I woke up the next morning, and quietly moved across camp to sit next to Carrigan. “What’s got you up so early?” I asked as I sat down and stared into the fire with him.

“Eh, rock found a way into my bedroll.” He said with a shrug. “How about you?”

“Not really sure.” I answered. “Been thinking about the magic and its rules. I’m sure that the other races have it, but do you know of a way to actually see magic?”

“Mage sight? Easy.” He answered swiftly. “If I had known you didn’t have it, I would have spoken up earlier. It really helps with some spells, not that you need any more boosts to your monstrous growth.” He chuckled before continuing. “Anyway, you should already have everything you need, you just have to feed it. There are special parts of the eye that need to be soaked in mana for ten hours a day, over three days. After that, they can activate.”

“That’s it?” I asked incredulously.

“That’s it.” He confirmed. “How else do you think people can progress in enchanting without seeing mana? That’s like asking a blacksmith to forge metal while blindfolded and without the ability to sense heat.”

“I gotta stop underestimating people from this world.” I said, shaking my head. “So what else can you tell me about this mage sight? Is it always on once you get it?”

“No, you can reactivate it with just a trickle of mana to your eyes. There are skills to get around it, so don’t go thinking that you can use it to detect everyone being stealthy. But why are you so interested in mage sight all of a sudden?”

“I need it to improve a spell.” I said, pulling a cup from my inventory. “See, normal cup. Until I cast Overlook on it.” Suddenly the cup in my hand was worn down, and had a crack running halfway down one of the sides. “I can easily make uncommon items look common, but I need a way to ensure that I am blocking how the magic looks if I want to progress it at all.”

“That’s a nifty little spell.” Bribis said, startling me as he plopped down next to Carrigan. “How long does it last?”

“A half hour right now, if I drop the maintenance.” I answered.

“Interesting.” He grumbled, stroking his chin for a bit. “Here, you’ll be needing a magic item to practice on next, and we’ve got plenty so you can check on these.” He said, pulling a talking stone out of his pouch.

“Thanks Bribis.” I said, putting the stone into my inventory so I didn’t lose it. “I’ll check to see if there’s a way to increase the time without saturating it with mana.”

“Sounds good. Just don’t try it with any merchants. We have skills that will pierce that simple spell quite easily.”

“I figured you would, probably through an appraisal skill. But if you were to hide your belongings at home from a possible thief, it would be a good spell. Or even if you were trying to sneak somewhere.”

“Relax a bit.” Carrigan said, nudging my shoulder. “He knows, but he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if he didn’t pass on the warning. Now, go get something to eat so we can get on the road.”

Taking his advice to heart, I started the process to obtain mage sight. It wasn’t that bad, I simply had to use my mana control to coat my retinas and sit there for a few days. That wouldn’t be so bad, but the blue haze that I was forced to look through was incredibly annoying. It was like I had one half of those cheap 3D glasses on. At least I had Norie and Elendria to bounce ideas off of.

Flash and Directed flash were good spells for blinding groups of people, simply using intense flashing lights to overload the eyes. Directed flash could be limited in range with a cone of mana, something I stumbled upon when I was playing with it to maximize its levels. I had no doubt that adding in a sound effect could create a magic flashbang, but that could wait until I had my basic elemental magics set up. What I needed was a way to blind a single person. I could create a laser to blast their eyes, but that would be a permanent effect. Effective, but limited to enemies only.

That thought brought me up short. I hadn’t even been in this world for three months, and yet I was debating permanently blinding people? What the hell had happened to me? I could rationalize it as the human psyche being incredibly adaptable, and there was no doubt this world I was in was a brutal one, but really? Could I live with myself, or more importantly still be the man my family counted on, and do these horrible deeds?

“What’s going on?” I asked, my train of thought interrupted as we were unexpectedly slowing down. We still had several hours of travel yet to go.

“I’m not sure master.” Elendria said. “Probably a blockage in the road, though they are exceedingly rare.”

“Well, let’s go see shall we?” I asked with a grin. Maybe there would be some excitement coming up. Heading to the front of the caravan, I saw Bribis, Carrigan and Gareth having an intense conversation.

“What’s going on?” I asked as we sauntered up.

“Hey Sean.” Carrigan said, turning to point behind him. “Got a slight issue up ahead, and we were trying to figure out how to deal with it.” I looked and saw a group of deer like animals nearly a hundred yards away. I say deer like, but honestly they probably came right out of the plains of Africa. Each had a pair of long horns coming up from the back of their head, and what looked like a little nub of one on the tip of their nose. I thought their pelts were a greenish brown blur, but telling colors with a blue tint was a lot more difficult than anticipated.

“So how dangerous are they?” I asked. Usually something like that would be fairly skittish, and the noise of a caravan on the move would be more than enough to scare them away. That they were slowly sauntering about while grazing around the road let me know they weren’t that defenseless.

“Trizelles.” Bribis nearly spat the word. “They have a good bit of wind magic, and a very protective herd instinct. Any threat they think they can defeat, and they bunch up with their horns outward and blast it with air blades until it dies. About the only thing they really fear is fire, probably leftover from the chances of large grassfires.”

“We don’t really have the manpower to take them down, and we can’t use Carrigan’s fire magic for fear of actually starting a grassfire.” Gareth kept the explanation going. “If we try and wait them out, it could be days. Something we can’t justify with our food rations.”

“They skittish?” I asked.

“If you can scare them with something unknown, then yeah. What do you have in mind?” Bribis asked before glaring a bit at me. “Keep in mind, that anything outright attacking them will cause them to turn on us.”

“Gimme a second.” I said, trying to concentrate. I tried making several mana orbs, starting them out solid, then expanding the mana into a thin shell around the void. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep the mana flowing to my eyes and create an airtight shell at the same time.

“Damnit!” I growled. “Carrigan, I’m going to need you to do this.”

“Not quite sure what you’re doing, but I’ll give it a shot.” He said with a shrug.

“Alright, I’ll do a step by step. First make a solid sphere of mana, then expand it while leaving the center hollow. The most important part is that you can’t let any air inside, at all. Send it out towards them, but off to one side of the road. Once it’s big enough and close enough, let the mana drop. It should create a fairly loud noise without hurting anyone.”

“I can give it a shot, but how big is big enough? Melon sized? Person sized? The size of an ox?”

“Let’s try a person size.” I answered, not quite sure myself. I didn’t think a melon would do it, as it was just like popping a balloon. While I hadn’t seen others casting a lot of magic, I actually saw the process as Carrigan did it. His blue mana sphere had streaks of green, probably air mana to keep the vacuum. He started it moving it away from him, gradually expanding it. He started sweating at about the midpoint, and stopped expanding it.

“Starting to lose it.” He grunted out when it was nearly 80 yards away, and about 10 yards off of the road.

“Just let it go.” I said.

BOOM!

The sound was much louder than I anticipated, nearly mimicking thunder. It rumbled through our chests, and we all instinctively ducked down. The trizelles had a much different reaction. The majority of the herd immediately started fleeing, taking two or three short dashes before jumping in the air and flipping their tails up. Three of the creatures held back, and one would send air blades toward the sounds location while the other two retreated a bit. They covered each other, rotating who was attacking the perceived threat while the others escaped, and my impression of them rose several notches. This wasn’t the panicked route of a prey species, but rather a strategic withdrawal designed to save as many as possible.

“What the hell was that?” Bribis yelled over the slight ringing in our ears.

“That was apparently a new spell.” Carrigan laughed. “Wow. Thunderclap, journeyman level. Thanks Sean, but next time you’ll have to warn us about just how loud it’s going to be.”

“If I knew, I would have. Sorry Bribis, but it worked, didn’t it?”

“Yeah it worked, but look at the oxen! It’s going to take us at least twenty minutes to get them calmed back down.” He brushed past me and I turned to see that the creatures were indeed terrified. They were shaking in their traces, and I could see the whites of their eyes.

“Come on, there’s nothing we can do.” Carrigan said while putting an arm around me. “He’ll thank you later tonight when he’s calmed down. You got us through without any bloodshed, not an easy task. And as a bonus, while we wait you can tell me why that spell worked so well!”

We climbed into the back of our wagon, and I spent the rest of the day trying to explain sound waves to Carrigan. He got the idea of a vacuum fairly quickly, he was just surprised that we had created one without using void magic. He could even understand the void would create a negative pressure, and that the air rushing back in would create a pressure wave. He just couldn’t understand that sound traveled through the air in waves. Though frustrating on the lack of progress on that front, teaching him served as a wonderful distraction from the blue glow and the lack of shadow spells.

Sundown finally broke the wall I spent the morning beating my head against. I had hopped off the back of the wagon, and turned to where we were setting up camp when the sun flashed into my eyes. As I was cursing this world’s lack of sunglasses, it hit me. Sunglasses. They simply block a portion of the sun’s light. All I had to do was go to the extreme. Blocking all light just required me to create a shield over the target’s eyes that refused to let any light through. The next morning, I was excited to try things out, until Norie pointed out that it did nothing to impede his darkvision. I made it three layered. Light blocking on the inside, neutral mana in the middle as a buffer, and dark mana on the outside to block darkvision. That finished the Blackout spell, one that counted as an apprentice level for both light and shadow. Getting shrieking signal up to maximum simply required me to have the signal flash a few different colors, and attempt a few different sound patterns. Once I had that, I finally earned the bonus for finishing apprentice photomancer, and a slight bump to my stats.

Inspiration is such a fickle thing. I was lazing about the second afternoon, absentmindedly playing with a blob of shadow as the blue tint still annoyed me. It also prevented most of the delicate work needed to improve spells. So I was killing time, and got to thinking about shadow magic and how it was usually represented back on Earth. Why was it mostly a debuffing type of magic? Aside from the odd ability to summon hentai tentacles, most of it was used to impede enemies. Slow them down, prevent them from moving, or blind them. That’s why it usually evolved into gravity magic, or so I thought. What knocked my thoughts into order was seeing one of my fingers accidentally get coated in shadow as I tried to make a fist. It was subtle, but that finger closed just a fraction of a second after the others.

I frantically looked around the bottom of the wagon, smiling like a maniac when I noticed three stalks of grass nearly the same size. I picked them up, and gave them a small blast of my gentle gust spell. They all bent nearly identically in the breeze, which was perfect for my testing. I left one alone, one got a striped band of shadow magic around it, and the third was completely coated. A second blast of gentle gust, and I started chuckling like a maniac.

“Master?” Elendria asked, confused. Norie was subtly sliding away from me, but I didn’t care.

“It makes so much sense!” I cackled.

“What does?” She asked.

“Shadow magic. Why does it make such a great way to slow down your enemies? If I had to explain it, it has negative energy! As you try and move, you have to send energy somewhere to create that motion. The shadow magic absorbs a portion of that energy! Don’t you see? That’s why it makes you move slower, you aren’t getting all the energy where it needs to go!”

Elendria looked confused, but Norie was sitting upright and staring at me. “I. It seems. Help me understand, please! I’m right on the edge of it.” He looked at me, desperately.

“Take this rock.” I said, holding up a small rock. I placed it on the ground. “Now, if I use a certain amount of energy, it can move this far.” I said, sliding it about a foot to the right. “If I use the same amount of energy, it will move the same amount of distance, every time.” I looked up to see Norie nodding along. “Good. Now, if I add shadow magic to the rock.” I kept going, letting shadow encase the rock. “That shadow absorbs some of the energy, so it can only move this far with the same amount of energy.” I finished my explanation, only sliding the rock about 80% of the original distance. “No matter how many times I use the same amount of energy, if there is shadow magic on the rock it will only move this smaller amount.”

“So what happens to the rest of the energy?”

“It goes into the shadow, weakening it. That’s why you can eventually overpower the spell. Once it has absorbed enough energy to reach zero, the shadow disappears!” He still looked confused, so I tried a different approach. “Think of the negative energy like placing the stone underwater. Each time the shadow absorbs energy, the amount of water over the stone is lowered. That’s the weakening of the spell. Once all the water is gone-.” I trailed off.

“Then there isn’t anything slowing the stone, and you’ve broken the spell!” I didn’t think his eyes could get any wider.

“Exactly!” I agreed. “And we know that the shadow color is depended on the energy it has! So the darker shadows aren’t just more shadow, it’s actually the energy level of the shadow!”

“So the color of the shadow, and how much you use directly affects the strength of the spell!” Norie completed my thoughts.

“Yes!” The excitement lasted for a while after that, though we didn’t have any other moments of enlightenment.

The day of training my eyes I was finally able to finish the darkvision counterpart to flash. Habitually holding mana in my retinas over the days had let me fall into a sort of trance with it, almost like a muscle memory. Anyway, it made actually developing new skills possible, and thus led to Darkburst and Directed Darkburst. Once I applied the roadmap from the light versions, they were simple to finish up. That still left me with one dark skill left to learn for each tier for the bonuses, and how to increase it. And I really wanted something that could drain an enemy’s mana, especially considering shadow mana’s negative energy traits. I was really holding out hope that my new mage sight would help. Carrigan was right, all I had to do was think about watching mana and the view would activate, letting me see the mana patterns in the world. It was still fairly weak, but apparently would grow the more I used it. That was fine with me, as all I really needed it for was seeing external mana.

So. Let’s start with the energy portion of dark mana. It would have to follow the same pattern as the light spectrum. If I went with a form of infra-grey, then I would likely drop the temperature as it would correspond to infrared. If I wanted to alter energy, I would need to go into the ultrablack spectrum. Knowing it was there, and actually getting there were two entirely different things. Several times I thought I had it, only to send a mana blade through the summoned area and have no effect. Three frustrating days later, and I finally saw a waver in the blade. It took another six hours of practice just to get a reliable energy construct, before I could move on to the next step.

I needed something that would splat and stick onto the enemy. That would give the dark energy the time it needed to draw out and drain the mana. So my traditional piercing missile got a snub nose on the projectile, and was fired with less velocity. That got it to deform on impact, and immediately start neutralizing the mana. Surprisingly, this was an apprentice level spell and was called Mana Consumer. Playing around a bit and increasing the density of dark mana in the middle of it finally let it reach level 10, though it didn’t provide any upgrades.

Stuck, I had to think on things. I needed a way to draw out the mana from the target, and return it to me. The dark mana would draw regular mana towards it, concentrating it in the center before it was absorbed. With a slight tweak, I created a different spell. A syringe of dark mana, barely piercing the shield I had conjured. This not only caused the mana to drain faster, but it also sent it through the tube and out behind the dark mana construct. This had to be what Bribis had alluded to, if I could only catch it. What sort of three-dimensional shape could I make that could stabilize and hold this mana?

Buckeyballs. Start with a pentagon, and each side around it is the side of a hexagon. Alternate and curve your product until it is a sphere. Sixty sides, 20 of them hexagons and 12 pentagons. The same pattern that is on an ordinary soccer ball. The structure was strong, and hollow. Using my abilities with mana manipulation, I got down to work. The inside of the buckeyball had an open ended mana shield, to prevent the captured mana from escaping. The opening was pointing directly toward the syringe, which was changed from a round needle to a hollow hexagon so that it matched with a side. Clip it on an angle to increase its piercing abilities, and I finally had it. Lesser mana drain. Once it was filled with stolen mana, it would detach from the needle and rocket back to my hand. While I really was only able to recover 75 to 100 mana from the target, leaving the needle behind let a bit more of the target’s mana drain out. The end result was that the target lost 125 mana while I regained close to 100. I called all that practice a week well worth it, as I finished out the journeyman requirement for the Shadowmancer class.

A surprising bonus to the Lesser mana drain was the upgrade the system offered. I could create a tether of dark mana to drain my enemy, but it had its drawbacks. While I was tethered, there was a chance the enemy could overwhelm my ability and use it to drain me. Not worth it in my book, and talking it over with Elendria she agreed. She did, however, make me practice with her for the next three days reversing the spell with light magic. I gained Lesser mana infusion, though there was a slight price. The target would take some damage from the needle, and the sharp pain had a high chance to break the recipient’s concentration. Definitely not something to be attempting in pitched battle, that was for sure.