I confirmed that I still had my 2 SP. Appraisal, now Appraisal(+), required 100 SP to advance again. Assuming that pattern held, it would cost 1000 SP to master a skill. If I earned 2 SP every level, that would require 500 level ups.

But my father had a master skill, and Vorel had two, and neither of them were over level 100. It stood to reason then that I would gain an increasing amount of SP as I leveled up. That, or SP could be gained from another means other than leveling up. To be honest, I hoped it was both. When I grew to level 3 I would have another data point and could try and draw some more conclusions from what I knew so far.

In the meanwhile, I was ready to try some magic.

If I was being honest, I had been putting it off a bit, first with the exercise, then with the inventory. I didn’t have much MP, and it seemed like this was a very good way to cause myself a lot of harm very quickly. I could also easily expose myself to my mother if I screwed up, even non-fatally. For that reason, I didn’t want to start with something noticeable if it all went wrong, like fire magic.

Fire was one of the only types of elemental magic that seemed generative, according to my mother’s grimoire. Of course, based on my understanding of fire, I suspected fire magic actually generated heat, and enough energy caused combustion, hence fire. I had pictures of summoned fireballs, but that didn’t appear to be how basic fire magic was used in this world, although it wasn’t necessarily impossible if I was interpreting what I read correctly. Water magic largely controlled existing water, although the grimoire suggested with enough magical power it could be generated as well. I suspected this actually pulled moisture out of the air, a magical dehumidifier which appeared to generate water out of nothing. Air was all around us at all times so there was no reason to suspect it was generative. Earth magic was absolutely non-generative, but being that we were always surrounded by earthen materials this wasn’t a problem for most out-of-doors mages; it was less useful indoors, unless one kept rocks on hand, which was something earth-specializing mages likely did.

I decided to try some earth magic first. I had hidden away out of sight of the front door of the house and other prying eyes. First, I removed some stones from my inventory and set them in front of me. I was going to try reshaping them into perfectly round spheres.

Next I had to draw my magic circle. I summoned the straightest small stick in my inventory and holding one side down as a pivot point, I made a circle in the dirt, tracing it in with my finger as I rotated the stick. It was messy, but it was a circle. I pulled out another, longer straight stick and bisected the circle in two from the pivot point of my first stick, and then keeping as close to ninety degrees as possible, made a second, perpendicular line across the circle. With that I had my four corners marked, so I used the long stick to connect the corners and make my square. I took a look at my work.

It was a mess. Imprinting into dirt was not a clean way to approach this, but it was what I had on hand. I had no idea if it would work. It certainly seemed, based on what I had seen at the institute and in my mother’s grimoire, that precision and exactness were important factors in magic circles. If you thought of magic as coming from the circles themselves, using your own magic as a fuel source, or that the circle was a conduit for your magic, precision would of course matter a lot. However, I was thinking of magic circles as a language with which I communicated to the world my intention, and magic instead was generated exclusively by my own MP. The power was controlled by my mental image and my imagination, not a drawing, and certainly not the chanting of a spell which predated magic circles.

Nonetheless, I cleaned up my amateur 4-point magic circle as much as possible. Eventually, I was happy. I picked a rock, and imagined it rounded out. I placed my hand on the magic circle. Knowing I had exactly 19 MP, I didn’t want to overdo it. I decided to try and channel 1 MP into the magic circle.

Nothing happened.

I tried again with the intent of channeling 2 MP, with no results, and again had no luck with 3 MP. When I tried to channel 4 MP into the rock, I watched with awe as the rock became a perfect orb.

I picked it up and rolled it over in my hands. I was excited, but tempering myself. This small operation took over a fifth of my current MP. If I were a native to this world, and had no notion of MP, and I tried this blind, I would have been at the mercy of whether or not I had enough MP for the spell to work. What determined the cost? Was it the amount of material I was manipulating, or the act of manipulation?

I also had felt a weird sensation in my head, like a pressure in my brain, since the spell had worked. I summoned my metasystem up and the sensation immediately dissipated when I read the displayed pop-up notification.

Skill acquired: 4-Point Magic

I grinned, and looked over my updated stats screen.

Pilus Horgson (Lv 2)

HP: 21/21

MP: 15/19

Status: none

EXP: 11/200

Skills: 4-Point Magic, Appraisal(+), Inventory, Literacy

I checked my skill board and confirmed my SP now showed 1. I had learned a skill in the way of this world and it cost a point from the systems of this world.

Totally worth it.

* * *

Over the coming days, I played around with earth magic. I shaped similar sized stones into orbs and then moved on to slightly larger ones which did, in fact, require more MP. The small orbs could be levitated with the same MP cost as it took to form them, which suggested that the cost was related to the amount of “earth” being manipulated. I couldn’t fire them off like bullets with 4 MP, so there was also likely a cost which related to the energy of what I was trying to do. Splitting the rock into two smaller orbs took 4 MP, again, and then manipulating the smaller orbs took only 2 MP.

Resting allowed MP to recover very slowly, whereas sleeping allowed MP to recover more quickly, but for large amounts of MP it wouldn’t be enough. I suspected this is why I always appraised my mother at less-than-full MP levels. While I didn’t see her casting a ton of magic, she did use it on occasion–such as fire magic to light the stove–and it would add up faster than she could recover naturally. However, some of our meals seemed to restore a non-negligible amount of MP, at least for my total MP of 19, so clearly there were ingredients present which could recover MP. I had yet to figure out which, but that was likely a path to making my own MP potions.

I had appraised the MP potion I stole from the shop, which was a fairly minor MP potion overall. For me, it would amount to a full recovery, but for someone like my mother it was only a small top-up. They actually weren’t identical, one recovering 26 MP and one recovering 28MP. A problem with manufacturing? Bottling? In any case, they were only useful for a novice mage, as an advanced mage would need something more substantial. Were those stronger potions even being made?

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Over the following days, I had split the rocks down into a multitude of orbs which could be controlled with 1 MP. Some of these stacked in my inventory, being sufficiently similar, but not all. Perhaps they had a slightly different makeup of minerals or the masses were slightly different. If I had more MP to play with, it would have been an interesting experiment to manipulate them until they were all identical, but even at 1 MP a piece it would drain my magic quickly to do a lot of changes.

The most annoying part of my practice was maintaining my magic circle. I wiped the ground clear when I wasn’t practicing so no one would discover it, and kept my rocks in my inventory, but each day I had to start by drawing the 4-point magic circle in the dirt. While I did get good at it (and found that I could free-hand it without any real issue with the spells) it was still a pain. If I had a permanent magic circle to cast from, it would have been a lot more convenient. I wondered if I could steal some parchment from my mother without being caught.

I had let my MP recover fully so I could experiment with shooting the stone orbs. By that point, I was thinking of them as bullets.

I summoned one from my inventory, and physically tossed it as hard as I could toward a tree. Making note of that, I sat down next to my magic circle, summoned another, and made it float in front of me. I placed my hand on the magic circle and imagined shooting the floating bullet with the same strength. The rock bullet flew forward with the same general arc. I checked my stats and saw that it only cost a total of 2 MP.

Satisfied, I collected the rock bullets and sat down to experiment again. This time, I tried to launch it approximately twice as hard, like a small slingshot had fired it instead of the rock being thrown. The bullet bounced off the trunk of the tree with a satisfying thunk. The total MP cost was about double, which seemed to follow.

Was the cost growing linearly with force? Or maybe distance?

It was at that point that I got a bit stupid and greedy. I had already been thinking of the rocks as bullets, so when I went to fire my third shot, the next natural step up in my head was to think about a gun. I pictured blasting the rock at the tree with an explosive force, and before I knew it, I could feel my magical energy being sucked aggressively from my body.

The rock bullet blew forward and smashed into the tree trunk, blasting splinters away from the hole and embedding into the wood. I fell forward, gasping, my head pounding and a pit of nausea forming in my belly. I pulled up my stats and grimaced. My MP had dropped to zero and I had taken a few points of damage to my HP.

After several calming breaths, I was able to straighten up and get control of myself. Stupid, I thought to myself. I knew magic was dangerous, and I knew that casting a spell without proper control could overtax my abilities. I had already lost some MP from the first two tests, and didn’t have much to begin with. By sticking with spells one knew they could safely cast, at least so long as they had approximately as much MP as HP, they should survive, but I escalated from an unstable position. I was much too reckless after a series of easy successes.

So, the MP required to move objects with increasing force might be exponential, not linear. I summoned some cherry tomatoes from my inventory and healed myself with their sweetness. That would be all for today, and possibly for a while until I could fully recover my MP, unless I wanted to sacrifice one of my stolen potions.

The one silver lining was that the tax it took on me to cast that magic seemed to register as a substantial new experience. I had gained some EXP from practicing magic, again with diminishing returns, but using larger magic seemed to be worth a noticeable bump.

I looked at the damaged tree and hoped no one would notice, although I was probably safe from suspicion even if my mother or father did question it in the future. I lay back and looked at the sky, then shivered. The days were cooling off as fall beat back the last remnants of summer. Level 3 still seemed so far away.

* * *

A few days later, I was lazing around inside, my motivation a little shaken after the earlier mistake shooting rocks. I couldn’t sit still for long, though, as relaxation quickly turned to boredom. I climbed up on a chair next to my mother and watched her scribing for a while. The locket she always wore swung forward as she reached for a slate, the sparkling golden sheen catching some light as it twisted on the delicate gold chain.

“Mama, what’s in your necklace?” I asked. As far as I knew, this world was nowhere near having photography, so it was not likely to have been a picture of me or my father.

“Oh,” she said absently, her hand raising in response to her chest. Fingers found the locket and she held it in front of her. “This? It contains my magic circles.”

Ah, I thought. I’m an idiot.

She opened her locket and showed me the inside. On the left was a 4-point magic circle engraved into the gold, and on the right was a 5-point magic circle. “See, with this I can cast low-level magic wherever I am. The magic circles aren’t big enough for more complicated spells but this way I don’t need to draw a circle every time I want to start a fire or make a small light.”

Of course mages would carry permanent magic circles on them, if that’s how they channeled their magic. There I had been, drawing one in the dirt every day, and all I had considered beyond that was drawing one on parchment. Jewelry and other wearables was the perfect way to always have a magic circle ready to go.

I excused myself and raced back out to the yard where I had been secretly practicing magic. I couldn’t engrave metal, but I could already shape rock. That had been the subject of my practice for a week now. Surely I could design something that would expedite and simplify my practice.

My MP had recovered since the bullet incident, so I pulled some of my rocks out of my inventory. I selected about 5 MP worth of manipulated material, then redrew my magic circle in the dirt. I coalesced the rock material into a small flat disc, about the size of a watch face or large pendant. It was a bit tricky to manipulate the image of the magic circle as an engravement into the rock, and my first attempt looked a bit wrong. Surprisingly, when I checked my MP, I had only lost 4 MP instead of the 5 MP I expected.

Did I miscalculate? Or could one improve their magic use and efficiency as they practiced? My expenditure of magic yesterday and practice with this material may be paying dividends in ways I hadn’t foreseen. In any case, I re-flattened the surface and tried again, and ended up with a much more symmetrical and even looking 4-point magic circle on my stone disc.

The disc had enough heft that it wouldn’t easily break or crumble, but I wasn’t so confident that I thought one would be sufficient for all the practice I had hoped to do. Now to test it. I wiped away the dirt circle and summoned another five rock bullets from my inventory. This time, I tried to make a second one using the circle on the stone disc.

The magic felt a bit different. The magic circle on the stone disc was smaller than the one that I would draw in the dirt, and I felt like I had to squeeze the magic with more intent, like trying to push the same liquid through a smaller funnel. Ultimately, I did manage to create a second one, but I was running low on MP and was extremely wary of letting my MP zero out again. I stored my two stone discs in my inventory and gave myself a mental pat on the back.

I had only collected so many stones from the yard in the first place, and didn’t want to deplete all my bullets, but I did have some more ideas in mind now that I had followed this line of thought. I wanted to make a larger one, but while I was at it, I wanted to make some 5-point magic circles as well for when I was ready to try that. I would need to collect more material for this project.

I figured I could probably unlock the 5-point magic skill carefully, like I had the 4-point magic skill, while just focusing on making a small light. It shouldn’t overly tax my magic power and I could try controlling the MP, one point at a time, until I could make light. That should use my remaining 1 SP and give me the skill. At least, that was what I was thinking until I pulled up my skill menu.

SP: 0

+ 4-Point Magic (1/10)

+ Appraisal (0/100)

+ Inventory (0/10)

+ Literacy (0/10)

I kicked myself mentally. That explained why elemental magic started to feel easier and use less power. The natural systems of the world rewarded practice, which is how regular people managed to apply skill points to skills for advancement. All I could do moving forward was hit level 3 to acquire more SP so I could experiment with more magic. In the short term, I could probably start working with water, air, and fire magic now that I was slightly more adept with earth magic. Slow, careful, and steady, I would make improvements in my knowledge and application, and from there I would achieve even greater heights.