With a soft click, the door closed behind me, sealing off the world outside. I exhaled, relieved. Finally, I’d get some rest.
I had instructed Tiberius and Quintus to wake me up when it was time for my shift at the Happy Bakery, which was roughly two and a half hours away. My sleep management thus far has been abysmal – a far cry from anything resembling a proper schedule.
Honestly, night shifts were no longer familiar territory for me, and I longed for the day when we could streamline the bread-making process to require only a handful of workers during regular hours.
A steaming cup of coffee would have done wonders to ease the misery of night shifts, but all they had were tea leaves. I scoffed at the thought. To me, any American choosing tea over coffee upon waking up should have their citizenship revoked and be shipped across the pond.
And look, I asked Clodia why we don’t just dump a boatload of bread on some preservation runes during the day and deliver it the next day. That would have been the best, right? Who needs to work at night if you can just draw some massive preservation runes like that.
It turns out that magic is lamer than one would think. Preservation runes for massive volumes of food need equally massive mana costs. That means if you are working with cheap food that occupies a lot of volume – bread, quintessentially – you are screwed. No other way to put it.
I get out of my clothes and inside my bed, sighing and rubbing my face multiple times.
Have I mentioned just how utterly drained I am?
Under normal circumstances, the mere thought of dating a stunning woman like Irene would have woken me up from the deepest fatigue for at least a couple of days. Instead, I’m feeling like I would feel on any random night as if my brain had neglected to push for the release of more adrenaline and dopamine.
If I had to give any explanation, it would probably be that magic thoroughly drained me of energy—yeah, that must be it. It wouldn’t make much sense, otherwise.
Perhaps exhausting your Mana also exhausts you emotionally? Or something like that…
Yeah, yeah.
That sounds about right.
Otherwise, how could I not be extremely excited at the prospect of potentially dating Irene? Sure, she seemed hesitant, but that’s because she probably has some family drama she doesn’t want to involve me in. But I’ll tell you what, I got a [Lightbolt] that can probably solve most of my current problems. Does she have an abusive father? [Lightbolt]. Does she have an abusive brother? [Lightbolt]. Does she have an abusive sister? Threes—sorry, [Lightbolt].
Anyway.
My point is that I don’t fear whatever Lady Luck is going to throw at me in terms of romantic experiences. I might be a novice at magic and not have any levels in no [Baker] class, but one thing is for sure: I know lots about the mating process.
Plus, Irene kind of checks all the boxes. She even asked me to bring food back to her family while she was on a date with me! That’s what I’m looking for in a woman, a caring attitude!
She’s beautiful, strong, and caring.
Sure, she’s not as blessed in the chest department as some other Elves… but! That’s not important!
My consciousness starts fading away as I yawn myself into sleep.
I can’t wait… yawn …to get to the bakery… yawn …and finish work so I can go back to do Cantrips… sorry, the other way around.
…
Joey descended into a deep, dreamless slumber.
The Omnium Compendium unfurled its pages in a quiet, swirling dance. They halted on a strikingly realistic illustration of a youthful [Archmage] gazing solemnly upon heaps of lifeless bodies, standing utterly alone.
A wizened old hand ran across the image on the page as its owner shook his head in displeasure. He turned to the next page, looking at the man surrounded by his children, all too weak to follow in his footsteps.
The old man heard Joey turn in his bed, mumbling something about magic in his sleep while drooling on the pillow. He got closer to the young man, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at the dark circles under his eyes.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“[Silence],” he spoke. “Joey Luciani, you are so… stubborn. But I don’t have much to do since that damn Dragon lowered the wards and made it possible for me to bring you here.”
The old man looked around the dirty room and laughed to himself, reminded of a past he no longer owned. Then, he looked back at the young man who had somehow crossed worlds. A broken young man.
He had seen many like him break under the terrible strain of war, or simply under the pressure of expectations. He himself had decimated his own bloodline due to his ambitions.
Now, the old man simply dedicated himself to perfecting the book and its teachings. This was his true legacy. Sadly, he had killed too many with it. Most people had barely been able to fulfill the prerequisites to unlock the real lessons.
“Well, Joey Luciani, you need some [Tenfold Rest],” the old man casually created a Tier 6 spell out of thin air in a matter of seconds and then went to the table, making a pen and an inkpot appear beside the book.
He had to make sure the Human would be rested for whatever would come for him in the future. The old man had read his thoughts and his past; what he had seen felt surreal. Never in his life he had met someone so…
The old man shook his head and, instead, wielded the pen.
This would be the very first modification he had ever made to the Omnium Compendium since its creation. He had believed it would have been useless to adjust it after the Dragon had stolen it from his family’s estate. He had thought about killing that damned lizard, but his unparalleled instincts had told him that even if he had had a body, he might not have had the upper hand in such a fight.
And so, he had hidden away for centuries, waiting for some of his descendants to come looking for the filthy Dragon and slay it. Or if not his direct descendants, at least someone from his people.
Reality, though, had been bleaker than he had imagined. Even his people couldn’t win all wars—not immediately, at least.
While Joey Luciani was away or sleeping, he had been hard at work to make sure he was on top of the current events. In the last five centuries, his people had been humbled because of an atrocious streak of events. While he still believed it would be impossible for them to lose the long-term battle, he had recently discovered that, apparently, since the day Joey Luciani arrived, moments before he had brought the Human away from Kome, someone had cast a Tier 10 spell around the continent. No living being was able to cross it.
No one knew how it had come there, nor what insane magic could possibly sustain such a spell for so long.
The old man’s heart was in turmoil thinking of it.
But he had always been practical. There was not much he could do in his current form to sway whatever was going down in Kome. Instead, what he could do was to nurture his next pupil.
He smirked.
He had foolishly calibrated the Omnium Compendium on his own talent. He had believed that if he had put the true blood of his people to the test with it, they would have risen up to the challenge. Instead, they had died. Every single one of the people who had tried to use the Omnium Compendium had died. And he had built the book in a way that the current teachings could not be disrupted by anyone, not even by himself.
The very modifications he was apporting at the moment would only take effect after Joey had finished the mandatory part of his training—which would still take a long time to complete.
The mysterious old man had built a few safeguards in order to stop the book from aggressively forcing someone to learn if they wanted to stop early in the process. That’s how he had made it possible for Joey not to look at the Omnium Compendium after completing his first lesson.
Now, however, Joey Luciani had entered the learning journey in earnest. Not even he could stop it nor counsel the Human beyond what he had decided to put in the book.
The old man had felt guilty at the thought that he would be killing the first otherworlder, a man capable of bringing sensational new technologies and general knowledge to this world. In fact, the creator of the Omnium Compendium had been beyond sure that someone who had never received any magical education whatsoever would have been ruthlessly killed by the book. Such was the price of attempting to gain levels in the harshest way possible.
Instead, Joey Luciani had defied every expectation the old man had held for him; that was why he was starting to add the discoveries the young Human had stumbled upon.
“Vectors and physics,” the old man mumbled, scribbling some diagrams on the book and drawing the spell matrixes that Joey had come up with to solve the Cantrips. “Marvelous. Just marvelous.”
This kind of deconstruction was unheard of. When a [Mage] cast a [Fireball], the whole matrix itself implied movement. With high enough control on one’s own Mana, you could make it swerve and add effects to it; if you were a superior spellcaster, you could imprint your enemy’s mana on it to create a vacuum that would home the [Fireball] on the enemy.
Now, though?
The old man looked at the drawings he had made fluctuating out of the page and coming to rest mid-air.
Deconstruction?
If any given part could be separated from the others, the control that one could exercise on magic would be extremely granular.
While he did see some shortcomings for the less talented in using something that would soon become exceptionally complicated as one crossed from the Tier 0 [Light] into a simple Tier 1 [Lesser Firebolt], it was still revolutionary. And the more developed a [Mage]’s spatial visualization and magic control was, the more this variant of the Reductionist approach to magic would be effective.
Wait.
Did this actually deserve a new name?
The old man thought about it.
Not yet, he reasoned. Not until it could be proven effective with more complex magic.
But if it did, that would mean that the Human had just created a, supposedly, Deconstructionist Theory of Magic.
He looked back at the sleeping Joey Luciani with a fatherly smile.
Perhaps, unlike the old man himself, the wrongly self-titled Baker would even reach the famed [Hero] class one day.