“How’s it that you have come so early, sweety?” Mom said as she put aside the silk she had been knitting.
“I was a bit tired after reading so I came back.” Mother looked at me with disdain, not believing what I told her. Her face screamed ‘you are tired of reading?’ With a sigh, I elaborated further. “I also found out that I cannot spellcast time magic.”
“Is that so?” She responded plainly, picking again the needle. “Time magic is really really complicated. It’s normal that you aren’t able to spellcast it, Edrie.”
Why wasn’t she looking at me? Was it something so obvious that she didn’t even categorize it as a problem?
“I would be impressed if you even managed to do a basic time spell.” She added. “You know that mom isn’t a great mage, I can only cast five-star spells, and it takes me a lot of time. I don’t have any good affinities, but magic doesn’t interest me either.” Mom looked at the piece of cloth with nostalgia. “You still have your other two affinities, that’s more than I ever got.”
I didn’t know if to feel bad for Mother, or great about how lucky I was. What I did know is that I wanted to erase that sad face of hers.
I approached my mother slowly and embraced her. “Thanks, mom.”
“Oh…” She grunted in surprise then proceeded to pat my head.
“I will be in my room if you need anything.” I told her.
“Oh, sure.” While still with a certain melancholy, her expression had brightened up.
So, yeah. Soul magic. Dangerous stuff.
As I read the soul guidebook yesterday, I had all the information required fresh in my mind. It was true that I could’ve taken notes, the library even encouraged it with paper dispensers and ink around the place, but my memory was enough, or so I considered.
Spiritual meditation was similar to the meditation I was used to, but this one followed the original intent of meditation, to connect with one’s soul. Meditation, the mana one, was more akin to a Zen state induced by the continuous manaflows that the mage did. Spiritual meditation, on the other hand, was rather passive.
According to the author, “one must stay in silence and find inner peace, then as tranquility has settled, one may feel the connection between soul and mind form”. Yes, I know this sounded like something out of a cult, but he provided plenty of hard evidence to corroborate such a stupid claim. Too much evidence, in fact. One of the reasons why I needed a full day to digest that book.
I sat on one of my body-size pillows (as everything in Ferilyn was somehow related to pillows) and crossed my legs. Then I followed the next step on the guide, channeling soul mana.
This one was an interesting prospect that I hadn’t heard about yet. I knew that the mana that flowed one the leylines was of pure arcane element and that our bodies refined the mana of the leylines and the atmosphere into usable mana. A process that was commonly known as mana regeneration. What I did not know, was that mages could specifically cycle a concrete type of elemental mana through their bodies. It was a rather obvious thing now that I thought about it.
Specific mana channeling was described as an intuitive process, something you were capable to do with ease. That obviously didn’t help, even if I knew manaflowing since I was a baby. But I had a vague idea of how to do it.
Firstly, I wouldn’t use soul mana. I haven’t had any practice with my Soul affinity, so I didn’t know what it felt like. Using arcane mana seemed like a sensible option. After years of practice, I had become rather attuned to the element, slowly being able to sense it better and better. Even being able to distinguish what spells were conjured if they were of arcane origin. This augmented perception was what I needed to try out the mana channeling.
I repeated the typical manaflows involved in common meditation. Constant intervals of breathing that followed an equal tempo with the in and out of mana of the body. This time, however, instead of letting all mana flow, I had to be selective. Only let the rather chaotic and power-surging arcane mana stay.
As I was channeling more and more mana, I recalled the innumerable illnesses that were accompanied by absorbing mana directly from a leyline, the principal source of arcane mana.
While it now appeared to be a dangerous practice, I thought I was safe enough. Atmospheric mana contained all types of mana, so I wouldn’t be as poisoned as drinking it from a leyline.
"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison." I said out of nowhere, seemingly to quote someone.
A spike of pain assaulted my mind, but I kept my cool to not lose concentration on my improvised meditation.
What was I saying? Ah, yes, mana poisoning. The quantity of arcane mana my body was intaking was small enough that I wouldn’t consider it a danger. Though I was none to talk about it as I was a child with my knowledge of magical arts and literally. And last but not least, I had the Cleanse spell that should help with minor afflictions.
After I tied up all my preoccupations, I managed to focus enough to start seeing my body glow with a purple tinge.
“That can’t be good.” I quickly unleashed all my arcane mana accumulated on my body. “Did I almost fill my mana pool with arcane mana?”
I was ignorant of the effects of such activities, but I preferred not to learn them. For an instant, my veins (or arteries I never remember which was which, but probably all my blood vessels) emitted purple light, as to show the overcharge in mana. I spellcasted Cleanse just in case, I didn’t want to have long-lasting effects caused by this practice.
As it commonly happened when I was meditating, I was unaware of the passing of time, and my mind and body were deeply relaxed. Maybe an hour, maybe two. It took time, but as had happened before with the arcane meditation, my blood vessels glow once again.
Instead of purple light, I saw an eerie, nuclear white one. As I did before, I unleashed the accumulated mana fearing the consequences. At least, I knew that I had managed to do a spiritual meditation.
“Ugh…” I sighed in exhaustion, losing my concentration and ending the spiritual meditation.
Flowing unique elemental mana around my body tired me more than I would have ever thought. While I wasn't sweating, or even in pain, my arms were numb.
That was enough of a signal to stop what I was doing a do some research before I repeated the spiritual meditation. Asking about it to father had crossed my mind, but I decided otherwise. I wouldn't want to alarm them, and I believed I wasn't in immediate danger. And besides, I doubted he could help me with something as convoluted and alien as soul magic.
Once again, I found myself in the Open Archives of Ferilyn searching for answers. I gave the introductory book to soul magic a quick, superficial revision to see if I had lost any comment on iridescent blood vessels or along those lines. As I recalled correctly, I found nothing about it.
A conundrum popped up. I could ask a librarian about this (which they would probably have a clue about) but paranoia took the best of me. The book hadn't commented on the glowing body parts during meditation because it was directed to the common ellari.
And I wasn't a common ellari.
What's the cause then? My best theories were either my superb affinity or the usage of arcane mana. That was why I didn't want to talk to the librarians because I feared I would reveal my position as a superb affinity user.
Before returning to my soul studies, I decided to investigate superb affinity. It may look suspicious, but a child interested in a rare status as it was such an affinity is likely to be cataloged under curiosity.
Stolen novel; please report.
I approached the librarian at the library's story on elemental affinity. “Hello, do you know where I can find a book about superb affinity?“ I said in the most childish demeanor possible.
“Of course!” Responded the lady inconspicuously. “You can find books about affinity strata two rows down at the right. Aren't you a curious one?”
I was indecisive about if it was a question or a statement, so I answered with a thank you and quickly left the desk.
The female librarian spoke the truth as I easily found a plethora of books related to the classification of elements, specifically their affinities. I opted to read a book called “On the Topic of Affinity Levels” by the virtue of its name.
The author took a fresh approach compared to the others I had read so far. It felt more like a scientific paper, stating evidence when it was needed and explaining the rest through their own investigation. Whoever wrote this had done its good share of investigation. The writer wasn’t anonymous but labeled with the pseudonym ‘Flow Weaver’.
While I could’ve jumped straight up to the superb affinity part (which was indicated by the detailed index) I found myself entrapped in the writing of Flow Weaver.
“Ellari are a curious species when compared to others on the affinity index, partially thanks to their innately magical nature.” Flow Weaver explained. “The index starts with null affinity and ends with the true one, both of which the ellari don’t naturally possess. There hasn’t been hard evidence on the existence of null-low or superb-true ellari affinity users, making both affinities only theoretical. Such extremes marks ellari as magical species above the average, but never an apex on the index.”
The last statement depressed me a bit. Achieving true affinity, or superb-true at least, was one of my life goals. I rather not have it cut short. Still, the book didn’t deny the possibility, meaning there was room for hope.
I also knew that Flow Weaver was an ellari, said so by a third person on an appendix. Yet it referred to the ellari as a ‘them’ instead of ‘ours’, which I considered a great use of language when talking on a scientific paper. Objectivity above all.
“True affinity users are an enigmatic kind as there have only four discovered, or rather, made public. And all of them maintained a secretive attitude towards their affinity’s nature.” They insinuated that there were more than four true affinity users, implicitly saying that there was more hiding.
“On the other hand, superb affinity users are more common, especially on magic species as elementals or ellari, albeit they are highly rare on their respective populations.” This told me nothing new.
I didn’t expect any of the information I was looking at at the moment. I was on the summary of the article, and it would take time to find what I was looking for as I was also interested in the other affinities, concretely the null one.
“Null affinity only presents on species of no magical origins or lesser ones.” I already liked what I was reading. “Examples of such species are humans, goblins, and the vast majority of animal kin.”
My head tumbled a bit on the mention of humans, a dissonance between my previous incarnation and the actual collided. No headache or nosebleed to be seen. I recomposed after a few deep breaths. Animal kin interested me, but not as much as the degrees of affinities.
“Their non-magical nature presents them as lacking on the subject of affinities, nonetheless, that doesn’t explicitly mean they are incapable of incredible feats of magic, as seen by legendary human archmagi…”
My mind deepened on the lecture, skipping some unnecessary parts, as I felt most of the null affinity was already explained. After a pair of hours, I found myself in the section where the author finally talked about superb affinity.
“As it has been stated before, superb is the penultimate step on the affinity index. While the effects of it are recorded, it cannot be said that they are known with exactitude.” I knew what Flow Weaver was going to say as it had followed the same pattern on all of the previous segments.
“…documented effects of such status are the superconductivity of mana, especially in those born with high-superb affinity or beyond, who have no way to control it.” It may have taken some hours, but I finally found what I was looking for.
Flow Weaver, following the scientific structure of the work, quoted some books on the related subject where they had extracted the information from. I wrote down some of the names, as I would read them at some point, but the book that talked about the superconductivity of mana was the one that interested me the most.
Mana conductivity was so complex that it had a field of study of its own. I entered expecting a quick read about why my blood vessels glow and ended up reading a plethora of books across a whole week. Hmm.
I had underestimated the depth of mana conductivity and its applications, without a doubt. I went from the natural resistance of objects to the calculus of leylines in a close environment. Yeah, a tad bit complicated for an eleven-year-old.
The week was mostly composed of reading the three main books on the subject again and again. Even after this much time, I didn’t have a solid hold on the matter. It wouldn’t sound strange to me if they told me this was a college subject.
Too long, didn’t read; objects can tolerate a certain flux of mana, if it goes beyond the threshold, mana starts leaking and degrading the medium where it's traveling.
This phenomenon happened to me as my body was able to conduct a lot of mana thanks to my superb affinity, but it couldn’t tolerate so much as I was still a child and my mana pool was pathetic, and that was being generous. According to my extensive research, this only occurs with the elemental mana one has an affinity with.
So, for example, if I had tried to flow air mana instead of arcane one, I wouldn’t have had such a problem. It baffled me how I didn’t think about it in the first place. The flowing air part, not the whole logistics on the mana permittivity of objects.
“Ha…” I sighed as I checked my notes which were scattered around the desk. “Why being born in the purple is so difficult?” Born in the purple, do you get it? Good one, Edrie. I snickered to myself.
These were first-world problems at their ultimate expression. I had found a solution for the superconductivity, it was just tedious. More workload upon the one I already had. Self-imposed workload, but workload, nonetheless.
You’d be surprised at how easy it was to solve the problem. If mana superconductivity was caused by the massive difference between the capacity of the medium and the resistance the mana has to face to travel across the medium, you only needed to reduce the flux of mana.
Simple as that. Reduce the intensity of mana until you hit an acceptable level. It just happened that it was a very long and boring trial and error. The boundary between destroying your own body with concentrated mana and the absence of mana in one’s channels was difficult to work with. I was already working with incredibly small amounts of mana intensity.
“Hmm…” I groaned in silent pain as I controlled my mana output. “Oh, I can’t feel my arms. That ain’t good.” My tone was rather unphased as I was tired of it. “Hey, at least I don’t feel pain. But I think that’s bad, though…”
While fluorescence might be a cool party trick, I rather not be a living lava lamp. And I hadn’t pushed far anyway, maybe a bit, but not too far. My tiredness was of mental origin, not physical.
I lay on the cushion hill; I could even sense the blood flowing across my body. “Aghh, life’s pain. Why am I such a moron?”
****
So, yeah. Channeling mana was an easy prospect that was needlessly complicated by my special magical situation. Two days had elapsed after my first successful, not harmful, channeling.
I had focused on arcane mana as it was the one I was most used to. I preferred poisoning myself and applying a half-assed solution with Cleanse than directly messing with my soul.
Today I decided that I should begin with spiritual meditation after more than a week of preparation. But first, I wanted to show if the manaflows had made any improvement on my mana pool. Whilst manaflowing wasn’t as effective in mana pool increase, there was still an effect. It wasn’t the go-to activity to form mana pools for infants for nothing.
“If I have a capacity around sixty Magic Chips, and Arcane Chip has its cost increased fivefold compared to Magic Chip, so theoretically, I should be able to cast spellcast twelve Arcane Chips. Let’s see it.”
I first went to the balcony; I wasn’t dumb enough to spellcast offensive spells in my own room. The three-star spell had a power compared to a ball impact when mitigated by the Force Shield. So, you wouldn’t want to get hit by it in its normal form.
“What are you going to do?” Mom asked me when I left my room.
“Going to spellcast some Arcane Chips at the balcony.” I explained.
“Arcane Chips?” Her eyes wandered around until she remembered what spell I was talking about. “Oh no, you don’t. You are not going to cast such a spell at my house. If you want to do it, you better go outside.” She pointed at the door.
What annoyed me wasn’t going outside, but the fact she said cast when she clearly knew that I focus myself on spellcasting.
“Okay.” I accepted without a complaint. I had no haste whatsoever, and I felt I needed a walk after such a pair of tedious days.
I strolled around Thal’mer park for a few minutes until I found a secluded place. I had spent so much time lately around a forest of books that I had forgotten what their predecessors felt like.
The place was a clearing exclusively composed of the pink canopy, and ashen trunk trees. It seemed like a good hiding spot, far from the main pathway, no noise, and a clear soil devoid of grass except for some overgrown roots that came up from the ground.
“Here we go.” I started spellcasting Arcane Chip.
The spell had a remarkable potency, while not enough to damage a tree’s durable bark, I believed it was needless to use them as target practice. I conformed myself by pointing at the ground as I only wanted to test my mana pool capacity.
First shot, second, third… I spellcasted them in quick succession. I had a better grasp on four-star spells so a low third like this one was a lot easier than before. I sensed my mana dwindle, but I knew I had a lot more in the storage.
Again, and again I spellcasted the projectiles. I was a bit mad to have gone to the park just to spend five minutes depleting my mana pool, but I knew, deep down, I needed the fresh air.
“This was the twelfth one, and there’s still more juicy for one, so that’s already an increase.” That meant exclusively flowing arcane mana had some effects on my mana pool. “Let’s try Magic Chip to get a more precise result.”
In the end, I was able to spellcast four Magic Chips, one short for the arcane one. I don’t know what it would’ve happened if I tried to spellcast it without enough mana. It would probably straight up dissipate or activate at a lower power.
“Haa…” I sighed once more as I returned home. I should study further the effects of concrete elemental meditation on my body. This could substitute my old meditation if it proved better.