I had settled in nicely in the crown of the tree, constantly cycling my mana between draining it from the monster and infusing it into my seed. I quickly checked whether I could purchase another node in the magical truth skill tree, but I was short four points and the node I could buy wouldn’t help me with my studies anyway. I gave the nodes in the tree another quick read, finding three nodes that would help me figure out this whole magic thing. I’d gained the ability to read and write runes, achieved a deeper understanding of said runes with another node, and gotten the magic bolt spell, which was considered the simplest spell of them all.

Which made it the best spell to analyze first.

Just like every spell, magic bolt was cast by mentally weaving a spell matrix in the air close to me. The second step would be feeding mana into the matrix until it was full and lastly, I’d cast the spell with a mental command. With newer spells, I had to carefully craft the spell matrix before casting it, which took up a lot of time if it was a complicated spell. Thankfully, intelligence and wisdom supported me during this process. Still, it was important to get the spell matrix correct, or the spell would fail to activate.

Leveling up a spell's level also helped tremendously with the construction of the matrix. The spells at level ten were less a process of crafting, and more akin to slamming a stamp into the air, which left the matrix complete and ready to be charged. With practice and the help of my attributes and passive skills, I could rapid-fire the spells by stamping several matrixes at the same time.

But of course, I technically had no idea what I was doing.

The system had helpfully provided me with the perfect spell matrix for each spell and all I did was reproduce what had been downloaded into my brain. I mindlessly executed the task of casting the spells. Of course, doing this had benefits as well. It was easy to do, effective, and it let me cast the spells at an insane pace. But in the end, I wanted to know more. If I learned everything I could about spellcasting, and really committed to figuring out how this whole thing worked, I should theoretically be able to do some actually crazy things.

First and foremost, I should be able to modify the spells I already had. What kinds of modifications I could make to my spells remained to be seen, but making them stronger, or making them do slightly different things should be in the realm of possibility. Another look at the skill tree made me believe that I probably wouldn’t be able to create whole new spells before I bought the node in the tree. The capstone skill as well, making it so all spells could be cast with a variable mana cost, lead me to believe that I wouldn’t be able to manually change the spells to do that.

It was somewhat weird to think that the system would deny me these things even if I managed to figure out how to do them myself, so I needed to at least try. The memory I’d seen on the fourth floor, the one with the magic tower researching magic, lead me to believe that everything was possible. On the other hand, it was possible that all of the researchers there had similar skills that allowed them to craft new spells. There was no reason to believe that these skills were exclusive to the skill tree I had. Maybe some skills and spells could be unlocked by just… learning and using them without the system's assistance.

But enough theorizing about things I had no chance of verifying, I had a spell to analyze. To help myself, instead of simply stamping the finished matrix into the air, I slowly and deliberately wove the matrix into existence, rune by rune. The spell matrix for the magic bolt consisted of five runes. One in the center, around which the others were arranged in a square formation.

The first one I constructed was the centerpiece. This rune was slightly larger than the others, and due to my skills I knew that the rune translated to “circuit”. I also understood that these runes were essential for every type of spell there was. The rune formed the foundation of a spell, responsible for regulating the flow of mana through the matrix. I knew that there were different types of these circuit runes that would cause the mana to flow differently. The other runes were placed along the pathway that was created with the circuit rune and would activate when enough mana was pumped into them, before letting the rest of the mana pass on to the next rune in line.

I constructed the next rune, placing it at the top right, directly onto the pathway I’d created with the center rune. This one translated to “solidify”. Another essential rune for most spells. It would give the normally intangible mana form. My skill told me that this was akin to boiling down sugar water. It would evaporate a part of the mana, making a thicker concentrate.

The next rune translated to “shape”. This one was fairly straightforward. Just like with the circuit rune, there were several different runes that did the same thing. This one created a sphere that would contain the mana until it hit the target.

Stolen novel; please report.

The fourth rune translated to “force”. A rune that would dictate what the spell would do once activated. In this case, it would shoot forwards, in the direction the caster wished. There was nothing fancy about it, merely making the spell fly in a straight line with a simple push of the mind. Once the trajectory had been decided, it was out of the caster's control and would simply fly straight until it hit something or used up too much mana and fizzled into nothingness.

The last rune translated to “limit”. This rune acted as the stopping point of the spell. It worked in tandem with the rune at the center to both complete the circle and activate the spell once enough mana had been pumped into the matrix. I had a vague feeling that the rune was also responsible for determining the amount of mana needed to activate the spell, but I couldn’t quite tell how that worked. I’d assume that the knowledge of how that worked was “conveniently” left out of my passive skills.

I looked at the completed matrix without activating it. Truly, magic bolt earned its reputation as the simplest spell. It was fairly easy to understand how it worked and how the different runes worked in tandem to create the spell in the end. It somewhat reminded me of an electrical circuit.

First, a foundation was needed upon which the spell would be built; the circuit rune. The mana would then need to be given physical form, a container to pour the mana into, and a purpose. Lastly, the limit rune would complete the circuit, executing the “code” that was just built with the go-ahead of the caster.

With a slight mental push, the spell activated and I took care to watch as the spell came into existence. It happened way too fast to properly follow, but I caught glimpses of the process. Almost instantly, the familiar sphere of mana hovered above me, almost colorless and hard to see, but it was there. With another mental command, I gave it a small push, and it rocketed off straight ahead where it harmlessly impacted a branch. I’d cast the spell with a mere five mana, making the impact laughably weak even with my high intelligence.

The spell created a sphere of pure mana and chucked it at a target, simple as that.

Now that I understood the skeleton of spellcasting, I needed to compare it to something else to see how adding or changing things would affect the spell. Of course, the best way to do so was to compare magic bolt to… magic bolt. I arbitrarily decided to check out the fire-infused magic bolt, as the change shouldn’t be too complicated.

I started weaving the matrix in the same slow and methodical way, carefully analyzing each rune as I went. The circuit rune was the same, but the second rune was already different. Instead of “solidify” this one meant “mistify”. Instead of making the mana a tangible “liquid”, this time around it would be made into a thin mist.

The third rune was the same again, creating a spherical container to contain the mistified mana. Then a new rune appeared. This one meant “fortify”. It would reinforce the container that was just created so it could withstand the fire that would be created. Following that, another new rune made its appearance. “Spark,” it said. The rune would create a magical spark that would ignite the mistified mana, creating a special type of magical fire by using the mana as fuel.

The next rune was technically the last one, the one meaning “limit”. It was only technically the last since there was an offshoot connected to it. After the limit rune, the mana pathway split into two. One of the paths lead back to the start, just like the magic bolt had, the other one entered a smaller, seperate loop that consisted of three runes before leading back to the limit rune. The offshoot was kept fairly simple.

There was a rune, similar to the center rune of the spell that created the pathway upon which the runes were placed. The other two were both heat runes. I took a few moments to ruminate about their purpose before I arrived at a plausible idea. I’d noticed that the elementally infused magic bolts gained secondary effects if they were charged up with enough mana. The wind bolt, for example, gained wind blades that were otherwise not present. If my theory was correct, this extra loop was responsible for adding this effect, in this case, it should make the fire hotter.

I couldn’t figure out at what threshold of mana the extra parts would be activated just by looking at the spell matrix, but there had to be some kind of mechanism that controlled that. I was just about to check out another variation of the magic bolt when the constant supply of mana suddenly cut off. I got confused for a second before realizing that I must have drained the tree of all it had to give. I’d been infusing the mana faster than I’d been draining and recovering, so my mana pool was completely empty, both regular and void mana.

A corpse appeared before me, freshly pulled out of my inventory. I made quick work of eating it, making my mana recover at a much faster rate. I was curious about finding out more about spells, but I had more craters to check. Surely there’d be more tree monsters that I could drain, which would give me ample opportunity to analyze more of my spells. It took a while for my mana to get back to full even with the support of gluttony, during which I took another look at the two spells I’d just analyzed.

Eventually, I was topped up and I jumped off the tree, spreading my wings and setting course for the next crater.