Chapter 6 - Leaving home and magic beams

Me and Charon went back to the inn, as well as Lester and Flynn. I needed my mother's permission to go to the school, personally I was scared and leading a clueless man to what could be his doom. I had Flynn and Lester as back up yet I felt even they might be ineffective in this situation.

We walked in and for some reason Charon decided he should be the one to convince her, very bad idea, In seconds after uttering the words I will be taking your son away he flew into a wall and 8 men and woman held my mother back, barely. It took me about 2 hours after that to explain the situation to her properly, albeit with some exaggerations about monetary gain I could get she changed her tune pretty quickly after that. It even seemed like she was eager for me to go out the door, the old saying money can change anyone is true especially in my mother's case apparently.

We rested for the night after a heavy night of celebratory drinking due to my travel plans, I also discovered the Lester is a raging alcoholic and a fun drunk. Leaving in the morning was a little bittersweet, I could tell my mother would miss me but her words of parting were a bit off key.

“BRING ME MONEY SON”

As you can see it was a bittersweet moment. Charon and I left after that, he on a horse and me on a tortoise that was much faster that it reasonably should be. I influence the earth around its feet to move with him, increasing his speed. Although riding on Flynn would be faster it wouldn't as smooth as a ride, plus riding Flynn would be too fast for Charon to keep up on hos regular horse. Speaking of familiars Charon's turned out to be an emerald snake, made of actual emeralds.

Charon told me we were heading to an academy for nobles, as it was one of the only ones with magus in it. It was primarily an academy that focused on qi users but magi were given what was close to free reign to pursue their studies due to the fact for magi to grow we did not need life and death experiences. My tuition would be covered by a scholarship provided by the school, due to the fact I had two familiars and I was so young. It was also on this journey that he taught me an actual spell.

“So I think by now you have realised the limitations of the ball spell, the lack of power, lack of control and the lack of variety. Well you see to use spells one must first use the spiritual force after gathering mana. The first spell I shall teach you is often used for learning control. It is called the spout spell and it is much like the name says, it makes an outlet for your magic, of course now unlike with the ball spell you can control the output, be it more or less”

He showed me the spell diagram, It was two circles, one inside the other, apparently you make the spell formation with your spiritual force in the air in front of you and imbue the outer circle with the mana, then the inner circle spews out the corresponding element. It took me a few hours to get the formation correct, after that I began to use the spell wantonly. I spewed fire, water and mini hurricanes using earth didn't work so well.

I then tried to experiment with the spell and do something that I had tried to do before with the ball spell to no avail, mixing the elements. It took a few tries but I finally accomplished my goal with very powerful consequences. It seemed that with a 60-40 ratio of fire and wind mana respectively creates and beam of fire, increasing the purity of the fire mana nearly makes it a beam of plasma, however that's when i discovered that like in the story's power was limitless, My head started to hurt and my spell cut out, turns out I ran out of spiritual force, Mana points if you will.

Meanwhile charon was shocked I had this must control over the spell as I did, to mix mana was apparently a very rare skill. Well all the praise goes to one place in the end, my ego. Although he did have a laugh at me due to my little mistake of using up to much spiritual force. According to him for us magi to have any use in combat we had to at least reach the apprentice stage, which he said I would learn about when I reached the academy. Another thing about the academy, it was self taught in the magus case, they opened the library to us and said do your shit. I rather liked this feature, I would learn my magic and if I needed help with stuff I could ask a more experienced magus.

Charon also mentioned a runic language that made up most if not all of the advanced spells accompanied with the circles. In other words another written language I had to learn, If it was anything like the bastard language… Well there would be lots of fire involved. While thinking this about learning a new language I absentmindedly started to cackle, slightly worrying charon, but oh well.

Over the time the journey to the academy took I kept using the fount spell and my own mixed mana beam spell. Charon said the more I use my spiritual force up until depletion the faster I will reach the next level, there are apparently more books that detail the change between levels in the elementary stage.

We saw the academy as well as the city that surrounds it before we reached it, long before we reached it. It was huge, the size was probably comparable to some cities back in my other life the medieval vibe here wasn't as strong either as from what I could see the buildings had the same type of look some modern might have.

We reached the city a full day later, it was encircled by a 10 metre tall wall which was very impressive. Using charon's identity to pass through the gates and my city life began.