The majority of those who came to study at the Academy knew to read, write and do some basic math, to some degree, yet there were also those who were basically starting from scratch in all three.
At the start of the previous month, Lomera was one of those few who knew nothing.
The twelve-year-old girl lost her parents to illness a few months back, and then, as if to compound on her misfortune, her father’s relatives took all of his possessions while allowing Lomera to live inside their old house as a sort of an unpaid servant. The little girl ran away after the first beating she received, and for two months she lived mostly by helping out at inns. When the winter arrived she was working at a pig farm, for food and a warm place to stay, when a fire consumed the barn she and a few others used as a shelter. The owners blamed their employees for the fire and the girl was almost turned into an indentured servant to recuperate the loss. Once more she had to run away.
A few days before that portal was opened a Master from the Library picked her up from the streets and enrolled her, allowing her to eat and sleep in the Libraries facilities. Mostly left to her own devices, the girl rarely left her small attic room. It took Penelope and Euria over a week of dogged questioning and half-answers to piece the girl's story.
Lomera’s stammer had also eased a bit, probably as she accustomed herself to their small group, but would come back full force in front of strangers.
While Lomera’s story had so many things that could have gone wrong and could have easily ended in many less than ideal ways. Yet now that Lomera was at this Academy, Tercius was sure that these relatives of hers had helped this girl step on a path they couldn’t have imagined.
Since Tercius was looking for something to do, and his options were limited by several constraints, he turned to teaching Lomera. His little sister, Aurelia, was his first true student ever, and in the process of teaching her, he found out that he actually enjoyed it. Every time he saw Aurelia using a skill he taught her, a warm, pleasant feeling would come in a surge over him.
From the very first lesson where Tercius taught Lomera the letters with which her name was written, Lomera showed that she had an eye for details and a very sharp memory. Every letter, he told her, had an associated sound. With Tercius’s skill Teaching helping to pave the path forward, one by one, Lomera wrote the letters then spelled their sounds, and they only moved to the next when she did the previous ones with high accuracy.
Within two days the rumor that he was teaching letters and numbers circulated through the dorms and a few curious ones joined on the third day. Within a week he had seven students, including Lomera. Mistress Dea even joined one of his classes, merely sitting and listening from the sidelines. From that point on, every week after new groups of students arrived, Mistress Dea would send someone to join his unofficial class. She joked, privately, that now all of the staff knew of him and his exploits of stealing their jobs. Master Slav also came around and told Tercius that he was grateful for the help. If his students knew their letters and numbers beforehand, then during his classes Master Slav could focus more of his time to help them progress further.
Since his skill Teaching was at a barrier, and Tercius at the time lacked even a speck of Energy, the skill stayed as is, at level 20. His Mathematics advanced by a level to 43, which was a consolation prize, in a way.
By the time the second month arrived, Tercius had taught twenty-eight of his schoolmates, to various degrees, how to write and spell letters, numbers, signs, and symbols. Excluding those from the last group that arrived, everyone could write and read simple sentences, albeit slowly. Everyone knew the numbers and symbols and their meanings, and most knew how to add and subtract, slowly moving towards more complex mathematical puzzles with each passing day.
Those who started with the original group, at the beginning of the month, progressed the furthest and for them, Tercius added light reading material to study whenever a free moment came their way.
***
On the first day of classes, nearly two hundred students were led by Mistress Dea to the building that was directly across the park from their dorms. After a mere five minutes of walking led them to a large classroom with tables and chairs, and Tercius felt himself return to his years spent in the elementary school.
In that classroom, for almost two hours, Master Slav held a lecture, a general introduction of sorts. The Master who was supposed to do it originally was unable to make it and Master Slav stepped in to fill in the empty slot, or so he informed them. There, the blonde-haired Master explained where and at which times the classes were, and every student got a written scroll with the classes they were to attend. The scroll Tercius received had listed, in a very nicely done penmanship, the classes for five months ahead. Excluded from his list were the ‘general classes’, as Master Slav called them, that involved learning to read, write and do basic maths, even a class on basic hygiene, and Tercius was allowed to skip them if he wanted to do so.
While Mistress Dea laid some ground rules, most of those referred to the dorms and the conduct the students are expected to adhere to, while Master Slav took to laying some ground rules for the Academy as a whole.
The Academy level of the Pyramid was the only one that students were allowed on, with The Repository and The Infinite Gardens being off-limits, for now.
“Is magic in any way involved in these classes, Master?” Tercius asked after the lecture was over, and most of the students left the classroom.
Master Slav took a moment to think about it and then said, "No, for now, these are merely the mundane version. In upper years we do teach a few spells for cleaning, even a few spells for writing."
The ‘upper years’ that Master Slav talked about were those from third to sixth, Tercius knew.
Even though Tercius doubted that he could learn something new in those classes, he did not let his doubt cloud his judgment. He would see for himself if there was something for him to gain and only then decide either to continue with the classes or drop them.
***
The next day.
Tercius watched as Master Lazarus paced back and forth across the raised stage. In his eyes, and in the eyes of the almost two hundred students that observed the Master from the amphitheater seats, the man seemed a giant. When Tercius and his group were first led to this amphitheater classroom, he wondered why the door was two and a half meters tall. As soon as Master Lazarus arrived, he got his answer.
As the Master walked near the windows a few students squinted from the light that was reflected off of his polished head. The middle-aged Master kept his curly beard in a small braid, which made Tercius think that the Master looked more a warrior than a mage. Tercius's hand went over the smooth baby skin on his face, and he lamented that he was currently unable to grow such a magnificent beard.
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Give that man a greatsword and plate armor, Tercius thought, as his eyes swept over the mage. Not that.
Master Lazarus wore something that could have been used to store grain, in a moldy storehouse somewhere just a few hours earlier. While the clothes of the Master painted the mage a common farmer, his Mana reserves spoke another story entirely. Every single Master or Mistress Tercius met so far kept his or her Mana in such a way that his Mana Sight would overlook them entirely, just as if they did not exist. Tercius learned that this was an application of Mana Metamorphosis, one which students learned in the final year of study here, at the Academy.
So not only was the man’s physique intimidating on some primal level, but the amount of Mana was kept available for everyone to see… He’s a dark sun, Tercius thought, as goosebumps went up his arms. Not even that eagle had a Mana color so dark…
The amphitheater's door closed with a snap of a finger from the Master, and every pair of eyes in the room suddenly looked at the Master, and he, in turn, gazed back at them.
This was the first official class they had in a course that involved magic, and Tercius was almost bouncing in his seat. Finally, he thought. Even when the furrowed gaze of the Master swept over him, he could not keep himself pinned down.
“Welcome students, to a class I like to call What’s what. For a start, you should know that I like to ask questions,” the man’s gaze went over the crowd, as the booming voice of the Master filled the amphitheater, “So don’t jump if I point at you. If you listened, then answer the question. If you did not… there's the door. The answer ‘I don’t know’ is perfectly acceptable, but it opens you to further questioning, so… do be careful.”
"First question, and this one is for the whole class." a pause followed his words as the Master moved to the center of the stage and then turned their way. "What's a spell?"
Tercius saw a few hands in the front row shot up with the speed of sound, even before the Master finished speaking. Master Lazarus seemed amused by their twitching hands, as he threw his gaze at the middle and back portion of the seats.
I better have an answer ready just in case he asks me, Tercius thought.
Any spell required two skills, Mana Manipulation and Mana Metamorphosis. At least that's what he knew at this moment. With these two skills, Tercius saw mages perform many wildly different effects. From moving and seemingly creating ice to lighting a fire out of nothing, from levitating crates, that must have weighed a ton just by themselves, to making wormholes and creating parallel spaces. These two skills gave a mage enormous flexibility if they knew how to use them. There was a knowledge requirement, to use these skills in such a way, Tercius reflected.
Yet the question was: what is a spell?
For Tercius, a spell was a command executed by a mage at the cost of Mana.
“Let’s try this. What’s a skill?” Master Lazarus' booming voice addressed the room, startling Tercius out of his previous thoughts.
This was an easier one for him. He always thought of skills as enhancements of sorts, a very specialized add-on that used Mana as fuel. These enhancements could be passive or active, or a blend of both. Gardening, for example, was a passive skill that shortened the time needed for a plant to reach maturity. Stone Shaping was an active skill that allowed him to, using his hands, mold stone into any shape he saw fit. His uncle’s Sphere of Cognizance was, in Tercius’s opinion, a blend of passive and active.
The characteristics of skills wildly varied, from what Tercius had observed. All were perfectly capable of working alone, but there were also those who worked well in concert with others and often actively sought after in pairs just like Mana Manipulation and Mana Metamorphosis.
The process of gaining a skill was also a giant puzzle, as for some skills no knowledge seemed required, yet for others it was. Tercius was sure that a degree of knowledge was required if only something as basic as knowing that a thing can be done. A man who never knew of woodworking might get a skill related to it simply by working, as the basic principles of work were quite easy to figure out even by someone who had no prior contact of any kind. In the process of working, he gained familiarity and knowledge and the skill was acquired, in a relatively short time period. Someone who never knew of Mana might one day become a mage, but how much time would be required for him to find out all of the prerequisite knowledge? A lifetime probably. From what Master Belior told Tercius, a 'wild mage' was someone who got the skill and survived the experience. The death rate the man mentioned was also quite high.
There were also skills that seemed spontaneous in their appearance.
For example, there was a girl in Nurium who got a skill that made her hair grow almost a meter in length per week. As her skill level grew, that speed of growth increased. From what Tercius saw, the girl was quite proud of her hair and even refused to cut it even when it got out of control.
That was one of the first inklings he had that ‘desire’ of a particular something also had a role in skill making. Knowledge played a role as well, as Tercius knew from obtaining Mathematics. Then there were also a lot of skills that seemed influenced by outside factors, Seliana’s new skill Heart of Mending to name just one. Tercius was not sure if outside factors, as Seliana’s particular case came to mind, were ‘triggers’.or rather ‘amplifiers’.
'Triggers', as Tercius dubbed them for his mental journal of skill research, were those pivotal requirements that made a skill manifest itself for the first time.
‘Amplifiers’ were things that allowed for these requirements to be lowered to a more… accessible point. The Energy, in Tercius’s mind, was one such ‘amplifier’. Yet, it was also much more…
While Tercius went over these things in his mind, Master Lazarus finally settled on someone.
“Aaaa… a skill… is aaa... spell?” the boy answered, and Tercius got the impression that the boy was merely stringing the words one after the other.
“Is that a question young man?”
“Aaaa… no?”
“Then my ears must be deceiving me,” the tall Master barked a laugh, then frowned. “It bothers me that your guess ended up being correct, in a way. Indeed, as our young colleague here said, every skill is a spell and every spell is a skill. At least they were, are, or will be at some point. Most of the spells we mages use were made by studying Mana movements of skills, and many spells end up becoming skills after some time of use. A spell I have used for nigh on two decades recently became a skill, and when the opportunity presented itself to take the skill, I did it. Can someone think of a reason as to why I did it?"
There was a silence and no hands were raised this time.
“I did it because a skill is an instinctual application of Mana, almost instantaneous in response, while a spell requires specific thoughts, and those thoughts require time. Now, as you practice a spell over and over again, that time goes down. Your body learns to do some steps on instinct. When I first learned the spell in question, it took me some ten seconds of concentration to make it work, and by the time I got the skill, I could do it in one. With the skill, it's even less than that. So, if skills are so much better than spells, even when they are at their low levels, then why do us mages hail spells above all else?"
Tercius could think of one reason immediately: Versatility.
With enough time, the number of skills someone could acquire is theoretically infinite. In practice, as the life expectancy was some 65 years of age, that number was somewhere around ten. Outliers exist, of course, but they are rare to a ridiculous point.
Spells, on the other hand, were cast with just two skills, and could, in theory, do everything a skill could do. While a skill could take anywhere from a moment to a decade to manifest for the first time, depending on the age and other factors, a spell was probably something one could learn in a more 'normal' timeframe. Tercius did not know how long this 'normal' timeframe was in length, but he suspected that it was within a period of a year. Could be less, could be more, he just did not have enough information. But even if it took two years, which he thought unlikely, then from the age of eleven to sixty-five, that was twenty-seven spells atop those ten skills. Of course, Tercius took the ideal version where a mage's sole focus was the learning of new spells.
Thirty-seven skills and spells, versus ten skills, was almost four versus one difference.
And that was the worst-case Tercius imagined, more probable was a clean five versus one.
Each skill, or rather spell, brought with it more versatility that then had a positive cascading effect on multiple areas starting with something as essential as providing food and shelter to something like security and combat.
The answers Master Lazarus got from Tercius's classmates ranged from 'because my mother/father say so' to an answer that Tercius had to spend a lot of time thinking about. The boy who gave that answer spoke in some kind of a broken version of the Common language, and while all the words were there, Tercius had to do some retrofitting for them to make sense. Folks around the Empire had used The Common for a long time, and while each continent had some specific characteristics of their own, everyone could understand each other easily. To Tercius's ears, the boy seemed to have started learning The Common recently, and he thought it odd for a moment, but then he remembered that the Empire was still expanding its borders.
A world existed where The Common was not common at all.
Then Master Lazarus looked straight at Tercius, and he knew that he was next.