William liked his new parents well enough, but he didn’t want to be a farmer. Even with the addition of magic, farming wasn’t that interesting. In addition to that, it was already planned out. His parents knew how they wanted everything to go- what plants would go where, and how they could be optimally raised. They raised animals also, but it was well known how to take care of them. William was interested in trying new things, or figuring out exactly the soil composition best for certain plants. He knew that trying new things would more often than not result in worse crop yields, so he didn’t try them. He also couldn’t look that closely at soil composition- he didn’t know if there were any books on it, and if he wanted to look at the microscopic level, he just couldn’t. Microscopes themselves didn’t exist in this world, though William had seen magnifying glasses and telescopes. Still, there was a significant difference between these and a real microscope.

What William really wanted was to be a wizard. He’d studied as one before, but been unable to use magic himself. That made a lot of his ideas impossible to test. Even if there had been others willing to help him, he couldn’t really explain what he wanted, at least without sounding crazy. It wasn’t like William had complete comprehension of all of science on Earth, either. While he could say that DNA was what caused living things to be the way they were, and even that it looked like a twisted ladder- a double helix- that information wasn’t really useful to anyone without more background. That also presumed that DNA was the same in this world, something William had never had a chance to verify, though he had no reason to assume it would be different. After all, humans and their organs were the same, at least to the degree he understood them.

William’s point was that he wanted to study magic now that he could actually accomplish it himself. Maybe he wouldn’t discover anything new, but at least he could solidify some details that had been unclear. On the other hand, maybe he was behind in his understanding now. Although the Wizard’s guild in Ostana had basically spent one hundred fifty years in decline after he had died as Archmage, Eclea had continued to progress. Now a further two hundred years had passed, they could be quite advanced. William had never been sure of the level of the demons’- gevai’s magic levels. He hadn’t even known the real name of the country- Jodrus. As a human, “the demon lands” had been sufficient, and since there hadn’t been much of anything in the way of non-combative fraternization between them and humans, that had just been the way of things.

Lorelei had a high understanding of magic, but she had made it clear she had kept many things secret from the Demon King. As for any other wizards, she had never mentioned them. At best, there was her apprentice she accidentally mentioned a few times. Since being born in Jodrus, William had learned that there was indeed something like an established wizard’s guild. It had branches throughout the country… but beyond that William knew very little. All his information came from his parents and the city nearby, and he hadn’t had much opportunity to visit town and learn more.

Perhaps magical knowledge had advanced publicly for the gevai… and perhaps not. The Demon King was destroyed, so Lorelei wouldn’t have to worry about hiding it from him. Except… William was still around, so there was always that possibility that the Demon King was as well. That idea kept returning to him, but he had no idea how to determine what was actually true. If he had failed, there wasn’t much he would be able to do about it. Though he would still want to destroy the Demon King… he wasn’t currently capable of doing so. His ki abilities were still quite limited, and he wasn’t sure if they could recover or not. Though he now had magic at his disposal, he didn’t know how to destroy a soul with magic. He usually thought about magic interacting with the laws of the universe, and he had no idea what a soul was actually constituted by. That would give him a marginal at best chance of success at doing anything with magic affecting the soul.

As an experiment, William tried to do something similar to what he did with ki. He caught a fly, and used magic in an attempt to knock it unconscious. That worked, but didn’t prove anything to William. Though he had been thinking about his Soul Techniques, and how he made things unconscious with that, he knew that magic sometimes achieved the desired result without full understanding of what was actually going on. There were plenty of purely physical ways the fly could have become unconscious. If his idea of what he was doing was wrong, it would be much less effective, but on something as small and weak as a fly, anything should work. In addition to that, William knew how unconsciousness worked, so he could have subconsciously cut off blood flow, among other possibilities. William felt that he gained more conscious control over what he did with magic as he practiced, so perhaps he would have a better understanding soon.

Though he wanted to go study as a wizard, William hadn’t brought the idea up to his parents just yet. The first reason that he was still realistically too young to leave home, at least from their perspective. Another was that his parents needed his help around the farm… especially now that his mother was pregnant. At only a bit more than a half dozen years between children, that was actually almost the same as a human getting pregnant the year after having a child. William had never been a big brother before… though he’d been mentally older than people who were like or actually were his siblings, it wasn’t quite the same. That made it more exciting.