In the novice section of the library I showed the young spider man a few books that I myself had read in the past when I was learning the basics of both pyromancy and geomancy. Though he was very shy he gave a deep bow and thanked me profusely. “Thank you very much sir. I will remember this.” He quickly scampered off to somewhere else in the library before I had an opportunity to say anything.

“A bit of an odd fellow isn’t he.” A familiar voice suddenly spoke from behind. I turned to see Mrs. Florens turning the corner of the book shelf with a small table-like object with wheels on the bottom. The object was covered with books that she quickly began placing back.

“Mrs. Florens, you surprised me.” I said, a little surprised by how quiet she was.

“Sorry about that. I just noticed that you were helping out a young mage not unlike yourself who was just starting his journey into the arcane. Normally that would be my job to help, so I wanted to thank you for helping him.” Mrs. Florens moved a few of the books around and exposed a few that were piled upon by other less advanced books.

“Now I know you are an avid reader so I thought you might be interested in something like these which you normally would get access to until you seek someone out.” Reaching into the pile she picked out three books that looked quite advanced. The first book was titled The Basics of Ritual Casting, the second How to Convert Manipulation Effects into Rituals, and the third How to Convert Basic Spells into Rituals.

I took the books and looked the covers up and down with a look of confusion on my face. This was the first time I heard anything about rituals let alone converting spells and manipulation into them. When I looked back up Mrs. Florens obviously knew what I was thinking. “Read the Basics of Ritual Casting first and it should explain everything to you. I don’t really know what you are planning on doing with that magic spell you were converting into manipulation but I don’t see how you can keep that up for long while moving around without at least a few months of practice.”

With that Mrs. Florens walked away leaving only the books on the shelf and those in my hands. I kept the Basics of Ritual Casting in my hands while the other two went into my dimensional bag before I returned to the table I was practicing at and started reading.

My eyes widened at the statements within just the very first page of this book. Preparing spells ahead of time such as the Tri Earth Bolts I was so fond of was definitely something doable, but with rituals far more advanced spells were able to be cast far ahead of time and stored within a mana stone.

‘This is incredible. I might even be able to use this ritual magic to maintain my sound barrier while I am moving around. I wouldn’t need to worry about my mana usage and it would be far more stable since it wouldn’t be subjected to my own mana fluctuations. The only real problem I see here is acquiring a mana stone strong enough to remain active for a decent amount of time. I bought one from that powerful merchant Osvald in his likely illegal warehouse, but buying one from the guild should probably be a lot cheaper since he was selling for both a profit and illegally.’

I made a mental note to look into the prices of mana stones so I could actually try out a few of these ideas that came to my mind and continued reading. As it turned out not all ritual spells required mana stones to operate, things like preparing a spell and moving it around certainly did, but if you just wanted a longer lasting variant of a spell or effect there were spells directly designed for that. The one downside ritual spells including these had was the caster would always need to perform the hand signs and speak the arcane words which was an answer to my questions about casting the tier one geomancy spells with just slight movements and mana.

One of the spells was called Bonfire and it predictably created a fire around the size of a bonfire that would stay in its spot until it ran out of mana. The interesting thing about this spell and how ritual spells worked was that I could actually hurt myself very badly with rituals spells like this one since it would actually be mostly using mana from the world around it, some of the mana would be mine but that was just to give it direction and orders, to fuel it the mana came from its own surroundings.

‘I will need to cast this spell somewhere outside, preferably somewhere outside the city where I won't need to worry about anyone stumbling upon it and hurting themselves.’ I thought to myself as I stood up from the table and closed the book. There were a few other ritual spells that looked interesting that I also wanted to try, but I needed to get outside the guild before I tried them out. ‘I should be able to find an abandoned building or two in the southern district that I won’t be disturbed in.

**********

I knew of one building that was abandoned in the southern district, but with the young widow living there it didn’t seem like a very good place to practice magic. Instead I looked around the area the same building was in until I found another more worn down building with a few holes in the walls. The front door was either locked or blocked from the inside so I was forced to conjure up a ladder to climb inside through a window not unlike what I did with the other building. It was also just as dark which forced me to conjure a flame to see.

Stepping inside I found myself inside of a strangely shaped warehouse with a small second floor that overlooked the actual storage area. I followed the wall until I found the staircase down that was more accurately described as a ladder, but since it was technically connected to the building itself and had a much larger slant to walk down it was considered a staircase.

The storage area was empty aside from a few old and rotting pieces of wood scattered across the stone floor. I allowed myself to get lost within my thought about what this place might have looked like many years ago, perhaps even just ten years ago this place was filled with tradable goods owned by a merchant making his way though the world.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

‘That likely stopped once the current captain of the guard took over. It must have been for at least ten years now for all the nearby buildings to suffer so much damage without any repairs. I’ve never even met the man and I would happily punch him in the face for all the damage he has done to this place.’ I recalled how Captain Tasius even with all his goodwill was having a terrible time trying to undo the lasting damage the district suffered.

Knowing I shouldn’t be wasting any more time I pushed those thoughts from my mind and sat down on the cold ground while I followed the instructions for casting the Bonfire ritual spell. I collected the small amount of mana I needed from myself and then focused on performing the hand signs and speaking the arcane words which collected mana from nearby and into a small area before myself. This process took a whole minute and ended with interesting the last bit of my own mana and sort of connecting it to the rest of the mana to give it the instructions for the spell.

Suddenly a flame shot up from the ground where I placed the spell like a beam. It remained for a second before quickly shrinking until the flame stopped altogether. I looked at the small flickering flame with a mixture of annoyance and confusion by what I just witnessed.

‘It should have been a lot smaller and lasted a lot longer. Must have been something that I did when casting it, maybe I did something I wasn’t supposed to, or maybe it was something I didn’t do.’ I reached into my bag and brought out the Basics of Ritual Casting and flipped to the page on the Bonfire spell. Rereading the actual forming of the spell I realized I miss understood something, I was supposed to shrink the connecting pathway between my own mana and the foreign mana to limit the amount of mana it could access at once which would limit the output of the flame and make it last longer.

I made the mistake of just leaving the pathway very large and wide which allowed most of the mana to pass through all at once. Thankfully it was a quick fix and the spell could be cast again within just a minute.

Like before I gathered a small amount of my own mana and began casting the spell to collect the foreign mana at the target location and shape it. After a minute it was done and I quickly inserted my own mana with the instructions on what to do, this time I made sure to thin out the pathway and took a step back.

The flame that came out was a bit smaller than I would have liked it to be only reaching halfway up my shin, but it was a noticeable improvement and the spell lasted far longer than it did the last time.

I continued my experiments with the basic ritual spells within the first few pages of the book, I tried a variant that created a small spinning motion with air, another that conjured and then squirted water upwards, and the last of the four which conjured up a few clumps of earth that rolled off in a random direction.

Clearly they didn’t have much real value outside of a basic training environment but I still kept trying out different things with them to see what exactly made them act the way they did. I wanted to see if I was able to direct where the magic went, for example I wanted to see if I could have the water squirt in a direction other than straight up.

With a lot of practice and experiments that took a few hours based on the changes in the sun's angle I did manage to do something like that. It was a lot harder then when I normally did something like that because I wasn’t able to direct it after the spell started, I just had to take notes of what I observed and try again.

To do this I needed to slightly change the instructions that I gave with the small amount of mana I personally provided the ritual. However since it was just a small amount, one unit of mana to be precise, I was only able to provide so much direction for the spell without just controlling the spell itself which would defeat the purpose of ritual magic.

The best I could do with such a small ritual was change the direction of the intensity. But that didn’t mean this was a waste, with the other two books in my possession I could definitely figure out how to use and make more powerful rituals and use stronger magic. It wouldn’t be perfect, but I was betting that it would replace a spell or two and save me in a pinch.

But to do anything more complex required an actual mana stone which ended up costing me around ten gold coins when I bought it from Osvald and his illegal market. Considering that it was the lowest grade of mana stone which was referred to as petite it was quite expensive, but I should be able to get a better price from the guild since they do receive funding from the kingdom and don’t really need to make a profit.

‘Looks like I will need to look into mana stone prices when I get an opportunity. Hopefully it won’t cost as much as a house this time.’ I sighed to myself knowing I only had a little more than a gold coin in silver, the potions I was making might help with buying it but if it was even five gold coins for the mana stone it would take several weeks to gather the money, perhaps even a whole month.

**********

“Five gold coins?” I asked with defeat evident in my voice.

“Yes, that is the cost for a petite mana stone. And don’t bother asking for a discount, we sell these things at cost. Any less and the guild would just be dumping money and the kingdom would just abandon us and find another ground to support for powerful mages.” The clerk said as if it was something he had been required to answer many times.

I didn’t say anything else, instead I nodded and turned to leave the magic item hall where mana stones were sold alongside magic items to those who would ask.

‘Well that is an unfortunate turn of events. At least I don’t need to save up a whole ten gold coins, but five is still quite a bit. I don’t really know how I am going to save that much.’ I thought to myself feeling rather depressed when I suddenly recalled something that might help me acquire the money.

‘The bandit camps! I can raid them and take anything I can find once the dust settles. Since I would be killing bandits nobody would care all that much about what I was doing, but I would also be able to make the forest safer for when I go foraging for ingredients out in the forest.’ I was excited by the idea that technically wasn’t my own, but at the moment that didn’t really matter as I knew of two places that would likely have a good amount of money once I killed everyone in there.

The first was the camp in the cave that was filled with the highest members of the Rusted Daggers, for now that was not an option given how strong they were. The alternative was the smaller and less powerful camp that as I recalled was controlled by a dwarven woman.