Again - Chapter Three

Practicing spells has been going well. I've made some good progress after two weeks.

I'm still only capable of casting beginner spells, and only the easiest ones, too, but my goal isn't to learn how to cast the most advanced spells, not yet.

The only reason I'm casting spells everyday is to force my body to expand it's "mana storage".

Until I reach a point where I think I can store just enough, I'll keep this up.

That's what I want to do, but Dad's been bothering me about swordsmanship.

I mean, what the hell?

I understand that this is another world and all, but teaching a five year old how to swing a sword is not normal, and that should be universal!

Well, I can't really say that it's that annoying, I am a bit interested in learning, since I'm sure that mages need to know about melee combat too, but I want to focus on one thing at a time.

I explained my goal to him, and he seems understanding, as well as surprised, but it looks like he'll force me sooner or later.

Anyway, in my free time, when I'm not forcing myself to pass out, I go to the library.

During my days in my past life, I never really liked reading, but the stuff here is genuinely interesting.

I've been reading some books about world history, society, other races, basically just general knowledge.

World history was definitely the most interesting, though.

This world refers to our planet as Fera, and the geography is completely different from Earth.

There's only one continent on the planet, and it covers most of the surface, while the only ocean that exists covers around 15-20%.

The map is quite huge, but there aren't that many countries, surprisingly.

Just four countries cover almost half of the continent, those being the Huma, Deim, Elva and Dwarve nations, named after the human, demon, elf and dwarf races.

A ton of wars have been started between these four over territories, but those were pretty much the only wars in history, since no other races had any problems with each other.

Right now, it seems like they're mostly peaceful, but the dwarves still have something against the elves, apparently.

I expected some kind of legendary hero or something to appear in one of these wars, but during the war period, almost everyone was cold-hearted, for good reason, though.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Those wars were pretty harsh, none of the races were kind or fair, hell, some things that they've done could even be considered war crimes.

That said, they've all been on their good behavior for forty years now, the newer generations got a lot softer.

Reminds me of a certain world.. can't quite put my finger on it, though..

Moving on.

I'm obviously in the human nation, and the society here seems to be similar to the society from the middle ages.

I searched the books for the typical "adventurers guild", but instead of adventurers, the dominant guild is the Travelers Guild, and they are similar in some ways, however travelers are more like merchants.

The ones that do things that adventurers do are the mercenaries, who have a separate guild, but they're all about hunting monsters and killing or capturing wanted people. They're more shady than adventurers, but the higher-ups themselves only promote monster hunting to keep a good image.

They apparently also have buildings for their guilds in every nation, to have a lot more members.

As for how they get paid..

The currency they use here is just bronze, silver and gold coins.

One silver coin is a hundred bronze coins, and the same for gold coins.

I can't quite figure out the value of these coins, though.

The capital city of the human nation is a huge city called Warmen. It was named by the king that found it kind of as a joke, since there are a lot of warm waters there.

The city is really large, it's as big as some smaller nations, and it's considered the best place to live in the world.

The education there is also the best, many people of many races come from around the world to learn there, at the top school, Pherma. It teaches a lot of magic, I guess, but almost everything is taught there. It's affordable, huge, has good dormitories, can't really ask for more, basically.

I might go there, and I kind of want to, but education is only optional, so I can just think about it.

About the other races, there are way too many for me to list, so I only remembered the more advanced ones, which are the humans, elves, demons and dwarves.

The humans are, well, humans, nothing special there.

The elves are very serious about mana, and they have the best mages in the world, but they consider swordsmanship barbaric.

The demons may sound scary, but they don't actually look demonic, they just have weird natural hair and eye colors, like blood red or purple. They don't care about what they use for combat, as long as it keeps them alive.

The dwarves are pretty much exactly how dwarves are portrayed in films or TV shows, they're all about forging swords, and stuff, in simple terms, and they're the best at it, so the demand for their tools or weapons is incredible, and that's how they're the second richest country after Huma.

The humans and elves live more on the north-eastern or central, grassy side of the continent, while the demons and dwarves live on the north-western, mountainous or sandy side.

The rest of the races live on the southern side, or on the very few islands, or.. literally just in water.

Monsters are also kind of considered a different race, but they aren't able to communicate and aren't very intelligent, so they're called lower beings.

I also read about the legend of how magic was first discovered from a history book.

Apparently, a demon named T'Bil Manafer first discovered it after receiving a message from a god in his dream.

He wrote the magic theory and gave it to many kings, however he was rejected by the dwarves and thrown in jail, where he rotted away.

After every nation realized that what he had brought to them was revolutionary, they considered him a man above every other, and as a sign of respect, every nation agreed to name the energy which is used for magic mana.

When the nations heard of what the dwarves did to him, Huma and Elva immediately declared war on them and swiftly claimed victory.

Both of the nations were so crazy about magic at the time that they slaughtered every dwarf that denied it's existence.

Shortly after, the dwarves supposedly were cursed by Manafer, causing them to be unable to comprehend magic.

I think it's all bullcrap that Manafer got a message from god and did the whole cursing thing, but hey, it's a cool legend.

With that out of the way, I pretty much have nothing to do now.

Casting the spells was fun at first, but now it's just gotten repetitive and boring.

Wait.. I completely forgot.

What about going outside?

Again - Chapter Three