I sat at the beach, marveling at my new arsenal. Bosh had come through. I don’t know if he read between the lines and figured out what I wanted or decided on this himself, because one of these things was not like the other.
The man knew how to make money work for him and stretched my coin purse to the limits. I guess he knew the right people to get the right prices. He had delivered a nice little cleaver, a decent hunting knife, and a beautiful, vicious looking bowie. At my seven year old size, a bowie was practically a short sword. I actually didn’t think I could wield something much larger effectively right now, even with all my physical training. I swished it through the air in front of me.
“Hello,” Nodel said from behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Nodel,” I said, when my heart descended out of my throat. “You’re alive.”
“I am,” she said, looking a little sad. She also looked a little unwell. “Sorry I went away. I got sick again. What’s that?”
“Ah… it’s a knife,” I said. “To defend myself. But keep it a secret,” I said, raising a finger to my lips.
“Hmm,” she responded noncommittally.
I tucked my tools away into my pack, and cleared my throat. Time to change the topic. “How are you feeling? Were you very sick?”
She nodded. “My mother said it was the same thing as before. She was sad because she thought I was healthy now, but it came back. The priests couldn’t help. It’ll probably come back again,” she said, looking down at her feet.
I appraised her to see if anything had changed from last time I saw her.
Nodel Mirut (Lv 3)
HP: 21/21
MP: 39/39
Status: none
EXP: 11/300
Skills: Literacy
My eyes widened in surprise as I looked at her updated stats. It was weird enough that she already hit level 3, but to have almost twice as much MP as HP already with no training in magic?
She had only just recently leveled up. Huh. She was sick when younger, too, but healthy when I met her, and already level 2. Then she got sick again, but now she was healthy and level 3. Could it be related? What does that have to do with her enormous MP?
“Hello?” Nodel asked, waving her hand in my face.
“Oh, sorry. Well, I’m glad you’re all better now,” I said. “I was worried about you.”
“Really?” she said with a big smile. “I thought you would have forgotten about me. You were always running away before.”
I shrugged, mildly uncomfortable. She was hard to deal with and messed up my plans, but she wasn’t a bad kid, and I felt bad she had a hard childhood with a recurring disease. Since I could easily go invisible after upgrading my 5-point magic, I was no longer worried about getting sidelined by her, so I could afford to be nicer. “I’m just a private guy,” I finally said. “Why did you always try to follow me around, anyway? It’s not like I was that nice to you.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel better around you.”
I still had her stats up, and watched her MP tick down 1 point due to my absorption buff.
Hmm. It was a huge risk, but if the theory I was forming was correct…
“Nodel,” I said, cautiously. “What do you know about magic?”
* * *
“So my mother is a magic researcher,” I told the young girl, pulling a 4-point magic circle stone disc from my pack, and showing it to her. “She told me about magic circles when I was younger, and I learned a little bit about how they work from her master at the research institute.”
All true so far. I had sworn the little girl to secrecy, but just in case she slipped up, I wanted to cover my bases.
“I found this while playing on the beach one day,” I lied, handing her the stone disc. She looked at it closely, turning it over in her hands. “That’s a 4-point magic circle on the stone, which is used for elemental magic.” Her eyes grew large with interest as she looked closer at the stone.
“Why are you telling me about this?” she asked after a little while.
That was a hard question to answer. From my exploration in this world, magic was pervasive and everywhere, and was possibly some kind of unknown element that physically existed. That element could be drawn down by plants, beasts, and even people. We consumed those plants and beasts to replenish our magical reserves, which I presumed was some kind of adaptation to evolving in an environment with a magical element. Beasts pulled it down as well, and sufficient amounts in particular concentrations of configurations could possibly even trigger evolution. Some of these evolved beasts consumed so much that it crystallized in their bodies.
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I did not think humans could crystallize excess magic. I hadn’t cut up any people–and didn’t plan to–but at no point in the last four years had I ever heard of people having magic crystals inside of them. My mother’s grimoires didn’t mention it, Vorel didn’t mention it at the institute, Belat never mentioned it, and Bosh only ever mentioned magic crystals as something in magic beasts. Those beasts seemed to only acquire magic crystals after evolution and even then only with sufficient growth, although I still wasn’t clear on the specifics of that. Presumably, a human wouldn’t crystallize excess magic until they evolved from a naturally-born human to something else, but that was also something I had never heard of happening, and didn’t think was possible.
Instead, a human’s natural magic reserves seemed to be able to climb quite extraordinarily high. Vorel had over 1000 MP when I met him. However, in order to build up those level of magic reserves, one had to train hard over many years, leveling up through excessive magic use. People who didn’t channel magic into spells and for other magical uses didn’t gain this larger MP as they grew, but had the potential to gain much more HP, presumably because of a need to train their body physically and for combat to keep up in this world.
What if a person was born who was naturally blessed–or maybe cursed–to pull down a huge amount of environmental magic? Maybe they converted too much atmospheric magic into MP as they breathed, or maybe they were unusually exposed to high magic concentrations, or they just had some kind of genetic mutation that resulted in excessive magic drawdown.
A person who drew in too much magic, without having any ability to actually expend it, hypothetically resulted in a build-up of magic in their bodies. All sorts of things could be toxic in excess; even water could be poisonous if you drank way too much, because it messed with the body’s electrolytes.
Nodel was getting inexplicably sick, and healing and curative magic from the Church wasn’t helpful. What did seem to help was when she leveled up–possibly earning enough experience from surviving the sickness itself–and her magic capacity skyrocketed upon leveling. This would, presumably, buffer her from magic toxicity for a while, until her body again became overloaded. A child with a condition like that would probably normally die young, before they learned to expend MP; it was possible Nodel only survived because the Church’s 6-point magic users sustained her body with curative magic, even if it failed to actually cure the condition itself. If children with a condition like that survived, well, it could result in some of the greatest magic casters in the world.
It was just a theory, but the only way to learn if it were possibly true would be to experiment. Not that I could explain that to Nodel. “Uh, I thought you’d think it was cool,” I finally responded, stupidly. She was still only a six year old kid, I didn’t really need to provide a full explanation.
She looked up at me, not fully convinced.
“Anyway,” I continued. “I couldn’t make it work, but maybe you can. I know a little bit about the theory, at least.”
I had her hold her hand out, with the stone disc resting on her open palm. I pointed to the corners, telling her about how they represented fire, earth, water, and air magic, the four basic elements that made up this world. I told her there were other magic circles, but this was the one most mages started with.
“Try to make this small rock float,” I told her.
Nodel scrunched up her face, concentrating on the rock. We sat in silence for a few minutes as the little girl stared into her hands. She finally looked back up at me. “Rocks don’t float though,” she said.
I sighed. “That’s because rocks aren’t usually magic, Nodel,” I said. “Try again. Think about what makes up a rock. Rocks are just small pieces of bigger rocks, right? You can break a rock and then you have two rocks. If you keep breaking rocks into smaller and smaller pieces, they would eventually become a pile of tiny rocks, like this sand,” I said, picking up a handful of sand and letting it trickle out through my fingers.
“Sand is just tiny rocks?” she asked, looking down.
“And if sand could be broken down into even smaller pieces, it would be an even finer dust. Even those pieces of dust could probably be broken down further. Eventually, the smallest possible piece of rock would be rock in its purest form. A single, perfect, almost invisible rock. This tiny, tiny rock, this element that makes up all rocks, would be so light that it would be easy to make it float, right? And this bigger rock is just tons and tons of those, put together. Focus on this rock and try to control all those tiny rocks. If you can control them, you can do more than just make them float. You can make the rock change shape and move as you like.”
Nodel redoubled her concentration, focusing on the rock.
It didn’t happen quickly. Having lots of magic power didn’t necessarily mean one would be good at using it, or understanding why. I offered several different ideas to her over the course of the afternoon, some of which I had read in my mother’s grimoire, others I manufactured in an attempt to help her break through the first barrier to practicing elemental magic. By the end of the afternoon, she had succeeded in making the rock shake a bit, which was still very exciting for a child who had never used magic before.
“It moved again!” Nodel exclaimed with glee. “It feels so good to make the rock move,” she said with a laugh.
“Good,” I said, standing up and brushing the sand off my pants. “You can keep that and keep practicing, but keep it a secret,” I told her. “Seriously, do not tell your parents. Don’t tell anyone. If you ever feel like you’re getting tired, like you’ve drained all your magic or if it starts to hurt you, stop immediately. You should start to recover afterward if you use no magic for a while, but if you use too much all at once you can really hurt yourself. Don’t try anything bigger than that rock. We probably shouldn’t even be doing this, so I don’t want to get in trouble with your parents if they find out. And you definitely didn’t get this from me, understand?” I said, pointing at the magic circle.
She nodded, only half listening. Her eyes shone with anticipation as she stared at the rock. Her MP was still in really good condition, despite spending half the day trying to make the rock float. Even accounting for how much I absorbed from her, I would have expected her to use up more than what I was seeing in her stats.
Practice would keep her busy, if nothing else, and let her use her tremendous natural magic power better into the future. So long as this didn’t get back to me–and so long as she didn’t accidentally use too much magic and get hurt–it seemed worthwhile, even if it didn’t help with her recurring sickness. If her parents did discover that she could use magic, she was in a strong enough social position that they would probably just get her training at the institute. If it did get back to me, I would blame it on my mother, citing her grimoire as the source of the information. I had plenty of lies concocted for situations like this, and in the worst case… well, I wasn’t sure what the worst case even was, but I could survive the jungle pretty well if I needed to.
It’ll be fine, I told myself. Probably.