Mana

Mana (魔力, maryoku) is the magical energy that fuels magic, magic tools and blessings. While all humans have trace amounts of mana, only the nobility possess enough mana, and have the magical tools required, to cast magic.

Mana is present in all living creatures, including humans, animals, plants, and even some inanimate materials. However, in the vast majority of cases, the level of mana is so low as to be effectively nonexistent. Therefore, commoners are typically referred to as "not having mana." The same is true for many animals and nonmagical plants.


 * Nobles typically have higher amounts of mana. They can learn to channel it through magic tools, control it with a schtappe, use it to power magic circles, and dedicate it to the gods in order to give or recieve blessings.
 * In the rare case that a commoner is born with mana, they do not have magic tools used to siphon off and store their excess mana. They typically suffer symptoms of severe fevers and die at a young age. This is called the Devouring.

Unlike humans, flora and fauna that have mana (called feyplants and feybeasts respectively) have naturally adapted and do not require magic tools to survive mana exposure. The distinction between "fey" and "nonmagical" plants is not always as clear as separate species. For example, the magical Kurhaize plant is the "evolved" variant of Eise, a common plant.

Anatomy. The humans of Yurgenschmidt have an internal organ which stores and processes mana within the body, which Myne guesses is equivalent to the real-world heart. Mana is carried in bodily fluids, including blood and tears. Because commoners have no way to channel their trace amounts of mana, they typically use blood to operate basic magical tools. When an organism with mana dies, including nobles, feyplants, and feybeasts, their mana gathers and hardens around their mana organ and forms a feystone. While human feystones are generally laid to rest in a funeral, the feystones of plants and animals are an important material for magic tools and potions.

Birth and Fertility. The amount of mana a child is born with is based primarily on the mana capacity of the mother. Mana capacity also has an impact on fertility: Those with very different levels of mana typically cannot have children.

Mana Exposure. A child's mana capacity grows as they age. However, humans are not well-equipped to deal with the mana they possess; they rely on magical tools to siphon and store excess mana to stay alive. When too much mana builds up in the body, it causes symptoms including stunted growth, severe fevers, and boiling or bubbling skin. According to Ferdinand, those who lose control of their mana die in a horrific manner (by explosion). To prevent this, noble children are given magic tools that absorb their mana until their baptism, when they begin to learn to channel mana.

Fatigue. Mana is a form of energy, and expending mana can lead to physical symptoms of tiredness and fatigue. Food and sleep are both important elements in restoring mana, and using mana with very little nourishment or rest can cause a person to become dizzy or fall ill.

She possesses an extraordinary amount of mana despite her age. Ferdinand asserts Myne has more mana than Sylvester, the Aub Ehrenfest himself, and her capacity would only continue to grow as she grows older. The main reason why her capacity has grown so large is due to her repeatedly compressing mana whenever it began to overflow, allowing for more mana to fill the gap. This method for increasing one's capacity can be fatal, as one would be brushing against death by allowing mana to overflow; adding to another reason why noble children are given magic tools to absorb their mana and are not taught the method until attending the Royal Academy. Ferdinand believes Myne has been successful in compressing her mana due to her adult-like mind.

Rozemyne's mana is of all seven main attributes, as denoted by her citizenship plaque being all seven colors, each representing one of the seven primary gods, and her mana is light yellow as seen by the color feystones turn into, when dyed with her mana.

In an investigation of Myne's mana flow, Ferdinand discovers several clumps of hardened mana, suggesting Myne's body had died at least once. When Myne gets excited, her mana flow accelerates, but the clumps hinder the flow and her body knocks her unconscious to prevent self-harm. Additionally, expending too much mana would lead to a weak flow that is unable to push the clumps, paralysing her body. In order to dissolve the hardened clumps, Myne will need to curate a potion based on her mana, which will be a tall task to fulfill.

The social hierarchy within Ascendance of a Bookworm is harshly dictated by mana. Those who are born into existing noble families, with a visible amount of mana from parents who possess mana, are regarded raised in their noble families, whereas those who aren't are considered commoners. However, nobles can also be born with little to almost no mana, leaving the choices to become a servant to their family or being sent to the temple. Commoners can be born with a significant amount of mana, which makes them suffer from the Devouring due to missing magic tools.

Nobles are taught not to show emotions and to control them at all times. Mana is tied to emotions and if they become strongly emotional, mana will leak out of their body. This works the other way round as well, having too much mana inside you makes one emotionally unstable. Noble children are given magical tools from birth to absorb their mana as they can be highly emotional, which can be dangerous.

Although possessing mana is a prerequisite for a noble, one must graduate from the Royal Academy to be regarded officially as a noble. Within noble society, mana influences the rank of nobles, breaking them down further into: laynobles, mednobles, and archnobles. If a noble child does not possess mana fitting of their noble rank, they will be kicked out of their family; if they're lucky, a lower ranked noble family will adopt them, otherwise the child goes to the temple for the rest of their lives. As such, it's custom for nobles to not announce the birth of their child until their baptism at the age of 7 to determine their wealth of mana. Succession within a noble family is determined by mana capacity rather than by age.

By forcing mana from the rest of their bodies back into the mana-storing organ, mana-users can compress their mana into a higher density, allowing them to gain a larger mana-capacity, since they can store more mana in the same amount of space so to say.

For adult's who's body has already stopped growing, this will only affect the density of their mana, but if this is done by someone still in their growth phase, this will cause their mana-storing organ to grow faster than it otherwise would.

There are risks involved in compressing one's mana though.

First simply having mana above a certain amount dispersed around the body, which is a necessity to compress it, carries risks of it's own: It will stunt the physical growth of the body and depending on the emotional state of the person can go out of control, which can result in others around the person being "crushed" by the mana or the mana harming the body, usually in the form of high fevers, though in extreme cases this could even mean exploding parts of the body. For these reasons nobles do now allow the mana of their children to build up, but instead give them magic tools that constantly drain their excess mana.

Only upon entering the Royal Academy at the age of ten are noble children taught how to compress mana in a controlled environment. Even among those already experienced in moving mana around their bodies, it is not unusual for their mana to go out of control during the first compression attempts. For this reason multiple professors are present during those lessens to immediately deal with such accidents. Every year there are several students per class that faint on their first few tries.

The way to compress mana depends on the person. They need to find a mental image allowing them to manipulate their mana in the way they wish. Some of the methods that have been mentioned are imagining stuffing the mana into a box, boiling it to remove impurities or folding it like a piece of cloth.

How much a person is able to compress their mana is a combination of how well suited their mental image is and their willpower. If the mana is compressed too much in too short a timeperiod, it can lead to headaches, dizzyness and nausea similar to a strong hang-over.

Having grown up without access to mana-draining magic tools, Rozemyne instinctively learned to compress her mana at a young age, which among other things caused her mana-capacity to grow much faster than those or other noble children. She believed that she started out with less mana-capacity than the devouring child Dirk, who Ferdinand estimated to have the capacity equivalent to a strong mednoble. But upon reaching the age of seven and a half, Rozemyne's mana capacity had already surpassed those of almost all archnobles in Ehrenfest, rivaling even the capacity of the Archduke himself.

She later shared her unique technique with Damuel to aid the laynoble with his romantic pursue of Brigitte. While their dreams of marriage were ultimately dashed by their respective situations, Damuel still managed to match mana capacities with the mednoble, demonstrating the potency of the technique and bringing the matter to the attention of the Aub.

Upon witnessing Damuel's incredible growth, Sylvester, Ferdinand and Karstedt confronted Rozemyne and she agreed to share her technique with the duchy, but under strict prerequisites and at a cost.

The agreed upon conditions are as follows:


 * Only people who already learned mana compression at the royal academy are eligible.
 * Applicants need to sign a country-range magic contract preventing them from passing on the technique to others, even family members, unless they too have already been taught the technique.
 * To be taught requires the permissions of Aub Ehrenfest and his wife, Knight's Order Commander Karstedt, High Priest Ferdinand and Lady Rozemyne.
 * A stiff cost needs to be paid depending on status. The higher in status, the more a noble will need to pay. Those who have relatives who already know the technique get a discount.
 * Part of the money will go to Ehrenfest's treasury to pay for the magic contracts.

The technique itself has multiple stages that Rozemyne developed over time as her growing mana capacity made more efficient compression more and more necessary for her survival.


 * The first stage is to imagine stuffing a piece of clothing into a bag.
 * The second stage is to carefully fold the piece of cloth before putting it into the bag.
 * The third stage is to sit down on the bag with all your weight to flatten it.

Spoiler from Part 4 Volume 4 At the royal academy Rozemyne developed a fourth stage based on advice by Professor Hirschur, where she imagines boiling her mana like she would do with soup, evaporating the water and leaving only the tasty bits behind. She has only taught this to Ferdinand and her retainers as of Part 4 Volume 4, and was planning to teach it to the rulers of Ehrenfest.


 * The reason why no other noble before Rozemyne seems to have ever thought of using such seemingly simplistic clothing-related mental images is because nobles have servants taking care of their clothes from birth, thus the concept of folding a cape for example themselves is not a concept that comes to their minds naturally.
 * Similarly, no one thought of the boiling method because it's not a common practice when concocting, and nobles won't be cooking food on their own.