There were cheers and congratulations in the wagon, with a few guys patting him on the back or shoulder after he finished coalescing his mana. There was more than one person who had envious looks - Felix wasn't some insanely far away existence like a high mage, but he was the one with the highest magical affinity in the entire recruit group.
Half of the people in the recruit group didn't have any magic at all! They were basically just hoping to end up cooking, scrubbing toilets, or being menial labor at the Fort rather than becoming some kind of cannon fodder. Of the 12 remaining in the recruit group, 10 of them were only peasant-grade mages! They used small spells to help out while setting up camp, like using create water for water, or using simple fire manipulation to help with the cooking. The only other low-grade mage in the recruit group was Felix's nightwatch partner, the smart looking guy, but even then, he was a subpar low-grade mage. Probably in the bottom 20% or so of low-grade mages. Meanwhile, Felix was easily in the top 5% of low-grade mages!
Still though, no one held their envy against him. With his affinity, they went a much smarter route - they tried to endear themselves to him! It made sense too - He wouldn't become a general or anything of course, but becoming a sergeant who could stand up for them and maybe pull a string or two to have them sent to a kitchen instead of a battlefield wasn't outside of the realm of possibility.
So, the wagon became lively, as everyone was giving him various tips regarding mana control, spell framework construction, using mana sense, etc. Even if they were mostly peasant-grade mages, they all seemed to know a small tip or two, and it was useful to Felix who was a complete beginner mage.
Finally, someone spoke up and said "It's about that time, it's been about an hour.".
A lot of people nodded. It was time for the second part of the awakening - elemental affinity shaping.
Felix nodded and focused on his internal mana flow. He had expected this as well. About an hour after mana coalesced into a mage, it would form a mana core in their chest, which would represent their elemental affinities.
Sure enough, the flow of mana was disturbed around Felix again. He wasn't taking in any additional mana, but his mana was re-arranging itself crazily, organizing itself, and becoming his own. He focused on the deepest part of his chest, and a small lump of mana began to form. Felix began compressing his mana into the core, making it larger and more stable. Eventually he began taking in more mana from the environment to fuel this process, which caused the other mages in the group to murmur again - it seemed none of them needed the excess mana to stabilize their cores.
Finally, after about 30 minutes of stabilizing and condensing his core, there was a change, and it completed it's form.
His mana core looked like an 8-sided diamond, shrouded in darkness. Felix frowned a bit, but quickly smiled for everyone else. The other recruits looked at him expectantly, swiftly congratulating him again. Then, the obvious question came.
"So, Felix, what kind of a mage are you?" one of the other mages asked.
"It seems that I'm an earth mage." Felix said.
A bunch of people nodded. Earth wasn't a bad element at all. Actually, considering where they were going, it was arguably one of the better ones. After all, earth focused heavily on defense. If they were going to be forced to fight at Fort Basil, being strong on defense was a good thing - after all, no one wanted to die.
No one asked what his sub-element was, and Felix didn't expect them to. It was a common rule that you didn't ask a mage what their sub-element was unless there was a specific reason to, because everyone understood that everyone else would want to have their own secrets and their own trump cards. So, people usually only identified themselves by their primary elements.
Felix identified his elements through the properties of his core. Typically, a fire mage would have a ball of fire as a core. A water mage would have perhaps a water ball or maybe an ice sphere. His was a faceted diamond, it was obviously earthen - earth mages typically had a gemstone for a core. As for his sub-element... it was darkness. The diamond was shrouded in darkness.
Earth mages were pretty straightforward. They could manipulate the ground, opening sinkholes, creating rock spires from the ground, creating defensive structures easily, etc. However, they also had the important ability of combining earthen materials with their body - they could make their skin have gems embedded in it, for example. So they were definitely the hardest to kill, although they faced a lot of awkwardness versus flying opponents. It was a decent element.
Darkness was an awkward element to use, however. No one wanted it as their primary element. Why? Well, it definitely had it's strengths. In fact, it was widely regarded as the most versatile and probably the strongest element in general. However, what could you actually use it for? Basically only evil things!
For example, a dark mage could use necromancy to raise the dead as thralls - that was obviously frowned upon. They could create powerful poisons or curses - that was obviously frowned upon. They could blend into the darkness to become unseen at night - but what would that be used for? Nothing good! It's obvious that would be used for thievery or peeping. They could search souls for information - but again, this was clearly a demonic and evil act. They could enslave people, which was legal in the Aurul kingdom, but again, this was clearly an immoral act.
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So, dark mages were suppressed around the kingdom. There were a few that stood openly and proudly in society, and only took lawful actions, like being a registered slaver who did everything by the books, or being spies working in the employ of the military or the aristocracy who worked at night, but even then they were looked on with scorn and suspicion.
Felix didn't consider himself to be a paragon of virtue and justice, but he wasn't a cold and evil psychopath who would wantonly commit evil acts without a second thought either.
But more importantly than that - his stats were way too skewed now! Earth already made him mostly focused on defense, but his sub-element was skewed towards stealth and utility! He was basically an unkillable cockroach who could stealth away from a predicament if there was anything that could actually threaten his defense, but he had no mobility whatsoever and very limited offense! Was he supposed to stand there awkwardly and tank things while slowly whittling down whoever he was fighting with curses and poisons? He was already getting a headache thinking about his future.
Mages in this world weren't required to stick to their elements. There was nothing preventing an earth mage from constructing a fireball spell framework, for example. However, it generally wasn't a good idea to do so for more than 1 or 2 low level utility spells outside of your elements, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, you got a massive boost to constructing spell frameworks of your elements, while framework construction of other elements would be suppressed. It was something along the lines of for your primary element the speed would be at 10 times the base rate, for your sub-element it would be about 8 times the base rate, and for every other element, it would depend on how it interacted with your elements, but they would all definitely be below the base rate. For example, a fire mage would probably construct a water spell framework at something ridiculous like 1% of the base rate. Or, for Felix, constructing a lightning spell probably wouldn't be too insanely difficult, since his primary element was the earth, which had a positive relationship with metal. He might be able to construct a lightning spell at a 10% rate, if he wanted to. But it wouldn't be worth it at all to try and construct a wood spell framework.
However, that was only one issue - even if you took the time to construct a framework of a differing element, it would take multiple times the mana to cast as your own element's spells, which would increase the time it takes to use, and the effect would be weaker than if you used your own elements.
So, most people wouldn't bother working outside of their elements except for maybe one or two useful peasant level spells like Create Water. Trying to work on another element's magic for combat usage was just a bad idea in general, since it was most likely the case that you could get much more out of your own element. Some people would create a low level framework of another element to use as a surprise trump card, but it rarely had much impact.
So, this basically meant Felix was stuck using earth and darkness.
One of the other recruits handed Felix a book. It was a peasant level magic manual that the military escort handed them at the beginning of the journey to pass around amongst each other to learn magic while they sat in the wagons. It didn't need to have any words, it just showed the spell frameworks and colored them according to their elements, and used pictures to infer their usage, which made sense since most people weren't literate. Felix started to skim through it. It had some genuinely useful spells the military and nobles wanted to be widely spread, such as Ignition and Create Water, and there was one or two spells for every element, even darkness, which Felix found a little surprising. The darkness spell in the manual was Night Eye - it just gave you better vision in the dark, in one of your eyes. This was actually something surprisingly useful for him, since he always seemed to end up as a nightwatch no matter where he went. A couple of the guys were watching what spells he was paying attention to, but no one had any change of expression when they saw him focusing on Night Eye - he was their nightwatch after all, this made complete sense for him to pick up first. It didn't necessarily mean he was a dark mage subclass. Actually, the other low-grade mage in their group had also been focusing on constructing Night Eye, despite the fact that he was actually a water mage. It just made sense for their situation.
A couple of the guys gave him some tips about framework construction. How it worked was that you had an infinite internal space (usually referred to as the "spell space") located inside of your core, and you poured your mana into it. You would mold the elements into nodes, with mana lines connecting them, and construct them into a specific shape that corresponded with the spell you would be casting - Night Eye, unsurprisingly, was constructed out of darkness nodes, and was in the shape of an eye.
Felix had slept through most of the day earlier, and his awakening as a mage and going through the manual took another couple of hours, so the sun was beginning to set, and it was near when they would be setting up camp. This meant that the dark element was rising and the light element was falling. So it wasn't difficult for him to find enough darkness to add to his framework. He began to absorb the mana and elements from the world around him, and poured it into his spell space located in his diamond core. The darkness shrouding his core was agitated and excited, swirling around the diamond while he worked. It resonated with the mana and elements he was bringing in from the environment, and quickly refined it to become his own. Still though, he was only a low-grade mage. By the time they found a spot to set up camp an hour later, he had only constructed 3 nodes of darkness, out of the 27 required for the spell framework.
They set up camp, cooked and ate dinner, and everyone settled in for the night. One of the escorts came up to him and reminded him that his nightwatch duties came first, framework construction came second. Felix nodded that he understood, and the escort went back to his tent and passed out for the night.
The smart looking guy (Who's name Felix finally learned was Alexander) clapped his shoulder and told him to focus on spell construction, he would focus on nightwatch for the night. He said it was the least he could do since it was his first day as a mage, and he knew how special that was, and how much he would want to get his first spell.
So, Felix did exactly that. Now that it was completely night, darkness abounded in the world, so he constructed the spell much more quickly. He just checked on Alexander every now and then, and only about 6 hours later, he finished constructing Night Eye.