It

  was only around three in the afternoon, but the streets were already

  getting livelier by the second as the weekly preparation for the

  weekend slowly took place.

  Marketday lived up to

  its name, and the streets were bursting with haggling merchants with

  their carts, merrily announcing their wares and starting localized

  price wars with their rivals right by their sides. Seventh reckoned

  that the Main Market was probably filled to bursting with the

  townsfolk hunting for new goods, low prices, and the best deals of

  the week.

  A wild torrent of

  people squeezing all around. That was in Seventh's mind something to

  avoid like a plague.

  Walking through the

  streets, slowly approaching his humble abode, the sellers didn't seem

  to have anything interesting to sell, and Seventh arrived at the

  Bloated Badger without stopping to make any purchases. To his

  displeasure, the tavern was also packed full of people.

  The back wall with the

  fireplace had disappeared behind the wall of merry tavern patrons of

  all sorts and sizes, ranging from tall and sleek drakes to short and

  stout dwarves, convening closer to the bar counter where their

  shorter tables were located.

  All voices mixed in

  together, creating an oscillating buzz and hum that loudly praised

  the past week's daring deeds and silently cursed the troubles drowned

  with alcohol. An already slobbering Knight was waving his tankard

  around in long arches, loudly telling a riveting tale of his brutal

  fight with a feral pack of diretrolls.

  The warm tingling of

  success and having made something concrete with his Skills was still

  lingering in Seventh's extremities, making him pause entering.

  He usually woke up

  early to eat breakfast alone, went to the sewers alone, killed

  anything he could alone, and returned to the inn to wash himself with

  a washbasin. He had taken a proper bath once during the week, after

  the whole lunerian incident.

  But he hadn't once

  stayed at the tavern long enough to meet other occupants, not to talk

  about popping in for a mug of ale after a long day of work.

  How about after a long

  week of work? That's normal, right?

  No pressure.

  Relaxation.

  But there were people. Noises and voices.

  Stares lingering for a

  fraction of a second longer than Seventh liked, and the fear from the

  dungeon rose its ugly head.

  Fear of being seen.

  Being found out.

  Seventh looked down at

  his legs. They had been happy to run him straight to the Guild after

  killing monsters. It would be wonderful if his legs would make a

  decision for him now.

  Something metallic

  clattered on Seventh's left, making him flinch and look. Annise had

  barreled out of the kitchen and had casually thrown a pile of washed

  drink-trays on the wooden surface of the counter.

  She slowed down a

  notch, noticing Seventh, and cracked her crow's feet open with a

  smile. “Finally decided to appreciate the Distiller's fine arts,

  eh?”

  Seventh took a small

  step back while making a thin smile. “No-I-uh, have studying to do

  and... can I pay an advance fine? I have a tome and... I'm going to

  try cast Light, maybe many times?”

  Annise let out a

  frustrated, maybe even a little disappointed sigh. “Nah. It's all

  good. You've been paying the Pyromancer-tax so much that even I start

  to feel like a predatory landlady. You you're happy

  without a drink?”

  “Positive.”

  Seventh squeezed the tome under his arm, making the leather crinkle

  inaudibly. “Besides, I was told not to spill beer on this.”

  “Alright, well, see

  you at breakfast.”

  Annise disappeared to

  the tavern's chaos, and Seventh retreated up the stairs into his

  room. There, he could hear a low murmuring below his feet and

  occasional loud laughter.

  Seventh dropped the

  heavy leather-bound tome on his bed and opened the shutter to let in

  some natural light. He had candles, but they cost money, and sunlight

  was more appealing, more lively.

  He looked at the tome,

  sighing deeply.

  After sending his

  adventuring gear to his voidspace and changed to his casual wear—

  heavily repaired grey tunic and matching trousers— he sat down on

  his bed, propped the book open to the first page, and started to

  read.

  Tomes were

  instructional books for one spell or a family of spells. For example,

  there could be a tome detailing how to advance through Firebolt to

  Searing Ray and eventually to Fireball. Seventh's loan-tome detailed

  only the low-tiered Light spell that everybody could learn given

  time.

  All the tome had was

  the necessary magical theory to comprehend the spell's basic nature

  and a guide to lead the caster through knowledge, imagination, and

  construction of the spell. Barely one hundred pages thick, the

  yellowing parchment was slowly crumbling on the edges, and old ink

  that had started to turn brown ages ago, making the reading just a

  little bit more challenging.

  It was clear that the

  tome had multiple previous owners. Judging from the collection of

  additional notes scribbled in the margins, clarifying some details,

  and personal notes. Most notes were congregated to the page with a

  picture of a ray of light entering a triangle and coming out as

  multiple colorful rays— or so the description said, there weren't

  any other colors other than the dull brown.

  The tome had a vague

  explanation that the light was an ethereal substance mirroring the

  sun, the stars, and the divine beings who had created it to chase off

  the darkness of the Void and breathe in the light of civilization

  into the Integrated Species. Basically, a short fairy tale without

  any good knowledge to lean on.

  Vague as it might be,

  the explanation gave Seventh a lot to think about. Firstly, his own

  Elemental Affinity was Entropy, a combination of Fire and Darkness,

  which made learning Light-based spells much harder for him, Darkness

  being the opposite magical affinity, and the Fire part didn't really

  help.

  And a Necromancer

  trying to learn a spell closely affiliated with Life? More fun.

  A tiny row of neat

  handwriting under the triangle with rays of light called the

  phenomenon a refraction, but one of the later owners had blacked out

  most of the text with a blunt judgment of his own: “Preposterous!”

  Since those two

  handwritings appeared more than a dozen times, Seventh had started to

  think of them as Neat and Preposterous during his long hours of

  deciphering the tome.

  Neat's notes verged on

  vandalism by dropping in useless trivia— Seventh didn't even

  understand how the light worked, not to talk about some invisible

  violet light— but they had a good grasp of magic and a knack for

  clarifying things down to Seventh's level of arcane study. On the

  other hand, Preposterous used grandiose words and complicated

  metaphors, making his notes indescribable word salad.

  At the very end, the

  book detailed a collection of circles, triangles, and squares filled

  with magical symbols, sigils, and runes connected with a complicated

  spider's web of lines and smaller circles. Magical diagrams are used

  for the imagination and keeping the magic stable.

  There were even newer

  ones added by the previous owners. Neat was the latest one to add

  their work, but as usual, Preposterous had vandalized the diagram,

  almost punching through the parchment during his enraged eradication

  of Neat's work.

  Between the amusement

  and frustration for his previous peers, Seventh had slowly learned

  the basics of spellcasting without using his Skills that just

  auto-casted them— like his Shadowbolt.

  When using the System

  to auto-cast, all the spellcaster needed to do was have enough mana

  and chant the activation phrase with intent for the System to cast

  the spell.

  Wizards didn't use the

  System, but manipulated the mana themselves. They constructed the

  spells on the fly, usually tweaking them to be more powerful and

  efficient depending on the surrounding mana. A Fireball was much more

  powerful inside a volcano than on a glacier— not that you actually

  needed a Fireball in a volcano.

  They didn't gain any

  spells from the System either, but their skills pivoted to amplifying

  magic, mana regeneration, and memorization of spell diagrams. Of

  course, Wizards learned spells as Skills like anybody else just by

  the sheer use of them, but usually they used their own style of magic

  instead of “basic cookie-cutter plebeian dabbling of the arcane

  majesty” like Preposterous had put it.

  Having read the tome a

  couple of times already from cover to cover, Seventh was confident to

  try casting. He had already learned Whisper Wind this way, and that

  had taken just two stops at the guild for short study sessions before

  he had been able to slowly cast the spell.

  Garth refused the

  honor of helping his student, so Seventh bribed Fang to endure his

  barrage of magical whispering until he gained the Skill. Both Light

  and Whisper Wind were low zero-tier magic that needed under a hundred

  casts until the Skill gain. Upper-tier magic needed more repetition—

  known as grinding in adventuring circles— up to thousands of times

  or just plain old genius.

  A sprinkling of luck

  was also always welcome.

  Seventh looked at the

  first diagram, carefully studied the formation and the intended mana

  flow. Scribbling his own notes on a separate piece of parchment, he

  was ready for the first try.

  He had, hopefully,

  enough knowledge of how the spell worked, enough imagination to put

  together a diagram inside his head, and mana for the construction of

  the spell in the real world.

  He had chosen a

  circular diagram since he had used them when learning Whisper Wind.

  Calming his mind, the Meditate activated and slowly stilled his

  thoughts, focusing on the magic.

  After the whole Thrust

  and thrust debacle, Seventh had checked his skills for further

  shenanigans and was pleasantly surprised by some of his Skills.

  Meditate, for example, gave him a small Concentration buff when

  focusing on one singular problem. It also helped with falling into

  sleep— which made sense since he had gained the Skill during a

  long, sleep deprived trek inside a dungeon.

  The diagram slowly

  took shape in his head. Circle to contain the magic, conversion of

  his mana into light through a maze of symbols, location at the point

  of his finger, shape was made with a circle with a dwarvish rune of

  to make it a sphere, duration as long as the spell had

  mana...

  The spell ready,

  Seventh dropped it from his head, past his heart and lungs, into his

  Essence. There, the diagram came to life, cracking with arcane might

  and put forth the inscribed instructions.

  Seventh's eyes flashed

  with pure white, and he was blinded for multiple minutes.

  Muttering curses until

  he gained his sight back, Seventh wrote the effect down next to his

  notes and a copy of the diagram he had used. He should probably stay

  away from the dwarvish runes until he learned the language, but they

  were used heavily in Valerian spellcrafting for their ruggedness and

  simplified nature. The runes even looked like they belonged in the

  diagrams with their sharp corners, straight lines, and mystical look.

  Flipping through to

  the end of the book, Seventh looked over the glossary of the runes

  and symbols used in the examples and noticed that the rune on the

  diagram and in the glossary were slightly different. The one on the

  diagram looked like a slim D with a diagonal line in the middle, but

  the glossary version also had small dots inside, just above the line.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Gods damn the one

  who proofread this crap!” Seventh muttered and tried the spell with

  the other rune. It also made his eyes flash with light.

  While making his eyes

  literally sparkle was a nice party trick, it wasn't what Seventh was

  trying to do, and he promptly moved to the next magical circle and

  concentrated on building magic inside his head. After failing, he

  tried to find a mistake, made a note of it, and tried again.

  And again.

  And

  Seventh had lost count

  of how many times he had already failed when he lit a candle to read

  after the sun had set below the city walls. He didn't use his magical

  lantern since it connected to his mana flow, and he didn't want to

  mess up spells because of it. Seventh could appreciate the irony of

  lighting a candle to study Light.

  He had improved from

  flashbanging his eyes, but now he was exploding lightballs inside his

  arm, making his bones show for a fraction of a second as his flesh

  backlighted them. Seventh was worried how his arm had started to feel

  tingly after the last couple of casts, and decided that he should

  quit for the day.

  Conceding defeat,

  Seventh read the tome yet again, stopping to stare at the symbols in

  the back while, hoping he would get an epiphany or something. The

  tome didn't start to speak to him, he didn't see any hidden meanings

  at the symbols, and in the end, he just fidgeted with a loose corner

  of the cover and stared blankly at the yellowed pages.

  He gave up for the

  day.

  "Ya

  look like crap," Annise said the next

  morning when Seventh appeared at breakfast.

  "Oh,

  thank you. You are the of my day, as always, Annet,"

  Seventh answered dryly while piling porridge on his bowl.

  The older woman

  narrowed her eyes. "There was some

  rudeness in there. Should I fine you for the spells after all...?"

  "

  I haven't cast a single spell since I have just miserably failed at

  every try."

  Annise made an

  apologetic nod. “Ouch. Why are ya studying spells anyway? Trying to

  become a Mage? Or Heavens forbid, a Wizard.” She shuddered at the

  thought.

  There was a minute,

  but very important distinction between Mages and Wizards. Mages

  gained spells through Skills and focused on one singular Affinity,

  buffing the damage and effect with additional Skills. Pyromancers and

  Cryomancers were the most well-known and popular ones.

  Wizards hated

  Mages, mostly because the best magical institution known in every

  corner of the world was the Mage's Guild, and Mages hated Wizards

  back.

  “Nah. Just some

  basic learning of magic, that's all. I don't believe I have the

  correct aptitude for wizardry.”

  “Nope.” Annise

  grinned. “Yer don't have enough fancy words and sneer for proper

  twinkly-fingery.”

  “That might be the

  most pleasant compliment I have heard all my life,” Seventh said

  with an appreciative tone.

  “Any day, darling.”

  Annise continued her morning routine of piling all the yesterday's

  cups, mugs, bottles, steins, and small barrels used up in the last

  night as Seventh ate his porridge and bacon sandwiches before

  returning to studying.

  Instead of going

  straight into spamming different diagrams, Seventh looked over the

  ones he had used and started making one of his own. Most of the

  diagrams assumed the caster knew how to convert their mana into the

  needed element, but some diagrams were a little odd, assuming the

  caster had Light affinity.

  Seventh had learned

  during Whisper Wind training how to separate the Fire and Darkness

  from Entropy and slowly distill them to neutral mana. He had used the

  so-called purification array in the center of his diagram like it was

  usually done, but he had started to suspect it was the problem.

  While it made the

  casting safer, it also slowed it down, and since the spell activated

  inside his arm, it might be too weak to move outside of his body.

  Magic needed some extra ooomph to break through the caster's mana

  channels and change from internal magic into external.

  Looking at his

  sketches of improved purification array inside a circular diagram,

  Seventh scratched his head. It looked like crap.

  “Maybe Darkness is

  just... too different? It is the absence of light... emptiness? Do I

  just need more mana, change this into that, and make a wiggle to

  there...”

  Seventh slowly

  squeezed his hand into a fist to get his blood pumping faster to get

  rid of the painful tingling inside his arm. His latest batch of tries

  had failed pretty much the same way, light in his arm. He was on the

  verge of just slamming a full manabar to the spell to see what

  happened.

  If the damn power is

  the problem, I have enough of that to keep advanced undead up and

  kicking for months!

  Just before going

  through the cast, Seventh calmed down due to Meditate and slowly

  disassembled the diagram without a cast. He gently banged the back of

  his head against the wall while thinking.

  Spellcrafting wasn't

  about raw power and forcing the magic to do things. It was a gentle

  ushering of natural laws to bend to the caster's will for a moment.

  There was something he

  just didn't get.

  As the tingling

  stopped, Seventh focused on the next try. Careful diagram, dropping

  it into Essence, meticulous mana control, aaand...

  “

  Seventh's arm bones

  glowed within, emanating slicing pain all the way from his fingertips

  up to his shoulder. A cold tingling continued forwards, making his

  heart beat faster after losing a beat.

  Caressing his arm,

  flowing with phantom pain, Seventh breathed slowly, closing his eyes

  and just thinking about the problem.

  The diagram was now as

  good as he could get it without going to a Wizard and asking them to

  do further refining work for him. That wouldn't help much unless the

  Wizard also told him how it worked to the nitty-gritty minute

  details. That would cost a pretty copper, and Seventh was on an

  adventurer's budget.

  "Fuck,"

  Seventh cursed again and squeezed his hand into a fist. The failure

  hurt more than the mana leaking out from the wrong places. Failing to

  cast more advanced spells would cause even more damage, maybe even

  kill the careless Wizard.

  Seventh mumbled curses

  as the tingle slowly disappeared. He had even been so careful with

  his diagram, too! How anybody could cast like this on the fly during

  a battle without accidentally firing lightning bolts out of their

  necks was a mystery to him.

  Maybe thoughts like

  this are the reason I'm a necromancer and not a Wizard? He

  thought and rolled his eyes.

  Waiting for the

  tingling to stop, Seventh calmed himself and backtracked to the page

  with the triangle. He looked at the blacked-out text and cursed

  Pompous for sabotaging others.

  “Why couldn't you

  just let the Neat's text be?” he asked from the judgmental

  handwriting. “Whatever he— or she— had said can't be so bad.

  You're Wizards for crying out loud, talk it through!”

  Having entered the

  stark raving mad portion of spellstudy, Seventh was sure he was close

  to a breakthrough or absolute madness leading to lichdom. He was

  starting to understand why so many of his compatriots slipped into

  the madness and need of immortal life without the longevity of higher

  ranks.

  It was time for a long

  walk. Long enough for him to forget which one of his inkjars would

  make the best phylactery.

  The next day, after

  breakfast where Annise compared Seventh to a destitute drunkard who

  had been sober for a week, he read the tome from cover to cover,

  staring at the collection of symbols, fidgeting again with the cover.

  It had to be his

  understanding of light.

  His diagram was

  workable. Even Identify to the parchment had resulted in the System

  labeling the parchment as “Diagram of Light spell — Entropy

  variation, ink on parchment.”

  At this point, his

  mana control was still rough, but serviceable. He didn't wax and wane

  between the runes, backtracking to make small adjustments or let his

  mind wander. His mind stormed through the diagram with arrogance fit

  for a Wizard.

  That left the

  knowledge as his problem. Light from Darkness, something from

  nothing, abundance out of absence.

  Lying on his bed, his

  thoughts wandered back to the creation of phylacteries, and where the

  closest dilapidated tower might be. How much would the rent be?

  He jerked upright and

  marched two steps to his door. ”Oops, let's not go there. Villagers

  would come with pitchforks after hearing a Necromancer had moved into

  a menacing tower.”

  Great, now I'm talking

  to myself. The first sign of insanity.

  Thoughts don't count,

  it's the talking that is worrisome.

  Popping out to

  replenish his rapidly disappearing stockpile of parchment and ink,

  Seventh stopped to stare up at the sun. It was perfectly round and

  full of light. A natural manifestation of the spell he had been stuck

  on.

  Closing one of his

  eyes, Seventh lifted his finger, making it look like the sun was on

  his fingertip. He kept his hand up until a nice guardsman asked if he

  was quite all right.

  “Erh, yes. Just

  wondering how I would create a sun on my fingertip.”

  The guard didn't even

  blink at the statement. “As long as you don't do it inside the

  city, I don't care. Move to the side, though, you're blocking the

  street, oh mighty Wizard.”

  Returning to his room,

  Seventh nailed his final diagram design on the wall with blown-out

  examples of the runes he had used and their translations, meanings,

  and uses.

  A drawing of the sun

  was above them all. Giving Seventh something to stare at when he

  needed a break.

  He hadn't even tried

  to cast the spell today. He was tired and frustrated.

  It wasn't like he

  needed the spell. He had lanterns, candles, torches, and his

  Wandering Eye, so he would have light and Basic Darkvision when

  needed, but it was about the principle.

  Or just pigheaded

  stubbornness, but Seventh liked the principle bit more.

  A silent scraping

  sound pulled him out of his reverie. He tried to hear it again, but

  whatever it was, it was already gone. Shrugging, Seventh continued

  his intense staring at the wall.

  Scrape

  scrape scrape

  Again, almost silent

  scraping, like parchment and wood being split gently open.

  Biting his lower lip,

  Seventh slowly looked down at the tome on his lap. It was open at the

  triangle page, the black block of text noticeably smaller than

  before. Seventh had tried to use the Inkstone to check if he could

  remove only Preposterous' ink, but no luck.

  His right thumb was on

  the corner of the back cover, gently ripping it more and more open as

  he nervously fidgeted with it.

  Horrified, Seventh

  quickly flipped to the back to check the damage. Garth had threatened

  to cut Seventh's ears off if he dared to earmark the pages. What

  would he do if Seventh accidentally ripped the cover off?

  Shuddering slightly,

  Seventh saw that the page wasn't torn or ripped. The cheap glue had

  just yielded to Seventh's nervous tick, separating the parchment from

  the leather-covered wood.

  Only Seventh didn't

  see wood beneath, but more parchment. Looking closely, he could see

  the last page of the tome had been glued to the back cover.

  Probably just a

  cheap fix, Seventh thought while wondering if he had any glue.

  A neat, tiny

  handwriting was peeking beneath the loosening parchment. Seventh

  immediately recognized it as Neat's work. Without thinking, Seventh

  carefully pulled the cheap sheepskin, revealing a hidden diagram

  design and a block of tiny handwriting.

  Even while feeling

  excitement from finding something hidden, Seventh grimaced and looked

  the book over. ”Sorry, Garth. I will fix it, I promise.”

  Then he read Neat's

  last entry.

  I fear that my

  habitual need to spew borderline nonsensical snippets of information

  in this book might annoy one or two of the following owners of this

  tome, mistaking my help for vandalism and defacing work I have made

  earlier in these pages.

  That is why I decided

  to draw another diagram here, along with information that may yet

  survive on the prism-page.

  Most who glance

  upon a prism see only the lie it tells at first glance: that white

  light is simple, and color is complexity. In truth, the prism does

  not create colors, it merely reveals what was already bound together,

  forcing unity apart along lines of resistance. The prism does not

  add. It divides.

  Black does the same

  thing, but in reverse.

  Where the prism

  forces separation, darkness forces convergence. Where light is

  splayed into its fragments, darkness draws fragments inward, pressing

  them together until distinction fails. This is why a perfect black

  does not shine, yet is never empty. It is not the lack of light, but

  

  Mana is energy, and

  energy cannot be destroyed. It must exist in

  some form, even when it refuses to be seen.

  Thus, darkness the

  phenomenon is merely the absence of light reaching the eye, but

  . It is not a

  void, but a pressure. Not emptiness, containment. A state where all

  paths of release are folded inward, where light is not gone, but held

  so tightly it cannot escape as radiance.

  With my diagram, you

  should be able to convert any mana to Light Mana and feed the spell

  gently without barbaric poking this tome encourages.

  Also, consider

  starting from the middle, not from the edges. Magic is all around us

  in all dimensions, not in just a flat plane, but that is entirely

  another matter, and I'm running out of space. I mean, they are called

  tiers for God's sak—

  A traveler, misplaced,

  but not lost.

  Seventh chuckled at

  the date. Of course, somebody was learning Light in the middle of

  winter.

  Two hundred and

  twenty-seven years after the Empire's fall... Sixty-two years ago?

  Seventh thought as he looked at the tome's cracked leather back

  and fraying pages. Just how old was the thing?

  Seventh stared at the

  message for a long time. Enough for him to need to light a candle as

  the darkness fell, and he couldn't see the small handwriting anymore.

  Neat had... an odd way

  of putting things, and Seventh probably understood most of the

  instructions incorrectly, but help was help, no matter how little.

  They were slightly

  rambling— like all magical textbooks and tomes— but Seventh felt

  a kinship between him and them. Neat understood what they were

  talking about, but stumbled while trying to get the words out in a

  logical manner on parchment.

  Where the words failed

  and fell on deaf ears, diagram shouted loudly. It was bold,

  unconventional, and utterly fascinating.

  While humans and elves

  used circles and curved lines, opposed to dwarven squares, triangles,

  and runes, Neat had made a dodecagon with a circle in the middle with

  two triangles pointing at each other, tips ever so slightly cutting

  into one another. The triangles were surrounded by interconnected

  runes and symbols that Seventh hadn't seen before, but Neat had made

  a legend under the diagram, explaining shortly what the markings

  meant.

  Peculiar construction

  aside, the spell was standard Light, very much like Seventh had

  himself made, and had only a couple of deviations where the mana came

  from due to the center and the triangles. The triangles identified

  the mana Affinity by letting it flow through symbols, filtering it,

  and peeling it layer by layer until there was only pure Mana, and

  sent it to power the diagram further.

  That was the answer to

  one of Seventh's problems. He had been feeding mana from the outside,

  thinking of the diagram as writing on a flat plane, but like Neat had

  been starting to say, magic was everywhere. It had multiple

  dimensions, and if Seventh imagined his crafted spell as a floating

  image, he could more easily control his manaflow.

  The mana issue mostly

  sorted out— Seventh would need to actually try the multidimensional

  imagining of the diagram— he started to make quick notes about

  Neat's description of mana, especially about Darkness.

  There was a major

  difference between magic and the real world. With logic and math, you

  couldn't fling lightning out of your hands or make balls of light.

  Magic could.

  It had its own rules,

  borrowing some from the real world just to make everything more

  difficult to comprehend and muddy the waters. Mana changed

  everything, gave nothing a substance, something to grab onto, twist,

  and change.

  Seventh's leg started

  to tap the floor on excitement. He had to fight against himself not

  to just try the diagram outright. He had to study and understand how

  it worked before he had a snowball's chance in Hells to succeed using

  it.

  Slowly and carefully,

  Seventh copied the diagram with the symbol legend on a full page of

  parchment and the message on a second parchment. He used Fine

  Drafting for everything, even for normal writing, but he wanted to be

  This was going to be something to keep and cherish. The

  System agreed and raised Seventh's Fine Drafting to F-rank.

  The diagram wasn't

  anything special in a first glance. It didn't use advanced theory,

  and all it used was simple symbols, but the way it all interlocked

  together into a complicated, almost automated, was something Seventh

  hadn't seen, not to talk about thought about. It was something only

  an experienced Wizard could do.

  But why was it in an

  old tome, hidden away for decades? It was clearly something you could

  publish— Gath had left style guides for magical research papers

  “accidentally” lying around Seventh.

  Probably a prodigy

  who was just starting on their Path, Seventh thought as he

  prepared to use the diagram. After a final peek at his notes, his

  mind stilled, and the spell took form.

  When he moved it into

  construction, he remembered the hint about starting from the middle,

  not the sides. Hastily making a quick correction, the mana stuttered

  in the diagram, but the rugged design held until it slowly dissipated

  from Seventh's Essence.

  Was the last-second

  change a mistake? Had he ruined the spell with a rogue strand of mana

  in the wrong place? How about the runework? That looked

  a little spotty to him...

  Opening his eyes in

  confusion, Seventh was greeted with an azure glow lighting up the

  room.

  His very first

  successful Light.

  A feeling started to

  spread from his fingers and toes. Not the painful tingle of failure,

  but something he was slowly becoming used to— even friendly with.

  Happiness reached his

  chest and heart as Seventh smiled at the simple magic he had

  achieved. He slowly lifted his hand, covering the badly drawn sun

  drawing with the ball of magical light.

  His magic wasn't

  yellow and red with pleasant radiance of warmth, but it was his...

  mostly. The credit of the diagram belonged to his fellow student,

  separated by centuries, but not by understanding.

  Excitedly, Seventh

  walked out of his room and down the stairs before noticing the loud

  hubbub. It was already night, and the tavern was full.

  Annise was behind the

  counter, cleaning mugs when Seventh appeared with a wild grin on his

  face, unwashed hair sticking all around, and shaggy, untrimmed beard.

  “I CAST LIGHT!”

  Seventh cheerfully yelled at her and proudly presented his spell. A

  couple of the nearest patrons snorted and chuckled at Seventh.

  The tavernkeeper

  slowly nodded, eyes moving towards the large sword hanging above the

  counter. “I see that, yes. Say, have you been doing just that for

  the weekend? Need a pint?”

  Seventh lifted both

  hands up in the air and shouted, “Next round's on me! NO DOUBLES!”

  After the fastest ones

  had cleared from around Annise and Seventh had paid for the round, he

  took a tankard of mead upstairs to make the grinding of the Light

  spell all so much more pleasant.

  Looking at the tome,

  opened at the page with a collection of diagrams, Seventh set his

  tankard on the table, replacing it with a quill. Even when Garth had

  threatened him, Seventh felt that the page was lacking something

  important, and under the pain of losing his ears, his quill scraped

  on the parchment.

  He already had the

  design memorized, and using Fine Drafting sped up his work, in just

  ten minutes, a freshly drawn dodecagon gleamed on the aged parchment

  with the signature of its creator.

  H.D.M 13.14.227 a.E.f

  The System approved, raising up his Fine Drafting yet again. Now it was at double-E. The Skill must've been teetering on the edge of rank-up to activate after such small gesture, or spell diagrams were excellent training for it.

  After gently blowing

  the ink dry, Seventh carefully wetted the old and failing glue to get

  some stickiness back to it and carefully hid the message and diagram

  again in case of future Preposterous Junior destroying Neat's work

  again. He left the corner slightly frayed so a frustrated future

  student of arcane arts, like Seventh, could find the hidden knowledge

  when it was needed the most.

  slightly more challenging than I initially thought.