“Teach me how to tame a beast!” Revkah’s son Giran yelled at me while hugging Buda’s side.
I let out another exhausted sigh.
Winter was passing, and spring was starting to show its face. While the north was never truly warm, the bitter cold was finally fading. I had started spending a lot of time in town, which meant that the locals were starting to get used to my way of life.
After spending so much time in Teichar with Ivar, and by association coming to get to know his neighbor Revkah and her family, it was only a matter of time before the children exposed to magic and beast taming would start to have unreasonable demands.
“I already told you, I can’t,” I said in exasperation. “I would if I could!”
Giran was only six years old and level two, and under any other circumstances I would have happily spread the gospel of taming companion animals. He had come to love Buda after their family spent so much time watching him, and he was equally fond of Treepo.
Unfortunately for him, Velgeins had no MP. With no MP, he could not learn to infuse magic into food and feed them his will in order to tame them. Even if I figured out an enchantment to channel MP through a device to tame beasts that way, and even if I used a magic battery to fuel that, it would still not work to create a taming bond without the MP being flavored by the individual will of the tamer.
Try explaining that to an angry six year old, I thought with a chuckle.
“Revkah, can you…” I said, trailing off and waving my hand at her son.
The kindly woman looked sheepishly at me, and shrugged. “Just ignore him.”
“MAMA!” he shrieked, burying his face into Buda’s fluffy coat.
The truth was, I had been thinking a lot about the Velgein condition, and based on what I had seen in this world, I did have a theory.
As with all traits, I was relatively confident that one’s starter HP and MP came, in part, from one’s parentage. I had started this life with a decent magic pool for a level one child, above what I had seen in my local community. My parents could both use magic, my mother’s much more powerful than my father’s, so it stood to reason that some aspect of that was passed on to me in the womb.
I knew that magic concentration and use helped to elevate one’s magic pool when they leveled up. I had even seen a condition that my childhood friend Nodel had suffered from excessive magic absorption which negatively affected her health before she learned to use it and burn it off, which in turn led to rapid, massive growth to her magic pool.
Presumably, early settlers to the north found themselves in the magic desert and over time found their magic pools emptied out. With an MP stuck almost perpetually near or at zero, growth in MP would stagnate. As they conceived children, they would fail to pass on their MP in large numbers to their offspring. Since lower MP tended to correlate to higher HP, eventually the people that lived here hit a point where they passed on no MP at all, and in turn were favored with enhanced physiques.
The question I had was whether or not that was a literal mutation in their genome, or a solvable condition.
Could I supercharge a Velgein person with magic to the point that they would acquire base MP upon leveling up?
“There… may be something I could try,” I said hesitantly. Giran’s eyes lit up, but I ignored him and turned to his mother. “I would need your permission.”
Revkah frowned. “Is it… safe?”
“I don’t necessarily think it would be dangerous,” I said slowly. “It should be trivial for me to keep him alive with healing magic.”
“Keep him… alive?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at me. “That sounds pretty dangerous to me.”
I gave her a half-shrug, and she shook her head.
“Sorry kiddo,” I said, turning back to Giran. His eyes welled up and he started to wail. I grimaced, apologized to Revkah, and snuck away from the crying boy to leave him to his mother. Buda snorted at me as I walked off, still being held in place by the crying child’s fists balled up in his fur.
Despite the rejection, it was something I would have liked to try in the future. Feeding someone an MP potion would probably make them temporarily ill, like it had with Nodel’s condition, but it would force excess MP into their body which would be taken into account upon leveling up. If I could either overcharge them with a full MP potion right before leveling up, or gradually increase their MP absorption with weaker potions over time as they worked towards a level up, I theorized that they could, eventually, break out from zero MP to one or more. Once they had some to work with, it would just be a matter of being taught how to use it—and having the materials necessary to replenish it, although that would happen naturally south of the mountains—and help their maximum MP grow with subsequent levels.
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Since it would require multiple levels to see a cumulative gain, it would be a better experiment for someone young with a lot of potential to quickly level up, the same way I had helped Nodel and Soa grow. To be honest, it had been wildly reckless of me to teach Nodel magic, but I was worried she would die if I did not. As for Soa, she was a southern orphan and needed all the help she could get, so any risks were worth it for her.
Giran had a family, and could live a happy life in the north without magic. I was not going to go behind his mother’s back. Frankly, without my continued resources—which I was depleting for myself as it were—my help would not amount to much for someone staying in the north. They would eventually hit the same roadblocks their ancestors did.
I shelved my thoughts on the matter when a screeching mental blast pierced my brain.
* * *
“Ugh,” I moaned, having fallen to my knees. Treepo chittered at me in concern, circling around me before standing and putting his front paws on me. “I’m ok… damn, that was more intense than I remembered.”
The intensity of this alarm was the main reason I had initially abandoned this particular avenue of experimentation with enchantments.
Pulling out my 3-point magic circle, I started scrying.
The alarm was the pendant I had left with Leiran. She must have pressed the magic crystal into the device, enabling the one-time 3-point magic enchantment within the artifact which sent me a telepathic alert.
My scrying revealed to me that Leiren was in Freigel, a small town just north of the mountain pass that had previously been abandoned when the Horuthian forces set up their lodgement nearby. It was the first town I visited in the north when I helped Leiren and Toch escape the camp, before heading onward to Teichar.
“That’s not good,” I murmured.
I attempted to create a telepathic link with Leiren. I was not sure it would work as a two-way connection, as Leiren had no MP to fuel the link on her side, but telepathy was one of the weird magics which did not seem to use enough MP to actually decrease my magic pool, but then again, I had never had 3-point magic less than at an advanced level. I had never taught it to anyone else to see if what held true for me was true for others, and never thought to check in with the precious few people I had used the skill with to see how their MP reacted.
Fortunately, I was overthinking the problem. The connection was made easily. Information magic was not particularly expensive compared to other forms of magic.
<...Pilus? How is this possible?>
Leiren paused for a moment.
I nodded to myself. This was around the time of year I had come north the previous spring with the first wave of reinforcements. By the time the Kingdom would have acknowledged that the insurgency was pushing them back out of the north, it would have been too late in the year to send reinforcements to fight a winter war. The Horuthians were not used to this level of cold, but it sounded like they were making another offensive soon.
Still, my decision from before the winter stood. I did not want to massacre my countrypeople wholesale.
<...The scouts heard a rumor that the Kingdom is sending in a mage to wipe out any further resistance to retake our land. A master mage.>
Oh. That’s definitely not good.
The Horuth Kingdom always had the numbers over the northerners, given that they engaged in farming grain and had an easier time expanding their population, plus the additional population of those integrated from the southern conquest generations past, though I had no idea what percentage of the army was southern. However, even with the numbers on their side, weaker iron against Velgein steel and weaker Horuthians against Velgein might have meant that, all things being equal, the north was able to hold its own against. It was not numbers that won the north over a decade back.
It was magic that made the difference. I had initially thought, upon coming to this world, that magic was the great equalizer, but from what I had learned about history it was exactly the opposite. Well-guarded secrets about healing magic is what won the south for the Kingdom, despite the south having already advanced their knowledge of magic from individual spell mastery to magic circle usage.
Similarly, it was magic that turned the tide when the Kingdom invaded the north. It would have again been enough this past year to suppress the rebellion if not for my aid, not that I would say that to Golchev. It sounded like after a year of fighting the rebellion, King Tobar Horuth was done playing around and taking measures to fully suppress the north once more.
The magical might of one particular individual, a hero to the kingdom, was the major factor in the initial invasion conquering the Velgein people. Through that war he achieved full advancement and became a Master, and from his mastery came the accolades, wealth, and power of a war hero.
It was for that reason that he was given leadership of a magical research institute in a growing, peaceful, coastal town in the west of the kingdom, carved out of the local jungle. The town of Mirut, where I was born and grew up.
I did not know if there were other master mages that the Kingdom had access to, but I knew for certain that there was one. It stood to reason he would be the one to return to the north and suppress it once more.
The man in question was my mother’s master, the very man who had given me my first lesson about magic on my fourth birthday: Vorel Bargolson, master of fire and illusion.