Finally some magic! I was so excited about writing this chapter I had to write it and upload it today :D
~ Grandma’s House, Homu Village
Breakfast was a hearty meal of fried red eggs which actually tasted quite delicious despite its gruesome appearance. The raw eggs themselves looked like squishy bloody tumors taken straight out of a sick and dying cancer patient, and the fried ones looked just like fried bloody tumors. Of course, naturally I was attracted to strange new things, but as strange as it was, it felt like the more gruesome it was, the more I was attracted to it. Hmm, must be a side effect of the gene manipulation.
Of course, this was what I was waiting for. Testing out my new, awesome, epic, and cool POWERS! I hadn’t had the chance to try it out since it there were a lot of things happening and was inconvenient before, but this is the time I had been waiting for. I had to let everything settle down first before trying anything, only this will give me the maximum enjoyment without interference. I felt like a kid during Christmas, receiving the biggest gift that I had prepared for myself. Hah… the last time I got a gift that was a system upgrade… those were good times.
Now for the real deal, I calmed myself down first, sitting in the backyard under the tree that looks like an apple tree, facing the endless plains. It is time to explore the mysteries of magic.
I felt the calming breeze that was now collecting in my new organ, and tried to focus the energy that was gathered into a single point above my palm. The energy coursed through my body, and eventually gathered through my palms into the single point, causing the air at the point to heat up and become a small fire.
I focused the point and made it move around, which also made the fire move around. I focused even harder, making the point smaller and smaller, which in turn also made the fire smaller but brighter and brighter until it was a small, but powerful white speck of condensed heat. While this happened, there appeared to be soot forming in the air, though hardly visible, my eyes were focused and could see the little particles in the air.
I stopped the focus and the fire immediately dispersed, warming the area above my palm.
Hohoho. Looks like I’ve got the first piece of the puzzle now. As one could see, focusing the energy onto the single point causes it to heat up. Apparently this magical energy is able to convert into one of the most basic forms of energy, that is heat. I am sure that no combustion actually took place; the reaction was proof enough. There was nothing to fuel the fire in the first place, other than my energy. The soot was probably the result of the fire burning so strong that it actually broke the bonds of the molecules that it was heating, and allowing for the formation of carbon particles.
As magical as they were said to be, magic seems to be following the laws of physics to a certain extent. Haha! It may not be as foreign to me as I thought… I think? Enough of thinking though, it’s time to do some work. Next up on my list of must-have magic abilities… is telekinesis!
Judging from how that the magical energy was able to convert into heat energy, telekinesis would very much be possible. It is after all, the manipulation of kinetic energy.
Instead of trying to focus the energy into one point, I instead imagined a hand holding up the rock on the ground a few metres away from me. The extension of the energy outwards, forming an arm, and imagining it grabbing the rock, re-enacting the movements with my hand. Sure enough, the rock was grabbed and I delicately lifted it upwards. It looked like a rock that is just floating in the air, but I know it is just being held up by an invisible hand that extended from my shoulders. It was like a third arm, except that it was much stronger, controlled by my mind, but does not feel anything at all. I clasped my hands, and sure enough the rock started to crack a little. I focused even harder, causing the rock to shatter into dust.
Easy enough, I thought. I did not expect it to happen that smoothly, but everything did felt like second nature to me. I wonder if that was because of the new organ. Even though this is probably not truly telekinesis, since it required me to form an external arm. Nonetheless, this gave me another piece of the mysterious puzzle. The magical energy is able to convert into different forms of energy, but how I am controlling this energy and the organ is still very much a black hole to me. It was able to take on a physical form of an arm this time, but I am sure this can be adapted to an emergency shield or even an invisible weapon. I could already come up with a thousand and one ways for the utilization of this magic.
“Hue hue hue hue hue…” I made a creepy laughing sound as it came naturally from my mouth. I decided to test one of the interesting ideas that came up in my mind. I formed an invisible shape of a guardless katana in the air, careful not to touch it. The blade is as thin as I could imagine it to be. It was dangerous, not just because of the blade, but also because of its invisibility. However, focusing much on the blade to make sure it is as steady as possible, distortions started to appear where the blade is, confirming that the blade is indeed working as intended.
I picked up a rock, and threw it at the blade on its front side. The rock almost didn’t split into two until it had hit the ground. A perfect cross-section of the rock can be seen as it split open. It was so cut so cleanly and perfect that it was glossy and smooth, unlike the rough rock surface. I raised an eyebrow, impressed at this sight.
I controlled the katana to spin, imitating Kenshe of Immortal Combat. I had thought that he was really cool with that floating longsword of his, and it was what led me to coming up with this idea. Surprising I could still remember that game even after such a long time though.
I was determined to spin it as fast as I can, and it accelerated at an incredible speed until it making a loud wheezing sound, not by the blade, but by the handle. It was so fast I could feel the wind blowing from it just from the handle. This is definitely faster than Kenshe’s blade. Satisfied, I picked up the rocks that were split and threw them at the blade.
“Woah.”, I said out loud. The rocks just turned into dust, as if it went into a shredder for rocks. They were cut into pieces so thin that they simply shattered in mid-air. The blade is a little bit chipped on the edges, but quickly repairs itself with the help of my magical energy.
I was astounded by the performance of the blade. Though every cut requires my magical energy to repair its delicate edge, it was still very dangerous, not just for the target but also me. Not that I would willingly walk into the blade, but it was still a doubled-edged blade. I’ll never know when a miscalculation of the delicate control for my blade could lead to my demise.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“What’s the commotion about?”, Grandma walked into the backyard, curious about the noise.
“Ahh… nothing much, just some experiments with magic.”
“What is that, a sword that you created?”, She pointed at the almost invisible katana.
“Yes. It is called a katana in my world back then. I just molded my energy into the shape.”
“You’ve already created and mastered telekinesis to this point already… and in just less than an hour of leaving out here alone. Well, it looks like you’re really curious about magic and good at it, so as an elder sage sorcerer, I shall take you as my apprentice.”
I smiled at the offer. A master in magic as my mentor would certainly… help my developments with magic a lot.
“Do you accept?”
“Yes.”
She drew a few symbols with her hand in the air, and a tingling sensation was felt on the back of my hand. It glowed bright golden for a moment before leaving a black symbol on it.
“That is my magic symbol, it carries my magical signature, and other people would be able to recognize that you are my apprentice if you showed it to them. My name carries a lot of power, you know?”, She smirked.
I could feel grandma’s presence in the symbol, giving off a venerable and heavy aura. It indeed feels like her.
“Shall we start then? From what I’ve felt earlier, you have only tried fire magic and telekinesis. Not even finishing the basic elements, and already jumping to advanced magic like telekinesis, how are you even learning? Let me teach you the basics first.”
…
After a whole afternoon of ‘training’ my magic, which there probably isn’t training since I was able to grasp the concepts at their roots, so it was just me being creative while grandm- no, Master was trying hard to pull me back on track.
As figured, fire was the first basic element, the most common form of them all. I created a mini-sun during the lesson when she asked me to create a ball of fire. I wanted to make a larger version of the white fire I created earlier, and condensed so much energy into a small ball the size of a ping pong ball and it became blindingly bright and hot, which then I threw into the nearby field as I wanted to see how it would react, and in the end it created a huge explosion and leaving a charred crater. I was impressed and satisfied at the outcome, but Master… was a different matter.
Water is next, and is the opposing element of fire. Technically it is just the manipulation of liquids, but since water is the most abundant I shall call it that. We went to a lake near the village, and Master told me to control the water in the lake into a ball by putting some of my magical energy, or mana as she called it, into the body of water and take control of the water.
Naturally, I had other ideas. I thinly spread my mana around the area we were standing at and took control of the water vapour in the air, changing it from its gaseous form back to liquid form, which caused the area to heat up considerably, then gather the water in the air together to form a perfect sphere of water, and started heating up the center of the sphere of water. And released my control in mid-air above us. It resulted in a magnificent explosion of steam and water, which rained down on us. Master dried us up by extracting the water on our clothes, did not show it but she was kind of impressed but annoyed at the same time.
The third one was earth magic, or manipulation of solid materials. The harder the material, the harder it is to ‘bend’ it, as I like to call it. Earth is the most abundant, and the easiest to bend, so it is the most widely used material for this magic. Seeing as to my skills, she created an earth statue of me and told me to do the same for her. The statue, though made of earth, was extremely detailed down to the hair and every single part. She challenged me that if I were to beat her in the creation of these statues, she would teach me about advanced magic without saying anything about my tricks.
However, as I tried to think about how to create the statue, the scenes from the the show Avatar: The Undead Airbender flashed through my mind as one of the most interesting and amazing shows I’ve watched. I instantly wanted to try out using those movements to bend the earth, so I did a punch, a kick, and ending with a stomp in which the earth would protrude out of the ground, just like in the show. Unfortunately, I aimed a little too far and catapulted her statue of me into the distance. In that instant, I could feel fear creeping all over me. Master was emanating a black, sinister aura that felt like it was going to eat me whole. I quickly raised a statue of Master in her prime, a beautiful young lady, while accentuating some of the important points. It wasn’t as good as her statue, but she was impressed and the aura was immediately gone. Phew, that was a close call, death can look for me some other time.
The last one, predictably, is wind magic, the manipulation of gases. She wanted me to use my magic to make myself float in the air using a cushion, though I could see in her eyes that she was going to expect something else.
I made a flight of stairs- no an escalator by solidifying the air in place then making the steps move upwards. At first, she wondered what I was doing, but stopped thinking after seeing me go upwards on the escalator, which went all the way to the clouds, where I had to create a ball of air around my face to breathe. It was a spectacular sight to see two suns in the sky, but I had to get down. So obviously the best way I could think of was to create a slide, which I did, to slide down back to ground. She said that I was treating the whole sky as a playground, and I have to admit, it was fun. Sliding down on solid air 2 kilometres from the ground is quite exhilarating, but actually quite tiring to keep up the magic since I was sliding at a speed near terminal velocity.
Well then after that we just went back home, but Master was deep in thought the whole time. The suns were already setting after all that ‘training’, but I was sure this was just the tip of the iceberg.
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