"Spell creation is a highly valuable skill for any class that uses magical energy, and while it isn't that difficult to get started, it quickly rises as spells become more complex, or as they become optimized to withstand greater mana flows. This rapid increase of difficulty acts as a bottleneck for many mages, though many of the more combat oriented mages ignore this skill in favor of purchasing them, or relying on the odd spell tome from dungeon drops."

-Excerpt from a speech given by Olly Oxhold, teacher at The Clover Academy of Magic

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The next day, after a nice breakfast where Heather once again marveled at how good simple food tasted with the aid of the System, I spent an hour or two testing out some of the questions that Heather had asked me the previous day, such as whether it was possible for others to provide the mana for [Construct Beast], which was unfortunately impossible as the shell that I made as the first step of creation insulated it from outside interference, and having Jackson's mom forcefully inject shadow mana caused it to break and dispelled the skill. After a few more miscellaneous tests to kill an hour or two, I decided to head over to Roxy's and hopefully buy her spellforms, as while they wouldn't give me any new abilities immediately, I had long since noticed that while controlling the elements via intent and attunement was more effective for actual control of the elements, it was bad at the more complex or conceptual parts, such as how Jackson's mom's shadow cloak spell not only made her harder to see via darkness, but apparently also used the concept of shadows to make things subconsciously ignore you, which was apparently an innate ability of shadow mana, and Roxy had mentioned that her crystal mana skill had a sentence about being able to store and amplify other magics that I had been unable to replicate with my own crystals.

While it may just be my lacking attunement or skill that prevented me from doing so, as even Roxy's spells didn't seem to have those effects, Heather's teacher had apparently mentioned the difference between true casting and intent casting, spellforms being the former and my style being the latter, and while she couldn't remember the exact lecture, she did remember the main advantages to both, mainly that intent casting was quicker and more versatile while spellforms were much better at persistent and conceptual effects, which lined up with the fact that the only persistent skill I had, [Elemental Channeling], cost so much mana to use that I was unable to effectively train with it, and that trying to use Lightning in any sustained way cost insane amounts of mana, consuming around a hundred per second when I tried imitating everyone's favorite emperor without purposefully controlling my output. Now familiar with the route from my house to Roxy's, it only took around half an hour until it came into view, her training in her backyard like every other time I had come around. Calling out to her as I approached, I saw surprise appear on her face before she beckoned me over pausing in her training and taking a swig of water from her canteen.

"What brings you here? Thought you had someone arriving?"(Roxy)

"Yeah, friend had a little sister, but she had some rather important information from her tutorial."(Mason)

"Oh? What kind of information?"(Roxy)

With that, I described how the tutorial went for kids, which made Roxy remark how jealous she was about the difference, and when I got to describing what we now knew about how spells and things worked, her eyes lit up in understanding as we started negotiating the price of her spellforms, both of us knowing how valuable they were as we eventually settled on me teaching her the mana manipulation exercises as well as paying 800 contribution points for all three spellforms, taking most of my savings but still well within what I was willing to pay.

Once we agreed upon the price, deciding to transfer the points next time we went hunting as they were kept track of via one of the mayor's skills and needed someone he appointed to witness any deals to actually transfer them, I first taught her the control exercise before she spent the next few hours walking me through the spellforms for Crystal Wall, Crystal Shot, and Crystal Spike, the last one being the one she made, it's spellform much less cohesive than the other two, clearly the work of an amature rather than the system. Since I didn't have to learn how to create crystal attributed mana, I was able to focus entirely on the spellforms themselves, but even then they were all much more complex than the candleflame spell, about twice as large, though still smaller than Jackson's mom's spells were, her having demonstrated them after Heather asked. It wasn't until three hours later that I managed to successfully activate the Crystal Shot spell, and even then the spell took multiple seconds to cast for an effect equal to what I was able to do in less than a second with my intent, the elemental energy that I used in place of mana making the spell stronger than it was when Roxy casted it, though my much higher mental stats likely also played a part.

The casting itself was a rather weird experience, as I could feel the energy flow through the spellform and changing without the need for me to flex my intent, automatically converting from energy to solid and propelling itself forwards, and while I still felt the same connection to the crystal I launched as I did for the ones I launched normally, the crystal itself was much more uniform, looking like a smooth elongated pyramid as opposed to the more natural spikes with various faces of differing depths that I usually used, and unlike using pure energy manipulation, the spell itself was much more strict with how much mana it could use, with 20 being the minimum and anything more than 50 causing the spellform to collapse in on itself, though Roxy apparently had a skill that made her crystal spellforms sturdier. After I got the first spell down, only practicing until I could reliably cast it after a few seconds as I could practice assembling the spell quicker on my own time, the Crystal Wall spell only took another two hours with the Crystal Spike only needing one as it was more or less a combination of the previous two, its main difficulty being holding it together when it was cast. During my practice, Roxy had been trying out the mana control exercise as well as weapon drills, mostly ignoring me unless I asked her a question, and once I got the final spell down I thanked her and walked back home, forming and dispelling spellforms all the way.

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Apparently, even though Roxy had managed to create a new spellform, which had apparently given her some EXP, she still didn't actually know which parts of the spellform did what, lacking the WIL to control her mana on a small enough level to properly modify her spellforms the Crystal Spike spell being the result of hours of randomly reassembling the two forms until something worked, so while she was pretty sure she knew what some of the parts were, I was still going to test and confirm for myself. Unfortunately, the Candleflame spellform didn't seem to share any segments with the crystal spells, so I was unable to do any cross referencing, but I was able to see that the Crystal Shot and Crystal Wall spells shared a few segments, and since those shared segments were almost all at the beginning I was fairly confident that they were the ones responsible for the mana type and material properties, as the spikes and walls had the same coloration and density, but since I wasn't able to even tell where one segment ended and another began, I would have my work cut out for me.

Since I had spent so long at Roxy's, it was already dinnertime by the time I returned, most of the meal and the few hours after spent trying to teach Heather the new spellforms I had acquired, though without the ability to actually attempt to cast the spell since she lacked the method to make crystal mana, they proved too complex for her to learn with only the spellforms, as without the ability to cast them, she was unable to see her mistakes and none of us had the ability to see the spellforms she made to correct her, as the only reason I learned them so quickly was that I felt the Crystal within me give slight nudges whenever I made the spellforms, helping to correct mistakes in their construction. Even then, she seemed determined, making me promise to continue attempting to teach her, as apparently her mother was terrible at conveying how to construct spellforms, relying far too much on System assistance whenever she casted.

I spent the next few days experimenting with the spellforms, mostly trying to identify the segments since I wasn't interested in the spells themselves, which I did by just cutting the spellforms into randomly sized chunks and running Crystal through them to see what would happen, which was almost always nothing. Since Crystal Spike was the one with the shoddiest construction, my first tests involved splitting the spellform wherever I saw parts that were connected by Roxy rather than the System, slowly shaving off small chunks until the way that my energy flowed through it changed in a noticeable way. Since each test took at most ten mana, I was able to do them very frequently, but even then I was only able to identify three segments from the spell, two of them being present in all three spellforms, while the last was the same between Crystal Shot and Crystal Spike, but different for Crystal Wall. The ones I was able to identify were the first three in each spellform, the first one being the energy input, the second being the one that determines the material properties for the crystal, and the third being the shape of said crystal. I was only able to find out what those were due to the fact that they were the smallest I could make the spellform and have it still do something, as if I channeled Crystal through the first two segments it would turn the energy solid, causing it to form a thin sheet over my body wherever I constructed the spellform from, as while they could be made externally, it was much more difficult and I had yet to succeed in doing so even once. And when I introduced the third segment instead of a thin shell, a crystal spike or rectangle would grow from my skin, plopping to the floor once I cut of the flow of energy, or it became intense enough to shatter the spellform. I did think about using just the first two segments to mimic my [Elemental Channeling] skill, but the shell it made was only paper thin at most, cracking with even soft touches, and with only one segment I was barely able to channel any energy though it before it collapsed, as my skill in spellform creation was still low.

Just these three segments took me five days, and I was nowhere near identifying any other segments, having switched my strategy from randomly activating chunks to starting with a spell and shaving off bits from the end until the spellform didn't collapse when I ran energy through it, allowing me to find out that both Crystal Shot and Crystal Wall had six and seven segments respectively, and while Crystal spike also seemed to have seven, the spellform itself was larger and seemed to have a lot of excess parts, though since it was made by Roxy rather than the System it made sense that it wasn't the same quality. Even though I had made pretty good progress, all I had really done is identify the segments, and even for the ones which I knew the effect of I still didn't actually know why they worked, and since they were also the most simple out of all the segments I figured it would still be a while until I was actually able to claim to have learnt magic.

While the next two days were pretty uneventful, just more testing with no success, they marked the end of our agreed upon break, and the next day was spent at Roxy's discussing our plans, though it was hardly a discussion since even though the now much more relaxed Jordan wanted to spend more time with his kids, food prices had only been rising the last few days, almost doubling in price compared to when I had first joined the town. While we originally planned to change our hunting schedule to come back more often so that we could earn more points, apparently mayor Jonathan had heard about how most people hunting for EXP just left corpses behind since they didn't have a way to carry them, and in an effort to reduce the amount of meat that was wasted had had the person responsible for the all the fridges in town to make large freezer boxes that registered hunters were allowed to take into the forest, so I made a sled and a bear to carry one of the larger ones that were available, which was about five feet all around, mostly wood with some light blue runes engraved inside blowing cold air, apparently able to run off of ambient mana. Even with the new method to store our prey, we still decided to only hunt for three days in order to ensure that those we left behind would have plenty of food, agreeing to hold off on selling anything until we distributed some to our friends and family.