Wacky geography aside, my magical theory stat is still somewhere around one or two. The only spell I’m going to be crafting any time soon is the magical equivalent of the video game cooking recipe that makes your character expel their intestinal tract and question the meaning of life.

Instead, as planned, I flip to the back of the book and start paging through the spells.

Belighten. Creates light, simple enough. It’d probably be a core building block of any system that displays information for the caster, but I’m here for a turn-key solution. I flip past three pages of hand-signs to get to the next spell. That’s interesting; the example spell from earlier was almost ten pages of signs, though it had a higher density of poses for checking correctness.

Tinder. Makes a small fire, far enough out ahead of the caster to get into a stove or under a bonfire. I flip through the four pages of hand-signs, curiously flip back to Belighten’s hand-signs, and eventually decide that a subset of the sequence is shared. This is a very good sign for future spell-crafting efforts! I continue onward, bolstered by the discovery.

Lightwrite. Allows the caster to scribe a trail of light onto a nearby surface. Another excellent bit of functionality, I’d probably look here to find out how to manage controlled inputs and outputs and basic world-sensing, but still not what I need. I flip past six pages of hand-signs this time, noticing substantial sections shared with both Tinder and Belighten. I turn to the next spell.

Firestream. Like Lightwrite, but with fire instead of light, the book’s first real combat spell. Yet another good building block and extension of previous spells, enough so that I’m starting to have a theory about how this spellbook is organized. I flip through the hand-signs and notice that Firestream shares sequences with both Tinder and Lightwrite. I decide that this spellbook is an introduction to spell engineering, presenting the reader with a sequence of spells that illustrate key concepts and demonstrate how to combine and extend them.

The contrast between the book’s practical expertise and its theory is starting to really bother me. The spells being engineered to admit checksum-like debugging handposes is mind-blowing. Perhaps these spells were provided by the magic system’s creator and transcribed verbatim, while the theory is all independent research by mana users? Or the spells were developed by a deity of magic or archmage that refused to share her theory? And I still have no idea what the eye-hurting diagram in the example spell was for or why I had to stare at it while casting the example.

My current - slightly terrifying - hypothesis is that the diagram induced a pattern in my visual cortex that let some insane spell hook itself up to my brain to provide that tactile mana-sense I seem to have and detect when I’m trying to cast so my fingers start making ripples.

Suffice to say that that’s the kind of magic system that the protagonist ends up destroying at the end of the second book of your trilogy because the big bad is using it to read everyone’s minds and subtly influence the world’s political leaders to perpetuate their reign of terror.

I take a deep breath and focus. Breathe in. Breathe out. Left foot. Right foot. Breathe in. Breathe out. The stones are still smooth under my feet, tilted just a hair so water runs off the road and into the gutters. We’ve fallen into single file to let other people pass us as they trudge toward the city with their loads. Liv has advanced to walk about fifty feet in front of everyone else, probably scouting even though we’re in a well-traveled safe area. Her head turns side to side and I think she might be singing to herself. Ji stalks along about halfway between Liv and us, probably so nobody’s in his way if he has to move quickly. The rest of us are stacked up into a small column led by Agnes and Bob, presumably forming a tank-healer duo. I’m third, the squishy wizard in the middle, and Heather is in the tail position where she can cover anyone with her bow. All in all, the party has assumed a quintessential D&D party lineup.

Even if it is that kind of magic system, the most likely perpetrator is on another plane.

Also, now that I’m an Isekai protagonist, I can wreck them and take all their stuff!

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

…On second thought, in this deeply hypothetical scenario, if part of their stuff is an artificial interface to magic that uses mind-reading and mind-writing to repress knowledge of the true underlying mechanics so the interface’s controller can rule the world, perhaps I shouldn’t take all of their stuff.

Hypothetically.

I flip past Firestream’s six pages of hand-signs.

Find Farness. Measures the distance to an indicated point. Probably intended to teach the user about storing data and displaying complex information. Twelve pages of hand-signs. A single sequence shared with Lightwrite and Firestream, which I’m tempted to say is the functionality for indicating a point at a distance? Then the remaining six pages of hand-signs must be for going out measuring the distance, returning it to the spell’s origin, formatting it for the user to read, and displaying it. How in the world does it format the result? What units does it use? The spell’s painfully short description doesn’t say. I’m going to have to spend a lot of time figuring this one out later.

I resolutely ignore the clear bent toward germanic roots displayed by the names of the book’s spells. The problem of Isekai Linguistics is for later.

Farshove and Farpunch. These apply force to a distant target, apparently hard enough that they’re useful combat spells. I bet they’re here to demonstrate how to affect existing matter rather than just setting it on fire, and there are two variations to show how to tune the effect. Their eight pages of handsigns are mostly identical.

I turn to the next spell.

“Ahah! Find Spellcraft,” I crow, celebrating out loud.

Agnes looks at me over her shoulder. Bob turns to walk backwards. I feel Heather’s eyes boring into the back of my head.

“I was studying the theory,” I say defensively, hunching over my book as much as I can while walking.

Agnes laughs. “No right have I to criticize the Wizard in her own domain,” she assures me.

I sheepishly return to my studying.

The spell’s description, what little of it there is, says that this will only find points where magic has reached a concentration where it actively interacts with the world. I have no idea what that means for detecting magic from other Gifts, but that’s why we bought those trinkets for testing with.

I carefully flip through ten pages of hand-poses, occasionally going back to reference earlier spells when I think I see a similarity. The spell is most similar to Find Farness, which I’m not surprised by. On a hunch, I even go back to the table of contents to find the example spell, but I don’t think I find any common sequences or gestures.

I realize at this point that I should probably also be checking for shared sequences that are rotated or reflected, but that’s way too much effort for me to be putting in right now. Especially since I’m walking and holding the book with one hand while I alternately curl my other hand into the appropriate poses to help me think and turn pages. All I need to complete the wizard image is a robe and a pointy hat.

Note to self: obtain robe and pointy hat posthaste.

Going through the gestures is going to be a pain with only one hand free at any given time. I’ll practice each hand’s poses on their own until I feel like I have them down in isolation, then ask, uh, probably Bob to hold the book for me while I try with both at once. Mercifully the spellbook hasn’t suddenly stopped including check gestures, otherwise getting this spell right would be even more of a nightmare than it’s already going to be. At least the light’s good; the hedgerows are dense enough that when they do block the light they cast consistent shadows. Nothing worse than mottled shadows in bright sunlight making it hard to read out the words on the page or figure out technical diagrams.

I sink my fingers into the mana, trail them through it to cast ripples out into the domain of magic, and start to practice.

As expected, I don’t feel anything magical happening under my fingertips while practicing one-handed. After a half-dozen tries I think feel my fingertips brush over a strange texture, but the sensation vanishes quickly. Was I just imagining it? I try again and don’t get anything. I suspect that even if I were to get the gestures perfect I’d only get half or a third of the spell to work and it’d fall apart somehow, but I’m not sure how it’d fall apart exactly.

…Is practicing one-handed even a good idea? How likely is it that a half-completed spell disintegrates into random effects? The book tried to scare readers with descriptions of explosions and other horrible outcomes of miscast spells, but it didn’t say anything at all about the relative frequencies of different failure modes.

I’m going to assume, for now, that these “intro to magic” spells are designed to be safer than usual. Or that they’re so tightly minimized that no simpler formation has a coherent effect. I’m kind of assuming here that the “random” failures have a principled explanation, buggy spells following the same dynamics as correctly-functioning spells, rather than something like reality rolling a thousand-sided die and looking up the result on a table of random spell failures. That feels like a safe assumption to me, though, since I haven’t yet seen any evidence of this Gift being anything other than predictable and committed to its principles.

In other words: Damn the arcane spell failure chance, full speed ahead!