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears. "Give me another."