Chapter 34 Modern Magic techniques

Chapter 34

Modern Magic techniques

Second theory of using magic is through magic circles and patterns.

Mana and ether seem to react to certain geometrical designs which are carved with special ink.

This ink is mana induced too and is made using blood of special monsters or from special trees that have high mana.

When the user releases his internal mana onto the magic circle, it activates it and the function written in the magic circle or the pattern is performed by mana in a magic stone connected to the circle.

Here the will is provided by the magic circle in form of instructions and ether inside the body just acts as a starter to give signal to activate.

The activation is done by a spell or a chant as the voice carries certain amount of ether in it and the spell itself spoken in certain way activates the magic circle.

This also forms the fundamental of magic tools and magic wands.

They actually contain complex multiple magic circles drawn in certain formation to achieve the desired effect and have a mana stone or magic stone to supply mana.

This way of using magic with wands and magic tools that have magic circles is called the modern magic technique.

This technique is more commonly used today but Zephy san said she was not a fan of it.

Anyways, the telepathy magic tool I am using is basically using only 1 MP on activation as I verified by scan.

The rest of the mana is provided by the magic stone embedded in it.

Scan itself is a passive skill probably, it requires a command but does not consume mana. Or maybe skill provided by the Goddess are somewhat special.

Also, my mana recovery rate is about 1 MP in 5 minutes. That means it will take 10 hours for me to recover my whole 120 MP capacity.

While teaching Zephy san acts in very grown up manner but her gestures are still cute and child like so its quite cute to see her teach with full dedications.

I asked Zephy san about the consequences of mana depletion and how to know if mana is low.

She told that once mana falls below about 10% of our total mana capacity, we start feeling low and lifeless.

And on complete depletion we would faint. But it was not life threatening.

I also asked her if there was a way to increase mana, to which she said that the only known way was killing monsters and leveling up.

It seems there was no scenario like depleting it again and again to increase it many fold.

Or maybe nobody tested it out. I should do that before going to bed and check it out if possible.

But right now I have no means to deplete my mana except my telepathy magic tool. My skills don’t use up mana and if that is good or bad I don’t know.

I did try it later and it did not increase. Maybe the amount was so small that my scan did not show it.

Other ways was to take a legendary potion made of some rare items, but that would cost a fortune.

She also told that the ancient civilization had a tool to quantify the stats like mana but presently only a few of those tools have been recovered and most of them are owned by royality.

She said that the main Syndell in the royal capital had one, but it cost quite a lot to get your stats checked there.

It was not like the Syndell was corrupt or something but it was simply that the magic stones consumed by that tool are quite a lot and of high quality so it requires a lot of money to run the tool.

That means there must be a means to know my skills, titles etc too. But I don’t think the process would be confidential, so I would not risk it.

I will wait till my scan levels up.

Its not like people donot have appraisal skills here.

When I asked Zephy she told me that, there were appraisal skills that could appraise weapons or potions.

There was even a skill to appraise people but all it did was tell the name, race, age and gender.

But she told me that some high species like high elf, dragons or fairies did possess special eye powers to measure someone’s potential and know his skills but she has never met them and only read in books.

I have a suspicion that I might have already met someone like that because there were two people whose eyes were glowing when I saw them.

One was the true vampire Charlotte aka fake grandma at the potion shop and the other was the high elf Sophia.

I hope they did not realize that I was an otherworlder.

When I asked Zephy san about the two in a roundabout manner, it seems she has only met Charlotte once and from how she answered I could tell that she did not see any of that red glow that I saw.

Maybe I am the only one who can see that. Also she did not know about Sophia at the Syndell.

So I did not tell her that Sophia was an High elf, otherwise Zephy san would get suspicious of how I knew that.

After some other basic discussion Zephy san started with practicing first step of magic activation.

That was mana manipulation inside my body or ether manipulation.

Zephy san told me to lie on the sofa and pull up my shirt. I did so feeling a little shy and also unsafe because there was drool coming out of her mouth.

I hope she is not thinking of biting me.

Then while breathing heavily she put her hand just above my navel and started transferring her magic power inside my body and tried to manipulate my mana inside me.

According to her once the mana starts moving its easier to do it by mysself.

It’s the initial rigidity that’s difficult to get past.

Mana was protected by a membrane like thing that was difficult to break from inside so when she broke it using her mana , it started to flow.

I felt something invading me and then vibrations and warmth started flowing from my navel part to all over the place.

Zephy then removed her hand and told me to practice moving it on my own.

She told me that this alone usually takes 3 to 4 months even for a very talented and blessed person to learn.

So this was her last lesson of the day.

But when I asked her what step came after that, she said that, releasing my inner ether out a little and trying to interact with mana outside.

And the third step was changing the attribute of mana into that of my ether.

But there was a long way to go before that, so for now I was only going to do the first step again and again and try to make my control as smooth as butter.

At last she said that the technique of forcefully moving someone’s else’s mana from outside is quite sophisticate and I should not try it on anyone else.

Apparently she reverse converted her ether into attribute less mana and then penetrated it into my body. Then she interacted it with my ether.

When I asked her, how the mages generally trained without that, she told that the magic technique she is teaching me is an ancient technique and mages nowadays use modern technique and use a wand.

According to her, the body releases a small amount of ether on its own without training. That is actually how I was able to activate the telepathy magic tool.

Only simple tools like light magic and telepathy tools are very easy to operate and can be done with only a little ether manipulation practice. Like I was able to do with my telepathy tool in first try.

On the other hand wands with other kind of magic like attack, support or heal type, require some degree of ether manipulation to activate it along with the spell that goes along with it.

So this principal is used by modern magicians. They don’t spend much time in practicing the movement control of their ether as the ancient technique users.

Instead after learning to move it a little, they then rely on magic tools called wands.

These wands have magic circles and magic stone attached. Its purpose is simple, when a person speaks a certain phrase imbued in their inner ether, the designated magic (computed by the magic circle) is fired with the help of mana in the magic stone.

The mana in the surroundings cannot be used by this method. That is because only the ether inside our body has the will to interact and command the mana in air and that cannot be done with the mana in magic stone in conjugation with magic circle.

But the technique of controlling is not masterd and they just use their internal ether to activate the magic circles in the wand which then mechanically casts the designated magic using the mana in the stone.

So once I learn the ancient theory I could always buy a wand and do the modern magic as well.

The modern magic has many disadvantages as compared to Zephy san’s ancient magic theory.

The magic cast by using these wands has fixed shape, dimension, speed etc. When magic stone dries up, magician becomes useless.

It costs lot of money to buy and maintain wand and magic stones.

One could only cast as high as an advance level spell using even the best magic wand and best magic stones available in shops.

For higher level spell, it is required to get some legendry level stuff, which was not generally available.

The type of spells that are fitted in the wand are fixed. When buying a wand, they give a list of spells it can be used to cast.

But there are also some major advantages in the modern technique and that is the reason it became popular.

In modern magic technique, anyone can become mage as long as he learns a little ether control technique and has enough money to buy a wand and magic stones.

Although the initial breakthrough itself required a year of practice if done in normal way and not like Zephy san just did to me.

There are other advantages too. As long as one becomes capable of ether control, he can cast any magic using wand regardless of his attribute which is quite an advantage.

Although things like activation speed and such still depend upon their ether control skill with which they imbue their chant with ether to activate the magic circle in the wand.

In the end it all ties down to ether control. This basic skill is the core of both the technique ancient as well as modern.

But the ancient method has 2 other core parts that is attribute conversion and mana control through ether.

Zephy san is old school, but I feel that I should also learn the hard thing that is the ancient technique.

Because I am broke and donot have money to buy wand or magic stones.

Secondly if one day I found a good wand, I could easily use it if I was already expert in ancient technique.

Zephy san also told that apart from wands, there were also something like magic tomes or grimores, which were like books containing magic circles on each page and magic gems or stones attached to covers.

The basic principle was same but it could contain many magic circles so a lot of magic could be cast.

But the disadvantage was that it was easy to get ruined or destroyed. Moreover instead of that, a sturdy cane or wand could also be used as blunt weapon.

Zephy san also told that magic swords were also a thing here.

But the magic circle that could be carved on it was limited and it required a costly material like mythiril for magic conductivity and they were very costly.

The cheapest wand or cane could be made from a treant wood and cost around 20 gold coins.

And it required a change of magic stone every month or even earlier depending upon the usage which were also not cheap.

So in all the ancient magic was what I would learn and practice without any cost.

With that my lecture with Zephy san was over. We then took a lunch break. After that Zephy san went to do some shopping for her trip.

I on the other hand started doing my ether control. It was difficult to move it even a little by myself.

If I go by my naïve theory that I read in my past life, than the magic basically is generated by the 3rd chakra out of the seven chakra of body, going by the its position above navel.

That chakra basically generates energy from food and sun. So source of magic can be said to be food and sun.

People here eat monster meat and plants that have mana. So mana is automatically generated by that chakra or the digestive system.

That means food rich in mana like meat of high ranking monsters or plants that grow in place with high mana will definitely be good for increasing ether maybe.

But there might be a disease like mana overload or something like in every iseka so I need to be careful of that too.

Maybe the magic recovery potion uses those magic rich plants called herbs. But what about consuming magic stones then.

Can that increase our MP. No. I am thinking it the wrong way.

Its not the mana that is to be increased but our container size to hold it.

If our holding container is big then mana will automatically fill in form surroundings. So those mana rich ingredients are only useful for fast recovery of mana or temporary overload I think.

And I think one of the method to increase our mana capacity is ofcourse level up by killing monsters. And that is what I will do.