Chapter 52: Once Is Luck, Twice Is Skill

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Kera continued his explanation.

“But if we're talking about absorbing mana and closing the Mana Hole's gate...” He looked carefully at Zeldryn. “I've actually already explained this.”

Zeldryn kept watching him without saying anything.

Kera raised one hand. “Imagine there's a gate that you can control however you want. If you're truly a Manholer, then you have a Mana Hole, and that Mana Hole has a gate.”

He moved his hand as though opening something.

“If you want to absorb mana, open it.”

Then he reversed the motion.

“If you don't want mana entering your Mana Hole anymore, close it.”

Kera shrugged and glanced slightly behind him. “Easy, right?”

Zeldryn narrowed his eyes.

'Bastard. I already know that, damn it.'

That was exactly the problem. He already understood Kera's explanation about opening and closing the gate. What confused him was what had happened before he understood any of those concepts.

“Look, Kera.”

Kera turned toward him.

“Last night, when I first tried absorbing mana, I didn't know anything about the concept of a gate.” Zeldryn pointed toward his lower abdomen. “I didn't even understand how a Mana Hole absorbed mana.”

Kera remained silent and allowed him to continue.

“All I did was close my eyes and focus on mana. After that, I saw mana particles inside my mind.”

Zeldryn frowned as he tried to reconstruct the memory.

“I didn't move them. I just let them be, and then suddenly the mana was absorbed by something dark.”

His hand shifted slightly toward his abdomen.

“At the time, I didn't even know that darkness was my Mana Hole. So if I use your explanation now, it seems like I opened the Mana Hole's gate without realizing it.”

Kera responded immediately.

“If you really did nothing to the mana, it wouldn't suddenly get absorbed for no reason.”

Zeldryn's attention sharpened.

Kera narrowed his eyes slightly.

“Let me ask you something. At that time, you really wanted to absorb mana, didn't you?”

Zeldryn fell silent and tried to remember exactly what had been going through his mind that night.

The answer was actually obvious.

“Yes,” he said with a small nod. “Now that I think about it, yeah. I really wanted to absorb mana back then.”

He thought about it for another moment before continuing.

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“Even though I just let the particles stay still, deep down I really did want that mana to be absorbed. The problem is, I didn't know anything about the theory behind mana or Mana Holes.”

Kera smiled slightly.

“Yup.”

He pointed at Zeldryn.

“That's your answer. Your desire to absorb mana probably caused you to open the Mana Hole's gate without realizing it.”

Zeldryn's eyes narrowed.

'There. Finally, we're getting to the real problem.'

He had already considered that possibility earlier, and now Kera had reached the same conclusion. That meant his reasoning had not been completely wrong.

But precisely after that point, the real problem began.

“Yeah, but Kera...”

Kera waited.

“You know I lost consciousness last night.”

Kera's smile remained unchanged.

“And based on what you explained earlier, it sounds like I experienced some kind of mana overload.”

Zeldryn placed a hand over his lower abdomen.

“It kept feeling like something blunt was hitting me from inside here, over and over again. The pain kept getting worse.”

His expression hardened slightly as the memory returned.

“I couldn't even maintain my focus anymore. I wasn't thinking about how to absorb mana, and I wasn't concentrating the way I had been when I first started.”

Kera continued listening.

“There was only one thing I wanted at that point.”

Zeldryn looked at him seriously.

“To stop absorbing mana.”

He paused briefly.

“I didn't want the pain to continue, but the mana kept entering anyway. Eventually, I lost consciousness.”

Zeldryn finally asked the question that had been circling through his mind all this time.

“If the gate could open unconsciously because I wanted to absorb mana that badly, then when I desperately wanted the absorption to stop, shouldn't the gate have closed too?”

He frowned.

“Isn't wanting to stop absorbing mana the same as wanting to close the Mana Hole's gate?”

Kera fell silent for a moment.

Then a small smile appeared on his face.

“That sounds reasonable.”

Zeldryn waited for the rest.

“But you know...” Kera raised one finger. “The answer is actually already inside your own question.”

Zeldryn frowned. “Huh?”

Kera smiled.

“You just said, 'without realizing it.'”

Zeldryn fell silent.

“You opened the Mana Hole's gate without realizing it when you first tried absorbing mana, right?”

Zeldryn slowly nodded. “Yes.”

“There.”

Kera shrugged slightly.

“Just because you managed to open it once without realizing it, does that mean you must also be able to close it without realizing it?”

Zeldryn froze.

Kera continued before he could respond.

“You said it yourself. Back then, you didn't even understand the Mana Hole. You didn't know how it worked, you didn't know there was a gate, and you didn't know how to open it.”

He raised both hands slightly.

“And of course, you didn't know how to close it either. So just because you managed to do something once without realizing it, why did you immediately assume you must also be able to do the opposite in exactly the same way?”

Zeldryn stared at him.

Kera's smile widened.

“There's a saying.”

He paused for a moment.

“Once is luck. Twice is skill.”

Zeldryn did not answer immediately. The sentence itself was simple, but as he turned it over in his mind, the thoughts that had been colliding inside his head gradually began to settle.

'That makes sense.'

That night, Zeldryn had understood almost nothing about mana or the Mana Hole. Even so, because his desire to absorb mana had been so strong, he had somehow managed to open the gate without realizing what he was doing. After learning about the gate from Kera, however, he had started treating that accidental success as though it were an ability he already possessed, assuming that if he could open the gate unconsciously, he should also have been able to close it the same way.

'But that was just my own assumption.'

There was no reason the two processes had to work identically. Zeldryn rubbed his chin as the simpler explanation became increasingly convincing.

'Looks like I really should go back to the simplest possibility. I got lucky.'

That night, he had somehow managed to open the gate without understanding how. That was all. Succeeding once by instinct did not mean he had automatically learned the opposite process as well.

'Yeah. Thinking about it that way makes a lot more sense.'

Zeldryn remained quiet as the theories that had been spinning through his head finally began to untangle. The realization also forced him to acknowledge something he had not expected to appreciate this quickly.

'Damn. So having a teacher really is this important.'

If he kept trying to figure everything out by himself, it would be easy to fall into the same cycle again: create a theory, argue against it, replace it with another one, and eventually become trapped inside his own reasoning. Without someone who actually understood mana well enough to point out where he had gone wrong, Zeldryn could easily wander through possibilities until he convinced himself of something completely false.

'I'm literally the example. Damn it.'

Zeldryn clicked his tongue softly, still thinking through everything Kera had said. Across from him, Kera quietly watched the changes passing over the boy's face, seeing the confusion slowly give way to concentration and finally understanding.

As that realization settled into Zeldryn's expression, Kera's smile gradually widened as well. There was an unmistakable satisfaction in his face now, almost as though watching the brat finally grasp the lesson had pleased him far more than he intended to admit.