“Gravity magic? I’m sorry, but isn’t that..?”

“Ancient magic? Lost to time? Incredibly cryptic and hard to understand?” Edward listed a couple of options for Alec to pick from. “It’s all of that. Which means that—”

“Which means that Professor Andrew never intended to help me. He set me up to fail, didn’t he?” Alec grumbled. It was frustrating.

“Yes. He did. Which brings me to the question of, why Professor Andrew? He doesn’t have the best reputation does he?” Edward asked. His eyes didn’t leave the paper, constantly trying to make sense of the writings on it.

“No he doesn’t,” Alec answered. “He wasn’t my first choice though. I tried the others.”

“By ‘the others’, who do you mean?” Edward asked as he raised his gaze to look at Alec.

“’The others’, is every teacher that I’ve taken a course from,” Alec said.

“And they..?”

“Didn’t accept. Most of them outright refused me because, apparently, it was too early for me to get a mana brain,” Alec explained. “Mr. Andrew at least gave me a chance. Well… I thought he did.”

“Yeah. He was probably just trying to push you away,” Edward answered after quickly turning the pages one last time before handing them back to Alec.

“Isn’t he worried that his research is going to be stolen? Why would he give this to me so willy-nilly?” Alec asked as he picked up the papers and placed them on his lap.

“I think those are just rudimentary notes. He might be keeping the important parts to himself,” Edward answered. “Or he isn’t even seriously studying the topic and he was carrying it at that moment by pure luck. He gave you whatever he could think of and shooed you away.”

After sighing, Alec got up and turned to leave. As he opened the door, he heard Edward speak.

“Don’t forget to come tomorrow! After your classes are over.”

***

“…That’s how the collective consciousness can cause such spikes in reality. Well, these were recovered from ancient texts, as we lack the necessary equipment to calculate such spikes...” The teacher babbled on.

After separating from Edward, Alec came to the History of Magic 201 class, which was an afternoon class. It was currently 3 p.m. If he wanted to think of something about his deal with the teacher, he had to think fast.

‘What’s important is, even if I managed to figure out the magic circle, I couldn’t show it to anyone. Unless I want to get every secret beaten out of me,’ Alec thought while playing with the corner of his notepad. ‘Figuring out a small part of the circle would probably attract Mr. Andrew’s attention. But even still, can I trust him to keep his part of the deal?’

As the lecture came to an end, Alec picked his stuff up and headed for the training grounds.

‘I was planning on holding off a little bit more, but I guess I’ll have to speed things up a little bit. I can’t solve the gravity magic unless I understand The Author’s Pen better,’ he thought to himself as he entered a private training room.

From his backpack, he took out a bundle of very low grade mana potions, six in total. These were the mana potions he had managed to pump out with his leftover mana from his endeavors throughout the last two weeks.

“Let’s see…” Alec muttered to himself as he took out The Author’s Pen and placed it down on the table.

So far, Alec had utilized The Author’s Pen in a very cautious manner. The first time he had used the artifact, it had resulted in him going into a mana coma for a few days, and he had felt wary of experiencing another such outcome. After all, even if he ignored the wasted time, he would still have to explain why he went into a coma out of nowhere.

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Even if a mage wanted to go into a mana coma, they couldn’t just expel every bit of mana they had and do so. It was somewhat like holding one’s breath to commit suicide. The brain would stop the person from doing so.

‘The main problem is, I still don’t know how the mana cost of my writings is decided,’ Alec thought to himself. Throughout his time in the academy, he had done his best to keep his creations to a somewhat consistent style. His instincts as an author had made him want to try new things with the pen, but the possibility of stumbling onto something that cost too much mana and knocking himself out was always there, hanging above his neck like the Sword of Damocles.

To try out the capabilities of the pen safely, Alec had been saving up on mana potions whenever he could.

‘Let’s start with my first theory,’ Alec thought to himself before picking up The Author’s Pen. ‘So far, the pen has had no trouble understanding what my writing means. When I write dig, it digs on the ground. The perfect amount at that.’

Alec brought down the pen, into a bowl he had prepared, and started writing.

[Water]

When he did so, the bowl was filled with water. Emptying it away on the ground, Alec started writing again, however, this time, he consciously imagined filling the bowl half-way.

[Water]

As he had expected, the bowl only filled up halfway.

‘So the normal magic rules still apply to The Author’s Pen,’ Alec thought to himself. There was one universal and very simple rule that applied to all magic and magical artifacts. And it was that they had to have intent behind it.

The only difference between a normal magic spell and The Author’s Pen was that, Alec would have to consciously put intent into the magic spell while the soul artifact could infer his intent automatically.

‘This is why the potions I created never spilled over other than the first time I tried the pen,’ he thought. ‘I was too distracted the first time to have proper intent. This also explains how my dig order could be understood by the pen.’

Next, Alec wrote down [Water] once more, however, this time, he put the intent of creating a pebble into the writing. The lines, instead of forming into what Alec had written, faded away without spending any of his mana.

‘From this, I can derive two rules for the usage of The Author’s Pen,’ Alec thought with his hand on his chin. ‘One, I have to have intent while writing. Two, my writing has to somewhat match up with my intent.’

To further confirm his theory, Alec wrote [Liquid] while imagining water, which still came out with the correct result.

‘This’ll help me understand the pen better,’ he mentally mumbled before going on to his second question.

‘How is the cost of my creations decided?’ Alec thought to himself. This was the prime question he had been thinking about but had no way of confirming his theories. As long as he solved it, he could leave the confines of his safe space of creation. The only clue he had so far was that if his understanding of the creation was better, it would lower the cost.

‘Neither volume nor weight makes sense for this kind of thing,’ he thought. Those were the options that he had ruled out by very simple trial and error methods.

‘I had thought of complexity being the deciding factor after those, however, that theory was debunked by itself,’ he reminisced. The reason was simple, he had used the pen to dig a hole in the ground before. Even at the time, he had felt the mana expenditure to be too much for such a simple action. It was almost as expensive as a Very Low stat upgrade potion, which was a lot.

“Hmm…” Alec hummed as he scratched his head. Browsing through a library of ideas in his head, Alec picked one and decided to go with it. ‘What if the cost is decided by how useful it is to me?’

However, before he could go on with his idea, he realized how it didn’t make sense.

‘No… That doesn’t make sense. If that was the case, the stat upgrade potions would have become cheaper the more I used them, as they would lose their effectiveness.’

“This is hard…” Alec mumbled to himself. ‘Still, maybe I should try it to see.’

Quickly, Alec’s mind kicked into gear. There were a billion ways to test his theory, but he had to pick one. Preferably one that was safe to do.

‘What do I not need right now?’ Alec asked himself. If he managed to find something that he didn’t need at all, he would be able to try it out. ‘Why don’t I use a potion as the test group? I’m not sick, so an anti-infection potion has no use to me.’

‘So what happens if I try to create an anti-infection potion and an antibiotic from my world? They both have the same usage and are both useless at the current moment.’ Alec thought. There was no need to think further. Bringing down the pen, he started writing at lightning speed.

When he wrote the very low anti-infection potion, he noticed its cost to be similar to that of an upgrade potion, which was already not a good sign for his theory.

‘The antibiotic should cost about 1.5 times more than the potion, considering my understanding of potion-making,’ Alec thought to himself.

However, when he wrote down the antibiotic, he noticed a strange sensation rising up from inside him.

“Oh shit…”