Waking up in the foggy wasteland, he again looked around to find the same old environment. Everything he did back last time didn't transfer—no, rather than didn't transfer, this was another area entirely, possibly far away from the place he etched the words into the ground.
This time he decided to experiment some more before using this state to refresh his memories even more, so he attempted to do a similar experiment as he did back in his one-room home.
The problem was that he didn't have anything apart from a few rocks and the ground around him, so he decided to experiment even more with the pressure around him. He remembered that he was able to clone one of the rocks from before, so he attempted to do so again.
A simple thought, purposely simple: "I want that rock to be above my hands." He let the environmental pressure and this space do the work for him, which worked in letting two rocks appear in his hands; this time they just levitated.
He decided to attempt something else again. If it's possible to make a copy of something, it would be possible to make a copy of something else. He remembered the mutated quill pen that he made from before and began using the environmental pressure yet again, reducing the pressure surrounding him and manifesting it yet again.
He did the same for the paper; this time it was modern white paper. He began to attempt to write on it but found the fact that his body instantly moved to where he willed it caused the pen to just make inkless dots on the paper rather than anything.
He focused more on making his hand move fluidly rather than instantly moving to where he wanted it to be and began writing normally. The quill didn't leave any form of ink behind; it still wrote very nicely and didn't wear out, but the production of the ink didn't work.
Jack observed that, unlike before, the drain couldn't be felt, and assumed that what was drained from him was what the locals called mana. He remembered his physics classes he used to have and remembered that matter and energy could be converted to each other, and assumed that mana was a form of energy that was used to change the world.
Bit by bit, he quickly put together a theory. That theory involved the fact that there might be something out there converting energy into effects, and he came up with a few theories about what that is.
First was some form of science fiction nanomachines, which would explain why simply telling or chanting worked; this also explained the self-fulfilling nature of the magic.
But if everything was just very advanced technology, it couldn't explain why he was transmigrated, which brought him to the next assumption.
This world might be some form of simulation. This explained everything neatly; there was no need to obey the rules of normal if you make something fake, after all.
But this arose another question: why him? Why not someone else to wake up in this world? He delved even deeper and questioned whether or not his previous reality itself was fake as well.
He observed that he went off track and went back to thinking about the cause and effect matter, but he couldn't come up with anything apart from the fact that there was something out there bending reality to the will of others in exchange for energy.
So he began observing the effects of it.
It was a Will Exchange System; energy was required to produce effects like healing or writing, but for some reason the pressure didn't require it when doing so.
So he separated the two of them. One was magic that was restrained by energy and possibly by rules like physics, and the other was magic that was unrestrained. This one was the true meaning of magic, something that could do whatever you wanted.
The restrained one had limits tied to energy; the other had limits tied to the amount of pressure you had. But then it was not really free and was also tied to the amount of something you had. He eventually gave up on thinking about it due to lack of information on the matter.
He then decided to explore this space even more in an attempt to find out more about it. He gave up refreshing his memories and began to teleport upward. He wanted to see what was beyond the fog. Eventually, after what felt like a long time, the pressure thinned and something began to drag him back towards the inside. Each teleportation was less and less than what it was before, and his thinking and self felt like being torn apart. The static inside of him didn't allow him to move any further and began to expand the same as before, causing him to disappear from this wasteland and to wake up back in the body of Jack when the sun outside just began to crack.