One might wonder why Darius hadn't learned Purify earlier and allocated his Skill Points into it, yet there were good reasons for that.

In essence, Darius was certain that many of his iterations must've specialized in Intelligence and this spell, turning him into an Undead Slayer. However, none of the three things Caesar had mentioned involved spells, hence why he chose to prioritize as he did.

Darius already knew how the spell system of Faust largely worked and even had plans of dabbling in the Magical Method once he completed his Journeyman Quest.

He was certain that with his Intellect and creativity as someone from modern Earth, he could think up far more unique and versatile spells. Of course, if he was feeling lazy, he could do some half-hearted work and have his Transmutation ability 'fill in' the rest.

As he had learned, the basic spells that only Amateurs could use were cantrips that had variable power depending on the way it was learned. Basic spells were not created by mages but existed in the world as a form of universal law.

You could not make new or variable Amateur spells - well, not including the Supreme System as it was a law of its own - you could only learn what already existed. This naturally begat the question: How the hell did Amateurs learn Basic spells and how good were they in battle if Basic spells were so weak?

This was naturally a troubling question. The answer was divided into two, based on the method in which a person awoke as a mage. Upon a natural awakening, a person would have an affinity with certain elements.

Depending on their talent, these could manifest in many ways. When they naturally awoke, they would 'innately' learn the basic spells of the elements they had an affinity with, and their power of the basic spell also varied depending on the strength of their talent.

So there were powerful Amateurs and weak Amateurs in terms of naturally awakened fellows. Of course, their Intellect also played a role in this.

It was natural to expect such an outcome though. Just like how fighters who had sparked gained abilities after the event, they would naturally know how to use these abilities at the simplest level or form.

It was quite amusing to gain the ability to manipulate sand upon sparking and not know how to actually control the sediment at all. Of course, there was a need to train one's gift to become used to the ability as well as become more efficient with it, but to not even know the basics…

Anyway, the second part of the answer was for mages who awoke through scrolls. There were largely two types of Scrolls of Awakening, random and focused. Random ones would grant the person any element at all under the sun, and the number of them was random as well.

Focused was the opposite, allowing a candidate to obtain prepared elements by the scroll writer. So for example, an Adept master could use special materials to make a Scroll of Awakening which focused on the space element, so that the user would gain that affinity upon awakening.

As such, one could imagine the cost of Focused Scrolls compared to Random Scrolls. Random Scrolls were the ones people normally saw and could only be purchased through struggle.

As for focused, no one was stupid enough to sell them. Adept masters carefully and painstakingly made them for their chosen Official Apprentices with love and care.

Here though, the basic spells would not come naturally and had to be manually learned, like how Darius had to give Foldo a spellbook for Ice Lance, which was the element Foldo randomly awoke to.

The one Foldo had before was utter garbage, so he had been using flawed Journeyman spells to forcefully increase his Intellect enough to try breaking through to the Journeyman stage.

Even the ones Darius bought from the bookstore were crap, some calculating damage in decimal points while the highest chance of learning had been 12%!

The debate had always been there, whether naturally awakened mages were better than those who had been awakened through artificial means. Which of the two had more chance of growth? Which of the two were more powerful?

Official opinions varied, but the simple fact was that Darius broke the understanding of various powers. After all, his Scrolls of Awakening allowed any candidate to unlock any element they wanted, up to 5 of them in fact.

5!!!

This was enough to make the various powers believe that yes, these rewards were made by a Master stage expert, if not a Grandmaster, as no one in the Andrato Kingdom could even fathom something like this.

Heck, even the Fraterina Kingdom which had Master stage experts had never encountered such a perfect Scroll of Awakening, much less 8 of them, which all had the same quality. It was no wonder they all unhesitatingly moved out.

Any party that created new Amateurs using these scrolls would be creating monsters that would shake the entire kingdom in the future! Whoever they were affiliated with would become top dog for sure, and they would decide the future of Andrato!

Of course, this was all a tangential matter and Darius ended his thoughts there. He thought back to what he was originally analyzing, which were the basic spells of Faust and how many existed under the sun.

In truth, there were almost an uncountable number of elements and sub-elements in Faust. Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Wood, Lightning, Lava, Explosion, Spirit, Psychic, Life, Death, Light, Dark, Space, Time, Order, Chaos, Metal, Poison, Ice, Gravity and more.

Darius would need to spend a lot of time creating basic spells for all the elements, though it didn't seem wise to do so. Rather, he had a wealth of elements to choose from when he wanted to create Journeyman and above spells of his own.

The only problem would be that he actually needed to research the quintessence of these elements and infuse them into the spells he would make. The higher the quintessence, the higher the quality.

Darius swirled his drink and stopped thinking about this. It was far too early to count his chickens before they hatched, and he had other concerns at this time. He took out a stamina potion of average quality and focused.

[Would you like to change the Common Stamina Potion into a Common Purification Potion? This will cost 0.02 Conversion Points.]

Darius smiled and made the change. The bottle of greenish fluid that seemed to sparkle with vigor slowly transformed into a same-sized bottle with a creamy white liquid that sloshed inside.