The magic circle spun, shedding an eerie purple light similar to the last time she messed with magic. The mana sparkled brilliantly and then disappeared in an instant. Nothing remained of her magic. She stared at the empty space where she was expecting an effect of some kind. Although this wasn’t what she wanted per se, it was nice that her magic cast without taking her hand off.
Maybe since it was gravity magic it would be invisible? Gravity, after all, is invisible to the human eye. It would only make sense. She instead focused her mana sense upon the suspected area. She instantly felt a hit as she could feel a dark-purple cube just a few inches from her position.
She felt around the space with her hand. It was heavy, though not too heavy to move about. Quinn tested it a bit more and came to a conclusion; the gravity in the cube around where she cast her magic had gone from 1g to maybe 1.25g. It wasn’t a startling increase that would stop anything in its tracks, but it was uncomfortable to be in. The gravitational field faded after barely a few seconds, causing Quinn some concern. Magic that faded almost immediately after being cast was worrisome when said magic relied on duration to take effect.
An increase in gravity was a powerful effect, but the change was too weak to actually do anything unless someone was in it for a while or they were extraordinarily heavy. If it was a change to 4g instead of just a suspected plus .25, then a short duration wouldn’t matter. The effect was just far too weak for a short duration,
She turned to the book for answers and found them not in Magic 101, but in An Introduction to Magic. Both books were fairly similar, but Magic 101 seemed to cover more warnings about magic and mana while An Introduction to Magic was more focused on introducing how to cast magic and the terms the reader needed to know.
Quinn searched for a while until she found what she was looking for: Passive Magic. Unlike Active Magic, which is cast and then an effect immediately happens such as with a fireball, Passive Magic has its effects drawn out over some time. The way this worked was by changing a modifier to something along the lines of passive, continual, and unending. The book highlighted several times that intent was extremely important when it came to Passive Magic. Passive Magic, by nature, was incredibly unstable since the mage had to stay in contact with it to feed the spell mana.
Quinn followed the book's directions and replaced Direction with Passive. She recast the spell but focused her mind on establishing a tether of mana to the gravitational field. It took nearly two dozen attempts as the spell failed every time she tried. Thankfully, the magic was cast a bit away from her body, so she could dodge out of the flesh-rending fields each time they were summoned.
After twenty minutes, and almost all of her mana, she finally managed to succeed. She felt a connection to the space in front of her. If she focused her mana senses, she could feel a small tether of mana connecting to a cube in space. She barely had any mana left by this point, and what was left slowly drained away as the tether fed it to the gravity cube.
A triumphant smile appeared across her face as she focused her intent and cut away the tether. Her mana sense revealed the mana racing back to the box, which stayed around for a time before fading to nothing. There was just one thing left to do; name her new spell. She thought long and hard about it before she settled on a name. It needed to be an apt description of the spell and something she could remember. She would call it Gravity Cube.
Quinn gathered her books and settled at the table with An Introduction to Magic. She was nearly out of mana and would have to wait a while for it to regenerate. She was quickly finding out that the weakness of mages was the recovery time for their mana. Sure they could summon nuclear fireballs and blow up whole cities, but they were useless once their mana was gone.
It wasn’t all bad though, she felt as light as a feather compared to just a few hours ago. Since most of her mana was gone, nothing was weighing her down. Not only that, but she felt incredibly good as amber flowed through her body easily. It felt warm and joyful like smelling a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. Quinn would have to set aside some time to research amber more.
She looked through the book for more information on the terms she had just learned. Mana Reversion was the first she saw, and this book detailed it far better. Apparently, Mana Reversion wouldn’t affect the surroundings of a mage immediately. If she were to cast magic and intentionally mess it up to devour someone, it wouldn’t work.
Mana Reversion was only dangerous to the mage who shared the same Mana Signature. The truly dangerous part came when Mana Reversion killed the mage that caused it. Then, the mana from the mage would be absorbed and cause a massive event depending on the amount. Then the book also used the same example as Magic 101. A fire mage was killed by his own Mana Reversion and then it blew up a city.
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The book also mentioned more about the Elemental Attribution of mana. It didn’t have a list, but it talked more about mana attributes. An Introduction to Magic was written after Magic 101 since it talked about a relatively new discovery in the way of Elemental Attribution. Almost everyone had at least one primary attribute and two secondary attributes.
The book talked about the Law of Best Fit when it came to Elemental Attribution. A person’s secondary attributes would always be a part of their primary attribute. It used the mud attribute as an example. The primary attribute was mud, so the secondary attributes would probably be something like water and earth. With all that being said, the mud-attribute person could still use fire magic, but it would be far weaker than someone with a fire attribute.
Quinn continued to read late into the night as she researched various happenings with magic and interactions between mana. She learned quite a bit, but she couldn’t help but feel her understanding was still shallow. She would need far more practical experience before she could become some grandmaster mage or anything of the like.
Her last candle burnt out, so she closed her book and settled in for the night. Although the candle was gone, she could still see well enough to move by. Sleep eluded her as various thoughts bounced around in her head. First and foremost, although she didn’t want to admit it, Gravity Cube was incredibly weak. It had a very small margin where it would be helpful, and it relied almost entirely upon her enemy being heavy. Such was tier-one magic.
She should really look into learning some magic from A Beginners Spellbook. As it stands, she was only capable of defending herself with her bow and somewhat by wildly waving her knife. That simply wouldn’t do unless she wanted to be mauled by some monstrous creature on her way to Strumgard.
So that left four days to find a better way of defending herself. Unfortunately, that also left only four days to learn how to cast tier-two magic. She had read it repeatedly over the last couple of hours, tier-one magic was just too weak for combat. There wasn’t enough mana to cause a major effect unless it was situational like with Gravity Cube and heavy objects.
If she had to phrase it, tier-one magic was mainly a support type. It was either used for an auxiliary purpose, such as Cleanse, or it was too weak to do anything by itself and required something to help it along. Quinn would need to push on to tier-two magic if she wanted a proper defense.
But that opened up a whole new can of worms. She wasn’t sure if she even had enough mana to cast a tier-two spell. From what she had read, being able to cast tier-two magic was the first true step into magehood. If you couldn’t at least do that much, you would never make it as a mage.
Aside from the mana requirements, she wasn’t sure if she could even control that amount of mana. She hadn’t had too much trouble with tier-one magic, but tier-two was twice as hard. Quinn was deeply worried about tier-two magic going unstable. From her understanding, however limited it was, Mana Reversion would be two times as strong since there would be two times as much mana.
But what other choice did she have? Using a bow wouldn’t cut it if she were to get swarmed like in Umbersknecht. She didn’t have nearly enough time to learn how to use a sword, and even if she did, swords didn’t interest her. The thought of being only a few feet from danger was deeply unsettling. She would rather be in the back, nowhere near the fight.
What did she want? Quinn would say to go home, without a doubt. So did she need to fight others? Not really, she just needed to be able to avoid combat while she researched Spatial Magic. So why was she trying to learn offensive magic and all of that? To defend herself. But she didn’t need to know offensive magic to defend herself.
She didn’t need to learn how to kill other creatures. What she needed was to stay alive. Her focus was on the wrong thing here. If she was just trying to stay alive, then Gravity Cube was quite good. She didn’t need powerful offensive magic that could kill groups in one blow, she just needed to deter would-be attackers.
With this renewed perspective on what she wanted to learn, Quinn put that thought on the back burner. She would need money to buy research materials for Spatial Magic, of which she had no doubt. Easiest way to get money? Offer an indispensable service. She had seen time and time again that doctors were paid a ton for their service in her previous world.
She needed to either learn a service or create one. From what she had read earlier, elements other than light, darkness, fire, water, earth, and wind were quite rare since most people can’t find their primary attributes. Her gravity element magic was quite rare then. And everyone knows that rare things are valuable.
A plan began to form in her head as she stared off into the darkness of the room. If she could offer a service to make stuff lighter, cargo and caravan companies would be more than willing to pay her. So she just needed to design or find a spell that would make transportation easier before she reached Strumgard.
That would take care of her money issues. At the same time, she would need to make a way to protect herself. If she died because of carelessness, she would come back and kill herself again. This issue was, if Quinn was honest, she had little to no talent in combat. She froze up with the zombies and could barely shoot a few arrows before suffering an injury. That might change in the future, but as if right now her defenses were incredibly weak.
She would first need to find good defensive magic before she began her money-making research. She would have to find her secondary attributes first to see if A Beginners Spellbook didn’t have some magic she could use.
Quinn was having a harder time keeping her thoughts together as time passed. Soon, her eyes had unknowingly closed and she fell fast asleep.