Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 37

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It took me a second to get back into the rhythm of things, and even though I’d given this speech many, many times in my past life, it suddenly felt awkward to be doing it again now. But I’d given magical lectures under worse conditions, and I could do it again now.

“Inscription is similar to enchanting, except that you are inscribing the language of magic onto a physical object. The primary purpose of this is to allow anyone to pick up that object and, assuming a base requisite amount of training, push mana into it to activate it. You might think of it as the other side of enchantment’s coin.

“Finally, transmutation. This is the discipline of magic that involves permanently changing one thing into another. Similar to conjuration, the magic is created, it has an effect, and then it ends. The difference is that the temporary effect deliberately alters a physical object. This is different than, for example, conjuring a blast of fire which incidentally leaves the ground scorched.”

“That… is a lot,” Father said.

“It is,” I agreed. “And I’m not going to get into any of those five disciplines beyond what I’ve just told you. Just knowing their basic purviews is enough information for today. What we’re going to talk about instead are invocations, which are the easiest spells to learn, and conjurations, which are the opposite of invocations. The primary difference is that invocations are an internal expression of mana, whereas conjurations are external.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far. Invocations are what we’re all doing every day to help us work the fields,” Father said. “And you can show me how to do it better, I guess? Be more efficient?”

“Technically speaking, I have only observed people using unstructured mana in a way that produces similar effects to an invocation spell. You could classify it as more of a pseudo-invocation than an actual spell. But yes, I’m going to give you some exercises to practice, and teach you how to cast the spell known as weight reduction. It’s the spell you’ll use to get down from here tomorrow, so it’s important to pay attention.”

“Wait, do you mean…” Father trailed off as he glanced over at the edge of the cliff. “Are you expecting me to voluntarily jump off of that tomorrow and trust in a spell I don’t know how to cast to save my life?”

“I would recommend practicing today,” I said dryly. “I’ve been forced into situations where I’ve had to use unfamiliar magic on the fly before. It seldom went well.”

“But you’re going to be watching to save me if something goes wrong, right?”

I shrugged. “I’m on a limited mana budget right now. I’m sure you’ll rise to the challenge.”

“Spirits guide my path. My son is a monster.”

I ignored that. I’d been called worse, and rightfully so. Father’s sarcasm aside, I was a monster. Just because I’d grown softer in my old age did not make me any less of one. There had been a time in my life when many people had a vested interest in killing me, and in retrospect, they’d been right to make the attempt.

“Let’s start with some mana control exercises. You need to be able to direct your mana to do what you want before you can shape it into a spell. It’s important to learn and know your own limits here as well. Having access to all the mana in the world does you no good if your mind is so wrung out that you can’t concentrate well enough to put together the simplest spell. Additionally, the worse your concentration, the sloppier your spell, which wastes your mana.”

In my past life, I would have saved that lesson for after an apprentice had the basics down. Refining mana control was important, but more so at the higher levels of spells where a bleed over effect could ruin the entire spell. Given the situation we were in though, techniques for conserving mana were going to be some of the most important things I could teach Father.

Fortunately, invocations were uniquely suited to practice this. Since the mana was imbued into the caster’s body, it was much easier to recycle excess mana back into the core without anything escaping into the air. That was, not coincidentally, why I started every new apprentice mage with invocations. They were fantastic learning tools for beginners. Everything was easier to control and sense.

“You remember how we spun the mana in your core to pack it down during your ignition?” I asked.

“I do,” Father said.

“This will be similar to that, except that instead of keeping it in your core, the goal is to sweep the mana out to the tips of your fingers and toes, and then bring it back to your core without losing any. Think of it somewhat like doing stretches for your mana core instead of your body. The easy part of this will be moving your mana out. The hard part will be bringing it back without losing any along the way.”

I watched as Father took his hesitant first steps along the road of magic and offered him guidance where I could. His early attempts often resulted in his mana threading its way down his arms and legs, usually getting close to his goal, and breaking apart when he overextended himself. After the fifth time, I said, “Remember, this exercise is about control. You need to stop trying to give your mana momentum. You’re not heaving it in an explosion of strength. You are guiding it with a steady hand to where it needs to be.”

Father grumbled something under his breath, but he slowed down and kept a tighter grip on his mana after that. It didn’t stretch nearly as far, but he also didn’t lose nearly as much when he pulled it back. “I thought you said getting the mana to my hands and feet was the easy part,” he said after a while.

“It is.”

“Doesn’t feel very easy.”

“Well, ‘easy’ is a relative term.”

Senica wandered over around then and asked, “Can I try too?”

Considering it had been days since she’d been subjected to a draw stone, her mana core was better than half full. She certainly had enough reserves to perform the exercise, but I had some doubts about her ability to control her mana. Still, it wouldn’t hurt anything if she wasted her mana on this and I’d be right here to keep an eye on her if she tried to do anything dangerous.

“Sure,” I said. “Do you need any help?”

“Nope!”

She settled down right next to Father, who’d had his eyes closed for most of the last hour in an attempt to increase his focus on the task. He didn’t look down at her, but I saw the corner of his mouth curl up into a smile.

It took her twenty minutes to complete the exercise, a bit faster than I’d expected. “I did it!” she said, disrupting Father’s concentration again. His eyes popped open to give her a look of disbelief before shifting to me.

I shrugged. “She did. It’s not surprising, really. She’s smaller, so less physical distance, and she has less mana, so less effort to control it.”

“She’s six!” Father protested.

“I suppose she’s a natural. Maybe we should have ignited her core instead of yours.”

Father thought about that for a second, then laughed. “I guess so.”

He continued to practice with Senica’s encouragement. That wasn’t doing much for his focus, but since he might someday need to put together a spell while someone else was actively trying to kill him, I let her keep distracting him. As far as handicaps went, this one was pretty mild.

Surprisingly, not all of her advice was bad. I had to clap a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing when, during one of his attempts, she said, “No, Dad! You have to push it out from the center, not pull on it. That’s why it keeps breaking! You’re stretching it too much.”

Father had been attempting to work the strands of mana winding through his limbs with a sort of gentle pulling motion of his mana, stretching it thinner and thinner the farther it reached. He was pushing more mana in to reinforce the structure, but on Senica’s advice, he switched to pushing it out from his core to give it more length and focusing his mental efforts on holding its shape.

There were hundreds of different mana manipulation techniques, and my personal style of teaching was to introduce a student to some base concepts, let them take some time to get a feel for how they wanted to move their mana around, and suggest exercises and training regimens to refine what they were trying to do or alternatives that would be easy for them to transition into. This tended to result in better control as students found what worked best for them before building on it.

But this worked too, and considering how little time we had to actually work on Father’s mana control, I couldn’t bring myself to object to the interference in the process. It seemed to be helping at least, even if it wasn’t the route Father would have naturally gone to on his own.

“Oh, I think I did it,” Father said in surprise. His mana had stretched all the way down into his toes while still tightly controlled.

“Now pull it back in without losing any,” I said. “Once you can reliably do that, we’ll start on the actual spell itself.”

The training continued on into the evening with a break for some frankly unappealing raw food from our garden, now several days old. All of us were eager to return to the village, if for no other reason than to have access to the garden and cooking fire again. Despite knowing how I needed to carefully conserve my mana, I had to resist serious temptation to do something to make the meal more palatable.

My father wasn’t the brightest student I’d ever taught, not by a long shot, but he was adequate. For the limited plans I’d began drafting over the future of the village, he would do well enough. It didn’t seem like he was interested in a permanent position running the place and defending it, but I thought I could talk him into at least holding the spot until he could find someone to replace him. If I was really lucky, he’d pass on whatever magical knowledge I managed to impart over the next few weeks or months and I’d be able to go completely hands off with managing the village.

If I were in a better position to do so, I might have considered Senica as a possible student. She was too young still, ironic coming from me, but in five or six years, she would be the perfect age and I was in a unique position to lay down substantial groundwork with her. As it stood, I just didn’t have the mana to devote to helping her yet. Maybe in a year or two, that would change, but I doubted it.

“And that’s ten,” Father wheezed out as he finished the final stretch of his mana I’d demanded of him. More than half of his reserves had been lost to practice, but that would all refill while he was asleep anyway.

“Alright, time to move on then. Let me show you the weight reduction spell,” I said.

“What, right now? I’m exhausted.”

“That’s intentional,” I told him. “You need to be able to cast spells under extreme conditions. A spell you can only use in a test chamber with no outside interference is no use to you. If you find yourself falling from a thousand feet up, you have only seconds to cast this spell before you hit the ground and die. You won’t get a second chance if you mess it up.”

Father groaned and pulled himself back fully upright. “Okay, okay. You’re right. Tell me what to do, oh wise master.”

Once again, I ignored the sarcasm, but I did find myself missing my teaching staff. It had that one nifty little inscription to make someone’s bottom feel like they’d been swatted with a switch for thirty seconds before the pain faded. I could have used that about now.

There was no sense crying over the loss. I started to pull my own mana out of my core to show Father where and how to use his, being very careful not to actually cast the spell as I demonstrated each part. I was going to need that mana back; there was no reason to waste it.

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