Chương 84: B2—Chapter 15: I’m A Real Wizard!

Lyura left first for the airport. Lis and Mahya stayed behind, busy at the computer as they looked for a good place to work, and left the next day. For the first couple of days, I didn't know what to do with myself. After spending so much time with friends, being alone again felt off. I wandered around Lleida, not exactly down, just lonely and restless. Rue picked up on it and kept clinging to me despite the hated rain, licking my face and rubbing his head against me, making sure I remembered I wasn't really alone.

God, I love this dog. After two days, it was time to snap out of it and get back to my assigned homework. I headed to Madrid, booked a hotel, toured the city for a couple of days, and then returned to studying Mana Constructs for Spell Creation. My study sessions were brief and inconsistent, in between everything else going on and the sheer difficulty of wizard word vomit, but despite that, I'd already made it through about half the book.

It took me a week to finish it and another three weeks to complete the exercises and practice forming the basic mana constructs. The simplest forms were an orb, a cube, a tube, either small for a dart or larger for more complex spells, a mesh, and a shell. The shell and the mesh gave me the most trouble, since neither had a standard shape. A shell changed based on the spell it needed to hold or the object it was embedded in, while a mesh depended on the item or area it needed to influence.

Meshes added another layer of difficulty. All area-of-effect spells required an open mesh, but mana constructs couldn't have open ends. Open lines caused mana leakage and collapsed the spell. Simply closing the edges didn't work either, since that short-circuited the construct and caused it to fail. Instead, I had to build a complex lattice along the edges, using a single continuous line of mana to seal all the mesh lines. It felt like weaving geometry, with the lattice demanding precise, repeating measurements.

The hardest part was that most embedded mesh spells also required a shell. The two interfered with each other unless I balanced them perfectly. Learning to keep both stable at once drove home an uncomfortable truth. Magic fascinated me, but it was far more complicated than I'd first assumed. I'd started out thinking, Hey, it's magic. You wave your hand, and things happen. That turned out to be wrong. Magic had laws and rules, just like a complex piece of technology, and ignoring them only led to failure. Bummer.

Once I got comfortable with the basic shapes and could create a simple open mesh, it was time to move on to the next step. Before diving in, I toured the city a bit, stocked up on Spanish food for variety, and visited the Prado Museum. That one was a must. Now it was time to make spells. After some deliberation, I went with the classics: fire and ice. There was probably a reason those two showed up so often in books. Finding those elements wasn't that easy.

I tried studying an ice cube, but it was too small and somehow not substantial enough to serve as a guide. Fire wasn't readily available either. After some thought, I rented a one-bedroom apartment with a fireplace and burned two logs from Tuonela. At first, the mana released leaned toward wood and nature, but after about two hours of burning, it shifted into fire mana and finally gave me the aspect I needed. Cross-legged in front of the fireplace, I closed my eyes and tried to learn the fire aspect.

In the middle of my experiments, Rue approached, his heavy paws thudding against the floor, and shouted into my mind, making me wince.

"NO! UNDERSTAND!"

"What don't you understand?"

"TV." He huffed, his tail flicking in irritation.

"You don't understand the TV?"

"YES! NO! UNDERSTAND!" His ears flattened, and he pawed at the floor. Curious, I went over to the TV, and it was tuned to a Spanish channel.

"Maybe we can find something in English?"

"NO! TV! NO! UNDERSTAND!" Rue barked and shouted mentally. I looked forward to the day he'd start speaking in full sentences at a normal volume. Trying to understand him from a single shouted word proved pretty challenging. I bought him Local Adaptation: Spoken Language—another five ability points gone—and finally understood why Lis called it the "Starting Package." It never ends. I spent the 500 mana for Spanish, and he went straight back to his show.

He'd spent too much time with Lyura; she infected him with her TV obsession. At least he could change channels with Telekinesis and didn't need me to do it. I went back to my fire experiments, focused on the aspect… and burned my hand. Ouch! This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. The next time, I got smarter and built a mana mesh around my hand, just like in one exercise, then focused on the fire aspect again.

I caught it once, but it slipped away, then again and again. After another half hour of trial and error, with a lot of muttered curses and annoyance, a flame finally bloomed in my hand. I had to keep feeding it mana so it wouldn't go out, but it was a flame, nonetheless. A flame I created. I WAS A REAL WIZARD! I sat there for a solid ten minutes, doing nothing but staring at it, completely captivated. Eventually, I snapped out of it and called out, "Rue, come see!"

He trotted over and leaned in to inspect the flame, sniffed it, and immediately started sneezing, his whole body jerking with each sneeze.

"BAD! JOHN!" Rue shouted, his tone accusing.

"I'm not bad John; I told you to look, not smell."

"BAD! FRIEND!" He insisted, his eyes narrowing.

"I'm really sorry," I said, trying to keep a straight face.

"Next time, don't sniff fire. But look, I created a flame with my magic! I'm a real wizard!" He shook his head, shouted,"FIRE! BAD!" and went back to the TV. It was time to move to the next stage. I filled a bucket with water, created a somewhat thick dart construct, filled it with mana, applied the fire aspect, and pointed my hand at the bucket. The dart just sat there on my palm, not going anywhere. Huh?! No matter what I tried, it wouldn't budge.

The only thing that worked was physically throwing it into the bucket. Clearly, I was missing something. With a sigh, I went looking for answers. As I started checking through Lis's books, I ran into a snag. I'd paid the mana to learn the spoken and written languages of some of them, but I hadn't actually read those languages to internalize them. I'd just paid the mana. That meant I had to read a page or two of each book to understand the title and figure out whether it might help.

Unfortunately, none of the books I'd already paid mana for held the solution I needed. So I ended up spending a thousand mana on each new language, reading a page or two, identifying the title, and moving on to the next book. After 8, 000 mana, I still hadn't found anything useful. Humming in thought, I looked for a solution to the mana issue. It took a while, but then I remembered that I'd fixed one wizard spiral to 95% and still had an old one with only five rings in each orb that I never fixed.

Maybe that would help? Unraveling the spiral was quick; building a new one took more work. By the end, sprawled on the couch halfway to the floor and sweating with a headache, I still smiled. Second Spiral Completed Quality: 95% My regeneration went up from 7 mana per minute to 9 per minute. Not much of an improvement. I built another spiral, and this time it turned into a real battle. I didn't know why, but each spiral was harder to create than the last, and the jump in difficulty was significant.

Now I wasn't just half sprawled on the couch but flat on the floor, breathing hard and so drained I couldn't lift a hand even if my life depended on it. There was no way I was attempting a fourth. Third Spiral Completed Quality: 95% My mana regeneration rate increased to 12 per minute, and 14 with active regeneration using the Absorb aspect.

With regeneration still that low, I needed something to occupy my time while my mana refilled, so I booked some workshops to fill the hours and earn back the points I'd spent on Rue. Paella and Sangria Workshop with Dinner and Drinks 10 Tapas 2. 5-Hour Cooking Class Flamenco Class Experience Sigh! Workshops were a lot more fun with friends. After another eight books, I still didn't find a solution.

Latin Dance & Salsa Class Experience Unique Traditional Cooking Class of Sardines Velázquez Tech Museum + Paint your Menina Workshop Another eight books—still no solution. Private Bachata Class Stone Carving in Cercedilla Make Your Own Bird Feeder Workshop After three more books, I finally found Action Aspects for Spell Creation, and earned another 9 points—my total was back to 102. To celebrate, I toured the Royal Palace and paid extra to see the Royal Collection.

The next day was Sunday, so I headed to El Rastro to see what I could find. The flea market was massive, spilling through the historic center of Madrid. The plan had been to take Rue with me, but he refused to move from the TV, too busy binging a Spanish cop show. At the market, I wandered from stall to stall and picked up quite a few things that would sell well in fantasy land.

Level Up +3 Wisdom, +3 Perception, +2 Luck, +3 Free Points Profession: Merchant Level 7 My lowest stat, not including Luck, was Agility at 38, so I added the points there. Lis was right; we needed all the stats. I got back to my studies and was halfway through Action Aspects for Spell Creation when my phone buzzed. Lis's name flashed on the screen, and I answered with a quick swipe.

"Are you still in Spain, or have you left for Italy?"

"Still in Spain, in Madrid."

"Fly to Toulouse airport in France, rent a car, and drive to Balma. Call me when you get there, and I will give you further directions," he instructed.

"Why?"

"We're done with the project and want to show it to you." There was a hint of excitement in his voice.

"Okay, see you in a couple of days," I said, doing cartwheels in my mind. I was super excited since I missed both of them.

"Rue! We're flying to see Lis and Mahya," I called over the noise of the TV.

"FRIENDS!" he shouted back. I really needed to practice talking to him telepathically—it would at least save my throat. He was blasting the TV at an insane volume since he enjoyed hearing the gunshots loud, and I had no idea why or how. Dogs' ears were supposed to be sensitive. I booked a flight for the next day and went to bed buzzing with excitement. I really missed them both.