Day 31, 4:20 AM

  “Ready for your lesson?” Edna asks while the rain still assaults the canopy above us. Whoever designed this crazy ecosystem needs a five star review, would let them design a world again.

  “Sure am,” I say without skipping a beat. I’ve been hovering at the border of sleep, waiting for her to catalog her thoughts.

  “All right.” She tries not to sound surprised by me being already awake and starts her lesson as I move to kneel before her. “Apprentice mage has eight known levels, with fourteen known skills. At first level you get a choice between Initial Arcane Lore and Initial Mana Sense. The former lets you understand some basic concepts about magic and learn the complex ones more easily. The latter lets you sense mana. I know of no cases where an apprentice mage willingly took the former over the latter, since learning to sense mana on your own is a tedious, years-long process which our distant ancestors had to learn.”

  I make a mental note to ask Edna about those ancestors, but don’t interrupt her carefully prepared speech.

  “When you reach level two, you will get to choose between Increased Mana Capacity and Initial Draw Mana. Just about everyone chooses to learn to draw mana, but there were people who decided to experiment. They ultimately failed to become mages, but they have documented their experiences as well as warnings against taking the skill. Apparently, Increased Mana Capacity allows more mana into your body, this was confirmed through mana sensing skills, but without the ability to draw more mana into your body, your ability to cast spells becomes extremely limited, and getting past the journeyman mage class is believed to be impossible.”

  All right, I can see why that would be the case. Having a bigger tank you can’t refuel when you like sounds like a crippling flaw.

  “Level three offers a pair of underwhelming skills, Initial Arithmetics and Initial Calligraphy. You mentioned that you have both, so there’s no reason to explain what they do, but I do need to tell you why they are useful to mages. Arithmetics are a vital part of spellcasting, once you gain the ability to manipulate external mana through the use of the one you internalized, you will understand how mind-bogglingly complex the task is. You will need to take into account the flow of mana, the density, what your opponents or allies are going to draw and how that will affect the atmosphere.”

  Edna stops herself from talking more, probably for the sake of my level up condition. “All these are things you cannot truly learn through theory, only practice and spellcasting. As for calligraphy, its use is mostly found in artificing. Simple magical equipment, like your staff, doesn’t require runes, but items which can mimic or even use spells require complex inscriptions to channel mana, as well as a skilled user to control the process.”

  Edna lifts her index finger, pointing at the sky. “Even if you have a hoard of magical contraptions, wands, disks, and such, you need to be at least a journeyman mage to use them because they require fine manipulation of mana. An important thing to note is that both skills can be acquired through diligent study and if you have them already, the level up will offer to increase their tier.”

  That sounds promising and confirms my theory. If a skill is tiered, classes offering it will offer a tier increase. That means I need to find a class which offers a guaranteed staffmanship skill increase.

  “The fourth level offers two very interesting skills; Initial Mana Control is the norm and what most people choose, but the alternative isn’t crippling. Initial Mana Overflow is the complete opposite of its counterpart. It forfeits control in exchange for power. Grabbing at least one level is handy for some, but most people who took it did so as journeyman mages.”

  Edna scans me as if expecting I will join the camp of those some.

  “Initial Mana Overflow uses any excess mana you channel while casting into making your spells more potent, in some way. Unfortunately, without control, you have no say in how the spell is improved. Your fireball may grow bigger, hotter, travel faster, but you don’t get to choose. Initial Mana Control curbs that defect if you have it, so people usually opt to choose it first. Healers, like me, prefer to increase its tier instead of supercharging our spells. For one, in healing more control already supercharges the spell, for another, healers rarely have mana to waste when they are needed.”

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  So, to do things properly, I need both, and I should try to increase their tier as much as possible. Maybe as I loop through the mage classes, I’ll get a hang of it enough to acquire the skills on my own.

  “Level five is where most apprentice mages exit the class, since it has the final skill they need to become mages and effectively cast spells, Initial Awakened Consciousness. The skill allows magic, something entirely alien and inconvincible to the human mind to become natural. Initial Parallel Thinking, on the other hand, is a complete trap.”

  Edna crosses her arms, and I barely stop myself from making a fishy comment.

  “The most ancient texts claim that by taking this skill in conjunction with a few others, the most powerful archmages have acquired a skill called Dual Casting. It allowed them to cast two spells at once. The records are around two thousand years old, and I, as a mage, can’t even begin to comprehend how the mind, hands, and mouth is supposed to function in that scenario.”

  That’s a fair point, Edna has to wave her hands and sing a melody when using more complex spells, but even for the simpler ones, either the song or the hand gestures are still present. Maybe if there are skills which reduce the need for them, or something?

  “The sixth level is a bit quirky, and it’s also the main reason most apprentice mages only strive for five levels. It’s very difficult to reach the seventh level, and the skills the sixth grants are underwhelming. You get a choice between Improved Distance Estimation and Improved Weight Estimation. Both are kind of useful when learning and practicing new spells, but that’s about it. One turns you into a human ruler, the other into a human scale.”

  She shrugs, and I kind of agree. I was a human ruler, and it wasn’t a fun job.

  “Level seven is another disappointment. You get another take at the skills you didn’t take at levels one and three. Meaning you pick between arcane lore, calligraphy, and arithmetics. If it wasn’t for level eight, all you got from climbing this high is two random skills and two attribute points. But, level eight more than compensates for the wasted time, if you manage to reach it.”

  The way Edna is speaking, I’m expecting to hear a drum roll, maybe a thunder in the distance. I prick my ears up, and Edna pauses, but the heavens don’t appreciate the dramatic moment.

  “Finally, level eight is the highest recorded one, and it gives a choice between two equally excellent skills, Initial Mana Affinity and Initial Mana Ambivalence. The names don’t mean much, the descriptions are even worse, the first one reinforces your mana affinity, the second one erases it. What they do is, they either make your area of expertise even more powerful, at the cost of decreasing your proficiency with all other fields of magic, or they entirely wipe away your innate preference and make all magic available and equally easy to use.”

  Edna eyes me, probably wondering if I have any questions, but I have already mastered the art of biting my tongue while she’s teaching, so she continues uninterrupted.

  “I can’t tell you which of these is better, but I can tell you that I would choose to reinforce my specialty, which is life magic. I would probably completely lose the ability to use red mana, but I could live without elemental spells.”

  Apparently, opposite, or at least conflicting, types of mana exist, and I note the thought, adding another question to those I plan on asking after the lesson.

  Edna proceeds to explain how different attributes influence magic. I’m surprised and amused to learn that what I have chalked off as social attributes influence magic targeting the mind.

  She wraps up the lesson and I ask my questions. As expected, she has no information about the geniuses who blazed their own path, learning how to sense mana and cast spells in an era before written history.

  As for different types of mana, they are aligned by color. Black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and white.

  Black is associated with objects, brown with death and burial, red with the elemental forces, orange with the stars, yellow with chaos and cowardice, green with life, blue with order and bravery, indigo is related to space, while violet relates to time, and finally, white is associated with fate.

  I consider the way this world’s mages split magic, and it feels like drunks playing horseshoes in a carpenter’s backyard full of stakes. The division is utterly random, obviously wrong, but that doesn’t matter.

  I have fully comprehended the lesson and a level up notification confirms my suspicion that BSD cares little about me learning the hidden cosmic truths, and instead focuses on the drivel Edna is teaching.