Noah spent the next several days trying to understand the disappearance of the salt.
He began with the simplest question.
Could he reproduce the effect reliably?
The answer was no.
Not yet.
He could move grains of salt with little effort.
He could hold several in the air, separate them, and arrange them into a rough line.
He could apply pressure from different directions.
But the strange disappearance occurred only when he reached a particular mental state.
Trying to force that state made it less likely to happen.
The process required a combination of concentration, energy density, and a kind of directional intention that he could not yet describe accurately.
He decided to investigate the opposite possibility.
If he could apparently erase a tiny amount of matter, could he create something that had not previously existed?
The question was more difficult than it sounded.
He could already move existing objects.
He could not count that as creation.
He could also change the arrangement of matter.
Pushing dust into a pile created a shape, not new material.
He needed to distinguish between rearrangement and genuine creation.
On Friday night, he sat at his desk with an empty glass dish in front of him.
He chose a single grain of salt as a reference object, studied its size, and placed it outside the dish.
Then he cleared the dish completely.
Noah closed his eyes.
He recalled the sensation from the earlier experiment—not the force of movement, but the strange compression of psychic energy into a point.
He tried to reproduce the sensation in the empty space above the glass.
At first, nothing happened.
He adjusted the pressure.
The energy gathered, weakened, and dispersed.
A tiny white speck appeared in the centre of the dish.
Noah opened his eyes.
The speck was smaller than the original grain.
He used telekinesis to lift it.
It moved.
He examined it closely, then compared it with the remaining reference grain.
The new speck appeared to be salt, but he could not verify its chemical composition through sight alone.
He had no laboratory equipment.
He had no reason to pretend otherwise.
Still, the result was different from moving an existing grain.
He had started with an empty dish and produced a visible speck through psychic energy.
“Creation,” he whispered.
The word sounded absurd in his bedroom.
He attempted to repeat the result.
The second attempt failed.
The third produced nothing more than a brief shimmer in the air, visible only because he had been watching the same point.
He stopped when his psychic energy began to feel depleted.
The next morning, he opened the system.
“Can you classify what happened?”
[Psychic Energy Application Detected]
[Category: Matter-State Manipulation]
[Subcategory: Formation and Erasure]
Noah stared at the words.
The system had recognized the event.
He continued.
“Is this matter creation and destruction?”
[Observed effects are consistent with local formation and erasure.] This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
[Scale, limits, and mechanism remain unverified.]
Noah exhaled slowly.
That was as close to confirmation as he was likely to get.
His psychic energy could apparently form and erase matter on a tiny scale.
He did not yet know whether the process drew from an existing source, converted energy into matter, or operated through a mechanism beyond his current understanding.
The system had confirmed the category, not the underlying physics.
He opened his notebook and divided a page into three columns.
Confirmed: He could manipulate existing matter with telekinesis.
Observed but unreliable: He could make a tiny amount of material disappear.
Observed but unverified: He could form a tiny speck of material from an apparently empty space.
He added a fourth note beneath them.
Do not assume the same technique can be applied to living beings.
The thought had crossed his mind.
He could imagine the consequences of a person discovering that he could erase matter.
He could also imagine what might happen if he attempted to apply the effect to a human body without understanding the process.
He would not conduct that experiment.
Not on himself.
Not on his family.
Not on anyone else.
Instead, he returned to the safer exercises.
He practised holding a coin in the air, rotating it slowly, and setting it down without a sound.
The coin did not disappear.
The coin did not multiply.
It simply moved according to his intention.
That was enough for the session.
For now.