Eli POV

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I looked out over the long dock by the river. The river was wide enough that several vessels could travel up and down it at the same time. This was apparently one of the major arteries that fed the rivers and streams down towards the west coast. The long rows of docks coming out over the water and endless activity as boats were loaded and unloaded with an innumerable amount of goods being carried to and fro.

These scenes always brought me some comfort. Never one for floating in the middle, I've found that the massive symphony of spaceports and the near dead silence of the workshop were my two favorite work environments. After spending a few days reading up on all of the available material I started experimenting and tinkering with various concepts. Considering all of the experiments I have done by myself in the warehouse these past 5 days, I figured I should get away from all that disappointment.

Caster spells were just crafter constructs in the air. I had all four affinities, an unheard-of stock as far as I am aware, and the ability to produce vast quantities of mana. Yet as I tried out the spell work for casters, I ran into several problems with it combat and construction wise. Even when I managed to get it to work by forcing it through my skin like I saw in the arena, a skill that seemed to come far easier to me than most of my fellow students, I was still left unsatisfied.

For construction, the increased mana cost to use spells meant crafts were almost always more efficient on building projects. That combined with magic’s poor combat performance meant I got almost nothing to show for all my hard work. For all my studies I only had two good things to come of these experiments: one was that I figured out how to make a flame craft that would produce a consistent source of light, even if it did make the surrounding air uncomfortably hot some times.

The other was eternal life.

Yeah that was a pretty big 'only' to the people of this world, but to me it was just more of what I always had in the past. The ability to live forever was sold in nanomachine packets by the cold and cancer medicine or in dealerships if you wanted a brand-new body from scratch. Here it was more of a pain but still completely doable. I would have to gather a vast amount of mana, probably in the form of mana crystals considering how long it would take to accumulate that much ambient mana. This store of mana could then be used to power a large number of healing spells which would slowly reverse the damage of ageing over long periods of time or use a single, but extremely high-level spell. Considering my abilities, the former option was already within arm’s reach.

From what the books said this was typically such a massive undertaking that all but the most wealthy and powerful humans in existence would ever even consider it. The elves were pretty much the only race with the resources to expend so much on one individual. Also, the elves as a people leaned towards water and wind as magical affinities, which meant they also had many more dual elemental mages centered around those two elements. That allows them to unlock a whole different branch of magic called healing.

The caster spells book explained that individuals with dual elements allowed them to unlock a whole new type of spell constructs:

Wind and water allowed healing. Whereas wind and fire allowed for electrical attacks.

Fire and earth allowed metal spells but as far as I could tell it shaped metal, it couldn't summon it from nothing like the other elements.

Earth and water allowed for plant-based spells, which by all accounts didn't allow for any genetic manipulation of plant-life just its rapid growth with predetermined magical mutations and even allowing wood puppets of varying power at later stages.

Apparently fire and water, along with earth and wind had nothing to say to each other.

Going over it in my head again and again I came to a hard decision. Magic spells felt good and were eye catching. Its mastery was the ultimate sign of power, wisdom, and prestige in this world. And it was pretty shit in a fight.

The first problem was that it cost the user physical energy to use. Sure, so does lugging around armor and weapons made with the power of science. But the crafts of this world weren’t much lighter and putting on the added exhaustion of spell casting was a huge burden on the human body, a problem I was all too familiar with over these past few days. Now to be fair they would not be hampered with the supply and ammo problems that my universe's weapons had, as the ambient mana would regenerate on its own. But that rested on the assumption that the fights would last that long.

When using magic even at the height of magical proficiency, there was still a limit to how fast the average human body could sense and move. This one fact was the only reason weapon crafts were viable in conflicts despite the fact they could be shut down with a single spell. So far, my experiments showed that the crafts and spells could only work as fast as the human who makes them thinks over the instructions. That meant if you could just think over what you wanted it to do without saying it the results were a much faster response. Which was backed up by several theory books by crafting experts I had read.

Flaming snakes, boulders for armor, massive deluges of water, and whirlwinds of cutting wind blades all provided a treat for the eyes and excited people's imaginations at every age the world over. But none of them could match the brutal efficiency of a single sniper round travelling faster than the speed of sound through a skull. Death would take them before any spells could be cast.

At the edges of my magical knowledge, I was aware that huge magical power allowed for increases in a person’s physical strength, reaction speed, and overall ability. This concept generally came into play more in the wealthier central continent, but for my purposes let's say you could get someone up to the point where they could survive sniper fire and the burden of spell casting became negligible. That was certainly possible, but the scaling was horrendous.

I hadn't been to the Base, which is where most of the people who graduate the Diamond academy go after graduation to accept contracts and harvest magical resources from nearby or on trips through Elves Clay. That was the nickname for the expanse of forest further out directly west that the Coalition and elves agreed to leave as a neutral zone that both sides can harvest magical materials from.

I had listened to a few conversations from the graduates who used the market there but took a gig out here helping around the study hall or stayed at the dorms. From what I could gather the cost of the magical resources grew exponentially more expensive than anything the average person could imagine. A horned rabbit, one of the lowest rungs of the magical creature’s ladder, had a pelt and meat that was worth almost 20 silver. From there the costs only increased eventually reaching such astronomical levels that people just gave up trading in gold and it reverts to a barter system mostly involving mana crystals. These huge price tags were partially due to the fact that the heavy veins of mana coming out of the earth turned the forest creatures in certain sections into foes far beyond what any regular person could deal with. Just getting to the horned rabbits is a feat of great danger.

The sheer amount of wealth necessary to reach the heights of magic was ludicrous. If it could be put on a graph with fields of effectiveness vs cost, the slope of the cost axis would be the stuff of data analysts fevered nightmares. For that same amount of money, I could equip 50 new men with assault rifles and grenade launchers made from scratch. Throw away all their weapons and ammo after the fight, then pay for their retirement till the day they die and do that again and again for several battles which would still come in slightly under the costs for that one mage.

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Also, even the most powerful of mages were ultimately still dependent on their ability to absorb the surrounding mana, apparently there was no textbook examples of a person pushing mana out through their own bodies like I do. While this was rare outside of massive war zones, they would eventually run out of ambient mana to absorb and you can’t just chug mana crystals like a pill. You had to crack the outer shell to release it gradually into the air which was useless if you were in a situation where victory was measured in fractions of a second.

This was an Achilles heel no one had ever managed to fix. Well, their major Achilles heel. I could still glow mana out of my body that was apparently many times denser than the ambient mana and was gifted in all forms of magical elements. Which I am not sure is even that much of a cheat as I estimate I can only produce maybe one or two palm sized mana crystals a week if I really pushed it.

But whatever my powers none of these things freed me from the simple fact that making a spell in the middle of a life or death struggle is far more demanding than pushing a button on a rocket launcher or pulling the trigger of a gun. While it was too easy and readily available to not use at first, the path forward was obvious.

Fortunately, it wasn't all bad. Healing and plant based spells could do things that my people could only do with extreme resource investment or not at all. The thrill of showing up all of the highest rollers who had their own personal solar systems but still couldn't force trees to grow was quite satisfying.

The biggest boon turned out to be crafting. While it was treated ambivalently by the magic world, I could take it to new heights, possibly beyond what my previous world had. In some ways. The ability to make something out of thin air was still a little mind boggling no matter how many times I saw it happen. Not to mention these storage rings and bags were something I couldn't wait to start tinkering with.

The mana management system for the crafting enchantments was more like having reservoirs and streams of water than circuit board design. Barriers in magical resources, restrictions in access to elemental constructs and a general lack of interest left a lack in quantifying the portions of mana used into exact increments.

What I found most interesting was that the routing squares didn't use up any mana to carry out their instructions aside from the transmissions themselves, no matter how many times they were used. This eliminated the last obstacle to the crafting concept I had on the first day in school. The critical flaw of magical items was the overload from enemy spells, due to the mana surging through the circles and triangles. This would cause the links to shut down, similar to a pipe bursting from the huge mana streams. The only silver lining was that sometimes these could self-regenerate back to working order if the surrounding connections weren't too heavily damaged.

I was hardly the first to try and come up with a solution to this weakness. There were so many attempts over the years to rectify this issue, but they all were either useless or involved hooking up mana battery circles to the triangle to store the excess mana. What this would inevitably do is drain the triangle or short circuit any of the squares connecting them when it was hit. Also, since caster spells used more mana, even the simplest spells could overwhelm the largest mana batteries.

I was disappointed to find out from my groups minder that there weren’t that many people studying this issue anyways. Out there in the real world, not the classroom, constructs were a lot harder to get a hold of as casters typically saw working to make items as a sign of poverty. Not to mention the fact they would essentially be working to help get themselves replaced. This left the few people who did try to find a solution shunned from major organizations and had to foot the huge costs themselves.

But I had experience and knowledge that they lacked. Combined with my abilities I came up with the answer to this problem: packet switched communication.

This was a computing concept that had the message broken down into portions rather than sent as a single uninterrupted stream. These portions would have identifiers that linked them together with their other packets which could then be reassembled back into their original form. It would also have computers keep tables with lists of their connections to other nodes in the network which would be periodically updated through messages.

For my magical system, it will just send brief flashes of minute mana with each spell function being assigned a number of pulses. Say I mapped a fire spell to have two pulses. A square is right next to a fire spell triangle that emits two pulses that go back and forth so there is no net loss of mana. If this square then receives two pulses from another square, it will respond with three pulses confirming it has the connection to the fire spell so that it can receive a small portion of the mana stream. The second square will then confirm to any inquiring squares that it has a route to the fire spell and so on and so on. If it doesn't have the requested connection, it will send a single pulse back.

This would allow the mana to still flow to their needed targets in smaller bursts even if one link in the chain overloads with no intervention from me being needed to make it happen. It will also help prevent overloads in the first place. By having all communications start with short bursts I can have it default to treat uninitiated streams of mana as overloading mana and shunt it towards a mana battery circle or maybe even feed another of my spells with it. This also had the added benefit of making the diagram nearly indestructible with its numerous connections.

Heading out of the docking area I ran back home to try out my idea. After some fiddling with a diagram on a piece of bark it turned out the concept worked out even better than I'd hoped. The lines to the squares wouldn't have any effect on any squares it travels over. This let me fit several squares inside a larger one as long as their edges didn't touch, allowing the craft to function a lot more like modern computer network designs.

The piece of bark was putting out a constant stream of water flowing into a pyramid, which was another aspect of crafting I had mastered. When putting in the thoughts for the circle and triangle that would produce the spell effect for your diagram you had to visualize what it was you wanted it to do, this let the spell effects function without the guardrails of caster spells that typically came from route memorization. This simple difference provided far greater flexibility than the casters magic.

Setting it down on the floor, I used a low-level wind spell that took almost no effort or mana to use. Sure enough the stream stopped, and the pyramid collapsed into a puddle for a long moment, too long, before it started back up.

Thinking over it for a minute, the answer came to me. The squares needed to have their minute reserves of mana filled before they could communicate reliably. After turning it off I hit the bark piece with the wind spell 3 more times till the stream shot out by itself, expending the excess mana that overflowed from the battery. Afterwards, the pyramid would barely have the time to lose its shape before the stream re-initiated.

From what I understand, I would be considered an advanced craftsman before even this achievement. The highest level of design in this world was having simple logic gates that would allow crafts to perform multiple functions. Apparently having multiple codependent objects wasn't a thing they considered doing either. It seems that the focus on magical development came at the expense of mathematical progress as well as scientific.

*tsk* *tsk*

Their lack of curiosity in the world around them was going to bite them in the ass one day. And it looks like I will be doing the biting in the near future. Maybe.

I was still pissed about how they forced me to be here, taking me in like I was just their piece of property. But eventually I had to admit their actions weren't totally dissimilar to what I would support back home. Forcing a child to go to school so they wouldn't be illiterate when they grew up was something everyone, including myself, could get behind.

My eavesdropping on multiple people led me to believe that how magical humans developed was another major difference here as well. Before the onset of puberty, they would hibernate for weeks every month for years as their bodies changed to accommodate the magical abilities. On a societal level, mages my bodies age were treated like some mix between children and mighty powers. Although their association with the Front still irked me.

'All right, enough mopping. Its late and I want to get some dinner from the local sailors tavern and then I am going to sleep late into the morning' I could feel the strain of today's work in my bones so I headed out to enjoy myself until it was time to call it quits.

But on my way back home from a night of good meals and spicy rum, I ran into a Kelton woman laying injured in the dirt.

 She had a soft grey fur covering her head down to her collar bones touching the rest of her green dress. Her smooth white horns sticking out on the side of her heads curving upward. Her head itself had a human shape with a slight snout that had a streak of white from the tip of her nose to the forehead. But the generous curves of her body left no question as to her gender. Although the dark grey of her skin would leave many in doubt as to how genuine her more human parts were as did the pale white that totally covered her eyes.