Though the Warrior Path is the oldest and most commonly walked, it is actually the weaker of the two due to one fatal flaw.

It can’t surpass sorcery.

There are certainly some discrepancies between some of the levels of power and also some specific advantages and disadvantages inherent to either Path, but that fatal flaw remains the same.

Magic users, as a consequence of their Path, face much less challenging bottlenecks and are able to exceed the limit of a Warrior and progress beyond the level of Master, into the stage of existence deemed to be the final hurdle between mortality and the Source; the level of the Supreme.

The reason for this lies in their drastically different ways of accumulating and assimilating mana.

In contrast to the Warrior Path that focuses on a complete and thorough bodily upgrade across every physical aspect and using mana assimilation as the means to progress; Sorcerers instead do something very different.

It essentially goes like this. A potential sorcerer upon starting their journey on the Sorcery Path would instead of conditioning their body to become able to absorb mana, would in contrast focus on honing their sensitivity to their particular affinity. Then, when they had a strong enough grasp, would extract this mana element from their surroundings, utilising a resonance to it residing within their souls and afterwards would draw this mana element into themselves to form a “core”.

I searched for some time and found not one scrap of information on how these cores were formed or structured. Only that a newly made Initiate would draw in their specific mana element in the initial gaseous state then “cement” it into a certain “node” within their body. From this point the magic user would focus on increasing the density of their core and would progress along their Path by condensing their cores into a liquid state at the Adherent level and a solid state at the Master level.

But here is where one of the main differences between the two Paths emerged. A Warrior only has one body and has to spread all their efforts for mana assimilation evenly across it. A Sorcerer however, could form as many cores as they wanted… for as many affinities as they wanted.

It was this difference that made the magically inclined members of this world so much more powerful. Though they missed out on the physical side of things, they made up for it due to the reduced mana resistance from their souls, as the spread of mana affinities they imbibed counteracted it. In fact, sorcerers focused on building internal core networks across specific nodes in their bodies in an affinity ratio as close as they can manage to their own inherent mana affinity signature. This way, the soul’s signature could be harmonised with and the resistance from the soul to the incoming mana elements can be reduced dramatically.

This wasn’t a revolutionary improvement though. It definitely reduced the resistance from the soul, but due to the complexity of the networks that sorcerers had to build and how they had to be intricate and specific to each individual, a significant amount of time and resources could be expended developing them. Depending on the sorcerer this could mean an even slower pace of progress than going the original way of Warriorhood.

Another thing to consider with the Sorcery Path as well was how magic was done and how “spells” were even cast in the first place.

How the books I was reading described it was that unlike Warriors, where the mana was permanently fused into one's body and could never be lost barring some catastrophic injury or one’s age catching up with the individual, the mana in a Sorcerer was, to put it more accurately, stored.

This is to mean that the cores a magic user developed were also storage containers that would release mana in particular ways to cast spells, ergo, resulting in a reduction in mana concentration everytime a spell was cast.

This was of course very disadvantageous and possibly dangerous. As a rule of thumb Initiates didn’t even learn any spell craft until after they had condensed a liquid core. The reason being that only at that point could they release mana in its gaseous state to cast spells without too much of a risk of a core collapse. If this happened it would mean losing all the time and effort that went into forming a core and it possibly exploding, as was certain the books stated, to happen when trying to cast from an Initiate core.

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Of course this wasn’t too much of a problem as Sorcerers as a common practice would focus on one primary core and bring it up to the Master level before they went about building up the rest of their internal network.

How these spells were cast was pretty interesting too, as depending on the Sorcerer or the teachings they were given they could develop their cores anywhere in their bodies. Examples I found were fire users building cores in their eyes to shoot laser beams or wind users building them in their lungs to exhale spells that would conjure tornados, but there were various other methods of doing it as well.

Altogether, Sorcerer’s developed their way of fighting to be varied and applied from long distance whereas Warriors fought straightforwardly and up close.

But you may be asking, if Sorcerer’s didn’t face the blockade to becoming a Supreme, why didn’t everyone strive to become a magic user and the Warrior Path face a decline?

A question I asked myself as well, and soon enough found the answer for.

To be expected from a run down Institute Side Branch of a small city not even on the main continent, there was nothing mentioned in the mana category about the Supreme level. There was little enough about the particulars of the Master or Adherent stages for the Paths either. But for the Initiate stage, there was a good amount of information, enough for me to figure out the answer to the question that bothered me. And it all boiled down to one simple word.

Talent.

And by talent, I mean the percentage a specific element occupies in a person's mana affinity signature. Because you see, there were long researched and proven affinity limits that needed to be met for anyone to have any measure of success if they wanted to progress on the Paths.

To begin with, the bare absolute minimum for anyone to become a Warrior is for a single affinity in their mana affinity signature to occupy a percentage of 5%. The number of people in all of Calzyn who fall outside of this requirement is generally accepted to be 99 out of a 100 and even those that barely make the requirement of 5% would struggle immensely their entire lives to become an Adherent. Even if they did, they would end up being stuck at that level for life.

But this is just to become a Warrior, a whole different thing than becoming a Sorcerer. Warriors step onto their paths by pushing their bodies through certain forms and exercises until their bodies push past a certain limit where mana then floods into them, meeting the bodies demands and alleviating the stress they put themselves under.

Magic users however have to identify and isolate their specific element from the atmospheric mana through their own will and soul resonance, which they accomplish through mental techniques and meditation.

But to be even able to do this an individual would need a very high percentage in a particular affinity to even have a chance of resonating enough with a mana element to accomplish this. A minimum percentage of 25% for a singular element of their mana affinity spectrum as a matter of fact, and even this is just for the lowest quality of Sorcerers who would most likely be stuck as an Adherent for the rest of their lives.

Also, to add as a general rule, as a person’s particular percentage increases the corresponding number of people who meet this criteria in the entire human population decreases. Exponentially.

So, as it happens in this world, those with a percentage of 5% to 30% in a particular affinity fell into the Warrior Path and toiled all their lives to strengthen their bodies and increase their mana assimilation. For those lucky few with a singular affinity between the percentages of 30% and 50%, they were talented enough to spend their lives on a worthwhile pursuit of the magical pinnacle.

The reason it capped off at 50% was that a 50% talent is the highest ever percentage recorded in all of human history and those who have had it are prodigies who appeared once every couple or so centuries. Nothing bad withstanding it is practically guaranteed they are to become the most powerful Grandmasters and from there have the best shot out of all others at becoming a Supreme.

Anything above that 50% limit has never been seen and is considered mythical and outside the limits of human beings, at least for now.

This is the outline for the Path system here in Calzyn and is the determining factor in anyone’s place in this world's hierarchy, with one exception.

It had surprised me a lot when I came across this in my research. I had only ever seen the Wizard, the Witch who had been in the town square and those I had taken to be Warriors making up some of the members of the city guard and the majority of the people that walked in and out of the Martial Association. But unexpectedly, there was a third Path that I had so far never encountered.

Spiritualists.

There was scarce mention of them and even less detail as to how they utilised mana but they were a certified third Path and way of growing closer to the Source. But their practice, unlike Warriorhood and Sorcery, wasn’t widespread.

It was instead isolated to a select portion of the human population, a clan to be more specific, who in turn isolated themselves from the majority of humanity.

What I read didn’t go into detail about the specifics but what it did mention is that these Spiritualists somehow manifested mana constructs or “spirits” through some unknown means and hosted them inside their bodies. These spirits usually took the form of some animal and the Spiritualist would work to strengthen said spirits through growing them in their bodies, being able to then release and control them to fight and do forms of magic when needed.

It made it clear that a talented Spiritualist could have more than one spirit though there was no known limit mentioned. The last very interesting piece of information I found on them was that its practice wasn’t just limited to the talented but was practiced by all members of the Spiritualist Clan, the Koi, based in a place called Kanmor, no matter their position in their community. It was all very interesting but there was no more in depth information besides what I had found and so I had to leave my research about them at that point until I found another opportunity.

By this point in my research I had gotten a firm grasp on this society’s conceptions about mana and the general aspects of the physical, magical and newly discovered spiritual Paths. But there was one final area that occupied another major piece of the mana puzzle and was of great importance to any Warrior, Sorcerer, or Spiritualist in this world if they wanted to grow and become more powerful.

And that was the mana affinities themselves.