Two months had passed since I had learned the Force Shield spell. Classes were easy to follow and simple enough that not even Marissa had many problems with them. I still felt a bit disappointed by the lacking education, but I tried to take the most of it.
History classes were the bests ones for me. Novela Ashcroft was an excellent teacher but liked to deviate from the subject a lot. As someone who found himself rambling all the time, I wasn’t the one to criticize her. It was very educating learning the geography of the Tilean continent and the relationship between different countries. As Ferilyn was a relatively closed country, ellari history was monotonous and only dictated either by the changes of High Arcanist, or magical and technological discoveries.
Ferilyn’s geographical location was an interesting one. If one looked at the world map, one would only notice an elongated peninsula at the southeast extreme of the Tilean continent. But a closer look showed that the city-state was situated on an island separated from the mainland by a considerable gap in the sea.
Every time that fact was mentioned in History class, the words ‘venetia’ and ‘saint-michel’ came to my mind. Its meaning was lost to me, though.
Currently, I found myself looking at a detailed world map in the school’s library. It was a lackluster place, more akin to a reading corner than a true library, as the quantity and quality of the books were rather dubious.
I hadn’t expected anything from a library for children in an elementary school, yet I felt disappointed. That didn’t stop me from reading every non-child story book I could find. Whether they be about history, magic, science, or language, it didn’t matter to me. I felt like a knowledge-hoarding demon.
Marissa wasn’t present as today she needed to run some errands for her mother. She wouldn’t have come here, either way. Her boredom with learning, and more accurately toward books, hadn’t changed since she was a little girl.
There weren’t any people in the library besides me, not even a librarian or a keeper. This was somewhat expected. Children and books weren’t the greatest duo I can think of.
Father told me that there was a real library in the other neighborhood, or sector as ellari liked to call them. The problem was that it wasn’t free, because screw public services, and you had to pay a monthly fee, an elevated one at that. Considering that the round trip took more than an hour and I was occupied by school, I couldn’t take the most out of the subscription. So, I decided to wait until the holidays to go to the quote-unquote majestic library.
One of my discoveries in these past two months was the act of pseudo-meditation. Instead of being focused on the act of manaflowing, you could multitask by meditating while doing other activities. At a reduced rate, that was. This was proven a great boon as I was late coming to the library several times a week over prolongated periods.
Reading was a simple enough task, and already pretty similar to meditation, so I could easily do some manaflows while devouring simple books.
My mana pool was in constant increment thanks to my unwavering training. I had been able to cast around fifty Magic Chips two months ago, and now that quantity augmented to sixty. Sure, only a twenty percent increase, but those ten extra Magic Chips obtained in two months were extremely faster than the fifty I achieved over a decade of work. I wouldn’t expect this rhythm to be as good as it was, but I felt like I could compete with students around the third or fourth year on mana pool size.
“Hmm?” I grunted as I saw something weird in the book I was reading. “Human mages tend to have higher elemental affinities than ellari on average, but their proportion of mages to common population is atrocious.” I paraphrased the book. “What sense does that make? How would random humans be more powerful than ellari?” I only knew that the elementals were the only species with higher affinity than the ellari. Not even the mighty dragonborn were good mages as they depended on their dragon blood rather than skill.
This fact seemed rather random, and because it was a book meant for children and young adults, there were no references from where they got this information. And not citing a source was equivalent to saying that you made it up.
“But higher elemental affinity, huh.” As an ellari who was at the apex of two elements, this was an interesting prospect. “The four true elementals are said to have a true affinity, an elemental affinity higher than superb.”
While it seemed counterintuitive, it was theoretically possible. One could think of the elemental affinity as a logarithmic function. It was incredibly easy to have at least a thirty-three percent affinity, so to speak. And reaching the eighty percent mark wasn’t complicated. But going from eighty to ninety was harder than all the previous efforts combined. And then, from ninety to ninety-nine even more so.
Following this example, we could say that superb affinity was ninety-nine percent. An incredibly high mark which was absurdly difficult to achieve. But it wasn’t the end. True affinity was the final frontier, the hundred percent. If the elemental affinity did follow a logarithmic function, then it would be infinitely difficult (literally) to have a hundred percent affinity. So, comparing zero to ninety-nine percent to ninety-nine to one hundred percent was like saying a pond and the ocean were the same size.
“And that’s my theory of why there are only four true affinity element users in the world. But I could totally be wrong.” I told to the dreading nothingness.
And having said that, a headache assaulted me. I had abused too much from my forgotten knowledge whilst theorizing and I was now suffering the consequences.
Rays of the sun blinded my eyes, blocking me from continuing to read the book. That’s when I looked over the window and saw the pastel sky and the sunset. While it was a truly majestic display, I had to force myself to not headbutt against the table.
“Why do I always lose track of time?” I used my arms to avoid my dumb head from crashing against the book. “Argghh…” I grunted, no one was able to hear it in this desolate place.
“I should do something about my rambling habits, they are getting out of hand.” I said to the air after I calmed down. “Oh boy, Mother will be furious when I get back.”
***
“Edrie Nightfallen, why did you arrive home this late?” Mother inquired. Her words may have sounded authoritarian, but her voice revealed more worry than anger.
“Sorry, I distracted myself while reading in the library.” I excused.
“Oh.” She implied with a tone of ‘what else I should’ve expected from him’. “That’s fine, then. But you should take more care and keep an eye on the time.”
“Yes, mother.” I responded as I embraced her. It was incredibly easy to appease her.
“Then you are free.” She patted my head and kissed me on the forehead.
I locked myself in my room and opened the spellbook. The book was thick, containing hundreds of basic spells of the most common ellari affinities. So no Time or Soul spells that I could practice. And meanwhile, the difficulty of the spells was limited to three-star spells overall, the most common affinities like the main four elements, plus Force and Arcane, contained some four-star ones, and very limited five-stars at the end of the book.
There were no interesting Arcane spells, though. I did some digging, and the sixth tier was the most important one for the arcane users. That tier contained the evolution of Arcane Chip, Mana Pond, and Mana Vacuum. All of these three spells were incredibly good, especially Mana Pond. This fact wasn’t registered in the book, but something I found whilst on my time at the library.
But six-star spells were too far away to even think about them. Five-star ones were more accessible, like Levitation, for example. Even if it sounded a bit dumb to learn it since I discovered the double Slow Fall synergy. Weightlessness was another spell from this tier and sounded rather appetizing.
With all these good choices on the higher stars, I felt the fourth tier was lackluster as the only one I found somewhat useful was Cleanse.
Cleanse was an interesting spell. As its name implied, it had cleaning properties, but in multiple meanings. The spellcaster could decide to switch between two modes. First, the cleaning one. It summoned a small mana pulse that could remove fluff and grime around the mage. A rather simple effect, but useful considering the time saved in cleaning duties.
The second one was the one I was interested in. Arcanists were known as the mana weavers, and mana had an unfamous reputation of carrying a lot of sicknesses if it was consumed in bulk quantities or it wasn’t purified as the Mana Pond did. The alternative mode of Cleanse eased or straight up removed mana sicknesses. This spell series is what made arcanists an improvised medic for mages (but everyone would prefer a Nature or Light element user to be their healer ninety-nine percent of the time).
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“They aren’t joking around when they say each star is ten times more complicated.” The magic circle used as a visual image of the spell was three times as complex as the Mana Pond’s one. It made sense as Mana Pond was a high three-star spell, while Cleanse was a beginner four-star spell. “It’s so weird that star tiers aren’t linear…”
Commonly, the grimoire only dedicated half a page for common three-star spells, with Mana Pond and Vacuum having one for themselves. Cleanse straight up had two for it.
Cleanse wasn’t a particularly complex spell; the problem was the switch between modes. It was having two high three-star spells combined into a single one. But even then, what I found the most difficult was working with the high frequencies of the spell.
All of the spells I had worked with until now ignored the frequency at which the spell moved mana. According to the author of the spellbook, this was needed both to remove grime effectively and to cure lesser mana illnesses without hurting the patient.
I didn’t have a way to measure the frequency at what mana oscillated, but I will bet that it isn’t an incredible frequency considering the star rate of the spell. I would say around a kilohertz, but does mana frequency even work as a common physics wave? Magic has proven to defy the laws of physics sometimes, but also to follow them. Mana being the fuel for magic, it was improbable that it behaved in a physically accurate way.
“Aargh… My head is killing me…” It wasn’t because of the spell framework complexity, but because of the unknown wisdom that was going back and forth in my mind. A moment it was there, and the next it disappeared. “I must stop doing this! Argggghh…”
I rolled around on top of my pillow bed in anger, annoyance, and pain. My very soul itched in discomfort, an itch I couldn’t just soothe by scratching. I rolled on the carpet in my room trying to alleviate the itch but it did nothing.
To get back to business, I meditated for a bit and a few minutes later I felt fine once more. Flowing mana across my body receded the pain in my soul. After I was finally calmed down, I picked up the spellbook and centered myself on trying to spellcast the Cleanse spell. Not before writing in my diary the few tidbits of information I had obtained now and today at the library. Maybe that was why this assault felt so tiring. This was the first time I ever had two attacks in a single day, or at least, in such a short amount of time.
This wasn’t the first time I had read or tried to spellcast the Cleanse spell, but the constant revision of the framework was needed until I managed a constant spellcast.
“How can something so simple consume so much mana?” Every failed attempt of Cleanse consumed around one-tenth of my mana pool. Not really that expensive considering that it was six times as costly as Magic Chip which was one of the cheapest spells at the same time.
Either way, I had only ten tries until my mana pool depleted, and it took a whole hour to fill my small mana pool. And I only had around an hour before dinner. Mana Pond boosted my mana regeneration enough to give me about two or three more spellcasts. Not a lot, but better than before.
Let’s see if I could learn it before dinner.
Every spellcast took around five minutes, far worse than the instant spellcast spell that the author referred to in the book. Maybe for a sixth-star mage it was instant, not there yet though.
I went over the formula, again and again, I created the best image of the spell I could, and I concentrated myself, giving the floating Mana Pond to my side a quick glance before beginning.
“Second spellcast of the day, here we go.” I took a deep breath, mana flowing across my veins.
“Aaand… fail.” I said five minutes later. Even if I was rather competent with magic arts, I hadn’t expected to manage the spellcast on the second try, even considering the other days of practice I had.
Third, fourth, fifth, seventh… Let’s not talk about the failure of the sixth. Mother had knocked on the door to say she was starting to cook dinner and I also stumbled to the ground, the spell obviously dissipated as I lost concentration.
I didn’t let the time limit dawn on me. The eighth, while still a failure, I felt I was getting close. The four-star spell wasn’t really that complicated, Mana Pond was only half as complex as Cleanse, so it irritated me that it took this much time to spellcast it.
Yes, I had managed it. Very anticlimactic, indeed. That’s how spellcasting works. If you spend a lot of time and effort, you’ll end up conjuring the desired spell. The ninth try was the good one, one quick pulse of blue mana surrounded my room and erased motes of dust and fluff. Where the obliterated mass went was unbeknownst to me.
I still had some minutes to spare, and I wasn’t satisfied with the potency of the spell. I would have spent all my remaining mana picking up some mastery before I left the room to dine.
“Edrie!” I stopped my spellcast as mom cried at me. “Dinner’s ready!”
With a sigh, I closed the spellbook and stood up. I was satisfied with my desk being the cleanest object in the world at this moment. I opened the door to find my mother and father sitting at the table. Huh, when did he arrive? I was so concentrated that I didn’t notice.
“Your mother told me you arrived home late today, son. What were you doing?” Not even a hello? That’s something I wouldn’t say to them.
“I was reading on History and Geography and got distracted while thinking on elemental affinities.”
I told as truthfully as possible while I sat at the table. Oh, salad with egg sauce and baked potatoes, yummy.
“Why on elemental affinities, though?” Father asked as I put a spoonful of potatoes in my mouth. Hot. Ouch.
I blew at the spoon and drank a glass of water before referring to him. “My History teacher said that the elders of the Council of Elementals have an elemental affinity even higher than superb, so I got curious about how rare it is to have a true affinity.”
“Well, pretty rare, that’s for sure.” He added. “There are only four known true affinity users and all of them are elementals. So not only is it absurdly uncommon but limited to their species.”
“Is it though?” I thought otherwise.
“There should be more people with true affinity then, don’t you think, honey?” Mother joined the conversation as she cut open one of the potatoes.
“Hmm…” Father pondered over the prospect. “The true elementals are essentially immortal, if there are only those four is for a reason. There had been a lot of known characters in history, whether they be ellari or elementals, that possessed superb affinity. But only four with true affinity.”
“I know that, but doesn't affinity grow with age and magic proficiency? Shouldn’t there be people able to cross that final wall?” I knew my father wasn’t a scholar, but I liked the theme of the conversation.
“While it is true that affinity grows with time and effort, it isn’t a substantial increase.” Dad explained as I stuffed my mouth with salad. “A low-medium will probably ascend to medium with all likelihood. But to medium-high? That’s pretty rare. Only those who had been mages for a long time may accomplish that.”
“Then you are basically saying that advancing one step in the elemental ladder is easy, but two is difficult?” I asked him.
“Yes. And a third step would be close to impossible.” He shut up as he nailed a bunch of salad with the fork.
“Then I should be able to reach true affinity as I was born being superb.” That was a very intended wordplay.
Father almost choked on the food as I said that. He coughed a pair of times and then talked. “I see your point, but I doubt it is that easy. As your mother said earlier, then there should be more true affinity users.”
“But how many people are born with superb affinity?” I counter-argued.
The question struck true (pun not intended) as father stood still for a moment, pondering as he scratched his chin.
“Not many people are born with superb affinity. Ninety-nine percent, or even more, of all superb affinity users are at that level because of arduous training. You were blessed from your birth, but the true affinity wall is something that is yet to be climbed over. Uncharted to every mage in the world. At most, I suppose you could reach a hypothetical superb-true level.”
“That’s good enough for me.” While I would like to have the highest affinity possible, being the only ellari with a higher affinity than superb was enough for me.
“Good enough he says, Lilin!” Father laughed out loud. “Being better than the High Arcanist is good enough for our child.”
“Yes, I have heard it, Tel’am.” Mom had a smile plastered on her face. “Having high hopes is a good thing.” She nodded to her own words. Contrary to her speech, her face showed the unrealistic probability of such action.
We ate in silence for a couple of minutes until everyone had finished dinner. As dessert we had melon slices. More menial conversation topics popped up, but none as important as the previous one.
“How are you doing with school?” Mother asked.
“Mom, you cannot ask it every day until something happens.” I responded to her.
“But when something happens, then I will have been right to ask you so.” She answered with a giggle.
“How about Marissa?” Father was the one who asked. “Is she doing well?”
“Yes, I believe so.” I taciturnly told as I ate the cantaloupe. But looking at their unsatisfied expressions, I was forced to elaborate. “She’s doing splendidly with magic class. She’s even better than some of the fifth-year students. But she has problems with History. I think that’s just because she’s bored out of her mind, though.”
Mother smirked. “Yes, that does sound like something little Marissa would do.”
“Anything else you would like to tell us?” Father asked in such a way that made me doubt if he knew about my achievements, but it was nothing more than a courtesy question.
“No…” I corrected myself. “Actually yes, but it can wait after we finish eating.” More specifically, we needed to finish so I could do it.
“Alright then, keep your secrets, then. Albeit for a short while.” Father stopped the conversation so he could eat the rest of his melon.
We swiftly ended our dinner. Our stomachs looked as if they were ready to burst at any moment.
“So, what did what you want to show us?” Mother asked me.
“Can we clear the table first?” They responded to me with a nod.
Father and Mother moved all the plates and cutlery to the sink in the kitchen. I just waited while watching them do so.
“Are you going to show us?” Father asked once he had sat again.
Instead of responding, I got up and directed myself to the full sink. As I didn’t want to stay up for the whole five minutes while spellcasting Cleanse, I had done it beforehand. Yes, I didn’t help my parents not only because I was a bad child, I was also doing my work.
Still, it took me a full minute before being ready. They looked at me with weird faces, not able to understand what I was going to do.
Cleanse. A bright light blue aura swept the room. The effect was concentrated in the sink, though. I didn’t want my mana to dissipate because it was wasted in other places.
“Ta-da~” I said as I shook my hands.
“What was that?” Mother asked as she stood up. “Oh!” Then she saw the cleaned utensils at the sink. “Our child has learned how to wash the dishes.” Mom joked, unbeknownst of the situation.
“No, Lilin.” Father corrected her. “Our child has just spellcasted a four-star spell.” As a magic practitioner who was more knowledgeable of certain spells, my father was able to discern what I have just done. “He has become a four-star arcanist.”
“Wait, what?” Mom’s eyes opened like plates; her train of thought crashed.
I responded with a smile.