Emrys's words provoked an immediate reaction in Nimue.
"Regain my sight and absorb the entire lake."
For a few seconds she remained silent, as if hoping she had misheard. Then, when she understood that Emrys was perfectly serious, her expression changed abruptly.
"Absolutely not!"
Her voice echoed over the lake, breaking the calm that had reigned until then.
"There is no way I'm accepting something so insane!"
Emrys turned his head slightly toward her before nodding calmly.
"Yes, I understand."
Nimue stopped short.
She had prepared herself to explain why his idea was dangerous, why he couldn't simply decide to absorb an infinite amount of magical energy, and why such an undertaking risked causing consequences impossible to predict.
But his answer surprised her.
He understood?
Had he finally realized how senseless his idea was? Had he understood that he couldn't throw himself into an experiment like that without even knowing what consequences it might have for them?
Nimue began to relax slightly.
After all, Emrys was sometimes impulsive, but he wasn't stupid. He could be extremely reckless when it came to protecting those dear to him, but he was also capable of recognizing dangers when they were laid out clearly for him.
So she thought he had just understood his mistake.
Unfortunately, the rest of his words quickly made her lose that hope.
"It's normal that you react like this. After all, we have no idea what would happen to you if I absorbed the whole lake."
Nimue froze.
"... What?"
"Absorbing the lake could solve the problem and let you get out of here, but there are plenty of unclear points. Would you keep your consciousness? Would you keep existing normally inside me? Or would you end up becoming one with me, our two minds fusing together?"
He paused.
"There are far too many unknowns. I completely understand that you don't want to take a risk like that."
Nimue stared at him, stunned.
She was even more surprised than before.
That wasn't at all what she had meant!
"But that's not the question!"
Emrys tilted his head slightly.
"Oh, really?"
"Of course not!"
She threw up her hands, clearly unable to understand how he could remain so calm.
"You're talking about absorbing the infinite completely! Just saying it out loud is ridiculous! Do you really think it's that easy?"
Her voice took on an even firmer tone.
"It's absolutely impossible, Emrys! Either the lake would assimilate you completely, or you would die from an excess of magical energy."
Emrys didn't answer.
He remained silent, his face turned toward his mother, while Nimue looked at him in disbelief.
However, contrary to what she imagined, he wasn't really thinking about the arguments she had just presented.
At least, not the way she would have believed.
In a logical world, yes, it would be impossible.
But there was a detail Nimue didn't know.
A detail Emrys, for his part, had never forgotten.
But are we in a logical world?
He kept his expression calm, but his thoughts took a very different direction.
At its root, this universe is the one from a fiction. And in a fiction, the rules aren't as strict as in reality. The mere fact that I can hear the sound of my own voice when I go past the speed of sound proves it.
Of course, he couldn't treat that hypothesis as a certainty. Even though he had been reincarnated into this world, he had no guarantee of knowing its exact origin. He didn't even know what kind of work had served as the model for this reality.
A series?
A manga?
A comic?
A manhwa?
A manhua?
Or a novel?
He mentally went over the different possibilities.
A TV series seemed unlikely to him. Most of them didn't feature power scales as extravagant as the ones he had encountered here.
There were obviously exceptions.
The DC and Marvel universes, for example, had characters whose abilities could reach absolutely absurd levels. Some entities there manipulated concepts, dimensions or entire realities, while others were capable of rivaling forces far beyond the usual limits of human understanding.
But the mere fact that Emrys still remembered those universes was enough to conclude that this wasn't one of them.
That left Asian illustrated literature.
He knew mangas, manhwas, manhuas and novels well enough to know that their stories could reach particularly high power scales. Some works started with characters unable to lift a stone, then led them, a few hundred chapters later, to clashes involving worlds, dimensions, even abstract concepts.
However, he didn't spend his time searching for manhwa or manhua fanfictions. For one thing, there weren't many, and apart from a few rare manhwa he had never had any interest in manhwa fanfictions.
On the other hand, mangas and novels occupied a much bigger place in his reading habits.
If I had to bet on something, this world would be from either a manga, or a novel, or both.
He had no proof to confirm that hypothesis. It rested solely on his prior knowledge, on his experience as a reader and on the things he had observed since his reincarnation.
But this reasoning allowed him to consider another possibility.
If this world really is taken from a manga or a novel, there must be narrative rules behind the events I come across.
The two genres had their own particularities, their own conventions and their own ways of telling a story. Yet they also shared a certain number of tropes and clichés.
Elements that experienced readers ended up recognizing, sometimes even before the author explicitly brought them to light.
And among those elements, a lake containing an infinite amount of magical energy couldn't be considered an insignificant detail.
Let's think. If an author takes the trouble to put a place like that in their story, there's necessarily a reason.
He fell silent inwardly for a few seconds.
Then he began to examine the possibilities.
After all, why introduce an infinite reservoir of magical energy if it was never meant to be used for anything?
Of course, there were works in which certain elements were only there to enrich the universe or give an impression of grandeur. But he preferred to start with the hypotheses that seemed the most interesting to him.
Drawing on all his experience as an otaku, he managed to identify five scenarios.
The first was relatively simple.
The lake is the protagonist's initial boost.
In this scenario, the hero would discover the lake's existence at the beginning of the work and end up absorbing its power, one way or another.
Of course, such power probably wouldn't be immediately accessible.
The protagonist might struggle to control it, be unable to use all the energy he had obtained, or have to overcome certain drawbacks before mastering its possibilities.
That kind of progression was common enough for Emrys to consider it a credible hypothesis.
In this first case, the lake would be absorbable.
Second possibility: the lake is the antagonist's objective.
It would then be a source of energy the antagonist would try to obtain in order to achieve his ambition. He might want it to power a magic or an artifact necessary for the success of the antagonist's plan.
Third possibility: the lake is coveted by both the hero and the antagonist.
Emrys lingered on that hypothesis.
This time, it wasn't simply a protagonist who would discover an exceptional source of power, nor an antagonist who would try to seize it.
Both characters would want to obtain the lake.
Their goals, however, would be different.
The hero might want to use it to protect his loved ones, save the world, fight a threat or reach a goal he considered just. The antagonist, for his part, might covet the same energy to impose his will, fulfill his ambitions or obtain a power that would allow him to carry out his own projects.
Or the complete opposite. After all, if he remembered correctly, that kind of manga had become very popular back in the day.
They would therefore pursue the same resource, but for different reasons.
Such a situation could make the lake the central stake of a confrontation between the two camps. Each would try to seize it before the other, and its use could determine the outcome of their conflict.
In that case, the lake could be absorbable, but it was also possible that its energy could be exploited some other way.
Fourth possibility: the lake is a power-up for the protagonist, meant to appear in the final phases of the work.
Emrys knew this kind of situation well.
An element whose existence was unknown, or whose importance seemed secondary at the start of the story, ended up becoming essential when the protagonist reached a level of power high enough to achieve his goal.
The lake could thus remain inaccessible for a large part of the story, before becoming the key that allowed the hero to cross one last threshold.
And finally, fifth possibility: the lake is the villain's power-up.
This time, the antagonist would end up seizing this immense reserve of magical energy, probably with the aim of obtaining overwhelming power.
But he would make a mistake.
He would try to absorb an amount of energy he was incapable of controlling, or underestimate the consequences of his act. That mistake would end up causing his downfall and give the protagonist an opportunity to defeat him.
In this last scenario, the lake would indeed be absorbable, but absorbing it would be fatal for whoever tried to take it.
Emrys finished his reasoning.
Five possibilities.
He went over them once more, then quickly did a few mental calculations.
In two cases out of five, the lake was directly absorbable.
In two others, its absorption was uncertain, but its energy could be used one way or another.
And in the last case, it was absorbable, but at the cost of the life of whoever tried to do it.
In other words, according to this very rough classification, there were two chances out of five that the lake was absorbable without its absorption necessarily being fatal.
Forty percent.
At first glance, that didn't seem particularly encouraging.
But Emrys wasn't the type to dismiss a possibility simply because it wasn't the majority.
Admittedly, it was an entirely subjective estimate. He had no statistical data to claim that these five scenarios covered all the possibilities, or even that they had comparable probabilities.
He had simply sorted the hypotheses that had come to mind, drawing on his experience as a reader.
There was also an additional possibility he couldn't ignore.
What if I'm just spouting complete bullshit?
After all, nothing guaranteed that the lake had any particular importance in the original story.
It might simply be an element of the setting, a feature of the place where his mother was, or a detail meant to illustrate the immensity of her magical power.
The fact that he was in a fictional universe didn't necessarily mean someone was supposed to absorb it.
Maybe it wasn't even supposed to play a part in the plot.
Yeah, it's possible.
Emrys finally gave up on that line of thought.
He might be an experienced otaku, but he wasn't a fortune-teller. He couldn't know the intentions of the author of a work whose title he didn't even know.
And above all, he couldn't make such an important decision based solely on narrative conventions.
Never mind.
He hadn't forgotten his mother's reaction when he had brought up his plan.
She had been afraid.
Not simply because he was proposing something absurd, but because she had understood that he was ready to take a considerable risk to free her.
He couldn't ask her to accept such a dangerous experiment based only on his hunches.
Even if his reasoning seemed workable to him, that wasn't enough.
I'm not about to flip a coin over my mother's existence.
So he gave up on his idea.
For the time being, he would treat absorbing the lake as a last resort. A solution he could only consider after obtaining reliable enough information to understand what he risked causing.
And if that meant looking for another path, then he would look for another path.
After all, he didn't need to solve all this world's problems in a single day.
Emrys turned his attention back to Nimue.
"Okay, let's forget that idea for now."
She seemed slightly surprised.
"You're giving up?"
"For now, yes."
He shrugged.
"I have no guarantee it would work, and even less that you'd come out of it unharmed. I'd rather avoid trying something that risky without having the slightest idea of what could happen."
Nimue observed him carefully.
She still told herself he was giving up for the wrong reason, but as long as he was giving up on this plan, that was enough for her.
Emrys spoke again.
"Even if I don't like leaving you here for now without many more answers, I don't see any other immediate solution."
He paused.
"In the meantime, I'm going to try to regain my sight. That way, you can at least fully enjoy the outside world through my eyes, like before."
Nimue remained silent for a moment.
Then she asked him a question.
"Are you really going to regain your sight just for that?"
Emrys turned his head slightly toward her.
"Why? Does it seem strange to you?"
"I won't lie, it does seem pretty weird to me."
She hesitated before continuing.
"If you told me you just wanted to regain your sight, I'd understand, but doing it just so I can see the outside world?"
Emrys didn't answer right away.
He shrugged.
"To me, your dream matters more."
He spoke with a simplicity that left no room for doubt.
"I've been living with this blindness for forty years now. I've had plenty of time to get used to it. I won't pretend that regaining my sight wouldn't have any advantages, but if I had to stay blind my whole life, it wouldn't particularly bother me."
He placed a hand on his chest.
"My Observation Haki already lets me perceive my surroundings, and I've adapted to this way of living. And on top of that, every time I use Advanced Observation Haki, I see the future world as if I still had eyes."
He paused briefly, and his expression grew more serious.
"But the real question isn't why I want to regain my sight, it's how I'm going to do it."
Nimue tilted her head.
"That's true, it's a good question. Do you have an idea yet?"
"Absolutely none."
Emrys scratched his head at this dead end.
"I've already checked several times. My blindness isn't a curse, or some magical effect that could be undone with anti-magic or a weapon that breaks spells."
Nimue was about to say something, but Emrys interrupted her.
"And yes, I've already used Structural Grasp on it, but for some reason I can't see anything abnormal. The structure of my eyes is exactly the same, so another of my theories goes down the drain."
"And what was that theory?"
"I had theorized that the effect of the attack that blinded me wasn't simply releasing a great light, but rather severely damaging the eyes before making them heal just as fast while keeping the aftereffects. That way no healing magic could work, because that state of the eyes had become the body's normal state. But with the total absence of those scars, that theory is worthless."
Nimue listened attentively.
"My combat experience is one thing. My mastery of magic is another. It's true that I can see the history of the people whose items I copy, and I thought about doing it with mages, but the problem is that the difference between this world's magic system and the world the mages I can copy come from is not negligible."
He crossed his arms.
"It's not like I can copy their talent either. To do in-depth magical research, develop theories, design experiments and determine the exact nature of a phenomenon I don't understand... my copying skills won't be enough."
"In short, I need a mage. And a competent one."
Hearing that, Nimue remained silent for a few seconds.
Then, slowly, a smile appeared on her face.
"You should have said so earlier."
"What?"
"Merlin, you can come back."