Chronicles of the True Wizard

Felix woke up, just three hours later. He felt completely rested so he decided to get up for the day. He looked out the window and saw the inky black of night still held so he decided to start going through his new spell book. He had skimmed through the pages when he had picked up the book up so he could check if his Memory Palace skill managed to remember the entire thing. He had wanted to test that for a while now, but didn't have access to any books big enough to do so.

He entered the library in his mind and looked for the book in his short term memory. He found that most of it was there, but some of the details were missing. Some of the pages were fine, others had blurry lines in place of the words and most of the intricacies of the spell forms were missing.

Not quite. I wonder if I could practice so I could eventually pull that off, or maybe I could find a spell to scan books, then I wouldn't even have to open them? Could I make that spell? No idea where to start on that now, but hopefully with more spells I can eventually figure something like that out.

Felix returned his consciousness to his body, pulled out the spell book and began reading under the light of a sustained Fire Bolt. There were a grand total of nine different spells listed in the spell book. Felix went through and memorized each and every one of their spell forms. There were also descriptions of the effects and some of the uses of the spells, all of which Felix found useless. The spell names were very self explanatory already and the listed uses were just the obvious ones.

I guess it kind of makes sense that the Spell Book only has a rarity. The spell form itself probably doesn't change between tiers in order to cast the same effect. Something in the way you cast it and how much mana is used could, but the spell form itself would probably remain consistent. The rarity is probably based on which and how many spells are in the book.

The spells the book contained were ordered from simplest to most complex. The first two Felix was happy about but not overly excited for. Heat and Light were simple utility spells it seemed. He could already achieve the general effect of the spell using Fire Bolt, but the added control provided by Heat and safety provided by Light were nice.

The next spell, had Felix more excited. While the effect was extremely similar to what he could already do, the addition of a new element that was obviously useful was the main attraction. Force Bolt was essentially Mana Bolt, but used raw force, it seemed.

Cool was the exact opposite of Heat in effect, but its spell form was more complex. Given a small area, Cool would consume mana to lower the temperature. Felix figured the added complexity had something to do with entropy or something like that, but figured he could investigate it later on.

Spark was cool because it involved electricity, but was useless otherwise. The spell had two spell forms that needed to be cast, then it would create a spark between them. The further apart they were, the higher the mana requirement to generate anything. Felix noted that, oddly, the spell forms were channeled.

Thunderclap was a novelty because it generated pure sound, but Felix didn't see many uses for it right now. Launch was the exact opposite, it was very similar to spells he had already seen but with a different targeting component. He saw many uses for both launching objects at high speed and in the new targeting component which seemed to target objects directly.

Jump and Feather Fall were much more refined and effective than his versions using Gust, which were already incredibly valuable additions to Felix's repertoire. They also used a different target component in their spell forms, which was exciting in it's own right.

Finally, the last spell in the book had the most complicated spell form and was the most exciting for Felix. Mana Shield let the caster channel mana into a spell form which generated a disc of mana in front of them.

Finally, some kind of defensive options, well, option. Time to experiment.

First, Felix entered the library in his mind and made sure the spell forms and notes on each spell were filed away so he always remembered them. Then, he began experimenting.

Felix began with Mana Shield as it was easily the most exciting for him. It took him a quarter hour just to cast the spell as its spell form was so complicated. Once he did, he was thoroughly disappointed. The spell did exactly as it said, it made a disc with a diameter of almost Felix's height, made of solid mana. It hung in the air with its center about a foot from Felix's navel. No matter where Felix cast the spell, it appeared in the exact same location. As he walked around the room, it followed him as long as he channeled mana into it, otherwise it would dissipate.

Felix tested shooting Mana Bolt's at himself, but to the side. That way it would hit the shield, but if the shield failed, he wouldn't be hitting himself. The shield dissipated the instant the Mana Bolt hit it, but not because of the spell. Felix cast the shield again, and hit it with a Mana Bolt, but this time he was expecting it. As soon as the Mana Bolt hit the shield, Felix needed to replenish the mana. The first time it hit, he hadn't been expecting the mana in the shield to vanish causing a void of mana to pull on Felix's mana pool to replenish the spell. It cost almost triple the mana Felix needed to cast a Mana Bolt, just to block one.

It wasn't perfect, but Felix already had some ideas to try and make it more efficient, and it was the only defensive option Felix had. After experimenting with hitting the shield using all of the spells he knew, with no unexpected results, Felix moved on to testing other spells. Heat, Cool and Light did exactly what he expected. He replaced Fire Bolt with the Light spell as his source of light, which was much more efficient.

He didn't want to test Thunderclap in the middle of the castle, in the middle of the night, so he held off on that one. Frankly, he didn't want to test it at all, he was worried about his own ears, but he knew he should at some point. He couldn't effectively test Jump, Feather Fall or Launch in his room and it was still too dark to see outside.

Felix played with Spark for a bit, and got used to it, before growing bored. He didn't really see any use for spark currently so it was more of a novelty than anything else.

Lastly he tested out Force Bolt. First he cast the spell without it's outer ring so that it wouldn't fire. The spell created a small ball of a translucent material with a slight blue tint that looked like water. Felix touched it and it rippled slightly but otherwise did nothing, to Felix, it felt a little but like poking a water balloon. Felix shrugged and just let it drop to the ground. As soon as it hit the ground, it created a small explosion, like a tiny grenade, with no fire. Felix jumped back more in surprise than any effect the Force Bolt's explosion had.

Huh, well that's interesting. Not sure what to do with that, I don't really want to swap force into my other spells if that's what a small ball does. I guess that makes sense though, force is like mechanical energy, in a little ball, what else is it supposed to do? I always thought of force as a solid though, like a force field, but I guess that's what Mana is? Mana Bolt and now Mana Shield are basically that, a solid object. I haven't really tested how much it takes to get through it though so I don't know how effective it is.

Felix didn't want to go outside just yet and potentially wake people up with light and sound so he decided to put off further testing of his new spells until later. For now he entered his mental library and began splitting the spells into their components. He didn't do any more than basic dissections as he would need to test the components to go any further.

With that out of the way, he exited his mind and put away the Spell Book and pulled out the [E - Arcane] Skill Test Cube: Mana Control.

What is Arcane rarity? That doesn't fit on any rarity scales I have ever heard of. Maybe it's like unique? Maybe it isn't a part of the rarity scale at all and it just means it's magical? Another question to ask someone. I don't think Noah or Amelia would know this one though.

Felix inspected the cube in the light of his Light spell but couldn't discern anything interesting. It was a featureless reflective black cube. Ironically, the most interesting part of the cube, to Felix, was that it didn't show any fingerprints whatsoever.

Well, it's a mana cube, guess I should try that.

Felix pushed a small trickle of mana into the cube which immediately caused a blue circle with a slight glow to appear on one side. Felix likely wouldn't have even noticed it if the room weren't as dark as it was. He flipped the cube over and examined the circle. There was nothing interesting or unique about the circle other than that it now existed, where it hadn't before. Felix could vaguely sense the circle with his mana senses as well.

Felix couldn't figure out what else he was supposed to do so he pushed mana into the circle. The circle glowed bright blue before it suddenly stopped accepting mana. It was like it had closed itself off. Felix stopped and waited and it returned to it's previous muted glow. He tried again and the exact same thing happened. He let it reset then he very slowly pushed mana into the circle with his eyes closed and his mana senses fully focused on the box.

He thought the ring was growing slightly outwards but he wasn't quite sure. He focused on the ring growing and tried to sense any changes in it's size. It was definitely growing, slightly, sort of. Felix sensed the mana spreading itself out from the circle, creeping outwards. He payed attention to the edge of the circle, where it was creeping outwards and ran his attention around the circle. Felix had to shift his focus all the way around the circle twice before finally noticing a slight divot in the growing ring. It was so small, Felix though he imagined it at first, but after confirming, he was certain it was there.

Everywhere else, the ring grew at the same rate, in this one spot, it slowed down slightly for some reason. Felix focused and tested over and over again. Luckily, growing the ring took a negligible amount of mana. Finally, after some unknown amount of time, Felix could finally see what was happening, barely. The ring was growing because there were thousands of tiny channels around the edge of the circle running outwards. The divot, was caused by a slight detour in one of the channels, it bent slightly to the side then back again, a tiny kink.

Knowing what was happening, Felix pushed mana into the ring, flooded the channels and pushed slightly harder on the one channel with the kink in it. After a few tries to make it perfectly even, the mana pushed right past and the ring continued to grow, until the next tiny divot in a channel.

Knowing what to do now, and being able to see, Felix felt like he blew right through this side of the cube. At first he planned out and memorized where he needed to push more or less, eventually that became too difficult. There were too many channels and there were points at which two channels that required more mana surrounded one that required less mana. If his offsets were off just slightly, it was doomed. Eventually he just started moving very slowly and sensing what was happening, adjusting it in real time. There was another hiccup when he didn't realize the circle that started at the center, needed to morph into a square to fill the whole side. Each and every channel needed to reach their corresponding edge at the same time.

As soon as it was complete, the side he was working on retained its mana making the whole side glow. At the same time, a circle in the center of a different side began glowing slightly.

This side took a miniscule amount of mana, glowed, then closed itself off from any more mana. Felix was confused for a while but he eventually realized he was supposed to control the mana he pushed into the ring after it closed. Starting with the same principal as the last stage, he spread it outwards. There were no channels on this stage so Felix spread it outwards. He only had a trickle of mana to work with and he had to spread it out over the entire side of the cube.

The hard part was getting used to controlling the smallest unit of mana possible, then getting used to controlling an even smaller amount, all at once. As the mana spread out, there was more and more mana to individually control. In the previous side of the cube, there were a set number of channels, a few of them split and diverged, but he could add mana to compensate. With this side, the mana slowly spread out and naturally thinned itself causing there to be more and more mana he had to individually control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .