Chương 50: Chapter 49: Growing the Arsenal

++Enchanting had an obvious appeal to me, as someone who planned to do more with my magic than just live richly and comfortably, but like all of the new-age fields of the arcane, I had to struggle a lot to learn it from scratch. And I enjoyed every moment of it. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Paula's room was smaller than mine, and far more decorated. I had never had much time for ornamentation while at the Winzorth Institute, or at my own mansion in Lachfel.

I simply do not see any value in decorations that are not my own possessions. When I restored my full power and finished slaying the Gods, I would build a palace of pure silver and adorn its halls with my enemies' skulls. Until then, what point was there in showing off a few trinkets gifted to me by people who expected me to do nothing to earn them? The woman whose room I was in now clearly had more possessions of her own, or else thought differently about displaying gifts from others.

"Why did you invite me here?" I asked. There were papers strewn about, but plenty of other trinkets. Trophies and medals in one corner, jewellery shelved elsewhere. None of it told me much in particular.

"Because you didn't look like you were having a very good time in the common room, waiting for your new quarters," Paula replied.

"New quarters?" She arched an eyebrow.

"Huh, you didn't hear? And here I thought you were the Grandmaster's new favourite, with how you were scurrying around his office. That ring you have, he made it, right? Or enchanted it at least. I recognise his magic." I did not like having a face. It required constant effort to keep my thoughts from being betrayed by its movements.

"I do not know what you are talking about." Paula was not deterred, naturally.

"Where'd you get the ring?" she asked.

"I see, so this is just an interrogation, then. That is why you invited me here." I turned for the door and was halfway through it before she almost-reluctantly called me back.

"Wait, wait. I'm sorry. Okay, forget it, we don't need to talk about that. I'll pretend I didn't feel anything." Feel anything, so she just had highly attuned magical senses. Not my own ability to physically perceive mana. It was still barely less remarkable that she could feel the Grandmaster's work, he had mentioned masking its magical signature at least to some extent.

"Okay." I paused, but did not turn and head farther back into the room. I wanted to give the impression of being undecided about staying, and it proved a wise decision moments later. Paula gave me something more.

"I've been watching you in battle practice," she said after a moment.

"You're…good."

"Yes I am." I had watched her, too, and like me she had enjoyed quite the advantage over our far younger opponents. The chief difference was that she did not get undue credit for it, her age was visible from the outside.

"I was wondering if you wanted to practice with me," she said after another awkward moment.

"Why me?" The woman looked annoyed, now.

"Because I thought you were smart and skilled. Or do you just ask stupid questions and get by on luck?"

"I am smart and skilled," I answered.

"But why are you so interested in training battle magic?" She rolled her eyes and started pacing.

"Do you know why I only came here at eighteen?"

"No." Oh dear, I was about to be lectured on her background.

"Because my prospects were shit. Everyone here talks about being a genius, but I was an actual genius. Out of nowhere, not bred from ten generations of magicians willing to fuck their own sister if it meant a son with that much more arcane talent." I thought about that.

"So you did not have any connections among other magicians when you discovered your talent?"

"No," she confirmed.

"And I didn't have the wealth or titles of a noble to compensate either." She said that with enough bitterness that I knew she was comparing her own experience to mine. She was not wrong, I would have preferred to be born in a magician family, but the Vornholts were powerful enough for my purposes anyway. It was why I had invested so much effort into making the family my own.

"Do you know what it's like, working here, trying to learn knowledge that I know would have already made me a world power if I'd been able to learn it in my childhood, and seeing myself surrounded by people half my talent and half my age who already match me for skill and power just because they got an early leg-up?" It is so very rare, as a caveman-turned-lich-turned-baby, to actually empathise with someone. I did not like the experience, it felt unfamiliar and wrong. Almost violating.

"That must be very difficult," I said diplomatically. She seemed to suspect I was mocking her, and kept talking only after waiting a few moments to check. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"... It was. How was your upbringing?" Ah. Many nobles did not like magic, or its practitioners. Of course she wondered.

"Relatively easy, my father was reluctant to send me here but other than that I had few obstacles in learning magic." No doubt, the Vornholt family's dwindling funds had been behind that. My father viewed both myself and Agrian the Younger as his golden geese, and outside of the occasional fits of rage he'd shown, he was unwilling to do anything that might jeopardize our ability to make him money in the future. That was not a universally good thing, however. I thought once more about my arranged marriage.

That was closer now than before. I had turned twelve recently, a few more years and it would be an imminent problem.

"Not surprised," Paula sighed.

"Seems everyone here had an easier time of it than me." She took a seat and seemed to expect me to do the same, so I did. That relaxed her, if only slightly.

"So," she continued.

"You and me practicing together, what do you think?"

"It sounds acceptable," I said after a while.

"You may wish to spar with Agrian too." She frowned.

"Why?" Because it would give him that much more practice in magical combat, and leave me commanding a higher class of minion as a result. But that did not seem like the sort of answer she would expect.

"He is a tall man, closer to the build of most magicians than I am. Testing yourself only against a child-sized opponent might develop bad habits, it could even be worse than not sparring at all if you did not do anything to offset it." I had learned that much the hard way, it was amazing how poorly combat against normal humans prepared me for battle against Demigods standing seven feet or more. She was thoughtful, and, once again, frowning.

"You're oddly…together, for an eleven year-old."

"Twelve," I corrected.

"Right, okay. But still…" I decided not to say anything more, if I made a show of trying to convince her I was normal it would only do the opposite. Instead I leaned back and looked like I was pleased to have impressed her. That seemed to do the trick.

I was enchanting, and I was going at it with a new vigour. The Professor of Enchanting at the Winzorth Institute was a small man who nonetheless spoke as if he had the lungs of a giant, seeming to bellow every word from his lips. It made for a remarkably stressful work environment, apparently. Other students had complained, and he had laughed when they had.

"You won't always be working under ideal circumstances, if your focus can't survive a bit of shouting then your focus won't survive." Professor Hyxal Foir was not the easiest man to reason with. Nor was he the easiest to look at, being almost as wide as he was tall and boasting a flabby, toad-like face capped by a hairline that receded almost to the base of his skull. But he was very easy to learn from.

Like every Professor at the Winzorth Institute, he knew his business with a master's familiarity, and he was even better at passing that knowledge on than he was at acquiring it himself. We were making fast progress under him. Today, I was attempting my first long-term enchantment. There were several stages to enchanting, with each one being more demanding in time and effort than those before.

In the past I had inadvertently worked with techniques similar to short-term enchantments now, simply searing my mana into an object like a hot brand heated by the furnace. Like the brand, these energies were radiated fast and abandoned it shortly. I was practicing them for two reasons.

The first was that there were still uses for a temporary magical item, in my case I needed them to poke and prod at the natural powers of my captive warrior so that I could uncover their secrets without risking a direct connection with my own mana at its source. The second was because learning to create temporary magical items was a stepping stone to permanent ones. If temporary magical items were heated brands, permanent ones were pieces of metal fully liquefied and reshaped while hot.

They did not degrade, did not lose power, and if their creator was skilled enough they could hold a sizable fraction of the energy that went into their creation. Professor Foir often bragged about his ability to create artefacts that boasted three-quarters his own maximum mana output. That would mean vis in the tens of thousands. And magical items did not tire, like humans did. Given a brief recharging period they could be used without end. Free up their user's own power to be spent on other things.

The possibilities were obvious. And my spell matrix failed just as I considered them again, cracking at one end before promptly bursting apart as my enchantment collapsed. If it were easy, of course, everyone would be walking around with permanent artefacts.

"Careful, Isabel!" Foir roared, making the room shake as much with his voice as I had with my mistake.

"That's a lot of power for such a little girl to be misplacing!" he was by my side instantly, peering at the failure and frowning in thought.

"Too much mana here, see?" He was speaking metaphorically, I had still yet to encounter another magician who physically saw mana. But I did, literally, see what he was referring to.

"I think so, but I am not sure," I lied. I had broken the matrix myself by applying more power than it could handle. Enchantments are fragile things, and require a hundred times as much skill as they do strength. It is why the ability to even hit three-quarters of his own maximum output made Professor Foir among the best in the world.

"How do I avoid this then?" I asked him impatiently.

"Why, use less power!"

"But if I use less power, I will not be able to press the magic into the metal at all." We were working with silver, one of the more enchantment-friendly materials, but even still I found it resisting my will stubbornly. The thought of achieving anything with less strength than I had used so far strained belief.

"Then you just need to gain a defter hand," he sighed.

"Watch." He meant feel, but I watched. He picked up the silver disk I had been working with and began caressing it with his power. I stared, fascinated, as mana formed tendrils, one seeming to massage the rest for every three that focused on worming their way down into the metal.

"You need to split your focus and gently lock the mana in place. Gently, I say. You keep treating it like some prisoner, and it's rebelling. Confining power too forcefully just generates pressure, which generates strain, which pops your enchantment." It was a foreign notion to me, and I did not like it. Overwhelming power had been my eternal advantage until the day I suddenly found it wanting against the Gods. Then again, perhaps that was a good indicator that I should have switched strategies long before.

I was certainly not relying on raw power against them now, in the grand scheme.

"I will try," I told him. It felt uncomfortable to be lectured so, but he did know more than me. For now. My next few efforts were no more successful than the last, but eventually I managed to produce a working enchantment. It operated at an entire half-a-vis, and looked like it would be continuing to do so for almost five minutes. I felt my new face burn with the humiliation of making something so pitiful, but the Professor seemed shocked.

"I don't think I've ever seen anyone take to it so fast," he whispered.

"Even with your talent, this is remarkable." I realised then that my ability to see mana may have helped here more than it did with magic in general. Looking around, I noticed the other students in my class were farther behind than was even normal. Including Agrian, who seemed to have taken a break from his own work to scowl at me. I was not complaining, either. Of all the new fields of magic uncovered since my age, this one may well have been the most useful. I would go far with this talent.