R-S Chapter 14 (Patreon)

I waited in my room until Mr. Rights came and got me. We headed back to the classroom and into a side room that looked like his office. Pages lay sprawled around on the desk haphazardly as some odd things sat atop them. Before I could figure out what the items were more than a cursory glance he spoke. “So… What do you know about magic?”

That was an open-ended question that I had an answer for already. “Only what I’ve been taught at school.” He smiled as if he expected that answer. “Oh? But both Mr. Evans and Mr. Smithe said you were showing signs of previous training up to the normal standards we’d teach at school. Care to explain that?” 

This was starting to feel more like an interrogation than an extra lesson. I was worried about what to answer before he waved me off. “You don’t have to answer, I was just curious. Besides the basics, it doesn’t appear they’ve taught you anything else or started to improve you beyond the strength you were born with.” He pulled out a book that showed exercises before asking again.

“Have you heard of the term upcycling?” I flipped through the exercises and they were all extremely basic to the point it left me confused. I did some of these when I was strengthening my body in case I didn’t have the mana capacity to become a mage. “No, I’ve never heard of upcycling before.” 

He went on to explain. “The safe range for someone to stay is at thirty mana capacity, any more than that and you can develop health problems, the higher above thirty you go the worse the problems. Someone who cycles fifty mana will be stronger but their life will be significantly shorter because the chances of their heart giving out or their muscles tearing themselves apart is much higher.”

He pointed at the exercises before explaining more. “That is if you stay at that level. It’s safe to go above thirty for short bursts. I cycle twenty mana naturally, as mages become less active most will begin to increase the amount they naturally cycle. I can go all the way up to eighty-eight for a few minutes though. At that amount of mana running through my body I can bend metal with my punches and my body is durable enough to take most basic spells cast from mages.”

I could feel him begin to cycle mana and even someone as unskilled as me at sensing the changes in people could feel the difference. He felt dangerous, similar to the feeling of looking at a higher-level monster. He held it for about five seconds before the dangerous feeling he exuded started to wane. “It will take decades to get to this level. First, you’ll need to increase the speed at which you can change the amount you're cycling. For you right now it will take you an hour to move up or down a single mana but in order to train you’ll need to be able to change how much you’re cycling to minutes instead.”

So it was a method I couldn’t use right now but if I got it down it was like another level of training my physical body. He went on to explain further. “While most people can’t handle cycling above thirty, training in this method will allow you to continue to expand the amount you can passively cycle without risking your own life.” It was like strengthening your body so it could handle the ever-increasing burden of more mana being permanently cycled. “The highest someone could passively channel reached fifty-seven. That is the king's bodyguard and he is stronger than me while cycling the eighty-eight mana in my body.”

At that level, he could catch arrows from the air or kill any assassins before they got even close to the king. “The next method we can train your body is to let you develop the extra senses that your high-affinity magic gives you through your mana threads.” He went on to further explain that each element could feel different effects depending on your affinity with the higher affinity being able to be used easier.

“Earth allows you to feel tremors in the ground while wind allows you to sense the air currents shifting.” With a smile, he pulled off a potion from the desk. “Normally, it would take you months, if not years to start feeling these elements around you. But there’s an easy way to cheat and gain the ability. All we have to do is get rid of all your other pesky senses that you would focus on instead of the new subtle sensations you’re feeling.” 

He shakes the liquid inside. “This is a senseless potion. You drink it and you’ll lose all your senses besides the ones you can feel with your mana for the next hour.” He had my head outside and take my shoes off so I’d be able to feel the tremors through the earth more before making me drink the potion. The feeling was strange, it wasn’t good or bad… More offputting than anything, not only could I not see, smell, hear, taste, or touch, I couldn’t feel the temperature or even any pain my body would go through.

I expanded my mana threads, which was easier to do in this state than naturally, I had an almost unnatural control over how far my mana threads stretched and they were easily ten percent, maybe even twenty percent further away from me than they ever had been before. I could feel it, the subtle thrumming of the ground under my feet.

It was odd, my mana sense from the threads only reached a five-foot area around me but I could feel the tremors coming from and knew exactly where my teacher was who was twenty-five feet away from me. I couldn’t make out the person, as he stomped it was like ripples at became less and less clear the higher it went up his body with the top half of him being a muddled mess. It was still very interesting. He noticed I noticed him and I heard a voice next to me.

“Good, it seems your high earth affinity naturally transferred to your tremor sense. Sometimes it doesn’t so that’s good.” I yelled out. “HOW CAN I HEAR YOU!?” He laughed as he explained. “You don’t have to yell. I can hear you if you talk naturally. This is a communication method two air affinity people can use. I’m talking to you through the air currents, even if we were in a crowded room my control is so good only you’d be able to hear me.”

It was odd, I could sense the shifting air currents but it was far more muted than my tremor sense. “I can feel the air currents but they feel muted compared to the ground vibrating.” He spoke next to my head again as I tried to not look towards the sound. “You’re affinity for earth is much higher than air correct?” I tried to remember. “I think it’s forty-five while my air is lower, I can’t remember off the top of my head but I think it’s above thirty.”

“That’s most likely the reason then. You also have fire affinity… Most people who live in this region do on account of the food we consume so I’ll test this next.” He moved closer, the tremors from his walking weren’t as strong so I could only see his feet moving as the ground rippled from his movement. It took him getting a hands distance away from me before I could feel the area next to his body light up. Like a candle flickering off an object, I could make out the hotter areas of his body as he explained.”

“I’m holding a ball of fire in my hand. If you can see me this is what your competition can use their senses to tell. People with higher affinities will be able to see anyone inside their mana threads as balls of heat under their skin, or they would be able to if they bothered learning their heat sense… Alright, now that you’ve seen the basics of your extra senses you can practice them by yourself. We’ll go over the rest after you gain the rest of your senses back.”