The next morning I woke up, ready to finally start attempting to use magic. While I had no intention to become a fully-fledged Mage, or any kind of Class for that matter, I still wanted to learn as much as I could about each one as well as be able to use their powers and abilities as I needed. Since, at the moment, I had found a Mage’s lair, I was going to learn how to do Arcane Magic first.

Now, I knew more than most about how different theory and experimentation was. Whenever I set up Physics experiments at home for fun, it always took a while to understand exactly what I was doing even though I read and understood all of the theory behind it. I knew it would be the same situation here, but even harder, because while anyone can set up experiments, very few people can use magic to a respectable degree.

Skimming through my notes, I recalled that the first thing anyone must do before being able to transfer energy, or “cast magic,” was to obtain a Focus. Really, anything could be a Focus as long as it had a high mana density, but Mages generally used orb staffs. The orb was the actual focus, while the staff was for bonking things, I guess. None of the books really explained why the staff was so widely used among Mages. Maybe to look cool? I don’t know.

Anyway, luckily for me, Dabiva had a couple orb staffs just lying around. So I picked the one that looked the coolest and was about to move on to step two.

But wait, wasn’t mana defined as some sort of fixed energy at a point in space? How can all that mana stick near the Focus instead of staying at the point in space it was originally? I thought, wondering how that worked since I didn’t have any explicit reason for it through my understanding of the concepts or my notes. Mulling it over for a while, I just chalked it down to something akin to a mana magnet.

How the mechanism behind mana magnet would work, though, I have no idea. Perhaps I should look for a book on creating a Focus. That should give me the reason behind that as well as help me create another if this one breaks or something, I thought, before moving on to step two.

Detect the mana near and inside your Focus. Well, hopefully this orb has a high mana density associated with it or else I would be wasting my time for no reason, I thought, knowing that this was the hard part. Or at least, the first hard part. Armed with my knowledge from all my reading, I stood up, back straight, good posture, chin up, lifting the orb staff high enough so that the orb was eye level. Then I closed my eyes and tried my best to clear my mind. The hardest part is detecting the mana inside your focus the first time, since after that you already know how to do it and it becomes much easier to feel the mana in your Focus. There was also an important distinction here: mana not associated with a Focus is much harder to detect than the mana attracted to the focus. The former is known as Wild Mana while the latter is called Focus Mana. In hindsight, recalling this information made me feel that my assumption of the focus being like a mana magnet wasn’t too far off from the truth.

Realizing that by trying to clear my mind, I was instead thinking more, I shook my head and tried again. This time, to keep me distracted from stray thoughts, I “looked” right in front of me with my eyes closed. After what felt like hours, I heard nothing but my own heartbeat. Groaning, I put the orb staff down and jumped on to the bed.

Hearing nothing but my heartbeat was bad. I was supposed to hear or feel a certain frequency of the mana in my Focus, after which I should match that frequency by humming gently in order to help connect my brain to the feel of mana. Apparently, this connection to mana is essential in order to detect it as well as use it as a medium. Frustrated, I just grabbed the orb staff and brought it beside my ear.

How better to hear a soft sound than to bring it right beside your ear, I thought. Though I read a lot of books, I always questioned what I learned and never took anything at face value: this was no different. After a couple seconds, I felt like I had a second heartbeat.

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What… I thought, but concentrating more on that feeling, I realized it was slightly faster than my normal heartbeat. Feeling like I almost had it, I touched my left ear to the orb. Immediately, I heard an extremely shrill frequency on that ear. I winced and fumbled with the staff. Luckily, I caught it before it fell: I didn’t want to test if it would survive a fall. It looked like a glass orb after all. Well, I definitely heard the mana, I thought, now it’s time for the connection.

I brought the orb back to my ear, and this time I could surprisingly hear it from about a centimeter away, and it was more… wavy. I could hear an oscillation in the sound and I tried matching it by gently humming along. However, I didn’t feel any connection magic or whatever happening, so I just yelled at that frequency. Hey, different things work for different people, I thought, while sounding humorously like a bard in training who would never actually become successful.

Suddenly, I felt a snap in my brain, and I knew that I had achieved resonance between my brain and the Focus Mana. Perhaps yelling stimulated my brain more or something, I thought excitedly. At the moment, I was literally feeling the mana fluctuate inside my Focus. Slowly, I retained the posture that the books described, holding my orb staff in front of my so the orb is at eye level. Then, I opened my eyes and looked into the orb. Even though I couldn’t exactly see the mana there, I felt that it was almost obvious that the orb had so much more mana than most of its surroundings. I smiled, starting step three.

I had to take this mana I could feel, push some of the orb’s stored energy through it at a certain direction, and allow the energy to reach its goal through the Mana. This particular technique was required in order to perform the most basic yet extremely useful Arcane spell known as Telekinesis. Since I needed less energy the closer the goal was, I wanted to direct this energy to the pencil that was on the desk, a couple feet in front of me. So, I resonated my brain with the Focus Mana, took a deep breath, and tried to slowly shape a mana path for a small amount of energy to go from the orb to the pencil. This was the “Magic” of Energy Transfer: you don’t control the energy, you control the mana whose only purpose is to create a path for the energy from one point in space to another.

In doing this, I felt that some energy was going to the pencil, but the power or the rate of energy was not fast enough. There was a simple way to fix this problem. Increase the radius of the mana paths.

“I need MORE POWER!!!” I yelled, and increased the mana path radius by a good amount.

In fact, this was so much power that the pencil flew back into the wall at an angle and split in two.

“...” I was speechless. Absolutely shocked. There was a small part of me that didn’t actually believe that I would be able to do it. Strictly speaking, I didn’t exactly do it, since I wasn’t able to control it and used too much power, but I honestly couldn’t care less about semantics like that.

Haha, I moved a pencil, I broke a pencil, without even touching it?!? W.. WHAT? I, no, no way, ha, HAHAHAHAHA. My thoughts were in fragments and I was absolutely shocked and speechless, even though I knew it should have happened. There is a certain feeling one gets after performing real magic for the first time. The exhilaration you feel is beyond comprehension, and in the books I’ve read, some Mages mentioned that they would kill if they could feel the euphoria of doing magic for the first time again. Though I can’t say I would necessarily go that far, I totally understand where they’re coming from. You won’t fully understand it if you haven’t felt it. But I did. And just for a few minutes, I felt like there was nothing holding me back.

However, soon logic hit me in the face and told me to actually take control over my magical powers now. Now that I know exactly how Energy Transfer works, I can’t even take the term “magical powers” seriously anymore. But it sounds cool and makes me feel badass so I’ll use it anyway, I thought with a smirk. Regardless, let’s see if I can’t control my mana paths. I do need to build up a fine intuition about how much power I need to use for each situation: too little and nothing happens but some energy lost to heat, too much and you lose control and waste energy from your Focus or body. Both can be deadly in certain situations so it’s very important to find a sweet spot.

For the rest of the day, I carefully tuned my power up from very low power to figure out approximately the perfect mana path size that would allow me to control various objects in the room, starting with a pencil and then trying a book, an empty box from the back of the room, and even a small desk from a corner. However, while spinning and flying a goddamn desk around the room, the energy from my focus ran dry and the little it absorbed back from its surroundings in the time that the desk was flying into the bookshelf due to its inertia was not nearly enough for me to regain control of it, and both the bookshelf and the table broke into a couple large pieces. Oh, and almost all of the books had been thrown around the floor, some of them snapped in two and having a bunch of ripped pages strewn about.

I looked down at the mess and wondered what Mage Dabiva Galamon would do to this stupid kid if she was still alive.

Welp, that was quite shameful, I admitted. Thank the Goddess of Wisdom that I took notes of every single book.