POV: Kyle Mercer

Magic is easy, or at least it is for me. The most important part of having strong magic is your imagination. Akira was a good mage because he could draw over top of his vision.

Literally, it was like painting a picture and then using a pencil to draw lines for magic. Being able to block out everything other than the most essential image was the power of Akira.

This is not the same for most people though. Most people use their imagination to make a brief instance of the magic happening and what it is supposed to do, then they lose the image. Akira would sometimes draw a bug on someone's face and laugh about it 10 minutes into a conversation.

Combined with his huge mana pool, Akira was the best mage in the entire human kingdom, and possibly the elven kingdom.

My approach to magic was a little different though, I liked to imagine the magic happening and the effect. This allowed me much greater control of the magic, but sometimes I would overshoot or undershoot it.

Take, for instance, the door that held me inside the sewer. I could imagine myself breaking the door open with a Blast earth spell, but what if it was too powerful and knocked down a wall in the sewer? I'm no structural expert, but I think it would be bad. What if I don't use enough power and the rock blast come back in my face? Akira would never worry about this, he would just yell "Screw the rules, I have mana!" and blast the fuck out of that door.

My method was better for precision use of my mana, in spells that used mana over time, something Akira did not have to worry about too often.

So how does this apply to others? It is easy for a kid to imagine things. Akira was a kid at heart, using his special eyes to paint on walls. Forcing children to not be able to learn magic until the age of 8 was a direct sabotage against the advancement of magical arts.

Kids would only imagine what they saw, and not things like lightning shooting from their hands. There was the danger of children using their magic to cause trouble, but it was important to learn magic young for a strong future.

Using imagination cannot really be taught, it has to be developed by the mage themselves. The second most important part of casting a spell was knowing the event.

Akira was able to bypass this step somehow, and he was able to use every spell without knowing exactly what happened, but not me. I knew it all.

Fire magicians need to know about combustion, something nearly everyone who has seen a fire knows about. Something gets hot, it pops, fire comes out. The strongest mages knew about the air fueling the fire and that only certain things were burnable. This knowledge of the essence of fire was necessary to make the spell very powerful, and the more that was known about fire, the higher rank spells that could be used.

Beth was able to learn this and was even using [Fireball].

Ice magicians need to know about freezing. Something I have seen about this climate is even though it gets cold, it does not freeze. I have so far not seen a single piece of ice from anything other than a mage. Important things to know about ice were the shrinking effect on materials, and the rigidity they get. There is also the escaping heat factor, and that was the most important part. Ice magic is pushing heat away from something and at the same time reforming the material to become rigid.

Beth learns this to a degree, and I'm not sure if taking off my shirt and standing in the cold for an hour would really help her learn like she said, but Beth can use up to [Ice], which was similar to [Fireball].

Lightning magic moves something called electrons. I'm not really sure what they are, I just know that they are in everything. To use lightning magic, one must imagine moving the elections into a path for the magic to travel. Because of this, lightning is highly versatile and can bend. The course cannot be corrected while being cast, but if the path needed to change to go around a tree while still using the chant, it was possible.

Beth had a blast training in lightning magic. We found a rug in the house that she could build up elections with, and then shock me. It was a little annoying, but worth it for the most powerful combat magic. Beth could only use [Shock] though, which sent lightning to a target from the hand. [Static] is the 2nd tier lightning spell, and it covers the body in little sparks. It was too much for her to understand.

That was the end for the magic Beth could learn, but compared to her parents that only knew Fire, it was pretty good. Beth was a 3 type mage, Fire Ice and Lightning.

To learn Earth magic, it usually takes a strong body. Boys are the best at it, and it requires knowledge of mass. You can't think of the rock as just a rock. It is millions of tiny parts of something, compressed to form a rock. Everything with Earth magic was like this, and every material was different. The second tier Earth spell [Blast] did not instantly form a rock and shoot it, the spell created each spec of mass and gave it a velocity. The first spell [Form] was similar to this, but it did not give it velocity.

The legendary spell [Gravity] was hard for people to learn because they had never felt anything without gravity. My own encounter with zero-gravity was when I fought the orbe interfector. It was a small creature, but it would throw tiny black balls out that would quickly expand and reduce gravity to nothing. When the unlucky prey was caught in this zero-gravity and unable to move, and in the next instant it would spit acid into the zero-gravity field to dissolve the prey. I killed it by deflecting the acid with my lightning-tiger style and casting [Fireball] on it. Had to buy a new sword though.

My abnormal large mana pool and survival of the attack from a monster with an almost 100% fatality rate was what made it possible for me to learn [Gravity].

The last and probably weakest magic type is wind. Its strongest attack if the 3rd tier spell [Blade], but it can be blocked with a wooden shield. To learn wind magic, one must understand that the air is not nothing, it is just a really light something that is easily pushed around. Most people are under the mindset that air is nothing and is just the absence of ground. Air is constantly moving, and the wind is just air that is moving fast.

I explained this to Beth by telling her 'if air was nothing, how do people suffocate?' but she still didn't understand.

The legendary spell [Fly] is another matter though. It does not produce wind, and has effects very similar to [Gravity]. A slight breeze can be felt when using [Fly], but it acts mostly as a shield for when moving very fast. Fly actually works by changing the nature of the air around the caster, and uses the slight breeze to effect the air. It uses a huge amount of mana though, even more than [Gravity].

Healing magic is the most useful magic for making money if you aren't a fighter. It is essentials to know about the human body and identify the parts that are injured. Healing magic is highly volatile. [Heal] can only be used when the part of the body that needs to be healed is known. The sensation of flesh being put together is absolutely essential. If it is not, huge amounts of mana will be used to heal everything and it will usually cause rebound.

In case I haven't defined rebound yet, it is what happens when a mage runs out of mana during a spell. First tier spells like [Flame] and [Frost] that continuously use mana will not cause rebound if they use up all the mana, but a spell like [Fireball] will if not enough is there at the end of the chant. Rebound is mostly headaches, but for me, it has evolved into going unconscious for an unknown amount of time.

Anyway, for the spell [Cure], one must know a natural cure to the disease, else it will fail. Once again, it can be used to cure anything at the cost of using huge amounts of mana. Dispel is the same way, but the subject of the curse must know something is different about them.

The legendary spell Resurrect though... it's not forbidden or anything, even Saint Ajoras asked us to use it for him on a few people. It just used so much mana. Sooooooo much mana. Like, one spell a day mana. Not only this, but people tend to remember the moment they died when they get resurrected. Someone killed in battle? Better left dead. I can honestly say, I hope nobody uses resurrect on me if I get my head cut off.

How to increase mana. The size of your mana pool increases as it is used, so using a weak spell that does not use very much mana, for a long time, is the best method. This method cannot be used continuously because mana does not recharge while a spell is being used. About 1/5 full is the best place for growing the mana pool, but because the amount of mana a person has cannot be measured other than how many spells they can cast, nobody really knows where this is.

The reason my mana is so large though... I don't know exactly why, but I have a theory. My soul used to be in my whole body, it was everywhere. Now though, my soul is resting near my heart. Something happened to my soul that is making it use very small amounts of mana and causing it to increase the size of my mana pool constantly, while I recharge my mana.

All that I know is, something happened to my soul, and now my mana pool is even larger than Akira's was.

Author's Note: If anyone has questions on the magic system, please ask. If I left anything out in this explanation, I would like to explain it. Special Chapter 01 will be on Kyle's soul and why his mana is so high.