“As a mixed disciplinary class—like mageblade, for example—attaining the Master mage designation generally takes over a hundred years. The difficulty skews heavily toward pure classes reaching pinnacle titles. I believe the fastest a mageblade has reached it on record is forty-three years, and that was with the full support of a royal house and doing absolutely nothing else with his life.”
“Why do you look so smug about this fact? Should I be concerned?”
“I’m going to do it in three months.”
“So I should be very concerned.”
“Only if I had any sanity left to lose. This is nothing.”
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Raina was asleep when Jair returned the first evening after his meeting with the king, and she remained asleep for almost the whole day following Dark Night.
Jair took an extensive rest himself, more than he intended. His body desperately demanded sleep even if he didn't exactly notice until he lay down and didn't wake up until well into the following day. Even then, he didn't sleep as long as Raina. She was still out when he headed into the city in the late morning.
Jair finished his Phoenix Healing list by the end of the day, then checked back in at Larenok's place in case the man had arranged anything else for him. There was no sign of Larenok himself or any additions to the calendar. He'd been here, cleaned up a few of the cabinets and left a bigger mess on the counter, but it was all mundane soulspace basics. Nothing interesting or indicative.
No note, though come to think of it, Larenok probably didn't think about the fact that Jair could come and go as he pleased. Perhaps back at the Institute? But if Larenok’s credentials had been revoked, which they surely had by now, what with his blatant neglect… unless he’d been overlooked in the rebuilding.
Jair stopped in at the academy admin building, but as he’d expected Larenok’s office was empty and dark. His possessions had been cleared out, leaving only the furniture and the room’s intentionally intimidating architecture.
For a moment he contemplated leaving a message at Larenok’s house to re-establish contact, but if he was busy off being a promoter then there was no reason to rush him. He’d find Jair sooner or later, as long as he returned from whatever he was doing before Terlunia.
Once Jair and Raina left the continent, there’d be little chance of anyone tracking them. Even Jair himself wouldn’t try to predict what they’d end up doing.
With one last cursory look around, he summoned Maelstrom to his hand.
"I know I made fun of you for going all in on Darkflame, but the ability to skip the half hour of walking from one place to another is very convenient," Jair muttered as he darkflamed himself back to the Serin residence.
Maelstrom flickered smugly with dark fire before Jair dismissed it back into their soul.
"Yo, Carn, what time's dinner?"
"I'm afraid you've just missed it," Carn said, completely deadpan. "Try again tomorrow."
"Nice try. Is Raina in with her father, or did she go out?"
"I last saw Miss Serin in her study. She seemed to be writing out some manner of list."
"Ah, shopping order, no doubt." They'd finalized the majority of their packing list that first night, but some things weren't already in their possession and required either special ordering or a trip out to Silvas and Parein.
He considered offering to collect them himself, but if she had someone in mind he didn't see a reason to interfere. He had plenty of his own shopping to do, and more important chores beside. If she was occupied for the moment, he had plenty to occupy himself with in the meantime.
The fallout of transporting himself from the moon, his clash with Ryenzo, and the subsequent brief contact with the seascourge had cracked open his soulspace and destroyed his manabody entirely. He couldn't start imprinting his spells because there was nothing to imprint them on.
His preferred solution would be to go to Nuprima and overload himself there. Painful, incredibly difficult, but it got results fast. Unfortunately, there wouldn't be a Nuprima passage until weeks after Solaria, and he couldn't afford to wait that long.
The next best thing was to spend hours meditating at a manaforge or similarly high-mana location, and Raina's family happened to own quite a sizeable chunk of exactly such a location.
"I'll be out at the oasis, if she comes asking," Jair told Carn. "I need to work on my class requirements."
"Understood. If she asks, I'll inform her."
Jair flashed himself to the oasis in a burst of green-black fire and sat down on the roof of one of the mana-curing sheds like before.
Class requirements was a bit of an overstatement. He didn't technically need to have a manabody now that he'd already unlocked the class—you didn't lose your class even if you no longer met the qualifications for obtaining it in the first place—but without reaching a full imprint layout his class would never advance beyond basic. His weapon may be fourth tier, but he remained stuck at first until the 'mage' started to catch up with the 'blade'.
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And, as much mobility as Maelstrom's darkflame teleport ability provided, he missed the everyday utility of Lift and Impose Weight. He probably didn't need to continue with his Stormstriker build, but there were plenty of spells he'd be happier to have available.
Cutting through everything, teleporting anywhere, and healing anything were all well and good, but at this rate he'd end up as just 'the guy who happens to be bound to Maelstrom' rather than anything showcasing his own capabilities.
He'd already gone down the path of becoming overly-reliant on Darkflame, back in the future with Qahrvirna. He didn't need to do it again.
So he began on one of his least favourite activities. Rebuilding a manabody from nothing was right up there with listening to the academy initiation speeches a dozen times. It wasn’t, by normal standards, ‘hard’, but it drove him to the last edge of his patience.
Right now, he was at his most vulnerable and exposed. Without a manabody as a buffer between himself and the volatile power of the oasis, carelessness could very well cause permanent damage or even kill him if he was truly unlucky.
This was the reason for lodgings being banned from the vicinity of all oases, the requirement of cities kept separate and workers coming in only for a few hours at a time.
Mana exposure wasn't inherently deleterious, but the effects tended to compound dangerously. Even if a single night spent unguarded in an oasis was unlikely to kill you, if you did it every night for a month you'd be lucky to still be alive and sane.
Jair wasn't in any immediate danger. He'd rested well. He knew how to prepare himself physically and mentally. It was just a matter of sitting, absorbing the power, and guiding it back out to refill the space that his lifebody occupied.
A properly-created manabody was shaped in an imitation of what was already there.
There were those who preferred to settle their mana in, say, a sphere at their core, rather than creating a full body with it, but that was a limiting choice. Sure, it could be channeled with, but reversing the power flow like that made spellcasting slow and inefficient. When you had the power in your fingertips, you could cast hand spells at the speed of thought. When the power was concentrated somewhere else in the body, you needed to first guide it to the imprint's casting point.
A few moments’ difference in activation time wouldn’t matter to a spell-worker, housewife, or craftsman, but in combat those moments could be the difference between victory and destruction.
The bond between manabody and lifebody grew stronger the more closely they resembled one another, which is why imprints glowed visibly despite the manabody being an intangible force in most cases. Those were the points of most perfect overlap.
There was a reason mageblade wasn't everyone's go-to class, and the Institute took between one and three years of preparation before its initiates were even granted the class. Its benefits were multi-faceted, but the requirements equally stringent in their demands.
Jair sat and accumulated power, holding it in a soft cloud that conformed to roughly the shape of his body.
Today’s progress wouldn’t be enough to even notice. It would require several repetitions of filling and condensing before he got anything close to a proper manabody set up, but this did give him the chance to build in some convenient shortcuts his younger self hadn’t known about. It might set him back a few weeks in the short term, but once he did get to Nuprima, he’d be able to bypass some of the advancement steps.
Firming up the edges so that it precisely matched the body was the most challenging part for most beginners in manabody creation. Anyone could collect a mana cloud at their center. Almost anyone could squish it down into a semi-solid blob. Doing that again and again until it expanded to fill the entire space of the body, then shaping it precisely to your every muscle and bone, that was a challenge.
A bigger challenge was doing that while maintaining a simultaneous connection and separation between manabody and lifebody.
If they got too wholly integrated, you’d end up with strange things happening. Some said that was where vampires originated from, but in Jair’s personal experience having a fully merged manabody mainly meant that you healed faster, hit harder, couldn’t change spell loadouts, and died more easily.
The Avlooni beastkin utilized manabody merging on a cultural level, with each generation guiding the next into the practice. Given the right incentives, they’d been willing to initiate even a kinless like Jair.
A lifebody had strong points and weak points. You wouldn’t generally die from a broken toe, though it would be painful. With a merged manabody, that broken toe isn’t just a painful nuisance, but a perpetual drain… and if you run out of mana you drop dead on the spot. You could run faster and longer, the merged bodies working together to maintain your strength long past when either one would have given out… but if you push too far and run out of mana, you die on the spot.
He never regretted the timeline of becoming ‘embodied’; it was a valuable experience to learn about the possibilities, but it was an unforgiving lifestyle and not one he was suited for. Jair wasn’t a brawler type, and he definitely wasn’t the sort to stay within such restrictive limitations. He much preferred the flexibility of spellcaster manabodies, and being able to push himself into overdraw if necessary without the instantly-dying part to worry about.
Tie them together, but hold them apart. It was a delicate balance to walk. Most initiates took months or years to even begin to find that balance.
The early stages of building a manabody were finicky to the extreme. Jair had broken his countless times in the past by trying to rush the process, or losing focus during a key moment. The process was so painfully dull, and took such a very long time. He hated it, as much as he accepted it as necessary, but it was one of his least favourite parts of becoming an absurdly powerful archmage.
At least the advancement process for mage was distractingly painful. There was feedback, the active resistance, the sense of pushing through to reach the goal. If he had something to focus on like that here, it would be a thousand times easier.
The earliest stages of building up mana felt like nothing. For several weeks when he first arrived at the academy, he’d assumed that he was doing something wrong.
This process required focus, it required time, and the only way to know if you’d done it right or not was to do it for days on end and hope.
Even doing everything exactly right, Jair knew there would be no tangible results today. He hated it so much. But it was necessary.
So he sat and he focused. He drew in mana that tasted like air, strained to hold it in place when it felt like trying to keep hold of a particular grain of sand in a hand overfull, and released the tension of the intangible intake.
Over and over.
For hours.
Jair was well used to repetition by now, but if he never had to rebuild a manabody again it would be too soon.
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