I arrived at home alone. Marissa had left me as it was already late. She insisted on taking a stroll in Thal’mer park like we did yesterday, but we hadn’t kept track of time, which meant that by the time I had to go back home, Marissa also had to go to hers.
“Hi there, sweety.” Mom greeted me while she did dinner in the kitchen. “You took your time. Where have you been?”
“With Marissa in the park.” I explained as a matter of fact.
“Oh!” Her face was plastered with a smirk. She covered her face with her left hand so as to hide it. She had a problem with gossip and weird theories.
“We were practicing magic.” I added.
“Of course, you did!” Mother said between giggles. “How was class today?”
“Better than yesterday.” I left my school bag in my room. “We did have magic class today, the most entertaining one so far.”
“Ah, magic class. Did you know I struggled a lot with those when I was younger?” She commented, her sight lost, reminiscing of older times.
“But it was too simple, the teacher asked us to cast Magic Chip. A simple sorcerer cantrip.” I responded a bit too outraged.
“Well, that’s because you are my intelligent little boy!” Mother toyed with my cheeks.
“Aah…” I grunted, yet she continued.
Do you want to play? Well then. I’ll have it my way. I struggled against my mother’s bindings, stretching my arms as much as possible. Then I touched her obscenely long ears. She let out a high-pitched screech.
While that surprised me, I did not stop. As she played with my cheeks, I toyed with her ears. They felt really good to touch. I wish I had ears like her.
“Edrie stop!” She said, still grappling to my face.
“No, you!” I counterattacked.
In the end, both of us stopped our duel with ragged breaths and colored faces. Mom’s face became pinkish and, I suppose, mine was bluish. It was curious how ellari colored their face out of exhaustion. My cheeks actually hurt pretty badly as mom’s grip only intensified as time went on.
Father came home, only to find us lying in the couch, still trying to calm our breaths. “What happened here?” He asked as he left his coat on the hanger.
“Nothing… dear.” She struggled to talk.
We sat to eat together. An overly spiced salad of incredible culinary supremacy, tofu soup with egg sauce (it sounded weird, but it was glory for the average ellari taste buds), and a fruit salad composed of strawberry, melon, and banana as desert.
Mother liked cooking a lot, and she showed it every time with her well-presented and carefully dressed plates. Sometimes, it was a shame to eat such pieces of art.
“Good as always, Lilin.” Father kissed mom.
I knew it was a common gesture of affection, yet I found it somewhat repulsive. My inner child at least did. I found no problem with the situation, even if the gremlin trapped inside me wanted to puke.
“Oh right, I forgot.” I commented as father stood up. “I’ve talked with my magics teacher and he told me that Marissa and I aren’t well-suited for this level.”
“How’s that?” Father sat once more.
“Classes are too easy, and magic is rather basic. Professor Accord said we aren’t taking advantage of our talent, so he wants to move us to a higher grade.”
“The teacher wants it, or you convinced him to do it?” My own father incriminated me. To which I responded with a shrug. “We’ll talk about this with this Accord teacher. Just remember our promise, alright?”
I nodded at him and went to my room.
***
I laid on my bed after the second day of school. Unable to sleep at nighttime, I decided to read to distract my mind. Three-star spells were advanced for my age, yet I wasn’t satisfied with my results. I was a reincarnated, I had an adult mind and the peak affinity of my people, yet I was only above average.
I felt like I was slacking. Wasn’t training for hours and hours, on a daily base, enough?
I knew I was in a state of self-deprecation, undervaluing my effort. Father, an adult spellcaster, was a six-star caster. Right at the singularity point between sorcery and wizardry, according to professor Accord. But he told me he had an average affinity and started at the same time as everyone. Whilst I had the maximum affinity and I was probably the youngest ellari spellcaster ever. Or at least the youngest conscious one, as it seemed high ellari pushed their children real hard.
Even then, four-star wasn’t a far-fetched goal. A distant one, yes. But not a hard one. The first step to be considered a four-star wizard, was to have a complete dominion over three-star spells. I had a few under my belt: Slow Fall, Mana Pond, Arcane Chip (an upgrade version of Magic Chip) and Mana Vacuum.
All of them were simple spells in theory. I already explained Slow Fall and Mana Pond, and Arcane Chip was a basic projectile spell of the arcane element. Mana Vacuum was interesting. If I had to explain it, it was the opposite of Mana Pond.
While one acted as an oasis that brought mana to thirsty mages, the other deprived them of their precious resource. Indeed, Mana Vacuum was a magical construct which absorbed magic, slowing natural mana regeneration.
Father explained to me how high-level arcanists could control the leylines, therefore they were able to grant or take mana at will. Mana Pond and Vacuum were the children’s version of that.
According to my compendium (which had become my cornerstone for ellari common sense) arcanists weren’t elemental users like pyromancers or aeromancers, but more akin to ‘weavers of mana’.
Yes, all mages weaved mana to cast spells, but this was referenced in a more primordial way. Arcanists were THE weavers of mana by excellence.
Out of curiosity, I casted both Mana Pond and Mana Vacuum for an experiment as a fleeting idea passed through my head. I left them separated in opposite corners of the room to gather mana for the time being.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Where was I? Arcanists, right.
Thanks to their nature as mana weavers, arcanists (or arcane users) were innate spellcasters. Everything I had been taught about there being arcane sorcerers was a lie. If an experienced arcanist was next to a leyline, they theoretically had access to an unlimited amount of mana under their control.
Was that incredibly powerful? Yes. A mage with unlimited mana was a recipe for disaster. There was a downside obviously. The absurd amounts of sicknesses related to mana. Redirecting a leyline as if you were a god creating the rivers was the literal analogy of being coughed in the face by every sick person in the world. At least one sickness was guaranteed to pierce your immune system.
Children, that’s why arcanists don’t shove themselves into arrays of concentrated mana for unlimited power.
A way to oversimplify it could be to say arcanists bent mana like elementalists did the elements. A pyromancer may use mana as fuel, but what they control is fire.
Or at least that’s how I understood it.
A flashing light derailed my train of thought.
Oh, right. The experiment. I was so centered on magical theory that I forgot about the Mana Pond and Mana Vacuum that I had spellcasted.
So much time had passed that the mana-sucking construct began glowing. It looked like a bomb ready to burst out. In reality, while it had absorbed a considerable amount of mana, it was still a small amount, around half of my mana pool.
One could compare both constructs with black and white holes, but that wasn’t exactly the case. Mana Vacuum filled the criteria of a black hole, the basic concept, it wasn’t going to tear space-time continuum out of gravitational waves. But Mana Pond wasn’t an ever-mass-emiting object. It didn’t expel mana, it homogenized the mana already in its range.
Weirdly enough, the unknown and incredibly complex matter that were those “dark and white holes” didn’t afflict me with a headache. Had I finally developed an immunity after yesterday’s events, or was there something else in play?
To put it simply, the construct did absorb mana, but instead of keeping it for itself, it was distributed in its sphere of influence. It simultaneously absorbed and emitted mana at the same time, which felt contradictory.
The disparity between the bountiful mana field and the mana-deprived one was enormous. As three-star spells, Mana Pond and Vacuum’s effects were mild. Nothing exaggerated. But if one walked between a normal Mana Pond sphere of influence into an overcharged Mana Vacuum, the effect was drastically higher.
Let’s suppose both spells had an increase (and decrease) of twenty-five percent in mana regeneration. If I stood in a place outside the spell’s area, I had my normal regeneration at one hundred percent. Into the Pond it augmented to hundred twenty-five, in the Vacuum it went down to seventy-five.
This meant that in crossing the border between the rich mana and the scarce mana, I could easily notice the effects on my body.
I don’t know if it was an ellari or a mage thing, or even an arcanist one, but I was extremely susceptible to changes in mana. It was like walking in a tropical humid jungle and then being teleported to a dry desert. I liked that analogy; mana density did feel like humidity for my ellari body.
I wonder what would happen in a mana-concentrated place like a leyline.
While this experimentation was interesting, I had to bring it to an end. Mana Pond would become unstable within a short period, and the glow on Mana Vacuum was honestly scaring me. Wasn’t the making of mana bombs incredibly easy?
How much energy was in the glowing ball of death? Assuming that an average adult punch has a hundred joules of energy… No, not useful. I don’t have any spell than can recreate the effect of a punch. What’s something I could compare with? Hmm… I scratch my not-so-long ears while thinking. Let’s assume, assume in the sense of I was pulling this number out of nowhere but sounded right, that a pellet gun has an average force of twenty joules. If Magic Chip and air gun pellets are equal, and the current capacity of Mana Vacuum is half of my mana pool, we have around… a thousand joules of energy trapped in the levitating violet sphere. Utilizing the specific heat of water of four thousand two hundred joules divided by kilograms per Celsius degree, it means that with Mana Vacuum’s actual capacity, we can raise a kilogram of water by a fourth of a degree.
Hmm…
One. That’s abysmally low. Either I have scuffed the math really bad, or my spells aren’t efficient at all.
Two. What in the River of the Damned was that? Where did all that knowledge come from? My previous incarnation couldn’t have known that. It's… so random.
Oh, oh. That’s a big one.
Ugh, my head. Yup. That’s big. Ugh, nefarious, simply nefarious.
This isn’t as bad as yesterday’s incident, but I feel incredibly nauseous. Ugh, everything is spinning. Oh, something’s coming, something’s coming!
Hmm.
I cautiously looked at the floor in front of me, more specifically, at the huge puddle of vomit at my feet. Uh, my mouth tasted like bile. This is the first time I’ve ever puked, and honestly, I prefer the nosebleed ten times over this foul taste.
Carefully, I went to the bathroom and cleared my mouth after a pair of gargles. Then I picked a towel and cleaned the ginormous lake of green liquid at the floor. Then I opened my room’s window to cycle the air and remove the foul odor.
Damn, if I was lucky my parents wouldn’t notice. Mom didn’t worry me, the problem is dad. He was going to be really mad if he found about this. He would think my reckless acts of magic caused this and I had broken our promise. And I couldn’t just explain him this hurdle was provoked by my weird memory blanks.
I laid myself on top of the mountain of pillows I had for a bed and took a breather.
“Well, the immunity theory has been disproven I suppose.” I sighed in defeat. “It would’ve been nice to remember things without being mentally assaulted, though.”
Either way, where was I?
Right, my calculations and the rambling about my random knowledge.
That arose the question of who my previous incarnation was. I’d like to think that I preserve the personality of my previous self, my essence. Even if there were no memories of it. Now that I thought about it, I did have knowledge from my life before death, but no memories of it. I had remembered a lot of menial things along the years, but no memories of myself.
It was literally writer’s amnesia.
In stories where people have amnesia, they always forget their memories, but not their knowledge. You could argue it was actually related to where the person in question had their head damaged as memories and knowledge are located in different parts of the brain. But I had no way prove the veracity of such claim besides questionable foggy knowledge.
A light flickered on the room and I jumped out. “Damn, that scared me.” I noticed that Mana Pond had outlasted its duration and had dissipated itself thanks to the failsafe which the spell was incorporated with.
I remembered that I had a time bomb accumulating mana at the other side of the room. I should stop wandering in my thoughts.
To disarm the potentially-not-so-dangerous object, I had to syphon the mana out. This wasn’t something I deduced myself, but an actual warning on the spellbook I had read.
Normally you would just let the spell pop because the author supposed you were a rational ellari with more than two braincells and wouldn’t overcharge the spell beyond its capabilities.
I didn’t want to risk an explosion if I simply canceled the spell (even if it had less strength than a firework according to my dubitable calculations), so syphoning the mana was the answer.
One couldn’t just extract mana out of a magical construct, typically. The exception was if it was the caster who did it. I didn’t know the full details of it, but alien mana interfered with one another. As I had control of the spell, I just had to do an inverse manaflows.
Slowly, I absorbed the mana from one hand, and shot it out from the other. I needed to have physical contact with the spell nucleus to do so, but thankfully the mana intensity was low enough that didn’t cause any harm to touch. No pain, no heat. I doubted it would be as harmless if it had accumulated more than twice my mana pool in its reserves.
I canceled the absorbing effect from the Mana Vacuum while I syphoned the mana out. I was doing the process slowly enough that if I left it active maybe there was a zero-sum discharging rate, therefore not reducing the amount of mana in the system.
I had to be this slow to not affect my own body in the exchange. Once again, mana diseases were a serious business. In this case, mana oversaturation. You could think about it like a sugar overdose or an ethyl coma.
There was a lot of mana in my body and the process was slow enough I could spellcast some Mana Ponds while I completed the syphoning.
I had spellcasted three Mana Ponds by the time the Mana Vacuum collapsed in on itself because of the lack of mana. I was disappointed to find the regeneration of Mana Ponds didn’t stack. At least additively. I could sense some increase, but it wasn’t a seventy-five percent as one might think, but more like a measly thirty percent. Once again, these were but numbers that I was eyeballing and had no scientific foundation whatsoever.
I thought of staying awake and casting more Mana Ponds to test the limits of regeneration stacking, but I stopped before I even began. I knew myself, and this would become a routine, a slippery slope inducing insomnia for the rest of my life.
With that said, I finally went to sleep.