Felix woke up. He was worried he would oversleep, but it didn't seem to have happened, it looked to be barely past dawn, so it was probably about 7. Time to go.
He grabbed his bag and the last dozen apples he had on hand. He double checked he had his coin purse. He took one last look around the house, everything was in place. He left the house, locked it up, and left the orchard. He walked north to the village, and ate an apple on the way. It was about 20 minutes until they were to meet up, but he didn't have anything else to do, so he just waited by the north gate early. Gurnkey was fairly small, so the recruit group was fairly small too. Gurnkey had a population of roughly 1500, and 24 young men in total arrived at the north gate. Felix recognized most of them, but he wasn't close to any of them, so he didn't strike up any conversations.
There were 4 simple wagons prepared, 2 for the recruits, 1 for their escort, and 1 for supplies. The recruits were all searched by the military men, who hardly said a word to them, and they were loaded into the wagons, and they left north without incident.
The reason they were going north was that there were no roads connecting the Aurum-Gurnkey-Fort Cumin road and the much more expansive western road network south of Gurnkey. Almost all of the development in the Aurul kingdom was in the north, west, and the northern three-fourths of the eastern kingdom. The south of the kingdom was basically dead dry brushlands of no value. Felix, being a transmigrator from Earth, suspected that this was because the south of the kingdom was in the rain shadow of the southern mountain range, while the opposite was true for the western kingdom.
The journey to Fort Basil would probably only take 10-12 days. Although regular simple covered wagons could typically only travel 20 miles a day under good conditions, the horses were a strong wind variant, and the wagons had simple wind enchantments on them. Adding on the fact that they were traveling on the 2 most important and most well-maintained high-priority military roads, during a situation where the military felt stressed and pressed for time, he was certain that they would be covering at least 50 miles a day. The distance from the Capital Aurum, which was fairly central in the kingdom, to both major forts, was roughly 400 miles, while the southernmost road was about 100 miles to the north of Gurnkey, as well as being 100 miles south from the capital (It marked the quarter-mark distance to both forts), all of this being planned by the very exacting military, and the connector road also had a distance of 100 miles. So, when you count the 100 miles northwest, 100 miles west, and 300 miles southwest, you got a total distance of about 500 miles. Add in a day or two to account for mishaps or general slowness or anything else.
While Felix was contemplating math, some of the other recruits started conversing with each other.
"So did you all get offered the same thing? Fight the blockade at the capital or head to Fort Basil?" one guy asked to everyone in the wagon. Everyone nodded and murmured in agreement.
"Not much of a choice, is it? If you went to the capital, you'd almost definitely die, so..." one slightly chubbier guy near the back said.
"That's the point. That's how the nobles work. Now you can't complain about being conscripted to Fort Basil. If you try to say anything about it, they would just shoot back that you chose to go to Fort Basil of your own free will. Think about it, they had 24 seats prepared. 24 of us showed up. They didn't expect anyone to seriously pick to go to the capital." one smarter looking guy said.
That comment set off a round of muttering and cursing the nobles under their breath. But mostly, it set off a feeling of helplessness in the wagon. This was how the Aurul kingdom worked. And there was nothing any of them could do to change it. Why?
Because it was questionable if the entirety of the peasantry and low-grade mages banding together throughout the entire kingdom could challenge a House headed by an upper-grade mage. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, it was basically impossible to coordinate so many people. Next, even if you did, they wouldn't be able to do anything to an upper-grade mage!
Mage grades referred to how efficiently a mage could absorb mana from the world around them, and convert it into spell frameworks. Strictly speaking, a peasant-grade mage and an upper-grade mage could both construct the same spell framework internally and cast the exact same spell. There was no upper limit for either mage. However, the more powerful the spell, the more complex the framework would be, and the more mana it would take to construct. Upper-grade mages had more educational resources too, of course, so they could construct better frameworks, taught by other upper-grade mages who came before them. But even if you handed a high tier complex framework to a peasant-grade mage, it might take him a decade to construct it, or even more! Meanwhile for an upper-grade mage, it might only take a week. Furthermore, even when the spell framework was constructed, it would need mana to activate it. So, in a combat situation, an upper-grade mage might be able to cast his high grade mass hellfire spell in 5 minutes, while it would take a peasant-grade mage a week to gather the necessary mana! So, it was totally pointless to teach a peasant-grade magician such a high level spell, he wouldn't even be able to cast it realistically, unless you gave him drugs to keep him awake for a week or something else completely unrealistic.
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Furthermore, constructing spell frameworks was an active process, not a passive one. You had to sit down and focus on your internal mana flow, and direct it into the shape you wanted. Why does that matter? Because who had the resources to sit around constructing spell frameworks? The nobles! Peasants were busy running farms or shops, who would have time to sit around learning to spit fireballs that wouldn't benefit them at all?
So most peasant-grade mages only learned one or two widely circulated super simple spells that the nobles allowed to be freely distributed, like Create Water, or Ignition, which could light logs easily.
So even if the entire peasantry and most of the low-grade mages rose in revolt, what would be the end result? One high grade mage from one of the 4 High Houses (The three Houses headed by the Dukes, and the royal House) would laugh and dust off his enchanted coat, fly above the unwashed masses, and spend a couple of minutes ignoring laughable fireballs and ice spikes and wipe out a hundred thousand people with one mass hellfire spell, and everyone would run away screaming in terror. The upper-grade mage would then just go back to lounging around sipping wine or something, happy to have had the entertainment. And all of this was before you considered them taking more extreme routes like using dark magic to turn them all into slaves.
So, they were truly powerless. Frankly, the nobles pretending to give them a choice and not just flipping them off and telling them to go to Fort Basil was already pretty decent.
The conversation died down at this point. The escort had never bothered to stop their conversation speaking ill of the nobles, Felix suspected it was because they had seen this exact scene dozens of times, and they knew how it would play out.
Some of the recruits closed their eyes, obviously working on their magic. Some of the recruits sat there daydreaming. Felix really envied the guys who were able to work on their magic, but he couldn't do so himself since he hadn't awoken his inner potential yet. He joined the daydreaming crowd and zoned out.
Eventually, the sun started to set. The wagon train pulled off the road, and the escort ordered the recruits to set camp while they stood guard.
Stood guard against what? Prairie dogs?
No one said anything though and started setting up the tents. They knew the escorts were just being lazy shits, but what were they going to do about it? Speaking out against the escorts was an excellent way to end up volunteering yourself for even more extra duties like cooking or cleaning, and refusing to do anything was a great way to end up whipped and beaten, followed by being tied up, and probably court martialed, and many other worse issues for yourself down the line.
The recruits divvied up the tasks, the escorts told them what needed doing but gave them the freedom to assign themselves. Mainly, there was cooking, setting up the fires, setting up the tents, caring for the horses, and nightwatch. Felix opted for nightwatch, explaining to the other recruits that he was the actual night watchman back at Gurnkey anyway, which a couple of people vouched for. So he was naturally the best fit, along with the smarter looking guy from earlier.
The food was rice and potatoes. The escort unit got to throw some jerky and a bit of spices into theirs. It was a bit bland, but no one could really complain, it's not like they expected noblemen cuisine, being peasants, let alone all the way out here in the wilderness.
The night passed uneventfully. Felix was mostly still on his night watchman sleep schedule internally, but he had to wake up his partner a couple of times. When it turned to dawn, they woke everyone up, cooked breakfast, packed up camp, and climbed back into the wagons. Felix and his partner slept through most of the day while sitting in the wagon, and everyone else ignored them.
At the end of the second day, they reached the crossroads to the west. There still wasn't anything here, the closest town was still another 20 miles or so north. They set up camp again, and did everything the exact same as the day before.
The next day, they were halfway down the connector road, when they reached the first town on their route. It was an unremarkable small village called Fias. The escort unit paid to buy more rice and potatoes, but they still camped outside of the village. Why would the military pay to put them in an inn when they had perfectly good tents?
Two more days passed like this. Then, finally, it was the day Felix had been waiting for for years. They day when he would unlock his inner potential, and begin walking the path of magic.
He woke up in the wagon. He felt the same so far. He ate one of his apples, and thought about it for a second, and passed them out to everyone in the wagon, who were surprised.
"Felix, right? What's the occasion? Or did you just want to hand these out before they spoiled?" one of the guys next to him asked.
"It's an important day actually, I was saving those apples for today. It's my 18th birthday today." Felix said.
There was mixed reactions to that. Some of the boys cursed the nobles openly, since Felix had just announced he was illegally conscripted, while some of them congratulated him. Most of them gave him words of encouragement.
Everyone ate their apples quietly, enjoying the treat, and chucking them to the wayside. The escorts said nothing. After a couple of hours, there was a disturbance in the air around them, and the light warped around Felix, it was the physical manifestation of mana rushing into Felix. A couple of people whistled, a bit impressed by the amount, even some of the escorts looked a bit interested.
Felix became a low-grade magician, but it looked like he was like his father, at the top end of the low-grade. The tiers were discernable by the phenomena that manifested during their awakening. Upper-grade mages would spawn ridiculous phenomena like rainbows and lightning around themselves. Middle-grade mages would have a colored flow of mana enter them. Low-grade mages like Felix would have a colorless distortion around themselves. Peasant-grade awakenings were basically only visible through sensing the flow of mana around them - they weren't visible to the naked eye.
Felix concentrated on circulating his flow of mana throughout his body, awakening his mana circuits. It felt like he had unlocked a sixth sense, he could feel the world around him through the mana in the air.
Felix had succeeded in becoming a mage.