- Really how? – ask my second mom

- New skill mana manipulation, as soon as I got it I was able to level up my fire magic since it was also the only one I had at maximum level. – I answer her.

- And how did you get it. – She ask me really interested

- Well I tried really hard to modify the way I do healing, I’m trying to find a way for us to make healing cheaper in mana cost, so I kept my mana sense active while I was casting heal on the wounded soldiers, I tried to make the heal instead of covering their whole body just cover the area around and within the wound, I was able to get the skill mana manipulation at that point, I do not know if mana sense at yellow is needed or not to gain the skill, but at least for now I found a way for us to continue moving forward. – I tell her

- Carter, sweetie, I’m not a healer. – She says looking at me

- And I don’t think you have to be a healer – she looks at me in confusion.

- Mom I took a spell with a wide area use, and modified it to become a pinpointed one, so if we need to do this we should probably do the same with a spell of any of the other magical schools, you could change the breeze spell from the wind affinity and compress it and form some kind of wind blade, this is a cliché spell but is it an effective one. – I tell her and suddenly her eyes sparkle.

- Really? Every mage for hundreds of years always though that wind blade was a hero spell, are you telling me that it is just a modification of the basic breeze spell. – She asks me not believing me.

- Let me try I have the image and while so far I have only modified healing spells, I think I can do this – I say.

I start concentrating and moving the mana controlling it compressing it, I’m going to cast the breeze spell but now the spell will just be as condensed at possible, if I could have done this in battle instead of blinding the orcs I would have cut off their heads, it takes a lot of mental energy and I feel how the Wind magic skill is not ready for such manipulation but screw it, I’m the one in control and the mana is going to do what I want it to do, as I continue fighting for control of the spell to fire it how I want it my second mom is watching attentively to not miss a single detail, I imagine she is also using mana sense, after a bit I am successful and I was able to fire the wind blade spell, with just that spell I got my wind magic straight up to level 100 in orange, and the wind blade well it hit the wall and went through it, leaving a perfect cut behind.

- That is how it goes and my wind magic skill was fighting against me, I think this type of spell should only be used at the maximum level of orange, understood mom – I finish asking my mom.

She is looking at me with her mouth agape, and then she goes to work trying to do what I did she saw how I moved the magical motes so she knows exactly what she needs to do, after 3 very long minutes she finally is ready and shoot also a wind blade but the cut on the wall done by hers is a tiny bit inferior than mine, but then she saw the same as I did, she got the skill and probably level up her wind magic.

- Yes son I got it, mana manipulation and wind magic level yellow, what is this level called? – She ask a bit absentmindedly

- This is the same level as the crafting professions, so it should be apprentice level. – I say

- Don’t you think is weird the first 3 level mean almost the same? – She ask me

- I do not think they are the same yeah a lot of people when they start working are called by one of those 3, either a beginner, novice or apprentice, but I do think they have some differences and well I also think the names are not that flattering since I suspect this are the level where you make sure you can go far by using the magics you know the best you can. – I say this and then I wince and say something completely cliché – I would say this first 3 level may be foundations for the future.

- Why the wince? – She ask me.

- Well because saying that certain levels are just a foundation is a cliché of a lot of stories in my previous world. – I say

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- Oh well but it is actually the truth right? – She insists

- Yeah or at least I think so.

After that my second mother happily goes away to continue training, on the other hand I continue my own training into trying to make healing more efficient, after a couple of weeks the effects could be seen, I knew that at least with external wounds I was able to reduce the cost a lot, I needed a way to see inside the body, I still remember the spell we did years ago and how it allowed us to reduce the cost slightly, so I went and started designing my own spell since looking in the library I could not find any kind of visual spell, the only one that dealt with vision was the illusion spell of the light magic category, and I did not need an illusion.

For a while I kept working into making this spell using my imagination and with the experience of how I could see the energy on other people when I used mana sense, I was able to make a spell that focused on my eyes and allowed me to see inside, I could finally see the broken bones, sometimes I could see the bruises on the liver or the lungs, each soldier had a different situation, when I focused with my imagination in those areas and casted the heal focusing on only healing that area I found that the cost of the heal was significantly reduced.

I went to my mom and I told her about it, and sadly it was not easy, and it took us a good amount of time before she could do it, she had problems with the new visual spell and while she tried heavily to modify the spell and found some partial success of it she never got the mana manipulation skill, it was not until well after my 12th birthday had passed that she was able to get her mana sense to the yellow level, almost immediately as soon as she did a modified heal while having the mana sense at yellow she was able to properly see what she was doing since she could now have mana sense active while casting the healing spell, and this gave her the mana manipulation skill.

I wrote this on my own book pretty much confirming at least by trial and error that you needed mana sense at the yellow level before you could get the mana manipulation skill, from there and with the mana sense as a basis my mom did not have too much problem in casting the visual spell that let her see the medical issues, but at the beginning she did not know what she was looking at and everything looked the same, after I sat down with her with all the medical knowledge books and showed her, teaching her and with visual aids of how the healthy organs looked and pretty much showing the difference between a healthy liver and a bruised one, she finally got the visual spell to work correctly, that also went into my books that specific spell required mana sense at yellow and actual medical knowledge so that the healers could see what they were doing.

Just a week after teaching that to my mom my dad received like 50 letters of different healers asking for training, my mom was easily healing 8 times more patients than any other healer in the building, and with the high amount of wounds specially since we were dealing with a stronger army the difference was something that every healer in the building noticed, so I went there at one point and the first point was getting all this healers to meditate, they needed mana sense at least at yellow since it looked like it was the basic skill where everything else magical was built upon.

It was absolutely hilarious seeing how every mage was meditating at every possible opportunity, the healers were taking turns so they could have shift completely dedicated to meditation, everybody wanted to go higher.

I also asked my dad how the people were doing with the demonic bite, and he told me that well the gossip network had pretty much debunked the myth and around 80% of our people believed us now that this was a level up, but that we did not know how to train the higher levels, the biggest surprise was my teacher of blacksmithing.

Bart had pushed himself hard and he was the first to level up his blacksmithing from level yellow to the next level and when he told me well, we continue following the colors of the rainbow, the new level was green, Now he was working on how the skill changed, and he pretty much told me the change was minimal at least from the mechanical point, the crafting was exactly the same, one of the biggest differences was that he sort of knew now how to make the weapon more uniform.

This ended up meaning that his output of high quality swords went up, now he was making close to 50% of the swords he made where high quality, and an amazing sword was birth in this environment, I was working and finally was able to get proper carbon steel after a lot of tries, with the materials we got from the alchemists I was finally able to get the right amount of each element that was needed to make Carbon steel, I presented the material to my teacher and he was able to use it to forge a sword, and well it was the first steel sword that has been forged in an extremely long time, and when we checked its quality it was a rare quality sword, my teacher was sort of confused by that quality and I had to explain my belief that this was the level above high, I asked him if he knew of any weapon with a higher level of quality and he told me that there was a relic in the capital of at least epic quality and it was rumored that the royal family might have a legendary quality weapon.

Having that info my teacher was excited and experimenting, he got some new alloys, some of them with actual magical properties, my teacher was overexcited when we made the first sword that could lit itself on fire when magic run through it, without any enchantment, just thanks to the magical properties of the alloy that formed the sword, also steel had more tolerance to spells than iron, so you could make some more complicated enchanting on those swords, obviously making rare quality sword was a difficult and time consuming affair, but my teacher was having the time of his life experimenting.

On another field of research of mine I was able to make a very minor breakthrough, I had finally been able to make a steam engine, but this steam engine did not use normal fuel but a magic stone to produce the heat necessary for it, with the new alloys that we were able to produce we finally could create pipes and drums and other structures with enough strength for high pressure steam to go through them, meaning we could finally get one of the things I had been trying to make since I was 5 a steam engine.

My dad at the beginning did not understand, so after building the first steam engine and getting some rails done and a steel cable made, we went to one of the towns were they mined the ore that we required for all our forging, we closed the mine for 2 days and with some earth mages we were able to build a simple railcar system to bring ore to the surface, after it was made and I taught one of the foremen what he should look for when they were using the steam engine, we went away, less than a week later my father called, the production on the mine just over the last week had doubled, I talked with my dad and told him about metal fatigue and the things we had to keep checking not only on the engine itself but also on rails and specially the cables, making the cables was good experience for any blacksmith and when my dad told Bart about it he set up one of his workers to make new cables for those carts, they had 3 extra cables and they changed the cable in the cart every month with the old cable being sent back to be melted and recycled into new materials, also my dad asked for 5 more engines and for me to go into the other mines in our territory to install those, the poor fella in charge of the cables was going to get tired of making them in the near future.