Reading a book isn't what James had in mind when he thought he would be training, but that's what he ended up doing.

In a world filled with monsters and Darkness and whatnot, it was easy to forget that sitting your ass down and actually studying was just as vital as fighting.

The three were all inside the dojo, but while Helios and Lunaris were practicing their skills, hitting dummies and dueling each other, James was sitting back and reading through the book Lunaris gave him.

He wouldn't say it out loud, but it was a nice change of pace. It reminded him of his old life, just spending his days reading and doing literally nothing else. The impatient side of him was too tired to complain.

His friends weren’t dampening their levels this time around, so they were able to display their full range of powers. James couldn’t help but sneak glances at what they were doing. It was almost like a firework show, he could barely make out what was happening since there were so many explosions and lights shining all over.

Seeing his friends working so hard made him feel a bit guilty, so he started reading his book as if his life depended on it. And in a way it kind of it did, he urgently had to get more powerful if he wanted to beat whatever awaited him in their next mission.

Although he did find it ironic that he actively kept trying to add spells to his arsenal, despite understanding the need to specialize and master something, instead of being mediocre at a bunch of things.

There were mages out there that only trained a handful of skills in their entire lives, some even only focusing on one. And they perfected that one skill so much that they could easily beat experts that mastered entire schools of magic.

Solidifying your fundamentals was always good use of time, and that's exactly what Helios and Lunaris were doing.

But James couldn't help it. That's just who he was, he was never the kind of guy to stick with one thing for too long. His saws could have been something he specialized in, but that was too boring. He was already sick of saws.

So it looked like he was going to become a mage that has a hundred different spells for any situation. Maybe one day he will master something, but for now he made peace with his fate. It was a world filled with magic after all, how could he possibly limit himself to just one thing, when there were so many wondrous things to discover?

As relaxing as reading his book was, spending days reading while he saw his friends blasting things and training hard, he almost felt the urge to jump around and set things on fire as well. But he knew he had to be patient.

James put on his earplugs to keep any sounds from reaching him, and then he focused hard on his book. The three barely took any breaks. They ate, they trained, and they slept.

As much as they were tempted to rest for a while, the thought of more innocents dying at the hands of the agents because they were resting was something that really gave them the kick in the ass that they needed.

Reading a book should not have been this useful, but Lunaris truly did create it just for him. Not only did she gather detailed information about the spells that caught her eye, that she thought would be helpful to James, but she also added her own notes!

“Jesus, just how good of a person and a friend can you be? I’ll show you, my time will come and I will be as good as you as you were to me. Even better!” James shouted it this time, venting his pent up feelings of gratitude, but only because he knew they wouldn’t be able to hear him. The explosions from their powers were so loud that he could’ve used a megaphone and they wouldn’t have heard him.

Lunaris’s notes were extremely detailed but she was also using very simple terms that anybody would understand, like she was explaining things to a toddler. Which was perfect for James, because that’s the way he loved to learn things. He’d break things down to their absolute simplest. Even the most intricate and complex concepts could be broken down to a chain of very simple things.

Whether in his past life at university, or in this life when reading complicated magic tomes, James was a fan of making things simple.

He had a weird, almost anarchistic attitude towards authority, and that included teachers and scholars. He was still respectful outwardly, he didn't want to be rude to anybody, but he had very little respect for authority in his heart.

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And when it came to knowledge, he sometimes had the sneaking suspicion that the people who wrote textbooks, on Earth, here, or in any other world for that matter, they made them hard to understand on purpose!

He didn’t know whether they did it to feel superior, to deliberately filter out people who didn't spend a lot of time studying their needlessly overcomplicated field, or if they just didn’t bother putting in the effort to make it easier to understand.

But James was a big fan of something Einstein had said, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” Or something along those lines, James always butchered any quotes he tried to remember. Even his favorite ones that he lived by. Even in school when he'd have to recite poetry, he always winged it and rarely learned the actual words in the verses, instead just getting the gist of it and saying whatever synonym popped in his head.

James hated it when somebody peppered quotes through the conversation. So ingrained was his dislike towards authority, that it extended towards pomposity and snobbishness. He thought that those who constantly threw quotes around did it just to show off how knowledgeable they were. The intellectual vanity was insufferable to him.

But this quote he took to heart, and he applied it to everything he did.

Lunaris must’ve noticed his way of doing things and how he studied books, and so she tailored her notes specifically to his style of thinking, which would save him a lot of time when analyzing these spells.

He couldn't understand when she had time do to this. But it would certainly help him in his training.

Lunaris seemed to have included spells of all schools. So if James felt he lacked knowledge about fire magic, spatial magic, or any other school, he’d have all the needed information in this book.

Even though the time they could spend was limited, James spent the entire first week of training exclusively reading the book.

The more he read, the less he could comprehend how Lunaris could have possibly had time to do all this. It was packed with information, a whole week and he didn’t even cover half of the book.

Although it wasn’t just the size of the book that made it take so long. As usual, James couldn’t help himself from being a weird little man. Every time he read about a new spell, he’d start daydreaming for minutes on end. Every other sentence he’d stop and get lost in his own thoughts.

As inefficient as it may have seemed, James wasn’t too worried about it. In a way, it was time well spent. He could have probably been much quicker, but even those daydreams had their use. Every time he got lost in his thoughts, this world made a little more sense to him. The mental tableau of the way the world worked was becoming a little more complete, a little more accurate.

That was his mind’s way of digesting information. Those daydreams were in a weird way conducive to creating new skills. He was sure that the next time he used the arcane meditation, he’d be able to produce a skill much more easily than before. The book's contents and the daydreams were just another part of his process of skillcrafting.

Another advantage of the daydreams and spacing out was owed to the fact that his memory wasn’t anything to write home about, and he’d probably forget a good part of what he had read. But he wouldn’t forget the daydreams. He wouldn’t forget the mental images, the worldview that he was developing subconsciously while his mind was drifting off.

He was starting to feel a bit guilty about not training directly, but he decided to keep reading the book. If he could develop a good skill, it would be all worth it.

Before he went into the Soul Grinder, his last studying session had been much swifter. But this time around he felt he needed to take it slow, to fully assimilate the information. The better a mage he became, the higher were his standards. The stakes were getting higher too, so he had to take his time and create something that could actually deal with the new threats.

In a way, taking it slow was for the better. He had been in such a rush for so long that his fundamentals were lacking. But now he was mending his flaws, making his understanding and knowledge of magic more stable, more complete.

It took another week for him to finish. For two weeks now, Lunaris and Helios had been working hard, while James was reading the book in the dojo.

“So you’re finally done, huh?" Helios nodded approvingly. "Well done, brother! Now it’s time for some real training, I want to see you cast a spell so powerful that it’ll destroy those indestructible dummies!” Helios said jokingly.

“I didn’t expect you to actually read the whole book so quickly! That was something that should have taken you months to go through, I thought it could even be something you’d peruse from time to time for years!" Lunaris couldn't hide her excitement, she was constantly fidgeting as she was talking. "But I’m proud of you, I hope you gained something from it?” Lunaris asked with a smile. She was proud of James, and even happier that her book had been useful.

“Yep, it was a treasure trove! I can’t begin to thank you, Lunaris. And I think I’ll still peruse it for years to come. But for now, I want to show you what your book helped me develop.”

James wanted to honor Lunaris for her efforts, he wanted her to see the spell that he was able to create thanks to her labor.

The idea had been germinating in his mind for days now. He had several ideas, but he was itching to try this one out first. But he wanted to finish the book before he actually materialized any skill, so that his understanding of magic would be at its peak before he forged the skills.

When he created the Chaos Javelin, he had created a powerful spell that required a lot of mana. He had chosen that drawback on purpose, since he didn’t want it to have a longer cast time or to sacrifice power or anything else.

So he needed a powerful weapon that he could use until he would be strong enough to freely cast the Chaos Javelin.

And while none of the spells presented in the book were quite right for James’s tastes and needs, he had gained an ocean of knowledge from them. His now deeper understanding of all magic schools enlightened him in ways he didn’t expect.

[Skill unlocked: Overloading Mana Prongs]