I stared at the slate where I had organized all my remaining skills into several lists.
One list was my purely physical skills, mostly of the martial variety. It included Acrobatics, Detect, One-Armed, Ranged, Stealth, Two-Armed, and Unarmed. Another list was of the knowledge and crafting based skills, which included Butchery, Cooking, Foraging, Knotting, Literacy, Needlework, Negotiation, Smithing, and Tanning. As far as I knew, none of these involved the use of MP whatsoever.
That left me with only a few remaining skills to consider: Brewing, Inkmaking, Inventory, and Taming. If I had been able to unlock the Enchanting skill, it would also be on this short list.
While not directly magical, almost all of these skills shared something in common, in that they involved the channeling or infusion of MP into something external from me without casting spells through magic circles. Inventory was the outlier, but I had a suspicion about that which I wasn’t quite ready to face. I ignored it for the moment and focused on the others.
I did not think these skills could be converted into a shared skill, but I was interested in exploring the idea of channeling MP further. A trained magic user could fairly easily channel their magic to imbue an item, but a novice would struggle. If someone didn’t have magic control, they could still channel magic through the acquisition of these skills, but the easiest way to acquire these skills was to already know how to channel magic. There must be a mundane way to acquire these skills, but I wasn’t interested in that just yet.
What I was interested in was solidifying a method of channeling magic. In particular, the use of enchantments came to mind. Enchanted items were designed with weak magic control or even mundanity in mind, a way for someone to use small amounts of untrained magic, channeled through a design created by a trained magic user.
I had an idea which could streamline this process, although I wouldn’t be able to test it before I learned how to enchant. It was an idea that came up as I was studying magic circles earlier.
When it came to a polygram {n/m}, m had to be less than n/2. Anything larger was just {n/(n-m)} in reverse. If I drew a pentagram {5/3}, it would be identical to {5/2} except for the path of my quill.
For polygrams with an even n, like with 4-point and 6-point magic, there was a special case where m = n/2, like {4/2} and {6/3}. The result was something quite different from a regular polygon entirely.
When each point was connected to the point directly opposite, the resulting image is a group of m lines that intersect in the middle of the magic circle. Technically, this should satisfy the demands of magic circles, as the only real aspect of importance was the number of points on the outer circle.
In practice, when I tested 4-point magic on a specially prepared magic circle that looked like a large, circled X, I could barely get my magic to operate. I was trying to light a fire and I was only able to produce the barest wisp before the circle cracked.
The lines which made up this special case of polygram were called digons, and the polygrams themselves were compound polygons made up of multiple digons, similar to how the hexagram was a compound polygons that was identical to two overlapping triangles. These digons, however, were called degenerate in ordinary space.
A true digon required not just two points, but two sides. A straight line only had one side. I suspected this was why the magic failed, in part, but it could also be that the line crossed the center of the circle.
Something about the digon spoke to me, though. One line between two points. A path for magic to channel between two objects. I couldn’t cast a spell through a 2-point magic circle, so there was no skill to learn, but if I could use 2-point magic circles as the base for enchantments, I had a theory about how I could streamline a number of different possibilities. Only time would tell.
* * *
There was nothing else to reduce polygrams and magic circles to. A monogon couldn’t work for magic, because even when degenerate in ordinary space it was an unbalanced circle. A digon was the simplest magic circle, and even that was a special case, if it was even anything at all.
On the other hand, there was no reason why magic circles couldn’t be larger than 6-point.
I had over 200 MP after growing to level 16, but that was still a drop in the bucket. Vorel had over 1000 MP, and magic researchers that I presumed were of his caliber had died trying to explore 7-point magic. I would not be making or touching a 7-point circle just yet.
Still, I was curious about two things when it came to the next tier of magic.
The first was related to my final special skill, my inventory. While it interacted with some of my other skills, the core aspect of it was the storage of items from physical reality in… some other space. Another dimension? A dimensional subspace? There were countless questions I could ask about it. If I wanted to create new magic that turned this special skill into something teachable, it would likely involve something powerful and new, and I was reasonably certain it would involve 7-point magic.
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I knew only one thing for certain about 7-point magic itself. Whatever it tapped into, it was so powerful that it could kill the strongest mages. I could bypass this problem, to a certain degree, by manipulating my MP quantifiably thanks to my appraisal skill, but I was sure other mages had some inherent concept of how to use controlled amounts of magic. The magic was simply too demanding, particularly if the caster didn’t understand what they were trying to accomplish with the magic. My only possibility to bypass this problem was to do something tiny to unlock the skill, then pour skill points into it, using my metasystem to gain enough efficiency to cast larger spells without massive MP costs.
There was a second quirk to 7-point magic, which was that a 7-point polygram had two irreducible regular shapes, {7/2} and {7/3}. Both heptagrams were perfectly valid shapes given what I understood about magic circles. Of course, a {7/1} heptagon would also be valid, but it would be close enough to the shape of the circle itself that it was too awkward to use.
Still, ignoring the convex polygons, there was no other magic circle that had two functional star polygrams to cast through. I had to assume that this would both be related to the strength of the magic, and the type of the magic.
It didn’t take long for me to form a hypothesis, given my inventory skill.
I believed that 7-point magic was spacetime magic.
In the language of magic circles, each point stood for a different aspect of the magic itself. With magic that could be cast through two different, equally valid star polygrams, I was willing to theoretically define one as being the better conduit of spatial magic, and the other being the better conduit for temporal magic.
As I sketched out my hypothesis, I defined the seven points anyway, based on my inventory skill but also my knowledge from Earth: subspace, gravitation, time dilation, interval manipulation, absolute stasis, spatial portals, and temporal portals.
My inventory was some kind of subspace in stasis, an aspect of space and an aspect of time. I wasn’t sure what other subspaces might exist or how they related to the caster, but that was my working theory. Stasis seemed too powerful to be something I could do for free with my Inventory skill, but it was only free within my inventory subspace. Trying to cast it in the real world could be hugely MP expensive. Gravity manipulation was a resulting aspect of spacetime manipulation, and so followed. Interval manipulation, or the ability to manipulate the distance between two things, would allow the caster to warp step or flash step to evade blades or projectiles in combat or increase movement speed. Spatial portals would allow for true teleportation, and temporal portals… well. I wasn’t even sure that was possible at all. Going backwards in time came with serious implications. Perhaps I could use temporal portals to jump forwards in time, though.
It was all just theory and guesswork, but at the same time, if no one had ever successfully casted 7-point magic, then my doing so could make it true. I would need sufficient MP and know-how to make it work, but once I thought of it as such, successfully cast it, and gained the skill, I would define the new vocabulary, which I had already done with 3-point magic.
If I was wrong, though, and someone had already developed 7-point magic, the wrong assumptions could easily kill me. Experimentation would wait until I was much, much stronger.
* * *
I took a deep breath of the crisp, cool air as I walked down the beach with Treepo, Gregory, Buda, and Vlad, who swam alongside us as close as he could without dragging his gargantuan belly along the sand. It was deep into winter after months of magical study and practice, and I had done little hunting at all beyond what I needed to do to keep Vlad happily fed.
The big sea beast actually took care of that himself, largely. He would impale other beasts from the sea on his huge horn and bring them to shore, then beg me to dismantle, cook, and infuse the meat for him. He was a little spoiled, but he had both saved my life and made me the wealthiest nine-year-old in Mirut, so I was happy to cook for the big goof. It also helped me to round out my bestiary with more sea-based beast information, without needing to go diving and fight underwater myself.
I tamed, evolved, and released a number of weaker beasts in the area as well to gain more information for my bestiary, and fabricated a special net that I could attach to Vlad’s horn so he could scoop blueclams for me to easily farm deepwater pearls. The pearls functioned identically to beast crystals, like I had thought they would, which was finally proven through testing and experimentation. I even evolved a regular, full-grown shieldback into a rocky shieldback with a beast crystal to test it out both ways, although I felt bad feeding the beast something that was harvested from a member of its own species.
One of the more peculiar beast evolutions was when I trapped and tamed a ratman. They were already tool users and clever creatures before evolving, and the alpha ratman that I evolved was disconcertingly clever with his new rank. It was, otherwise, a fairly subtle change. He grew taller, his coat grew longer and silkier, his limbs got thicker with muscle, but it was the intelligence in the eyes which startled me the most. I ended up feeling so weird about it that I quickly released him back to his tribe.
Many days later, I heard from the young guard Timur that hunters and the few rare travelers to and from Mirut were having issues with ratmen raids. They only stopped when the weather started to improve and the ratmen migrated back north, out of the jungle. I hoped that I hadn’t started some kind of ratman revolution.
I did not, and would never, evolve a stingknight or a stingknight queen. I would not permit such a demonic entity to come into existence. Instead, I wiped out another couple of hives to replenish my chitin stocks, so I could fabricate new armor. With my new smithing skill, I was considering picking up some tools and trying to make it myself. If I was going to be facing the kinds of beasts which could so easily wreck my gear, it would be nice to know how to make or repair it myself. It was also a way to earn fresh experience without risking my life against wildly overpowered beasts.
As winter came to an end and spring began, it was time to properly figure out what I would be doing with my apprenticeship when I turned ten that fall. I was determined to leave Mirut behind and explore more of the world. I had enough strength, and gold, to start taking my first real steps out of this small town. I had a few plans of action and it was about time to start testing the waters, even if it meant tipping my hand.