Looking at Lucinda’s twin [Lights] revolving around each other, I finally understand why everyone calls her a prodigy.

They are much more defined compared to the ones Domitilla showed me. Their movements are just a big laggy, but mostly smooth. Plus, they can run ten revolutions before stopping and disappearing.

When they poof out of existence, I’m left wondering why the magical education of this world lagged so much behind compared to my book. I don’t want to insult Lucinda, but I could do better than that in a jiff. I’m pretty sure that I can complete the first Cantrip in less than thirty minutes. I just need to get the coordination between the separate spell matrixes down. Once I’m done with that, it’s just about re-applying the same principles I learned before.

“Questions?” she asks with a serious face.

She really doesn’t joke around magic.

“Would you mind if I asked you a couple theoretical questions? Feel free to reply with stuff that’s public knowledge only. If you have your own insights, you don’t have to share, ok?”

I’m too curious at this point.

She’s clearly not manipulating the matrix to create movement in her spell. I activated [Advanced Mana Sense] this time while she was casting, and it looked like she simply summoned a pre-arranged matrix and completed it without thinking.

The interesting thing is how little energy she used. I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or what. But the first time I messed around with a spell’s polarity, I ended up putting a hole in my wall. Now, I understand why you have to be careful about the speed and how much Mana you use.

But she… she looks like she’s doing things without really thinking about it.

“Sure, ask away,” she sits on my little couch while I get a chair and settle in front of her.

We are still a bit awkward with each other, but talking about magic is easy for her.

“So, when you cast a spell, how exactly do you… see it? I mean, how does the casting work? You just visualize the spell or something?”

I’m trying to be vague, already knowing that my personal method of casting is not common at all.

She looks at me, slightly confused.

“If you can multi-cast three [Lights] you should know the answer to this. But I’ll humor you, Joey. Every spell has a formula. You have to use your Mana to recreate the formula in your mind and then try to visualize where you want the spell to appear. It’s a very instinctual process. Some people are much more talented at visualizing things in their mind and magic comes easier to them. The better you are at visualizing and the more you practice it, the better you get, as a general rule.”

My subconscious adopts a very nasal voice before going…

Oh.

My.

God.

These people are only imagining the matrix! They are not using skills or artifacts to see it! Why? I imagine that getting a [Mana Sense] without the ‘Advanced’ part cannot be that hard, can it? The book basically gave me a free skill, but there must be another way for them to do the same, right?

If you only visualize a hypothetical matrix, you will always introduce mistakes in tracing the squiggly lines. And how can you control more complex things like the polarity or the anti-matrixes that you overlap on it?

“Ok, that sounds good,” I say with a smile, “and what about movement? How do people move spells around? I’m having huge troubles doing that.”

“Well, you know, everyone has their own insights in the field. That’s the reason people will never explain their casting process for the [Light] spell. But, as a general rule, you attach your own Mana to spells that usually don’t move, like [Light] and use it as a stringed puppet.”

You have got to be kidding me.

I can’t help but widening my eyes and having my jaw go slack.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a lot to take in if you just begun. But you multi-casted a spell, Joey! Your talent must be incredible at least in that regard! Do you know that many people will never learn to do that? If they do, it’s usually after they cross the threshold of level 30 or higher. It’s not common. It’s not even rare. It’s, like, super-rare.”

She is mistaking my surprise for something else. I’m not surprised people manipulate their spell with their own Mana, similar to how puppeteers do with their puppets. I’m surprised because that’s so damn dumb. You need to control every single piece of the movement. With two [Lights], it takes a stupidly high effort to move them in concert for more than a few seconds. If you had to cast in quick succession multiple things like that, you would soon hit a bottleneck in what you are able to do.

Instead, if you manipulate the movement straight from the Matrix, even if it requires more effort upfront, it will pay off in the long-term. You can easily stack multiple spells on top of each other because you don’t need to worry about controlling them individually. Once you get the coordination right, you can summon ten times the same spell and have all of them make the right movement. If you must control each spell individually by a Mana thread or stuff like that, every casting makes it exponentially more difficult to control them all…

Me and Lucinda keep talking for a while about magic, but also about the bakeries and my plans. She’s thrilled about my bold move and she’s incredible supporting about it.

After almost two hours, she finally tells me she has to go back and take care of a few things.

This was nice.

This was cozy.

This was lovely.

I tell her I can wash the casseroles, but she shoos me off and brings them back with her after putting them in a pouch. Now that they are empty, she can easily bring them back without making a mess of her little dimensional bag.

Yeah, dimensional bags, or bag of holdings as they call them, are a thing. But right now, she’s my only concern. While looking at her smiling at me on the other side of the door, her gaze lingers on my face for a second too long.

And I take the hint.

I lean toward her, and I give her a kiss.