Chapter Five

The Early Life of a Wannabe Mage

My mother had revealed two essential things in her little silique. First of all, that there were many types of magic. She spoke of how my father was gifted in earthen magic, which was relatively common, wishing that he was given stronger abilities to make us more money. She went into further detail listing out some of the main classes of mages. The most common mages were of a water attribute, and right after water were earthen mages. Seeing as those are the most common things on the direct surface of the earth, it makes sense that that type of mage is the most common.

While earthen and water mages are the most common, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are the weakest, there are some powerful water and earth mages, but in most situations, they are looked down upon because the majority of their users are unable to reach the higher forms of the element. My mother went on for a small while talking about how she was slightly impressed that my father was able to vaguely reach the altered form of earthen magic and use metal magic.

After complaining about my father for a bit longer, she fell off the topic of the types of magic in this world, but what she moved on to was arguably more important. She moved on to how my father became a mage.

"Your father learned his first spell at four. Isn't that amazing! Your papa is super talented isn't he little adam," my mother kyued in appreciation for my father's miraculous achievement. "Normally people don't learn their first spell till around six. Michal was still learning to read and he was able to use his first spell."

My mother went on for a while longer on how impressive my father was. Hearing her talk like that for so long reminded me of how my parents used to talk about each other back on earth. I felt a pang of regret as I tried to push the memories of them to the back of my head like I had been trying to since being reborn here. There was no point in thinking about it right now with no way to get back to earth.

Shortly after my mother had stopped talking about my father, she got up from her knitting chair in the corner. She stood from the chair taking me with her before making her way to my room and setting me in my cradle.

The cradle itself was magnificent, made of dark redwood that was beautifully carved. It had intricate markings in the shape of small animals for children to look at and touch while laying in the cradle. The rest of the room was not half as nice as the cradle. It was similar to the rest of the house in the way that all of the walls appeared to be made of wooden planks. The main difference was that the walls were painted in different bright colors.

It was a perfect room for an infant to sit in with plenty of things to look at. Lost in thought, I almost didn't hear her. My mother put me to sleep and said that she was going out to make some food. I remembered it after she left, but she never finished the book she was reading me. She got too caught up in telling my father's stories instead of the actual story that she was reading. After she had finally left the room, I gradually fell asleep waiting for dinner to be made.

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In the span of a few months, a few things had happened. Firstly, I can talk now. Whenever I spoke my first words, it disappointed my mother for about a week, seeing as my first word was dad. I wanted to make sure that I said dad first, not because I dislike my mother, but more so because, as a male, I felt like I would never forget the satisfaction of being one of my child's first words… Assuming I actually had any back when I was older.

About a day or two after saying dad, I attempted to console my mother by saying, "mama." It's safe to say that it worked for a while. For the entire rest of that day she was bouncing off the walls in the excitement that her baby boy finally said, mama.

Soon after, it seemed to come back to her that I had said dad first, and she calmed down after that, but overall she was still happy that I could talk, even as limited as it was now.

One of the other things that had happened was learning to read. After getting a good look at the writing of this world, I realized that it was quite similar to English writing. There were only a few differences, but in the majority, all of the letters still made the same sounds and looked similar enough to English that I was able to pick it up in just a few weeks.

The final big thing that happened was I can walk now. I took my first actual steps a few months ago. Those first steps were pitifully wobbly and extremely difficult, but still, it was walking. Now I am able to traverse the house with ease. With the ability to fully explore the house, I learned a few things about it.

Firstly, it was small. The house was about the size of a small apartment from back in San Francisco. While it was on the smaller side, it was still extremely homey in most places. Like my mother's little study room, it was small but still left it feeling like a home should feel.

There was a small living area with a couch and a large armchair that could fit two people. Both were made of rough cloth material, but there were soft animal pelts covering the majority of the seats despite this. Right behind the sitting area, there was the kitchen.

There was a small wood-burning stove in the kitchen with pans cluttered on top of it the majority of the time. Something that surprised me about the kitchen was the sink. I had guessed that there was a well outside that we would have to get water from, but surprisingly the sink had its own running water.

A few other rooms in the house had just as many surprises while feeling homey still, but my favorite was most likey my mother's sitting room. There was just so much to do in there. All of the wonderful books, and there was a bunch of art supplies. They ranged from paint to pencils and even a primitive form of pastels.

I was currently sitting in my mother's study, scavenging the bottom shelf for a book pertaining to magic. It took quite some time, but I was able to find a book titled "The Early Workings of a Mage." Seeing that book, I immediately pulled it out from the shelf and flipped it open to the first page. There was a picture of a man with wavy lines drawn around him on the first page, seeming to represent his aura.

Below the man, there was a phrase it said, "You do not need magic to change the world. All you truly need is the will to do so because your will to do will forever be stronger than any magic you can conjure." It was a thought-provoking phrase; my will is stronger than my magic.

After rereading the quote, I flipped through the book until I found some interesting information. One of the main parts that intrigued me was the description of magic and where it came from. In the book, they said how it was largely unknown how magic works. There were a few things that they did know about magic, though.

The first is that it is powered by mana. Mana can be found in the atmosphere but also in the body of every being on the continent. The main thing that differentiates beings that can use magic and those that can't is the amount of mana inside a person's body. If the person meets a certain threshold for the amount of mana trapped inside of their body, they gain the ability to use magic.

The next thing I was able to pick up from the book was more specific to how a mage becomes a mage. It wrote of how long and arduous the path to becoming a true mage was and gave more examples of what a true mage was. A true mage is a person who can use magic for more than just mundane household chores like drying the clothes with a gust of wind or conjuring a splash of water to douse the fire. Being a true mage was learning how to move with magic and how to fight with it. A true mage could send a blast of fire that ignited forests, a spike of earth the size of a tree, or a gust of wind capable of shifting buildings.

Becoming a true mage was extremely difficult to do, though. It took hours upon hours of meditation and study. The more you meditate, the more mana you are able to draw into your body and thus progress further into the following stages. It also mentioned people meditating to become a mage initially. A few reports of young pre-teens and teens were just on the cusp of being a mage but not quite there becoming mages due to meditation and forcing mana into their bodies.

I thought to myself that I should try to do that sometime. My only problem being that I was never extremely good at meditation, but I'll build the bridge when I get to it. Reading further into the book, I saw that there were multiple stages in a mage's life. The stages ranged from white to a mysterious purple that only four recorded people have ever reached. The color of the mana in your body starts off at white then slowly turns from white to light grey. After light grey, it progresses to dark grey, then black, then black with some tinges of purple, then an all purple, then lastly, the one that only four people have reached, purple that looks like it is flowing through your body like water in a stream, instead of the mana sitting in your body like a stagnant lake.

According to the book, the color of the mana was based on the purity of the mana in your body. Well, at least that is the best guess that they have as of now. The true answer is that there is no real reason that they know of as to why the mana slowly gets darker till turning purple.

My mother had started to explain all of the different types of magic in this world, but she stopped short. Luckily, this book went more in-depth about it. There were five base types of magic, and every kind of magic had its own altered form that was much harder to access. There was fire, wind, water, earth, and gravity magic. Water and earth magic were the most common after those two were fire and then wind. Wind and fire were reasonably rare, but gravity was on a whole nother level of rare. The chances of inherently being a gravity mage were around one in five hundred thousand. To put that in perspective, there are only around one hundred million people on the continent I was born on called Arak. That means there were only two hundred gravity users out of the entire continent.

The higher forms of the magic types were relatively self-explanatory. For water, the altered form was the ability to control ice. For fire, it was the ability to control plasma that ranged from controlling stuff like lightning, but it could also be used to things like the northern lights. Fire, to some extent, also has the ability to control electricity. Advanced earthen mages that have unlocked the higher form of earth can harness metal magic. They can pull metal from the ground and shape it into weapons such as swords and spears with their metal magic. Suppose a person can control both metal and plasma. In that case, they are able to make an extremely powerful weapon by coating the edge of their blade in plasma to make it able to cut almost anything. The next form of higher magic is wind magic, it is incessantly rare for wind mages to reach this point, but the higher form of wind is light magic. With their light magic, they can force light into spheres and explode them to force blindness onto an opponent for a time and many other tricks. Gravity by far piqued my interest the most when I learned its higher form. Gravity's higher form is darkness manipulation. While it is even rarer than the light manipulation that a wind mage can use, it is far more dangerous. With darkness, you can take away an opponent's vision similar to a light mage, but instead of making a bright flash, they expand their darkness to fill their opponent's vision making it impossible to break free from. With darkness, they can also seemingly form weapons out of it. Light mages can form weapons as well, but the difference is while a light mages construct can physically cut something, a darkness mages weapon seems to delete the matter that it passed through. It is like it sends the matter that it hits to a separate space. Instead of cleaving the item in two with force and moving the particles out of the way, a sword of darkness completely obliterates any particles in its path.

Reading more into the book, there was so much information about how rare and powerful gravity mages were, but that didn't mean that it neglected to describe ways other types of magic could be used. The book even had information on the base forms of magic and how to use them.

After reading a bit more of the book, I didn't find any more interesting info, so I put it back on the shelf and waddled my way back to my room, and plopped myself onto the floor. With nothing to do to pass the time, I tried to meditate. Safe to say that I was still terrible at it, but I kept trying to sit there and sense anything in my body, sense any mana within me. After what felt like an eternity sitting there and meditating, I finally was able to see some specks of white.