Chapter 1 - Energy

The first difference, the most important difference, between my world and yours is the energy that you would be quick to judge as magic. Magic doesn’t exist here or there, and it’s just a fools word, but it’s used in your universe for fiction and in my universe for tricks of which resemble what you talk about in that fiction from yours. It’s not magic, even when we say it is, the adaptation of mana to what we now refer to as ‘spells’ is what I’m mainly referring to.

It’s strange, we’ve been the ones able to observe your world since the beginning of time, but you’re the ones who are immitating our abilities in your fiction, which in turn is why we do refer to them as ‘spellcasting’. It’s strangest simple because you’ve never been able to observe this mana manipulation but despite that you have at times got the concept captured impressively accurately. Of course, there are certain... disagreements between our reality and your fiction. For one, you have serious problems with agreeing on one single basis for the existance of magic, the basis meaning how it exists, how it’s used and how it works. There are far too many magic systems to name that work in your fiction, all to the same general effect but none of them exactly depicting the truth.

The truth is that mana is a product of certain chemical reactions that simply manifests as an energy, an energy that is essentially made of matter but attatches itself to non-material concepts. That’s probably a difficult concept to comprehend, but that concept itself, for example, could be where mana comes from. I don’t suppose that makes it any easier either.

If you believe in a diety, that belief could be used to manifest magic, and the chemical reations from within a person’s own body could allow that mana to be created, and this works the same way for enchanters, healers, elemenentalists, and any other kind of user of what you, and many others in our world in effect, would call ‘magic’. A chemical reaction, or a concept, could be one of many, many things, expecially when you consider that there are more chemical reactions than you take for granted, it has a much broader definition and encompasses melting and boiling and the reverse as an example. The most important reactions though, are quite simply the ones that take place inside the body because the conciousness needs to do a lot of work to establish a living being. That doesn’t mean that a conciousness beeds to be a living being, in fact it’s a common practice to make a conciousness so that it can sustain its own mana and be used as a source for it. A conciousness, might I add, has its own broader definition in this universe. Far too complex for me to explain though, it’s a valued knowledge known only by the most learned of scholars.

Scholars, for another subject, aren’t solely dedicated to the subjects that exist in your world because in this world, the universe in fact, mana exists everywhere ready to be observed and understood, so it can be used and so that it can simply be known, such as for defence which is always easier when you know what you’re defending against. It’s possible to learn enough about mana to ensure that you can cast a living conciousness on a shield and allow that conciousness to react with the environment in some way generating mana and using that mana to prevent any reactions from occurring near that shield, thereby making it almost impossible to cast ‘spells’ on that shield, or disallowing interatction with any kind of matter.

The only known use of that same ‘spell’ is an enchantment placed upon a stone that is present at the core of the planet used to cap the power of mana so that it can no longer brink the universe out of existance as has happened in the past near the beginning of the universe, but that’s ancient history and of no importance to you. The only people who care about the beginning of the universe are the scholars that specialise in the area, but since I’m not teaching you how to use it and I’m just giving you an overview, I’ll leave the creation stories to the religious. All that you need to know is that mana can be, has been, and will be used as an incredible source of power.