Chapter 7

“I HIT THE JACKPOT!!”

With her sudden shout, everyone in the banquet hall stopped talking and turned their heads our way.

The guests attending the banquet had confused looks on their faces. Even Cheon Seolhwa was looking this way with curious eyes.

She must be wondering what happened.

Unfortunately, I don’t get it either.

While I was thinking about stuff like that in my head, Lady Elara grabbed both of my shoulders with her hands and started shaking me, not caring about the fact that we had become the center of attention.

“To think I would find someone like you here! On top of that, you agreed to be my disciple! Those old fogeys from the association are going to be so jealous and will only be able to bite their nails!”

“P-Please calm down, Lady Elara. Everyone is looking at us now!”

…

Ahem.

“Sorry, I get like that whenever I get too excited.”

“Y-yeah. It’s fine, Lady Elara.”

I was trying to calm her down, but to no avail. It took a while for her excitement to die down. While everyone was back to enjoying the banquet again, some of them still stole glances at us, wondering what that was about, including both of my parents and Cheon Seolhwa’s family.

Unable to hold her curiosity any longer, my mother, who had kept quiet all this time, asked her.

“Umm… Lady Elara? What makes you so excited about our Hwi?”

“Oh right! Your son’s talent just amazed me. His sensitivity to mana is abnormal.”

My mother looked happy to hear that. I, her son who had always been judged as untalented, actually had something I excelled at according to someone else.

My mother had always thought the world of me, but all this time, I just couldn’t fulfill her expectations. So seeing my mother happy made me happy too.

“Is what I’m doing that amazing?”

I asked her because I’m still not familiar with all this mana and mage stuff, and I had no one to compare myself to, so I didn’t quite understand what she meant.

“Hm… For you to understand, I need to explain the tiers of mages.”

Lady Elara started to explain the ranks and strength of mages.

“For you martial artists, if I remember right, there’s third-rate, second-rate, first-rate, peak, supreme peak, and master martial artists, right? We mages have similar ranks among us.”

“The rank is basically decided by the tiers of magic a mage can use.”

“A Beginner can use Tier 1 and Tier 2 magic, an Intermediate can use Tier 3 and Tier 4 magic, an Advanced can use Tier 5 magic, an Expert can use Tier 6 magic, and a Master can use Tier 7 magic.”

“Tier 1 and 2 are basic-level spells. They’re easy to use, but they’re not that strong. Tier 7 magic basically allows a mage to become a one-man army if the magic is a combat spell. One Master Mage can destroy a whole city all by himself.”

Hearing the scale of power of a Master Mage made me feel dizzy.

“What exactly is magic?”

I asked her because based on what she told us when she explained about Dark Magic and Demons, the scale of power in magic was hard to believe.

“Magic is a word we use to describe a phenomenon in which a mage uses mana to force their will upon the world.”

“Forcing their will upon the world?”

“Think about it like this. If martial artists use inner energy to strengthen their bodies, mages use their mana to manipulate natural laws.”

“Simply speaking, mages use their mana to force the world to do their bidding.”

I went quiet. Not only me, my father and mother also went quiet.

From the perspective of someone who came from a martial artist society like Murim, forcing one’s will upon the world was something that only someone who had already become a transcendent, someone who had already gone beyond the wall of mortality, could do.

And Lady Elara just told us that magic, at its core, was about doing exactly that.

“Then, Lady Elara. What rank are you?”

Since she already explained the ranks of mages, I was wondering how strong Lady Elara was. She said that she and her friends had fought against that Dark Mage, Edmund Blackwell, to the point that the Dark Mage had to run away after sustaining serious injuries. I don’t know how many people were fighting him, but Lady Elara should be pretty strong.

“I’m an Archmage.”

“Archmage?”

I tilted my head. She said nothing about Archmages in her explanation before.

Noticing my confusion, Lady Elara started to explain.

“Archmage is more like a title rather than a rank.”

“A title?”

“Yeah. To be able to get the Archmage title, a Master Mage must create a new original Tier 7 spell or make a magical breakthrough. The magical breakthrough could be a new magical technique or theory.”

“Hee, so you’re someone amazing?”

She grinned smugly at my question.

“Of course I’m amazing. You see, kid. There are only seven Archmages in the world currently out of hundreds of thousands of mages. Seven. And this master of yours is one of them!”

After saying that, she started to roughly rub my hair, making a mess of it.

“You better be grateful someone as amazing as me is taking you as my disciple.”

While Lady Elara was still messing with my head, my father asked her the question she hadn’t answered.

“Then what makes Hwi so talented that you got so excited, Lady Elara?”

“Oh right.”

She finally stopped messing with my head. I patted my hair, trying to set it again somewhat.

“You see, to get the level of mana sensitivity like your son, a mage needs at least 10 years of training first. But your son already has that level of mana sensitivity even though he’s not trained properly.”

“This is his unique talent. Just so you know. Even I, the youngest ever to be an Archmage, needed at least 7 years of training before I reached his level of mana sensitivity.”

“What is the advantage of having high mana sensitivity?”

I asked her, still trying to set my hair right.

“There are two big advantages. The first one is your speed of accumulating mana and the coating process will be much faster than your peers. The second advantage is that your control over mana will be much better than your peers, and that allows you to learn how to use magic faster.”

“Just so you know, most mages are stuck in the Advanced Rank all their lives. Do you know why?”

“Because they’re not sensitive enough to mana?”

“That’s right. The higher the tier of magic is, the more important your mana control becomes. So, a mage needs to train to increase their sensitivity to mana.”

“There are several ways to train that, but most mages use a kind of meditation method. They just sit and close off all their senses to start sensing the Ether all around them. As Ether is the unprocessed form of mana, the better you can sense it, the better your ability to absorb that Ether and process it into mana in your body and store it in your heart.”

“Another reason why mana sensitivity is important is because the higher the tier of magic is, the more important the coating on their heart and blood vessels becomes.”

“I already said before that before you use magic, you need to do a process called coating, right? As I said, it’s a process to coat your heart and blood vessels with mana, essentially turning your heart into your mana core and your blood vessels into your mana path.”

“The higher the tier of magic is, the more it will strain your mana core and mana path. So if a Beginner Mage somehow stored enough mana in their heart and forced themselves to activate Tier 5 magic, which is Advanced Rank Magic…”

“Then that Beginner Mage will experience the same thing as me.”

I answered her before she finished what she was about to say.

“Exactly. Well, it’s because of that that having a high mana sensitivity is important. If mages want to get to the next rank, then they need to keep improving their coating. And coating itself is directly linked to mana sensitivity because mana control is very important during the coating process.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t do the coating properly and do it unevenly, the part that has a thin coating can pop.”

“I see… How scary.”

“Yep yep. That’s why mages take their coating very seriously. It’s the basic, but it’s the most important part of doing magic.”

After all her explanation, there was one thing that I was really curious about, so I asked her.

“Then based on what you have explained, how fast can I grow stronger, Lady Elara?”

“Hmm… Well, I managed to reach Master Rank in 20 years.”

“As for you…”

She looked at me and grinned.

“If nothing goes wrong, 10 years.”

“I’m confident you can reach Master Rank in 10 years.”