As I was practicing for the fourth stage, some of the lazy people started breaking through to the third stage, one of those lazy people being Keswick. Now, this was weird. I knew that Keswick did roughly about a third of my practice routine.

That meant it should have taken much more time to break through to stage three. I was confused about how she managed to pull it off, so I just asked her. Apparently, if you are a descendant of a relatively high-class noble like that lucky bastard Keswick, the academy just sends you a wizard to perform the operation to advance to stage three, and you don’t have to put in any work. You just love to see it.

Anyhow, after plenty of exerted effort from my great self, I finally managed to pull off the conditions to advance to stage four. I can close and reopen mana breaches within three seconds.

Creating mana breaches only by imprinted mana manipulation isn’t much different than moving mana around. Mana veins connect to the entirety of the soul, and the soul is purely constructed out of imprinted mana, so creating a mana breach is as easy as just pulling a part of your soul's imprinted mana into the mana veins.

Reconstructing the mana breach is different, though. If you wait some time, your soul will naturally fill in the mana breach by copying your physical body. You can speed this process up by filling the mana breach with imprinted mana and arranging the mana in rough accordance with its surroundings. This will prompt the soul to fill in the mana breach more rapidly because most of the work will already be done.

Advancing to the fourth step wasn’t that hard this time. Having to open permanent mana breaches on each of my fingers was a bit of a hassle, but nothing that horrible like last time. Now that I could create mana breaches by will, it was mostly trivial anyway. But what should I have expected, everything becomes trivial to me in the end anyway.

Completing the fourth and final step of preparing the soul for wizardry meant that I could finally release mana into the atmosphere. That meant I could at last try out the two magic rings that I had rattling around in my dorm.

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Before I left, the soul anatomy teacher told me that I was ready for the second year and that I should not try any spells without teacher supervision. Meh, the magic rings probably don’t count as spells, right? Oh, who am I kidding, I’m always right.

So I returned home and tested out the rings. The spatial ring worked as advertised, although I found out why it wasn’t priced higher. The space in it wasn't even enough to fit my sword. The only things I carry around with it are my dagger, my notebook, and my quill, with its ink.

The ring I took from that one noble I kept captive, whose name I can’t bother to remember, is apparently a ring inscribed with a defense spell—that one transparent shield spell she used during our battle. Testing it out, it’s quite strong, as it showed during the last person who used the ring, that it can withstand stabs and slashes. Although it’s hard to keep up, because of the ring, I found out for the first time what running out of mana felt like.

When your body runs out of mana, it speeds up your breathing rate to compensate, although I have found that there is some sort of hard limit to how much mana the body's willing to spare, and it's somewhere around 30 percent.

Eventually, the first year was drawing to a close.

I was talking with Keswick on some inane subject when she suddenly brought up, ”So Jeld, where are you planning on going on the one-month break?”.

Each year of learning contains 11 months of education and has a one-month break in between the years.

I plan to just stay here to learn more, and plus, let's face it, there's no place in this filthy world that quite deserves the magnificence of my esteemed presence anyway, so why try finding one?

So I tell her as much, “I’m planning on staying in the academy.”.

“Doesn't the academy close for the month?”.

“It does?”.

“Yeah, you know the workers need breaks too. I mean, look at Ms. Rose, I’ve never seen her stay in one place for more than one hour, she definitely needs a break.”.

Oh, that’s not fun. I’ve got to move out of my dorm for the month, which is pretty bad because I have to move out Ustos along with my luggage.

And where would I even go afterward? Should I just return to the slums? No, I should probably go to the Ustos estate or something. They probably expect him to return there for the break.