[ Please enter a description for the new profession 'Not a Green Mage'. ]
Pascal shook his head. "We can do that later. First, I'd like to gather some basic spells for this new profession. Take me to a bookshelf on magic."
[ Confirmed... ]
The white golem-type spirit floated off towards a bookshelf. He followed it with a new energy in his step. Now that he had finally decided, he felt a certain excitement in the air.
[ Destination Reached. Bookshelf G82 contains many magical tomes. ]
"This is all Nature magic... This is the opposite of what I need."
[ ... ]
Pascal looked back at the white ball of light. He could have sworn he heard a sigh from it, but it must have been his imagination. He gave one last look back over the bookshelf and shook his head.
"I'd like some books on time acceleration magic. Particularly one with low maintenance and low mana requirements."
[ Confirmed... Please follow. ]
Pascal followed the ball of light up several staircases. They climbed the floors of the library before arriving at a slightly more populated floor. A half-dozen people sat scattered around the different tables with varying amounts of books piled up around them.
He felt the other occupants of the room eyeing him, but he followed Dia up to a bookshelf. "This is...?"
[ Destination Reached. Bookshelf ST101 contains many Space Time spells with low mana requirements. ]
Dia motioned at a particular book, and Pascal picked it off the shelf. The title read 'Beginner Space Time Magic'. He thumbed through the thick tome and found the time acceleration magic he was looking for. He analyzed the runes for several minutes before nodding to himself.
"This looks like what I need."
"Hey, are you interested in Space Time magic?"
Pascal looked up to see one of the other residents of the library standing in front of him. However, they probably wouldn't like his answer. "I have no interest in Space Time magic."
"Hm? But that book... Oh well, nevermind then. If you have questions, feel free to ask. There's lots of us studying Space Time magic, so you'll have plenty of support."
Pascal gave a polite answer and nodded, but quickly cut the conversation short. "Dia, I need a spell on light generation."
[ Confirmed. Please follow. ]
"Apologies, but I'll be taking my leave." He bowed out and followed the ball of light back down several staircases.
[ Destination Reached. Bookshelf L209. ]
Dia showed him a book titled 'Advanced Light Magic'. It contained multiple spells for different blends of light and methods for manipulating it.
"This is exactly what I needed. Thanks."
[ Gratitude Confirmed. ]
He asked for one other book, on Water magic this time. He followed Dia down a few levels before retrieving a book from the bookshelf.
"These should be everything. Thanks again, Dia."
[ Gratitude Confirmed. ] The white ball of light twirled and disappeared.
He took the books back up to the usual floor of the library and returned via the green walkway. The farmers had returned to the fields, staying busy, as usual. He passed them by as the farmers grew and harvested new crops.
At the end of the farm section, there was the branched hallway. He took a left this time, making his way to the lab. The lab contained all the equipment to experiment with Nature magic, such as clay flower pots, fertile soil, and artificial lights. However, he had no intention of actually dabbling in Nature magic.
Pascal pulled up a stool at an empty lab table and sat down. First, he removed the three books and began reading. It was said that plants needed three things: sunlight, water, and time. The three books he had on Space Time magic, Light magic, and Water magic, would hopefully allow him to assist a plant's growth without relying on Nature magic.
The first hurdle was the runes making up each spell. None of the spells were specialized to do exactly what he wanted, so he had to modify them to accomplish his goal. To do that, he would first need to fully understand each rune making up their composition.
Each rune interacted with every other rune differently. To modify magic in a specific domain, one must memorize the interactions for the runes making up that domain. However, the runes for Space Time spells were completely unfamiliar to him. He had some knowledge of the runes used in Light and Water magic, but he had never studied Space Time magic. Most everyone in the city had some knowledge of magic, but more specialized knowledge was only ever learned as needed.
"Dia."
He called out and the white golem-type spirit appeared. They rarely showed up outside the Tower of Knowledge, but this Lab was one of the few places the diamond-type golems would appear.
[ Summons Confirmed. Pascal, what can I help you with today? ]
"Can you show me the interactions for this rune here?" He pointed at a rune on the page.
[ Request Confirmed. Displaying rune interactions and notes. ]
A blue screen appeared with the rune shown on it. Multiple lines branched off of it, connecting to other runes. Symbols hovered over each branch, denoting different effects and notes. He looked around and found the rune that came next in the spell. He tapped it and a box appeared with more detailed information.
"Minor mana decay, moderate bonus to mana capacity, minor time altering effects..."
He mumbled the words to himself as he read. Both runes had time altering effects, but their interaction also introduced further side effects in the spell. Specifically, the spell's mana would decay a small amount over time. The interaction between the two runes would also raise the mana capacity of the spell and increase the time dilation effects.
"Hmm... That's a pretty good synergy."
The further runes in the spell had similar effects. Most of the interactions applied a minor time acceleration effect while boosting mana capacity. A few of the interactions had destabilizing effects, like minor mana decay, but they were few and far between. Closer to the end were the actual runes which changed the shape and duration of the effects, but he already knew those from his general study of magic.
"I see..."
Most of the Space Time runes had few interactions overall. They could be combined with other runes almost freely without blowing up the spell. However, their effects were extremely minor, and they would conflict with themselves, so the same rune couldn't be used more than once.
"I understand how the spell works, but I'm no closer to tailoring it to my needs..."
He wanted a spell that lasted longer, and further accelerated time. However, even if he understood the interactions between the runes within the spell, he was only at the starting line for modifying it. He'd have to research more runes and their interactions to supplement it. For now, though, he moved on from Space Time magic.
He began looking into spells to use for the lighting and watering requirements of plants. He selected a sunlight-mimicking spell and humidity control as the base of his further research.
As he did with the Space Time magic, he analyzed all the runes comprising the spells and their effective interactions. By the time he finished, he had forgotten the ones in the Space Time magic, so he began memorizing those again too. Round and round, he analyzed the runes and committed as many to memory as he could.
After who knows how many hours, he felt his brain beginning to fry. It felt like there were just too many runes. However, the runes comprising these spells barely scratched the surface of what he needed to learn. If he wanted to change them, he'd have to memorize several dozen times more interactions. So, he carried on, quizzing himself on the different runes and turning them over till he went dizzy. When the artificial lights in the lab began to dim, he finally leaned back.
"I guess that's enough for today... Dia, you can go. Thank you."
[ Gratitude Confirmed. Returning to standby. ]
The diamond golem-type spirit spun and disintegrated into particles of light. The sparkles then shot up and into a magic stone in the lab's ceiling.
He began picking up his things. He had written down the runes and spells to help memorize them, so he collected the loose sheets of paper. As he did so, a pair of footsteps echoed down the hall.
"Oh, Pascal. What are you doing here?"
Freja stepped into the lab entrance. Dirt and mud cake her overalls and boots. Behind her, a small Lazulite golem cleaned her dirty footprints off the floor.
"Nothing much." Pascal replied. He tucked the papers into one of the books and began to leave, but Freja stopped him.
"Hold up. What are those books... You're studying Water magic? Are you betraying me here? I thought you said you were gonna become a Green mage."
"I don't remember ever saying that. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I'm never going to become a Green mage."
"I thought you were joking, but... You were actually serious?! B-But you love plants!"
"I like plants, which is exactly why I won’t use Nature magic..."
How many thousands of potato plants had she killed today? Day after day, she grew them just to dig out their roots. But there was more to a plant than just their fruit. All the Green mages who professed their love of nature inevitably began looking at plants as mere tools.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"If you'll excuse me..." He pulled the books tighter to his chest and continued out of the lab.
"H-Hey, wait up!" Freja chased after him. The small Lazulite golem followed her, mopping up the dirty footprints she left behind. "You've been so distant lately, what's up?"
He took a left and headed down the stairs, towards the dorm and leisure facilities. "It's nothing. I just don't like Green magic."
Freja put one mud-caked arm around his shoulder. "You're the only one in this city who has such a strong opinion on Green magic, you know. I bet you'd have the talent for it."
"Whether I have the talent for it is irrelevant. As I said, I dislike it."
"C'mon, why do you hate it so much? Just tell me."
They walked down the stairs together, and Pascal let out a small sigh. He specifically refrained from telling her all this time. She'd probably just laugh at him, so he changed the subject.
"You're covered in dirt... Why don't you wash up and stop tracking mud through the city? You've even gotten me dirty."
Freja clicked her tongue. "If I go wash up, you'll probably just run away."
"I'm not gonna run away. I'll be in the reading room this evening."
"Okay, it's a promise, then. You better be there."
Freja hurried off towards the baths and the small Lazulite golem diligently followed her, wiping up her dirty footprints.
Pascal took the time to get his own chores done. He fed Whiskers, made his bed, and brushed his teeth. By the time he stepped outside the dorms, he felt his brain finally rested enough to keep studying.
He headed out the dorm entrance and took a right before the stairs. The green sector had plenty of leisure areas and he headed into the small reading room. He took his usual chair in the corner and pulled out his notes.
After a whole day of studying the three spells, he could recite all the runes and their interactions in each of them. Just to be sure, though, he quizzed himself and confirmed he still remembered them. Once he was satisfied, he called out for the white golem again.
"Dia."
[ Summons Confirmed. Pascal, what can I help you with today? ]
"I'd like to search for runes. Can you show me a list of Space Time runes that can accelerate time? Order them by effectiveness and create a separate column with the number of average secondary interactions."
[ Query Confirmed. Please see the attached results. ]
A blue screen appeared in front of Pascal. It showed a long list of runes with their effects listed. The ones shown here were far more powerful than the ones he learned in his spell. However, they also contained nasty side effects. Looking through the list, he filtered out the ones with the most horrible interactions and found a few promising ones. He wrote down their id numbers on his notes. Tomorrow, he could look into them more and figure out which ones he wanted to use.
"I also need-" He began to ask Dia for another list of runes, but the sound of approaching footsteps interrupted his thoughts.
"Oh, Pascal, you're actually here."
Freja stepped inside the reading room, wearing a loose pair of green cotton pajamas. She had a book under one arm, but he doubted it was one for reading.
"Indeed, I am here," he replied.
"It's been some time since we read together."
"Are you actually going to be reading?" Pascal raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Freja sat down in the opposite chair and grinned back at him. "It's reading, in a sense."
She opened the book and it began to glow. She chanted under her breath, and the green light enveloped her hands. A vine grew out of thin air, snaking between her palms.
"I'll be trying out this new spell. Want to learn it too?" The grimoire in front of her was another form of magic. It contained pre-built spells one could activate with the right chants. If one didn't care about the runes and principles of the spells, they were a far simpler way to get results.
"I'm fine." Pascal shook his head and returned to reading runes.
"Hmm... Are you sure you don't want to learn it? Nature magic is pretty fun, you know."
The vine twisted between Freja's fingers. It moved with a life of its own, forming complex shapes. Despite just picking up the spell, she had complete control over the living vine. If one ignored that she didn't know a single rune, she was quite a skilled mage.
"That's very impressive, but I think I'll pass."
"Suit yourself." Freja began humming to herself and turned back to the vine.
Pascal returned to his own studies and called out for the golem-type spirit. "Dia, I need to modify this Water magic to affect soil. Could you find me runes that can apply effects inside a porous solid?"
[ Query Confirmed. Please see the attached results. ]
Another screen appeared in front of him. It contained a list of a dozen runes which matched the description of the effects he asked for. Pulling out a fresh sheet of paper, he began marking down the new runes. He'd have to cross check them for interactions and side effects, but area-of-effect runes were usually much more stable.
He continued his study session on Light magic after that. He searched for runes to modify the intensity of the light. If the light was too intense, it could hurt the plants. Additionally, he needed an interval modifier to simulate day and night. After finding several prospective runes, he recorded them and finished up his study session.
"Thank you Dia, you may go."
[ Gratitude Confirmed. ] The white ball of light twirled and disappeared.
"All done?" Freja asked.
He nodded back. "For now, at least."
"So, what are you working on?"
"It's a secret. I can show you once I finish, though."
"It's clearly something to do with plants, but... You know Green magic will probably make it much easier, right?"
Freja formed the living vine into a web between her fingers. Individual sprouts grew off it, connecting between parts and adding complexity to the stringy shape. Indeed, the magic he was working on would probably never achieve such control over plants, but he was fine with that..
"I'm determined. I won't be learning Green magic."
"Suit yourself," Freja said with a smile.
She collapsed her hands around the living vine, completely covering it. When she opened her hands, the vine had formed into a small loop. There was no start or end to the vine, nor any roots.
"Here." She handed him the small vine, but he wrinkled his nose at it.
"That's quite a troublesome thing... You know, this plant is destined for death. If I take it, it won't survive more than a few days." Without roots to support itself, the plant wouldn't receive the nutrients it needed.
"You can just learn Nature magic and support it that way."
"You know I'm not gonna do that."
"If you don't take it, I'll just throw it in the trash."
Pascal sighed, staring down at the poor plant. "For your mother to so cruelly abandon you... Poor thing." He begrudgingly accepted it.
After receiving the plant, he chatted with Freja a little longer, then headed back to his quarters. Whiskers had already returned to the vents, so he went to sleep alone.
The next day, he headed to the lab again. He brought the unnatural vine that Freja had created with him. The rootless plant would soon wither, but he had an idea after sleeping on the problem.
First, he got a small pan and filled it with fertilized water. Then, he made two cuts in the loop at the vine's growth nodes. With any luck, it could start growing roots from the cuts. He laid the two ends of the vine into the pan of water and set it aside. The rest would be up to the plant.
After attending to the vine, he turned his attention back to his studies. First, he began working on the Water magic spell. This one was the closest to completion. He used a humidity spell as its base, so the spell would already maintain a certain level of moisture. All he needed was to change it to apply to soil rather than the air.
He pulled out the runes from the night before and cross checked their interactions. As he thought, most of them had no interactions with the current configuration of the spell. He pulled out the first one from his notes and reformulated the spell with it.
"Alright, let's see if this works. Dia."
[ Summons Confirmed. Pascal, what can I help you with today? ]
"I need a wand to store and execute spells from. Probably best for it to have a decent rewritability. The casting time, efficiency, and capacity isn't too important. Can you produce something cheap that matches that criteria?"
[ Query Confirmed. There are several wand schematics that meet such criteria. Would you like me to produce one? ]
"Confirmed-" Pascal blinked and shook his head. He had almost talked like a golem for a second there... "I mean, yes. That would be great."
[ Request Confirmed. Producing Cheap Wand no. 5 for 33 credits. ]
The white ball of light approached his table, and a wooden wand clattered out of it. He used the wand to register the magic circle for the modified spell. It flashed white as the wand updated with the new spell. Taking it, he scooped some dirt into a pot and began his first test.
He poured mana into the wand, and a magic circle appeared at the tip. He pointed it at the pot of dirt, and water beaded on the surface.
"Hmm, it seems to work. Let's see how it did." He stuck his finger into the dirt and frowned. "Too much water."
The dirt was almost muddy. It had become far too saturated. He went back to the drawing table and removed some of the amplification runes. The resulting spell ought to result in less mana cost and less water created. He took it back to a fresh pot of soil and tested it once more. This time, the soil was only slightly damp.
"Perfect."
He continued onto the spell of sunlight. For that one, he only needed to add a variable intensity modifier along with a few runes to calculate day-night offsets. Essentially, he just needed the spell to turn off during the night. It required adding new vertices to the spell circle, but none of the runes he added had any interactions with the original spell, so it was fairly easy.
He overwrote the spell in the wand, and his test worked on the first try. He only had to fiddle with it a little to modify the maximum intensity. After only an hour, he had both the water and Light magic spells sorted out.
"Alright, last up is the time acceleration spell..."
The Space Time spell was built on a spell circuit rather than a spell circle. There were many implications, but the first was that he couldn't use the wand to cast it. If he wanted to cast it as is, he'd have to build a plate for the circuit to run on. That sounded like a pain, so he decided the first thing he would do is reformat it as a spell circle.
He took the component runes and laid them out into groups. For a spell circle, runes had to form looping chains of interactions. Quite a few of the runes interacted with multiple others, but not all. So he sorted them into their interactions and pulled out the looping chains that could work inside a spell circle.
By the end, he discarded nearly half the Space Time runes. The resulting intensity was far less than optimal, so he needed to supplement the runes he had discarded. He began picking out the extra runes from his notes, forming chains of equal length. The number of runes in each loop had to be identical, so the important part was to identify the chains and group them by length.
After almost an hour of matching and discarding various groups of runes, he was left with almost none of the same runes as the spell circuit he had built off of. The resulting runes he had picked out were of much higher intensity, though, so they made up for that in their own way. His final spell circle had three loops of four rune chains, forming a twelve vertex spell circle.
"Turning this into a spell circle took more time than expected... Actually, it's more like I just built my own spell, this is nothing like the original."
If he calculated it correctly, the spell ought to function, but there were always risks with designing a new spell. For an amateur in Space Time magic like him, it was unlikely to be optimal.
"There is still one last piece to add, though."
A final rune could be placed in the center of the spell circle. The rune needed to not have any interactions with any of the other runes in the spell, however, its primary effects would be amplified.
"Dia, could you find me a list of runes with a primary effect of time acceleration? I'm looking for ones that don't have any interaction with the ones written down here."
[ Query Confirmed. Please see the attached results. ]
A blue screen appeared with a list of runes. He picked the first one and double checked the interactions to be sure, but it fit his needs.
"Perfect, thanks."
[ Gratitude Confirmed. ]
He placed the last rune into the spell circle and nodded to himself.
Image of Space Time Spell Circle [https://i.imgur.com/AUBocH8.png]
"This should be everything. Now, to test it out."
* Up Next: The Difficulties of Space Time Magic
* Author's note: I think I might have gone into too much detail at the end... If anyone reads this, feel free to call out if it feels too slow. New named character and perspective coming next chapter. Things should get more interesting from here.