Yuki made himself a schedule. It felt stupid — no one was grading him, no one was watching, and he didn't even have a way to track time beyond the sun's position — but he needed structure. Without it, he'd either spiral into existential dread or spend all day launching fireballs at dead trees, and neither of those was productive.
Morning: elemental basics. Afternoon: physical training. Evening: review what worked and what didn't. Repeat.
He started with wind because it was his most reliable element. Palm out, mana flowing, air moving. He could do it in his sleep by now. The problem was that "moving air" covered everything from a light breeze to a concussive blast, and he needed to be able to hit any point on that spectrum deliberately.
So he drilled.
He set up targets — dead branches stuck upright in the dust at varying distances. The goal was simple: knock over the closest one without touching the one behind it. Focused wind. Controlled range. No collateral.
He failed for two days straight.
Every gust came out too wide. He'd topple the target and three branches behind it. Or he'd overcompensate and produce a puff of air so weak it barely rustled the dust. There was no middle ground. It was either a cannon or a cough.
This is like trying to write calligraphy with a fire hose.
The breakthrough came when he stopped thinking about power and started thinking about shape. Instead of pushing a mass of air forward and hoping it stayed focused, he pictured the wind as a thin line — a needle of compressed air, narrow and precise. He wrapped mana around that image and released it.
The front branch snapped sideways. The one behind it didn't move.
He punched the air. Literally. Then felt embarrassed about it, despite being completely alone.
After that, he applied the same principle to everything. Fire wasn't just "make heat" — it was a specific shape, a specific size, at a specific temperature. He practiced holding a flame the size of a marble in his palm. Steady. Unwavering. No growth, no flicker. It took a week before he could maintain one for more than a minute without it either guttering out or blooming into a bonfire.
Water was the most tedious. There was no water source in the dead zone — everything had dried up during the chain reaction. He had to pull moisture from the air itself, condensing humidity into liquid one drop at a time. It was slow. Agonisingly slow. Like wringing out a dry sponge and hoping for results.
But it worked. Drop by drop, he learned to gather water, shape it, hold it. He made a sphere of water float above his palm — wobbly at first, then smooth. He could heat it to steam or cool it to ice. He could stretch it into a thin stream and direct it like a hose.
Not exactly combat magic. But if I'm ever stuck without a water source, I won't die of thirst.
Earth was the hardest. Stone didn't want to move. It was heavy, dense, and stubborn — every manipulation cost three times the mana of the equivalent air or fire spell. Raising a wall of rock felt like arm-wrestling the planet.
But the cost didn't actually matter. Because his mana was, for all practical purposes, bottomless.
He discovered this during week two.
He'd been running drills all morning — wind lances, fireballs, ice spikes, stone walls, one after another, cycling through elements as fast as he could. An endurance test. He wanted to find his limit, figure out how long he could sustain heavy output before he ran dry.
An hour passed. His mana didn't dip.
Two hours. Still nothing. The reservoir in his chest felt exactly as full as when he'd started.
Three hours. Four. Five. He was launching spells continuously, burning through mana at a rate that should have been draining him. But every time he spent energy, ambient mana from the air flowed in to replace it almost instantly. Like trying to empty a bathtub with a cup while the tap was running full blast.
By hour six, he stopped. Not because he was depleted — he wasn't, not even slightly — but because his arms were sore from the physical motions and he was hungry.
He sat in the dust and ran the math in his head.
Six hours of continuous high-output casting. No measurable depletion. Ambient mana replacing everything he spent in near real-time.
I can't run out.
The thought should have been thrilling. Instead it sat in his stomach like a cold stone. Because if he had functionally infinite mana, then the only thing standing between him and catastrophe was his own self-control. There was no safety valve. No point where his body would simply run out of fuel and force him to stop. If he lost control — like he had during the chain reaction — there was nothing to limit the damage except his own ability to shut it down.
Great. Unlimited power, zero guardrails. Every fantasy protagonist's dream and every rational person's nightmare. Maybe it's a blessing that I ended up stranded in the middle of the forest. If I had arrived in a city, I would be sitting in the middle of a massacre.
He doubled down on precision training after that. The goal wasn't "how much can I do" — it was "how little can I do." Minimum effective force. The smallest flame. The gentlest breeze. A pebble lifted one centimetre off the ground and held there, perfectly still, for an hour.
It was boring. Mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly boring. He missed his phone. He missed music. He missed having literally anything to do besides sit in a dead wasteland and practice making tiny flames.
But it worked. Slowly, over weeks, his control tightened. The gap between intent and result narrowed. He stopped overshooting. A flame the size of his thumb stayed the size of his thumb. A breeze strong enough to cool his face didn't escalate into a windstorm. He could move a single pebble without disturbing the dust around it.
Progress. Ugly, tedious, unglamorous progress. The kind that actually matters.