R-S Chapter 15 (Patreon)

“The main way to improve attributes other than being born with them high is through the food you eat.” He pointed to the tray of chocolate-covered ants, a tray with some type of meat, and a final tray with a small glass of liquid. “Each of these ingredients, if consumed for long enough will increase your affinity with an element.”

He picked up an ant before eating it, smacking his lips as if he enjoyed the taste. “These are chocolate-covered flame ants. They’re of course tied to the fire element. Eating these will, over time, increase your fire affinity.” Holding his hand over the meat. “Lightning eel meat. One of your classmates Douglas Donaldson owns the eel farms where these were raised. Even though his family has been eating the lightning eel for two generations now they still haven’t gotten the inherent affinity that would provide to their offspring so Douglas is just another one of the many fire mages in the class.”

I couldn’t remember the person he was talking about as like he said, they all just sort of bunched together in my mind. They were the fodder, the background characters in books that you’d just ignore or pass over. The few times one of them tried to insult me it quickly backfired on them and soon enough they all just ignored me like I did to them. They weren’t worth remembering.

Holding his hand over the small glass of liquid. “Last but not least, we have diluted silver pine syrup. This is the most heavily earth-aligned food I could get on such short notice that wouldn’t cost more than a zeffer.” Even just looking at the liquid had me gulping in anticipation as he handed me the plate of ants first. They were good, better than I thought they’d be. I couldn’t taste the ants at all, just the delicious chocolate and satisfying crunchiness were the only thing the ants provided. After eating most I did start to feel something, my body heated up and I started sweating from consuming them.

“That is the defense mechanism of the ant acting up. If you eat too many of them you’d heat your body until you’d suffer from heat stroke and die.” He handed me the plate of eel meat next with a noticeably bigger smile on his face than before. I tentatively bit into it and almost instinctively retched from the taste. If I was raised off fancier food and still not accustomed to the better meals from the academy I’d have spit it out. Struggling to finish it I gagged as I kept chewing. It tasted spoiled, like the worst parts of fish and gamey meat. It was also hard, chewy, and had a sand-like grit that coated my mouth.

After swallowing I had to catch my breath like I just accomplished something significant as he picked up a piece. “It’s an acquired taste. Go ahead and finish the rest.” I struggled to eat and keep down the rest of the meat. I couldn’t believe I’d ever acquire a taste for that. My body heaves a few times before I manage to calm my stomach down. He didn’t say anything, just handing over the liquid to me. After the two other foods, I was slightly wary of drinking but as my lips touched the liquid, the only thing I could focus on was consuming the delicious concoction.

“That may be delicious, but it’s also addictive and… Expensive. That little tiny glass cost a zeffer, yes. The average monthly wage of a highly skilled professional for something you just consumed in three seconds. Most foods that provide affinity are more expensive than normal foods and have side effects like I’ve shown you already… That’s all except for monster meat that’s affinity aligned.”

He lifted off the metal cloche I had ignored set on a different table and revealed a still steaming piece of meat. “This is meat from a wolf that could instinctively manipulate the wind around itself.” He handed it to me and it tasted good, but not insanely different than wolf meat I’ve had before. “The reason most people in this continent have high fire affinities is right there. The food chain for this area tends to lean towards the fire element so that makes most average people gain higher affinities with fire and they consume animals which are normally more aligned with fire which increases it further.”

That makes sense, creatures tend to have that type of affinity so that type of affinity is raised naturally over time which affects the children of the people which raises the overall level of fire affinity in the area, and so on and so on until the area has a higher fire affinity than other elements. This doesn’t explain why mine is so low or how other affinities also can still be formed. 

“How do we get high affinities with other elements then? Shouldn’t everyone eventually just become a single affinity?” He chuckled as he cut off a piece of the wolf steak I was still eating before eating it and talking. “The world isn’t that simple. A family of fire mages can have a water mage, or even a dud with no talent at any time. It goes the same for peasant families where they can go generations where the highest mana capacity reaches thirty and then suddenly birth a fully fledged mage who can instinctively control their element from birth.”

“So, what does having a negative affinity mean and how long do I have to eat this eel before I fix my negative affinity?” He laughs like what I said was the funniest thing he heard all day. “It will take you months of eating it for every single meal to shift it a single percentage and that’s only because it’s in the negatives. The higher you grow your affinity the harder it becomes to increase it. You’ll spend the rest of your life eating foods to raise your earth affinity up a few percentage points and you might reach fifteen or twenty in lightning affinity if you eat eel for the rest of your life. You could speed the process by eating extremely powerful monsters like earth or lightning dragons, but if you’re able to take down a dragon then you don’t need to worry about your affinities because you’re one of the strongest mages in the continent.”

That was unfortunate but to be expected. If there was an easy way to improve your affinities then everyone would do it. “There is an easy way to improve your affinities rapidly though. Do you want to know how?” I shook my head in affirmation before he went on to explain. 

“If you’re lucky enough you can form a contract with a monster and it’ll become your familiar. Doing so will let you naturally increase your affinities toward whatever affinity the monster is aligned with. For you… I’d recommend a golem, but that won't be for a very long time. First, you’d need to finish school, then track down a location where a wild golem is then slowly bond with that golem which could take years. Or learn how to make golems which is a much more difficult thing to do than what I just said.”

I mentally added learning how to create a golem to the list of things I needed to do before the time loop broke. Maybe there were other monsters I could buy that I could make my familiar. “Can you have more than one familiar?” He finished off my steak. It was something that slightly bothered me but because he was teaching me for free right now, and it belonged to him anyway, I didn’t mind as much.

“That’s a tough question, which brings us to the next method of strengthening yourself. We need to test you for other types of magic the normal method doesn’t check for. Here.” He handed me a needle. “Prick your finger and get some blood on that then hand it back to me.”