Second to last day of the first week on Sin’fal’s academy. I was beaten up for a myriad of reasons, some more influential than others. Yesterday’s fight still soured my mood and as I had yet to find anything in the authorless book, it certainly didn’t help.

Sure, I had only known about the anthology for a few days, but there wasn’t any clue to be found in the book. I tried graphology analysis, checking handwriting between all soul magic author’s in the library just if one coincided by any chance. The result, which was expected, proved no similarities between all the soul spellbooks in the library.

I thought of analyzing the composition of the cover, transparencies on the pages, and invisible ink on the text, but I had no equipment to do so. This was real life and not a mystery novel, but considering the strange background of the book, it did seem plausible. Crazy but plausible.

For the time being, I centered myself on the healing properties of soul magic. Every type of magic had offensive, defensive, healing, and mobility properties. Some were better than the rest, obviously.

Fire magic was known for its offensive properties, earth for its defensive applications, nature and light magic for healing, and air and space magic for the enhanced mobility. Neither Arcane nor Soul possessed great mobility options, but they did exist. Ungravity and Astral Projection were an example of it, though not very good ones.

I had already proven the offensive capabilities of Soul and disregarded the defensive ones as they strictly protected the soul. It made sense, but if you were good enough with soul magic to cast a barrier, then you probably were also good enough to shrug off any attack by sheer willpower and the might of your soul.

On the other hand, healing and mobility proved more interesting subjects. The idea of moving one’s soul instead of the body was thrilling, to say the least. Astral Projection was a mere recreation of what lay ahead. A lich’s phylactery would probably be the apex of soul mobility, this world had surprised me plenty of times with original spells.

Huh, how ironic. A stationary object being referred to as the best mobility option. Yet it was true. A phylactery could be thousands of kilometers away from the caster and the soul could be recalled instantly at a moment’s notice.

Healing was the same as the defensive factor, it only affected the soul. Well, technically. The bridge that connected the body and the soul worked one way. You may heal the body, but the soul would still be fractured. You may heal the soul, and the body would mend.

Why did this happen? I didn’t know. I was but an autodidactic student, I never had soul-related classes beyond Alatea’s lectures. Maybe I would be able to figure it out in the future.

Returning to the soul-body healing, once the soul was in perfect conditions, it could be “overhealed” to repair tissue on the body. It wasn’t true healing like nature magic, where at higher levels could materialize a whole arm, but augmented regeneration.

This didn’t mean it was bad, not by a long shot. The soul remembered the optimal state of the body, so when you overloaded its regeneration, it will heal the correct parts. I have heard creepy bedtime stories about healing spells malfunctioning and making the patient grow new limbs, damaging the brain, or straight-up killing them.

Ellari were brutal with research and ruthless with their descriptions.

Basically, soul magic allowed to return the body to a prior status. That did sound like time magic, to be honest. There was an if, though. This miraculous regeneration only worked if the soul was in perfect condition.

If by any chance the soul was damaged, corrupted, or lacked some parts, the regeneration would be incomplete and no different than giving someone cancer. Huh, it was literally the definition of cancer. Magically enforced cancer seemed like a banned war weapon.

Were there even conventions to ban the use of certain magic during times of war? We weren’t told this in history class, but I guessed that should be the case.

I was getting too carried away.

So, healing magic, yes. That was basically it, there was technically no need for spells to heal the body, just infuse the soul with mana.

Most of the soul healing spells were for healing the soul. They were meant to soothe, repair, and heal the soul in different situations. Have you chipped away a part of your soul? Regenerate it. Did someone send a battering ram to your soulspace? Soothe it. Have you had your soul bisected? Rep- Nah, you were probably already dead if that happened.

As I had explained with the one-way connection between the soul and the body, if you were to be hurt excessively on your soul, it would affect your physical body. It may not saw your body in half, but your pain receptors would go overdrive and probably die from a stress attack or something.

Soul magic is scary.

That was the reason why after punching my Astral Projection against somebody’s soul they felt like I have punched them even if there was no physical interaction.

This was, in a nutshell, all the theory I had extracted from a book called “Spiritual Ailments and Recovery”. Why couldn’t the author call it just “Soul Healing” was beyond me.

I decided to learn a seven-star spell from the anthology, with the aid of this healing tome, as I only possessed makeshift healing that could only treat so many injuries. And having a decent, real healing ability would be appreciated.

The anthology recompiled the spells from every book at the library and sometimes upgraded them, but it lacked the explanation from the author that may give some insight into the spell. So, that was why I was multi-tasking books.

I would like to say it was easy to find such spells, especially after the list I had made to compare spells between spellbooks, but I was constantly distracted by cool and horrifying spell names. Possession, Soul Shatter, Charm, Mystic’s Dominion, Necrotic Bolt, just to name a few.

Subjugating lesser souls was a thing in offensive soul magic, and necromancy also existed as seen with Necrotic Bolt. The deal with necromancy is that it was a chimera between multiple elements, so you couldn’t just impede someone learning such dark arts by banning soul magic, as they could go over another element to learn it.

That was why when Alatea explained to me about types of soul magic so many years ago, she hadn’t talked about necromancy (besides the fact I was a little child at that moment). More schools of magic shared this ‘multi-elemental’ foundation. You could either approach a part of the discipline with one element or use multiple elements to tackle the whole field of magic.

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For example, necromancy could be approached with Soul, Shadow, or Body elements. How did that mismatch of elements work? That was unbeknownst to me.

It worried me about the implication of the offensive spells I had found. This basically was mind control, how was this knowledge allowed in the academy library? Then I remembered. Soul Shatter, Charm, and Necrotic bolt were present on other grimoires, especially Soul Shatter which was repeated multiple times as public dominion.

These spells, whilst incredibly damaging, were categorized as offensive spells. It somewhat made sense as a Fireball could create a forest fire, but they didn’t stop pyromancers' from learning it. With the exception of Charm, that was a minor ‘illusion’ spell. Yeah, I didn’t know what they meant by that. It was categorized as a compulsion rather than actual mind control, so maybe that was because it appeared in the public domain.

But Possession and Mystic’s Dominion were exclusive from the anonym anthology, original spells. And they were the most worrisome of all. Possession usurped the body of the objective by moving away its soul. And Mystic’s Dominion well… it was a ten-star spell, let’s leave it there. I had gotten a headache by just looking at it.

This arose once again the mystery around the book, no sane mind would allow these spells in a library. Someone had put the book here, and it had passed unnoticed until now.

With another clue to this impossible mystery chase, I renewed myself and tried to learn some healing spells. Spoiler alert, I was too distracted.

*******

“As you may know by now, mana isn’t constant and homogenous, containing impurities and elemental paraphernalia. This is what is colloquially known as mana purity.” Teacher Innit explained to the class.

He had drawn a series of glyphs on the blackboard, all were schematics for mana batteries, though the differences between them were painstakingly obvious.

“Higher mana purity enhances the power output of a spell per quantity of mana consumed. Therefore, a great subject to work over an Applied Mathematics class.” He rose his chalk and suddenly it floated in the air. Then it wrote by itself on the board. “Checking for your own mana purity is rather simple, a basic mana capacitator can store a limited power of mana. Beware my words, power, not amount.”

This was rather surprising, I thought the glyphs were batteries, not mana capacitors. While the first did store quantity of mana, the latter did it with power. It seemed I had made a lapse in my observation.

“This means that the same capacitator is able to store different amounts of mana depending on the purity of the mana given.” Mister Innit clarified. “There are basically two methods of achieving a higher purity index. The most well-known is elemental affinity, though it isn’t the easiest.”

Henry drew an ellari silhouette and a bottle on the board with his flying chalk.

“Elemental affinity is a natural form of mana purification, independently done by our bodies.” He covered half of the silhouette with chalk. “But artificial forms of mana purification have been developed, that’s how the pure mana used in alchemy classes is made.”

Now, he filled the whole bottle drawing with chalk.

“This method is much more efficient than natural purification, but also far slower. Higher elemental affinities do not speed up the process, only make it more efficient. And there have been tests which demonstrated that higher affinities slow mana regeneration because of the difficulty that purification carries.”

Oh, Henry, if only you knew. After more than a decade of daily meditation, several times a day, I had just managed to have a competent mana pool because of my atrocious mana regeneration. And not even my arcane magic and Mana Reservoir helped with that because after one hour those spells starved out of mana in the nearby zone.

“These mana capacitors allow to display one’s mana purity with different levels of tolerance.” He explained pointing at the glyphs. “The first one starts at a twenty percent tolerance, not very great, but can give you an approximated image of your own purity. Then skipping to the latter with a five percent difference, which is enough for the activities you are doing now.”

“Whilst elemental affinity can already give you an approximation of your mana purity, it isn’t the only relevant factor to determine it.” Innit walked around the class as he lectured. “The amount of notable elemental affinities affects it as well. A high pyromancer would most likely have higher mana purity than a high dual element wielder as there would be more leakages and interferences.”

That was interesting, I always blamed my high purity for having such an atrocious mana pool and regeneration, but I never bothered to check how high it really was. And according to what he explained, as I had two superb affinities, they weren’t as high as they should be.

…This awfully reminded me of the struggle between the Arcane and Soul that was continuously occurring in my spirit.

“There are some theories that true affinity means totally pure mana as most superb users had shown results of purity of eight tenths and higher.”

Hmm, if I were to achieve the true affinity that I had talked about with my father, then my regeneration would be truly abysmal. Even though I was critiquing high affinities badly, my mouth watered at the power output of such mana purity.

“Until now you hadn’t taken advantage of the purity of your mana, as lower star spells don’t consider it necessary. But seven-star and upwards your mana purity will help you not only in more efficient consumption but also to increase the success rate of your conjurations. I will explain it down the week on Spellcraft.”

But I hadn’t used my purity on my seven-star spells? Or at least, not that I knew of. Well, it might not be exactly true. Mister Innit said it also affects the success of sorcery and wizardry, and I learned to conjure both with Soul casting and Arcane spellcasting seventh-tier magic before others. So, I may not use the mana-saving properties of the purity, but I certainly did with my fast understanding of the seven-star.

“From now on until the end of the class, you’ll pick to recreate one of the glyphs you are more comfortable with and check your mana purity by yourselves.” The teacher explained as he erased every drawing on the blackboard except the mana capacitator schematics.

Oh damn. What a conundrum. Did I choose a lower tolerance margin glyph and risk my partners knowing of my veritable elemental affinity, or I went safe and choose a higher margin and not be myself sure of my true purity?

Truth was, I didn’t need to pick out only one option. I quickly drew the highest tolerance glyph, the one with twenty percent tolerance, on my notebook and proceed to execute on another page a glyph with ten percent tolerance.

The thing about this type of glyph was that you could only conjure them through a physical medium. Akin to magic circles and runes. So, I had to write both glyphs in my notebook either way.

One had to be careful when scribing glyphs as the smallest error would make the writing useless. And also, it needed to be infused with mana because if not there would a drawing on the paper, not a glyph.

Once I inspected the glyph, I noticed the display of purity was interesting. It obviously didn’t give me a percentage per se, but it did have twenty ink blobs that were programmed to be illuminated according to the power inserted following the power-amount ratio of mana.

After uncountable minutes of silence and hard work, I had finished the glyph. Marissa and Monica decided to make the lowest tolerance glyph, and as it was incredibly more complicated, they weren’t even halfway. On my right, Adrian also elected the easier ten percent glyph and was about to end.

With a deep breath, I started pouring mana into the glyph. Slowly, the ink blobs started illuminating, shifting from mate black to shining blue. The amount of mana needed was small as it only was a makeshift test, not a real capacitator.

In any case, I kept the rate of mana injection low. I was feeling pretty nervous. Half of the blobs had already been illuminated, meaning my mana was half-pure.

Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity, the lights stopped illuminating and began flashing. Sixteen lights. Sixteen lights out of twenty had illuminated. According to the tolerance margin of the glyph, I should have around seventy and ninety percent mana purity.

Considering what teacher Innit had said about superb purity, the numbers lined up, meaning I was clearly a superb affinity user for anyone who looked at the glyph. But thankfully no one seemed to notice as they didn’t want to lose concentration and mess up their glyphs after so much time.

There was still some time before the class ended, and whilst I had not much time remaining, I tried doing the five percent glyph even if it was only to practice my drawing skills a bit.