So then how do I work the magic then so to speak? I would like to make something explode at least once with magic.

You technically already can, with an external fuel source and a static shock you could make the right pre-existing compound combust.

That isn’t really “Magic” though, not exactly the snap your fingers and boom blow up whatever you want.

Snapping your fingers to set off an explosion seems a rather inefficient means to release enough energy to start a reaction. It’s far better to build your explosion to go off the moment you start building the energy structure at your target.

See that’s what I’m talking about, so how do you do it?

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, let’s start from the beginning. As I explained before, you first start with the same process and building your energy container. From that container you structure some energy around a form that is slightly large, the condensed energy if structured correctly can influence the physical particles around it much easier. This is the basic foundation for spells, form is function, some structures will react to one form but not another.

So it’s a free form puzzle to cause any particular reaction?

To initiate the foundations of primal magic at least. As the foundation you have for building spells advances, complexity increases, and less restrictions on what you can do with the raw amount of power at your disposal. When the structure of your spells reaches an advanced stage where you can by will alone alter reality you achieve the pinnacle of magic in the mortal capacity.

That’s it? Just think it and it happens is as far as magic can go?

Oh no, Magic can go infinitely, but a mortal practitioner cannot advance beyond the threshold of their own mind. To expand from that coil, you must change yourself, and that means you walk the path of Divine level casting; that is for a much later discussion however.

So you’re telling me once you stop needing to even use your own will to use magic, its godhood?

Like I said, later. Back to Spells, so far as I’ve mentioned you manipulate your mana into structures that can affect other things yes?

Yes, and how you build them affects the interaction.

Good you understand. Let’s start with the simple structures, like with mana containers, the structure changes how it interacts with things. While you know that spheres are the most efficient storage of mana as a vessel; what shape do you think is best form for forcing basic elements of mana together?

Make two bricks and smash them together?

Crude, functional, but not the best. Pyramids, of the three sided variety, give you the strongest impact when pressing base matter together. At the tip of each you place an extension strand of energy and force them to collide. You can have as few as 4 of these for your compression structure to a bit over a few hundred and still work efficiently. After exceeding 150 base units in compression it is highly unstable and tends to deteriorate quickly.

So how do you get that to hold together in the first place?

Like the mana vessel, you create it manually with much larger, and less precise particles. The primal magicians would have to manually create every part of a spell from scratch, each piece of energy molded by direct interference. Imagine trying to build a sand castle one grain at a time, using chopsticks while wearing oven mitts; and the sand is dry sand. After this discussion I’ll let you try it on your own directly. Once you have a few of these compressed structures, it’s time to build something out of it.

Who would even try that? You would have to have an insane amount of time and mana to eventually complete a single spell.

One advantage these primal magicians had was so much raw energy they could physically touch it, piles and clouds of the stuff everywhere in existence. Some also had access to already compressed materials, not quite matter, but also not so volatile to destroy everything it touches. I was lucky in that regard, my origin world had pools of composite matter and an abundance of raw energy.

So if your world doesn’t have this stuff can you even become a magician? Then how can I use it?

I never said that, anyone can become a magician; if they have the right resources. You will find that mages all eventually travel, if not to tour all existence, then to find easier access to resources. I am here now specifically to gather the information of all your history and a few of the denser parts of your star before I leave.

Wait what?

We’ve gotten very off track, back to spells. So when you have the base compounds, you use them to influence the big particles of matter. You can break them down into more base matter, change them into different ones, or simply change how they move. Do any of those three things and that is functionally a spell.

Hold on, you plan on taking out parts of a STAR?

Stars hold the largest collection of raw materials, the denser that material the easier it is to break it down into whatever you want. If stars don’t get harvested and replenished with less dense material periodically they explode. Now can we talk about spells or are you more interested in the universe’s equivalent of a berry bush in the woods.

Spells please, I don’t think I can contemplate the gravity of what you just said at the moment.

To continue then, all spells have this as a basis, though you are more interested in how to scale this process up a bit. Let’s take a simple example, say I want to make a rudimentary explosion to use your predilection. What is the easiest way that I said earlier to make an explosion?

Use something that already is explosive?

Quite right, so we move some particles together and using our energy compound as a vessel to keep it together long enough to have another compound either compress or combine the particles. Once we reach a certain density or combine the particles into a new compound, we can detonate it. Agitate them with enough energy so that when we release the pressure, the particles scatter violently.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

That seems more like an air blast than an explosion to me.

Taking it a step further, what if the particles start combining with the particles we didn’t influence directly, and a purely chemical reaction occurs? Like all the nitrogen in your atmosphere is perfect, compound it correctly and it will naturally ignite. If you really wanted, you could have your compounds combine after releasing the nitrogen into actual matter and accelerate and increase your effective power at the cost of the base material you used.

Now that sounds like the kind of power I’d expect from a fireball!

It’s crude but simple enough for a non-magic user, even a decent alchemist could accomplish the same thing. The real art in my use of magic is much more powerful. Why use an explosion when I can unmake whatever I want and harvest its entire raw energy or material for my own needs? I have yet to meet a single evocation specialist who can argue that point without trying to make me explode.

I think you lack the perspective of enjoying simpler pleasures, like fireworks.

I don’t argue the entertainment value of the different ways to use the art, but their effectiveness for a task. Now how do you suppose you make sure the explosion happens where you want rather than blow yourself up?

Move your little compounds with a really long stick of a different compound?

For some crude early magic, yes, that’s basically how it was done. Then someone figured out if you made a shell of mana around your spell you could just throw it more or less where ever you wanted. Projectile casting is old, but still used in some cases but far more advanced from the old days of triggering a spell and throwing at something hoping it works.

So what is the most advanced method of spell delivery available?

For mortal level spell casting? Self-Directed space tunneling completion. You create a spell that tears space towards a non-physical location, then back into the physical location of your target location as the spell activates. Makes your energy unstoppable and undetectable as to its origin.

You make it sound easier than it probably is.

It’s only difficult when you don’t understand how it functions, that should give you a basic understanding of spell creation and delivery. Now let’s talk about making it a bit more complex and efficient. Using that explosion spell, what if we could use the same compounds for that spell over and over again? Even better, linked them together to speed up the completion process and gave them a means to reach the target more consistently? Doing all this while not having to manually rebuild the structures over and over again.

Spells to make a spell?

Correct, this is what rituals do for casting a spell. Worlds that have gods or governing forces strong enough will shove these rituals into people they are cultivating to harvest energy from, or if they are bored and want to watch mortals play with the fire stolen from heaven kind of deal. Magic structures for the creation of even stronger magic is ritualization of magic. From these structures, the specializations of magic were created.

So potentially, you could create a structure to cast a particular spell, and anyone could use that structure? Isn’t that really dangerous giving someone power to blow shit up basically at will?

Yes, giving someone the gift of power that magic represents is extremely dangerous. I’ve watched empires grow and die because of it. Power corrupts and no empire lasts forever if new growth isn’t maintained. As an example early ritual structures might not work on a given world anymore if they are not adjusted after time goes on; either from lower aggregate amounts of base energy like we talked about before, worlds can dry up those base resources very quickly.

Magicians who learn to transplant these systems rarely last long enough to extend their lifetime to the point that they can stick around to solve these problems. Most are killed for their knowledge, usurpers come to try and coerce this power, or they die in service to the powers that be. Your value as an individual changes very rapidly when you can destroy a city or a person just by deciding you want them dead. This is what has led to “witch hunts” as you know them, across an untold number of worlds.

So it’s not all power and glory when you become a magician then I’d imagine?

Oh it is very much so power, but your measure of power is limited by your energy and creativity in using it. You don’t need to destroy for power either, creation is much more practical of a commodity for most magicians. It’s why alchemy is your world’s foremost form of progress.

So I’ve taught you the basis for energy to use magic and how to put it together, but not all of what you should not do.

Is there some kind of rule or big bad that eats wizards who don’t follow the rules or something?

No, but attracting undue attention and flaunting those stronger than you isn’t a good idea. Like if you travel to a world with the structures of a god scattered everywhere looking for things that don’t belong there you may quickly find yourself in trouble for trespassing. So having some relatively standard practices in place is important for surviving encounters with other powers.

So what are these practices?

The first thing to know is how to know if there is energy compounds around. The first way to tell is if there is little to no basic energy in the environment, gods and the powers that act like them have usually picked clean worlds they control of this so new primal mages don’t enter their world. In place of it they have compound structures that mimic it and detect non-standardized mana.

So how can I hide from a world covered in detection devices?

The first step is making sure none of the detection devices can get inside you. To do that, you need to form a layer around every part of you so the compounds can’t collide or detect anything non-standard. This gives you some time to trap some of the native compound structures where they can’t signal an alarm or destroy you. Once you have identified the base compound they supply to the locals if any, you can mimic it to avoid detection, adjusting your spells to convert it as you do your own casting.

So there’s no easy way for them to really know I’m there or have been on any given world?

This is first line of defense levels of going to a new place as a foreign magician. You also need to know how to enter and exit them safely, how to identify at a reasonable distance safe and hostile places. The safest way to enter a foreign world is with regular traffic, with as little disturbance as possible. Worlds without regular inter-world traffic need to be scrutinized very carefully for the local conditions, preferably within range for your fastest emergency exit spell.

This is all very useful but how does this affect the actual practicing of magic?

I’m getting off topic again, the reason you form that barrier in the first place isn’t only so you can go undetected, but so that if you fuck something up it is less likely to kill you in the process; or kill others if you make something self-replicating that eats you alive from the inside out. This is why magic can be so dangerous, entire worlds have been subsumed by negligence.

So the second important practice is when building a new ritual or spell is to contain what and where it can effect things. You should know from your own science education standards that testing requires controlled conditions. So you don’t burn your planet’s atmosphere to nothing when experimenting with nitrogen affecting spell compounds as a mild example.

Additionally maintain a record of what you have done, so that if anything happens someone has a chance of fixing it and your progress isn’t for nothing should you decide to die.

I understand magic is powerful but choosing when I die?

I can assure you as a necromancer, everyone chooses their death or struggles in vain to prevent it. This is doubly so when you have the power available to really act on it. I’m not here to debate the philosophy behind it but that’s an observation I’ve found after more time in existence than some stars.

Let’s recap to make sure I’m not missing anything about spells or how they work.

-We build structures that affect the world around us with mana, that’s the function of a spell.

-Building a structure that creates a structure is the ritualization of a spell.

-Don’t experiment with magic in a way that could kill you and be sure to record what you experiment on so it can be fixed if it kills you

-Don’t travel to other worlds without some safety precautions in place

That everything?

Well it’s not everything but enough to satisfy enough curiosity and warn the foolish hopefully. So now that you understand how magic is performed, it’s time to have you experiment. Afterward we will talk more about the theory and schools associated with magic that I am familiar with, and the role prefabricated systems play in the practice of magic.

Sounds fun, let’s get started.