The following days flew by, between my shift at Charm and Fable letting me do my homework for my ethics and core classes, as well as practice my abjuration spells, and think up strategies for Applied Mage Combat, and before I knew it, I was back in Fundamental Magecraft.

“Well done,” professor Silverbark complimented as I lit six lights on the tree training device a solid green color. “Yes, indeed; You’ve completed the first circuit in the technique. You should be ready to actually try it in the ether pool now.”

“The first circuit?” I asked curiously. “Like… first circle of spellcraft?”

“No, no, circuit in the sense of a roughly circular line, route, or movement that starts and finishes at the same place. Did you count the number of leaves?”

“Fifty-ish? I didn’t count, but I eyeballed it.”

“Fifty-four! This technique can be stacked with nine levels of increasingly complex loops to improve the ether regeneration. Now that you’ve completed the first one safely, you can use it to stimulate your ether pool’s recovery,” the professor explained. “As you continue to train and master it in sets of six leaves, you should be able to continually improve your ether recovery.”

He moved on to the rest of my table then, and Yushin lit eight lights, while Kybar the minotaur lit five. From there he swept over to the next table, and I reached within myself. I teased out a strand of ether, and then began to loop it around my pool, pressing and massaging its edges.

And my pool refilled.

It wasn’t a torrent or gush of ether, but there was a steady trickle of power from Etherius, speeding the recovery of my ether pool. My ether pool was already almost entirely full, though, so within moments, it pushed at the edges, gently ballooning them out. The growth was far less… dramatic… than the bottled explosion technique that Jackson had shown, but it also had a faintly pleasant tickle, rather than searing pain.

Then a wash of green light rushed from the next table, interrupting the sensation and causing my head to snap over.

Wesley had lit up forty-eight leaves. The forty-ninth flickered several times, before it went out.

“My goodness!” professor Silverbark said, eyes wide. “Why… I… My goodness!”

Wesley, on the other hand, frowned, glaring at the six unlit leaves.

“If I’d had another day or two, I am confident I would have been able to get them all,” he said sourly.

I stared at him, mouth slightly agape. When we’d been in class and been given the trees, he’d been worse than I’d been. How had he improved so fast?

“Mister Illinor, are you disappointed? You didn’t know Xander’s massage before starting this class, correct?” The professor asked.

“I am, because I could have done better. And no, I didn’t.”

“I’ve never had a student manage to light this many within a week. Not without having already mastered the technique thanks to private tutors and training,” professor Silverbark said giddily. “Have you perhaps been granted the extremely rare and powerful ether affinity, like most of the Erudite do?”

That made me take notice. If most Erudites had an ether affinity, it made the one who ran the Citadel of Ether – Henry, apparently – having the status as the second most combat capable even more impressive.

“No,” Wes said flatly, but most of the class had their eyes on him, and even his confidence cracked a little, causing him to explain a little more. “Mine is related to divination. Not a divination affinity, but somewhat similar.”

“My goodness indeed… That makes your skill even more staggering! Everyone, please applaud Wesley here! Applaud, applaud!”

The professor looked around, clearly expecting us to actually obey. I felt a sourness build at the bottom of my stomach, even as I joined in the applause.

The professor continued working his way through the class until finally he had checked everyone’s progress, then he took his spot back at the board and smiled.

“Today we will begin going over our next ether manipulation technique, one for pool expansion, called Summer’s inversion. Just like with Xander’s massage, I’ll ask: why?”

He surveyed the room, and Kybar raised his hand.

“I actually know this one,” the big minotaur said. “The wizard who invented it, Archmagus Summers, came from Endless Wheat, where I’m from.”

“Oh really?” professor Silverbark said. “How interesting. Then please, explain why I’m teaching this technique?”

“Well, you know how everyone’s ether pool starts at a different size?” Kybar asked, looking around the room. “Usually there’s not too much variation for the starting point, but there is some. But Archmagus Summers started with a really tiny pool. Like, when she started learning, she couldn’t hold a weirlight for a full second level of small.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I winced in sympathy. My own ether pool had been pretty average when I’d started, but at the time it had felt tiny. I couldn’t imagine how awful it would feel to start even smaller.

“Anyways, despite her ether pool being smaller than an ant who was hit with a shrinking spell, she was determined to figure out a way to become a wizard, so she studied ether manipulation techniques for expansion. Some work great, some awful, but she’s slowing in growth as she gets older. She barely breaks into fifth circle before she hits twenty-five, but her years of work in ether manipulation mean she’s got truly absurd skills, enough to establish herself as an archmage.”

“Wait, if she managed to break into fifth circle, why did she make this technique?” a tall redheaded man asked. “And she was already old. She couldn’t expand her power for much longer, even if she was an archmagus.”

Professor Silverbark snorted at the idea twenty-five was old.

“Well, she might have only had a few years left to grow, but she’s worried her just-born daughter might inherit the tiny ether pool, or others might face her problem. So she spends her last bit of time focusing on this technique. It works in inverse proportion to the size of your ether pool. For a fifth circle mage like her, it was average. Not bad, but with her skill in ether shaping, she had better options. For Erudite Olivine, who was twenty-one and a ninth circle mage already, it was terrible, an entire hour of practice expanding the pool far less than even casting a single arcane missile would have.”

The minotaur held up a stocky finger.

“But! When she tested it with an utter neophyte, his pool went wild, expanding faster than any other known technique. So, yeah. Inversion, cuz its effectiveness is inversely proportional to a person’s ether pool size.”

As his story wound down, Kybar suddenly looked sheepish.

“I. Ah. Guess that last bit was the only part that real–”

I started applauding. It might have been petty of me, but if Silverbark was going to insist that I clapped for a smug prick, he’d have to deal with me clapping for Kybar.

The applause caught on, and when it died down, professor Silverbark smiled.

“An excellent summary of the technique. Indeed, depending on your ether pool’s size, you will likely wish to pick up a new technique in your final year or post-graduation. But it’s incredibly useful during these critical days while your ether pool is still small.”

Professor Silverbark began to draw a diagram on the whiteboard.

“Now, the basics of this technique involves a similar manipulation of our internal connection to Etherius, but this time, instead of a tree drawing nutrients, think of it as carts on a road. You shape your ether into as large of a box as you can, then continuously undulate it up and down the connection. This is where the inverse proportionality comes in – after all, the larger the cart traveling along a road is, the less road exists. As your ether travels along this connection, the technique involves pulling new bits in from Etherius. Fellow wagons, joining your little caravan. As the caravan fills, there is less road, and as there is less road, fewer wagons can enter the caravan. Thus, the inversion.”

He waved his hand and new devices appeared on his desk, plain-looking glass dowel rods.

“These are a touch different than the trees. There are no stages to this technique, simply being able to perform it, or not. You’re going to move your ether along the channel within here, and feel it begin to disperse, as it does when actually practicing the technique. If you fail, nothing will happen. If you begin losing ether, sending it into Etherius rather than building your reserve, the glass will begin to glow red. If you succeed, the rod will glow green.”

I raised an eyebrow. That sounded… pretty much identical to before.

“Ah, I see the confusion. Allow me to demonstrate,” the professor said, then picked up a rod, which glowed green, then went out.

“I executed the technique perfectly. But the light went out, because unlike the massage, this technique must be continually started from the beginning, rather than looped.”

It lit up green again, then went out. The professor focused, and it flashed green again. Over and over it flashed, with the time that it was clear shrinking from a second, to half a second, to a tenth of a second, until finally, as far as I could tell, the rod was just glowing continuously.

“I’m not simply maintaining the technique, like you can with the massage,” professor Silverbark said. “Rather, every time I complete Summers’ inversion, I’m starting it over from the beginning.”

He placed the rod back down on the table after that.

“That’s not your goal, however, as that not only requires a good bit of strength, but also a lot of finesse. Simply lighting it once will be considered a perfect score. If you can light it multiple times in a day, then that’s suburb! I advise you to do so – these years are critical to your development.”

He glanced around the room, then launched into the same lecture I’d heard already about expanding power a bunch while you could, before he finally wound down.

“Regardless. If you are in my ether manipulation course, I’ll be teaching you another technique, one that’s well suited to long term power development. It is, in many ways, the opposite of this, better suited to developing power the more power you have. But even if you’re not in that course, if you do hit the point in a year or two where this technique’s luster starts to fade, seek me out, and we’ll see what we can do. Now, come up and take a training device!”

When I sat back down with the device, I flowed some ether into it, and immediately slammed into a wall. Despite the analogy of carts on a road, the actual application of the technique was difficult.

The connection to Etherius was constant, and with Xander’s massage, I’d learned to stimulate that connection and improve my recovery, so I knew it was possible.

But as I used this device, I could feel the technique’s radical differences.

First, instead of stimulating the connection in specific spots, I needed to stretch the connection until it was practically flat, which was both incredibly uncomfortable and rather unintuitive.

Then, once I’d flattened it, I needed to take all of my ether, down to the last drop, and catapult it down the metaphorical road and into Etherius, but before the ether left my grasp, I needed to wrench it back into my pool.

Finally, once it was in my pool, I had to throw it all outwards with a mighty push, which reminded me of Jackson’s bottled explosion technique, but was clearly far more refined, and less painful to the user.

Kybar lit his glass dowel instantly, and I leaned forward.

“You’ve used this. Do you have any tips?”

Yushin also leaned in slightly at that.

“I’ve used the technique, not the training tool, but yeah, it’s about the same,” Kybar said. “And hmm. No secret, but I can tell you that if you want to snap your ether back to your pool fast, leave a super tiny strand in your pool. Then use that to pull it back.”

I thanked him for the tip, then went back to work. By the end of the class, I’d gotten to the point I could flatten out my connection to Etherius most of the time, but not every time. I worked on it more through lunch, before finally heading off to go visit a haunted house.

Applied Mage Combat was certainly shaping up to be an… Interesting… class, given I got to think things like that.