A few days had passed since my plan of outsourcing was rejected and ever since then I and sensei had spent almost all our time researching and practicing magic. Right after I left grandma’s house, I made myself busy inside my house trying to understand magic.

Sensei used various scans to understand this thing called mana that is ever existing in my body and then we had a detailed discussion over it as well as some hands-on session. From the long conversation we had, there are a few things I understood.

The first thing we understood was the mana channel in our body is similar to the circulatory system and we decided to call it the mana flow system. Anyways this mana flow system is spread throughout our body and makes sure each and every part of our body is supplied mana equally. This discovery gave me various exciting thoughts. If it’s possible to exert mana from your hands, then the same must be possible with any part of the body, like covering my entire body in a layer of mana, or maybe strengthen various parts of the body and so on. Of course, the inspiration for all these thoughts are without the doubt the animes and mangas I have watched and read before.

The second thing we understood was when we expend all the mana in our system, stop before we start fueling magic with our life force, the mana replenishes automatically after a whiles rest. Interestingly, the mana heart or mana chamber actually expands a little. To be exact the increase in capacity is nothing much, nevertheless if one were to empty and then restore mana on a regular basis, the increase in his capacity will not be small. We understood this fact after I experimented with magic. It was really hard, in the beginning, I had to first get a feel of this thing called mana. Maybe because somewhere in my subconscious I was still doubting the existence of mana and magic and it was sensei’s advice that let me clear that obstacle. Once I could feel the mana flowing through my body, the next phase was trying to control it as per my will. Luckily, it wasn't as hard as the first stage. With a little concentration, I was able to move the mana inside my body s I wanted. It actually felt a little weird, to be honest. The final stage was imaging the type of magic and its effect. I had used, for safety reasons, a simple earth spell to mold a handful of earth to form a small ball. Even such a spell drained me completely out of my mana. While I was excited about the notion being able to use magic, my poor capacity dampened my mood instantly.

The third discovery was even more exciting. Now that I was able to use magic, I needed a method to replenish it. And the most basic way was to not use magic till it replenished. But this method was too time-consuming. It took more than four hours to fill my small mana chamber. So for somebody with a much larger mana chamber, it would surely take a day or so to completely replenish their mana. And with my knowledge from my old world, I tried meditating. Even if I say meditating, my mind was too distracted with various thoughts, and so I couldn't concentrate much. A few days of training and I was somehow able to control my mind a little. My concentration improved and my senses sharpened. Soon I was able to feel the mana inside me with ease followed by a sense of mana in the air around me. And this development actually sped up my mana recovery. The time needed for me to replenish mana reduced to 30 minutes, a huge reduction. What’s more interesting was that this new sense I obtained did not vanish even after I stopped meditating and thus it took me only something like an hour or so to replenish my mana. It was like my body was suddenly tuned for mana reception and it was truly surprising. With this, I was able to actually solve the problem without many hardships.

Since I had a method to fill my mana with ease, I had devoted almost all my time in training my magic. And by the time three days passed, my mana chamber could hold four times the original mana I had. With this amount, I could use small spells like the spell I used on the first time four times, but a spell like a fireball that was the size of my head could only be used once. Nevertheless, I had actually improved my mana greatly which actually gave me some kind of hope. If I could actually teach the others how to use magic then the matter of village security can be solved and then I would be able to outsource manpower from the other villagers. With earth magic user I’ll be able to build the houses for these new labors. But with this low number of people in our village, even if they could use magic, numbers are always numbers. The more people you have the more things can be done and so right now rather than an all-purpose magic corps, I want people who can do hard labor. Maybe if the village were to develop to a big town of some kind, then the magic corps might come into being.

The fourth thing we found out was that every spell depending upon its size and effect had a different amount of mana consumption. While there was no limit to the effect we could imagine, the mana consumption would skyrocket depending upon this effect. In other words, if I had enough, I could even terraform this planet. But sadly such a day will never come, as there is a limit to how much mana a person can store in his body. For doing something like a terraforming magic, a few storey high building worth of magic is needed. While the mana limit for a person might vary depending upon their talent in magic, there is no way that a person could store such a huge amount of mana in his body, is what sensei concluded. Apparently, my talent is really good, once again thanks to those gods, and so I can store more mana than most human. But even sensei has no idea how much mana my body can actually store so I am kind of looking forward to the day when I saturate my mana capacity.

Now comes the details about various attributes or elementals. Out of the seven elements, I was able to invoke six of them, all except the space and time magic. When I say invoke, doesn’t mean that I used some sort of awesome magic or anything. All I was able to do was simple things, like summoning water and fire, molding earth, bring forth a ball of light and darkness element, use wind magic to sway the leaves on a tree. They might not be much, but for now, I am happy with knowing I had the ability to use all these various magics. As for space and time magic, I wasn't sure what the simplest spell of the elemental was. While I knew that teleportation, storage magic etc fell under space and time, since I wasn't sure about the mana consumption of those spells, I didn't want to risk falling into a coma.

These were all sensei and I managed to find out for now. And so I have been occupied for another four days with magic practice. In total a week has passed since I started practicing magic. Thanks to the rigorous training I now have enough magic to cast a fireball thrice. From what sensei told me Euthe-kun’s mana capacity can afford him 10 such fireballs. Right now, my mana capacity is equivalent to that of all the adults around me. So that mean’s Euthe-kun has rather good talent in magic or so sensei told me.

And so today marks the eighth day of my training and I was so immersed in expanding my mana that I didn't notice my mana depletion at all. It’s actually hard to know when the mana inside your mana chamber has depleted. If not for sensei’s timely reminders, I would have long since fallen into a coma or even died. The thing is, when the mana in your body depletes, the magic almost immediately sucks in the energy it needs from our life force. The time it takes to switch from mana to life force is actually a two or three seconds. People here think that magic users fall to coma because of magic itself. They don't realize that rather than magic or mana, the depletion of life force is what causes the magic users to turn into a breathing corpse. As I told you, the source transfer from mana to life force takes a few seconds and during this time, the body actually feels heavy. It’s as if the air around you turns heavy, but this sensation is not that prominent and so the magic users till now often don't notice it. Even if they did, I think, they just neglected those signs as symptoms that arose due to the hard work they were doing or something. I mean, till now people only used mana for crafting purposes, so the craftsmen who used magic as a tool for their trade attributed their body suddenly feeling heavy due to the heavy labor they had to do. Anyways, once you paid good attention to your body while using magic, you can actually feel the amount of mana being drained out as well as the amount left in your body. But since I always concentrate too much on perfecting my spell or controlling the mana flowing out, I sometimes forget to check the mana that is left inside me. And such a negligence has once again caused sensei to get a little angry with me. Even though sensei said ‘advice’, his voice actually carried some anger and frustration in it. Not wanting to anger him anymore, I extinguished the fireball in my hand and then sat on the ground. And in the next moment, my body began to feel really tired and eyelids felt a little heavy. I slowly forced myself up and then paced myself towards my home.

Once inside, I drank a mouthful of water and then forced the bread and meat into my mouth. The dinner was finished in a matter of minutes, the sun had already set and so darkness had found its way to my home. I then laid down on the makeshift bed and soon drifted away to sleep.

My everyday routine changed to getting up in the morning, having breakfast, magic practice, meditating, practice some more, lunch, magic practice, meditation, practice, dinner, and sleep. A very organized routine, right? But by the time ten days passed, I was already bored of the routine. Being able to do this for ten days is in a sense, not a normal feat I guess, but anyways, I no longer to take it and so decided with great excitement to test out my newly learned abilities. How, you ask? Of course, by using it in a practical situation. I decided to hunt.