Sougen didn't bother with theatrics when he began the explanation. He stood beside the central circle, hands clasped behind his back. "Projection, or Gradation Air, is the magecraft of creating an object from prana," he said. "Not truly creating something from nothing, mind you. What you produce is a temporary imitation shaped by your understanding of the object itself." He stepped closer, tapping a knuckle against a wooden practice sword resting on the desk.
"To project something, you must know it completely. Its shape, its weight, its materials, even the purpose it was crafted for. With that knowledge fixed in your mind, you force prana into that image until it manifests as a usable copy. Most magi fail because their imagination is sloppy. Their projections crumble because the concept behind them is incomplete."
He moved past Kakine, straightening a sheet of parchment as he continued. "This is why Projection is taught early. It trains visualization, control of prana flow, and mental precision. But do not misunderstand. Most projected objects are weak and unstable. Without reinforcement afterward, they are barely more than illusions made solid for a moment." Sougen's gaze sharpened on him.
"Projection is one of the most basic spells in modern magecraft," he said, while projecting various materials. "Despite how flashy it looks to beginners, it is rarely used for anything grand. At best it is a convenience. A mage might project a lost key, a broken tool, or some simple object needed in a ritual. Anything more complex falls apart almost immediately, and anything valuable is useless because a projection lacks true substance."
Kakine nodded and raised his hand, calling up an image in his mind. A small wooden block flickered into existence almost instantly, followed by a thin metal rod and then a smooth ceramic bead. He didn't struggle with the spell at all. Each item appeared cleanly, shaped by the precision of his imagination. But when he tightened his grip, the wooden block cracked apart like a hollow shell, and the bead crumbled to dust the moment it tapped the floor. Kakine frowned, projecting another object only to watch it fracture just as easily. The spell felt effortless, but the fragility irritated him to no end.
Before Kakine could attempt another projection, Sougen raised a hand, stopping him. "That's enough for now. There's another spell you should learn, one far more useful than Projection despite its quirks." He reached into a drawer and pulled out an old fork, placing it on the desk. "Flash Air. It is a spatial displacement spell. You take the space occupied by one object and replace it with another. It's fast, effective, and sometimes the only way to defend yourself when you have no time for proper magecraft."
Sougen traced a short pattern in the air, and the prana around his fingers shimmered. The fork vanished with a faint snap, replaced by a chipped porcelain shard that hadn't been on the desk a moment before. Kakine leaned forward with curiosity burning behind his pupils, until he noticed the condition of the objects.
The porcelain was dull and cracked, as if it had aged decades in an instant, and when Sougen retrieved the fork from where the shard had been, it looked just as ruined. Rust bloomed across its surface, the metal pitted and weak. "This is the flaw," Sougen said, turning the corroded fork in his hand. "Flash Air disrupts the structure of anything you displace. The longer the distance or the larger the objects, the worse the degradation. It's a tool of last resort or sharp improvisation, not something to rely on carelessly." Kakine watched the ruined fork crumble slightly between Sougen's fingers.
Sougen set the ruined fork back on the desk with a faint clink, his gaze lingering on Teitoku for a moment longer. "That will be enough for today," he said quietly. I'll let you practice more, but that's all I have left to teach you for now.
Kakine Teitoku eyebrows lifted in surprise. The lesson was rather short in its entirety, but he decided not to dwell on it.
When Sougen finally stepped out of the study, the door shutting softly behind him, Teitoku remained still for a long moment. Projecting wood, metal and stone had come effortlessly. But this wasn't something the world recognized. This was something outside it.
Dark Matter, Kakine's original power, was never a substance the world allowed to exist. It was not antimatter, nor any material found in physics. It was matter that obeyed its own rules, created from concepts and laws that simply did not belong to this universe.
Every property of it, its mass, its movement, the forces acting on it, followed Kakine's personal logic rather than the natural laws that governed everything else. It was matter that the world could not categorize, could not stabilize, and could not accept. Because of that, reality would constantly try to erase it the moment it appeared, like the world's immune system attacking something foreign and impossible.
A glowing, milky-white mass materialized above his palm, swirling with an unnatural radiance. Its surface twisted and folded in ways that defied geometry, constantly rewriting itself. The moment it appeared, Teitoku felt his circuits flare violently, every single one of them igniting, straining, pouring out prana in a desperate attempt to hold the projection together.
It was not his technique that was unstable. His technique was flawless, precise in every way and executed with perfect control. The problem was the world itself. Projection magecraft creates an imitation using prana, shaping it into the concept of an object, but the result is always temporary.
The moment a projected object appears, the world begins correcting it, treating it as an error that needs to be brought back into line with the laws of nature. The more complex or unnatural the object, the faster that correction happens. A projected knife might last minutes before weakening. A projected gemstone might crack within seconds. But something like Dark Matter, something that has no place in the natural order at all, deteriorates instantly. The world tries to erase it the moment it exists, pulling at its structure until the projection collapses in on itself.
Hairline fractures formed in the air around the mass, tiny distortions that made the study's walls warp like heat haze. The projection buckled, recoiling as the world tried to tear it apart from every direction. Teitoku's body trembled with the effort of sustaining it, his circuits screaming without actually injuring him, exerting themselves far beyond anything meant for a novice.
He grit his teeth. "Just hold still."
The white Dark Matter pulsed violently, then convulsed like a dying star. The strain clawed at every circuit he had, and he knew he could not keep it intact any longer. With a sharp breath he released his grip on the spell and dismissed it.
The white Dark Matter collapsed at once, dissolving into a cloud of shimmering prana dust that scattered across the room like pale snow before fading into nothing.
Kakine Teitoku frowned in his grandfather's workshop. How was he supposed to recreate Dark Matter when the world rejected it the moment it appeared. His projection technique was flawless, yet the substance itself was something reality refused to tolerate.
In Academy City his Dark Matter had functioned because a Level 5's power rewrote the world around them, forcing reality to comply with their personal interpretation of physics. A personal reality was the ability to impose one's inner logic onto the external world, even if only for an instant. But here, without the esper system to support him, all he had was magecraft.
There were times like this where he had to give Aleister Crowley his props, even though he despised the man with every fiber of his being. For all of Crowley's manipulation, cruelty, and sheer arrogance, Teitoku could never deny the man's intellect. Aleister had understood things about systems, about power, about bending the rules of the world, that most people could not even begin to grasp. He had built an entire city on the idea of forcing personal logic onto reality, layer by layer, experiment after experiment.
Teitoku hated him, but there was no denying how smart and ambitious he was.
And that goes without talking about Tree Diagram and the countless hours I spent staring at its predictions back in Academy City. A supercomputer that could calculate futures, predict lives, model entire wars.
Kakine leaned back in the creaking wooden chair, fingers drumming lightly against the desk as his thoughts drifted. If personal reality was impossible for him now, then he needed something that could mimic it, a space where the rules were different and he could perform experiments without issue. A place where the world's correction couldn't reach him long enough to stabilize Dark Matter.
Magecraft didn't have anything like the AIM diffusion fields, nor the City's layered systems of feedback loops and reality anchors. But it did have one thing that came close.
Bounded fields.
He'd only skimmed the theory so far, but from what he could pick up, bounded fields were rings of magecraft woven into a space, reinforcing it, isolating it, overlaying a mage's will onto a contained environment. A Bounded Field wasn't true world rewriting, but it carved out a pocket where external interference weakened.
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
A bounded field altered the world's interpretation of the space within it. It could dull perception, hide information, reinforce physical or magical structures, or even create a bubble where phenomena behaved differently. If he had the chance he could create a bounded field that could act like an AIM diffusion field.
If he applied the same logic, he would need to start by creating a space that was stable and heavily reinforced, a domain strong enough to keep the world's interference at bay. On top of that, he would have to construct a layered structure within the field, something that actively resisted outside correction, the same way Academy City's systems supported an esper's personal reality. And finally, he would need to shape the conditions inside that space so they aligned with the underlying concepts of Dark Matter itself, replicating the logic that defined its behavior.
It wasn't exactly the same as an esper's ability but it would make a decent work around with the same principle.
He leaned forward, taking a piece of chalk and sketching the outline of a bounded field on the parchment. "Bounded fields rewrite the rules of a space by embedding a mage's intent into its foundation," he murmured, recalling one of Sougen's older explanations.
But intent alone wasn't enough. You needed a purpose, a structural logic, anchors, and a ritual framework to keep everything from collapsing.
The key was logic, Every esper ability was built on a logic diagram, personal rules expressed as equations and constants. Kakine's Dark Matter had always been less about the matter itself and more about the rule set behind it. The why and how it behaved was built on the governing laws he imposed on it.
Kakine's mind was still deep in the structure of bounded fields when a quiet knock snapped him back to reality. "Teitoku," his grandfather called, "the food's done. Don't keep it waiting." Kakine set the chalk down, realizing he'd let time slip without noticing.
Sougen wasn't the type to fuss over fancy meals, so dinner was exactly what Kakine expected: a bowl of miso soup, steamed rice, and grilled mackerel with a small side of pickled vegetables. Kakine ate quietly, and as soon as he finished Kakine, he thanked his grandfather, stood up, and slipped away to return to his work.
In the quiet of his room, the door clicking shut behind him, he grabbed the battered notebook resting on his desk. The pages were already crowded with diagrams and half-formed ideas, but despite that it still was useful to him.
By the time the ink slowed and his thoughts finally settled, Kakine had filled several more pages in his notebook. He closed the notebook with a quiet snap and set it on the edge of his desk. The room was still, dim, and colder than he'd expected. He exhaled, rubbing his thumb over the bridge of his nose before finally pushing himself to his feet.
Kakine changed quickly, and slid beneath the blankets.
Morning arrived quicker than a road runner trying to flee from a coyote, and with that Kakine decided to continue his musings. Well he decided to look through his grandfather's study. The best way for him to create breakthroughs is to look through his predecessors.
He walked into his grandpa's study and picked up the oldest book he could find, for this type of stuff it was most logical to start from the beginning after all. The title of the book he picked out was "Fundamentals of Thaumaturgical Mineralogy: A Primer for Structural Reinforcement."
The author was written by a man named: Hirota Kiyonari, Second Rate Mineral Thaumaturgist of the Mages Association.
The First Chapter, "On the Magical Properties of Minerals"
Contrary to what inexperienced magi tend to assume, minerals are not valuable simply because they are hard, shiny, or rare. A mineral is, in essence, a stable lattice of spiritual information, an organized structure that can hold, shape, or transmit prana according to the circumstances of its formation. This stability allows minerals to serve as tools for storing prana, filtering it, anchoring it, or aligning it with a magus's intended structure. Every mineral carries what scholars call a Formation Memory: the lingering imprint of the geological conditions under which it was created. Pressure, temperature, elemental exposure, and even the surrounding leyline environment leave their marks on the mineral's internal record. Rituals frequently use this memory to strengthen bounded fields or reinforce deliberately layered constructs.
"…"
What the fuck. The information would probably be useful to him later, but the amount of prior knowledge he might need to fully understand would take awhile to acquire. Kakine didn't want to approach his grandfather with his own affairs but it seemed like he would need to. But since he had some current knowledge he decided to think a little on it.
The concepts overlapped with his old work more than he wanted to admit. Not in methods, but in structure. Everything magecraft did was just a clumsy analogue to the systems Academy City built with scientific precision. Instead of equations, they used rituals. Instead of computation, they relied on inherited mystery. Instead of AIM, they had spiritual lattices.
It made sense in its own archaic way, but it was slow. Inefficient. Layered in outdated assumptions and missing half the logical steps. That's probably just magecraft at its core when you think about it. It was an entire discipline built on tradition first and logic second. Half the time it felt like he was reading someone's half-finished lab notes from a hundred years ago.
But even if the structure was primitive, it wasn't useless. Magecraft was attempting to solve the same fundamental problem Academy City had been tackling: how to impose one's internal logic onto the world. The difference was that espers treated it as a scientific process, while magi treated it as an inherited privilege. Espers pretty much forced their logic to work through physics while magi tricked it into believing what was what.
The more he compared the two systems, the more the gap between them sharpened in his mind.
Mystery.
That was the dividing line.
For espers, the world expected them. Their powers were the result of a defined process. AIM fields, brain patterns, equations, and data.
Magi, on the other hand, relied on the opposite: the world allowing anomalies to exist only because they were unexplained.
Magecraft functioned by leaning on gaps in human understanding. As long as something was unknown, unproven, unmeasured, and unquantified it had space to manifest. The moment a phenomenon became fully understood, it stopped being a mystery and started being science. And once that happened, the world no longer permitted it to function as magecraft.
That was the irony Kakine couldn't ignore.
Dark Matter was the purest example of a man-made phenomenon. It wasn't natural, it wasn't inherited, and it definitely wasn't something the world had created on its own. It was the result of countless calculations, simulations, and psychological conditioning. A construct of science so meticulously engineered that the universe eventually accepted it as something that should exist.
So how was he supposed to recreate that through mystery?
Magecraft asked him to do the exact opposite of what created Dark Matter in the first place. Where Academy City demanded hyper-specific understanding, magecraft demanded ambiguity.
And that contradiction hit him harder the more he thought about it.
He wasn't just trying to reproduce Dark Matter. He was trying to force a fundamentally scientific phenomenon through a system that rejected anything born from complete understanding.
But he was already in the study so he might as well squeeze as much info out of this book and theorize later. With a brief flick of his fingers he reopened the pages and continued to read.
"Quartz and the Principle of Spiritual Resonance"
Though common, quartz possesses an internal symmetry that makes it one of the most accessible minerals for modern magi. Its spiritual structure vibrates at a steady, predictable frequency, making it an ideal medium for stabilizing prana circulation or reinforcing weak bounded fields. Many magi employ quartz when constructing harmonic links between ritual layers or when they need to dampen subtle environmental interference. Still, quartz alone is insufficient against the world's corrective forces. It can slow interference, perhaps even dull it, but never stop it entirely.
Kakine's fingers traced the fine diagrams in the margin, noting how Kiyonari had sketched the lattice structure of quartz and marked the vibration nodes with meticulous circles. Each diagram, though crude compared to modern schematics, hinted at principles he already understood instinctively.
He felt like this endeavor might take longer than he wished it to take, but if he just kept on practicing and researching he'd make decent progress.
...
I forgot to mention this, but I already posted this on AO3. So sometimes my chapter comments are outdated. I'm pretty much copy and pastes shit.