The World That Runs on Mana

**Chapter 1                        **                           The World That Runs on Mana

Most people dreamed of saving the world. He dreamed of saving his SSD before it hit 100% capacity again.

It was 3:47 a.m. He hadn’t slept in twenty-nine hours. Caffeine had evolved from beverage to bloodstream. His desk was buried under sticky notes and ramen packets. A second monitor displayed an active auction for a rare collectible chess set, and on the main screen, a neural network simulation was just beginning its sixth iteration.

He should’ve gone to bed hours ago.

Instead, he was solving the Tower of Hanoi using a custom algorithm just to see if he could beat the standard time complexity.

He muttered to himself, slumped in his gaming chair, rotating a mechanical pencil between his fingers. “No girlfriend, no degrees, no job security—just freelance gigs and an unreasonably high puzzle-solving score on obscure forums.”

A soft ding came from his phone. Another side job.

|||

🧿 [Client: @TheArcanist]

Remote debug request – Enchanted Script Emulator crashing at Loop #13

3,000 yen equivalent, urgent

|||

“…Enchanted Script Emulator? What kind of bootleg mobile game is that?” he murmured, clicking the message anyway.

The files arrived with weird glyphs embedded in the code. Not Unicode. Not ASCII. Not anything.

He frowned. Opened his custom hex viewer. The file glitched for a second—actually glitched—before his entire screen went white.

No time to react. No error message. No blue screen. Just white. Endless and sterile.

"Huh... wait, What is happening??"

And then: Silence....

Until air returned, and color bled back into the world—only now, it wasn’t his cluttered apartment.

It was grass. And sky. And a sun hanging behind some clouds.

The clouds drifted slowly, unnatural in their symmetry. The grass swayed with a rhythmic hum—like wind tuned to a specific frequency.

He squinted.

No keyboard. No chair. Just soft earth beneath his boots. Boots? He looked down. Not his usual worn-out sneakers, but thick, black boots with reinforced soles and silver-lined seams.

A tunic draped over him—gray and matte, woven with hexagonal stitching, like an RPG character’s starter outfit if it were designed by someone who read too many technical manuals.

He crouched near a puddle, oberving that his physique and face is the same as usual. The only difference is his clothing style that becomes different. He ran his fingers through the grass.

“Definitely not a bootleg game.”

He stood again, slowly spinning on the balls of his feet, scanning the horizon. One sun. Pale. Slightly larger than Earth’s. The gravity was close. Wind resistance normal. He inhaled through his nose—no pollutants. Slight trace of iron. Ozone.

Far to the north, the land rose in jagged ridges. Rocky. Volcanic. To the east, dense clusters of trees, canopy glinting faintly like leaves dipped in crystal. West, open plains. Flat and dry. South—

There.

Just beyond a shallow dip in the terrain. A wisp of smoke. Thin. Controlled. Rising vertically.

He tapped his temple. “Smoke rises clean, not chaotic. No wind interference. It’s artificial. Cookfire or chimney.”

His eyes narrowed, the world dimming slightly as his focus sharpened. And then—click.

The Φ symbol ignited behind his right pupil.

His vision warped.

Not dramatically. Not like sci-fi scanner overlays. But subtly—vectors highlighted, light refracted more clearly, energy patterns emerging like faint brushstrokes on a transparent canvas.

he noticed the same strange shimmer in the air —like heatwaves. Some of it distorted more in some area and some just a little out of line. Especially when looking at living things, such as Plants, some insects and birds, their image is much more distorted and colourful than surrounding dead matter. "That means the living things here had something that could distorted my view quite strong. However it seems that i can activate this type of vision as much as i can. hmm.... very informative for the start." He murmured.

Then he narrowed his eyes, the Φ symbol humming faintly behind his right pupil.

The lines weren’t random. They followed consistent flows—looping, twisting, reconnecting. Symmetrical patterns embedded into motion.

Data.

He couldn’t explain it. But he could see it.

And he had none of it.

"Okay… so either I’m broken," he muttered under his breath, "or I’m so advanced this place hasn’t updated its drivers yet. Well, I hope this is the latter case. I've seen enough isekai that gives more suffering than happiness."

He sighed.

Twenty-nine hours awake. Thirty now, maybe more. The high from discovery was fading, and his body was catching up with overdue invoices.

He looked around the gentle slope of the grassy hill. Not a bad spot. Elevated. Clear sightlines. Not too exposed, but not boxed in. No nearby threats visible—not that he knew what counted as dangerous here.

He tugged at his collar. The tunic was breathable, at least. He patted down his pockets. No food. No water. Just the stone he picked up earlier and whatever counts as digital trauma from interdimensional transit.

Sleep first. He needed to rest. The brain needed cycles to consolidate all this new data. Sensory input was off the charts; he couldn’t afford to misread something just because he was hallucinating from exhaustion.

He gathered tall grass—sturdy, dry, and surprisingly soft when layered thick. He didn’t bother with a full structure, just a shallow dip in the land with a makeshift canopy made of woven stalks, supported by bent saplings.

It was primitive. It was lopsided.

It was… functional.

He laid back, hands behind his head. The sky above was starting to turn that weird desaturated violet that suggested nightfall here ran on a different wavelength.

“Field log, Day One,” he said to no one in particular. “Accidentally isekai’d. No mana signature. Visual overlay active. Surroundings stable. Potential village to the south. No hostiles yet. Unknown rules. Unknown laws. But…”

He closed his eyes, the Φ symbol dimming with his thoughts.

“…I think I can work with this.”

Sleep took him quickly. The kind of sleep that only came after sustained hyperfocus—a full system shutdown. No dreams. Just black.

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