Chapter 10

“Haa…”

A sigh of relief came out of me. After a week, I had finally finished coating all of my major blood vessels.

What the heck? Coating blood vessels was much harder than coating my heart.

What made the process of coating blood vessels so difficult was not only that they were much thinner than the heart, but also that blood vessels were long and had a lot of branches.

“Alright, the coating looks great.”

After checking my coating, Master Elara gave me her approval. Honestly, if she hadn’t kept watch over me and given me guidance from time to time, I would probably have needed a month just to finish coating my blood vessels.

As weird as she is, I guess she really is a great mage and a great teacher.

“Hm? You just thought something disrespectful about me, didn’t you?”

Tch. She’s so sharp.

“Of course not. How could I think something disrespectful about my great master?”

A bright smile appeared on my face, but she still looked at me with suspicion.

“Hah, whatever. More importantly, now I can finally teach you magic.”

Yes! Finally, after over a week of preparing my body, I will finally learn magic spells!

“Well, for now, take a break first. Drink something and start absorbing mana to fill up your mana reserves while you’re at it. I will be back in an hour.”

“Understood.”

…

“Let’s start with Mana Ball.”

The sun was already high in the sky. To protect ourselves from the sun and make things more comfortable, we moved our training spot under the shade of a big tree, still within the training ground.

I could see Seolhwa still training. Right now, she was squatting while carrying a full basket of rocks on her back as a weight. She was doing lower-body training. It was a very important exercise for martial artists to strengthen their stance.

Now that I’ve stopped training in martial arts, I can see why my mom always worried about me whenever she saw me training. That does look ridiculous.

Smack!

“Gah!”

“Focus! This great me is about to teach you magic, and you let your mind wander!?”

“Uuh… Sorry.”

It was my fault for getting distracted, so I couldn’t talk back to her.

But still, can’t she stop hitting my head? If I get dumber, it will be her fault.

“We will start with Mana Ball. This is the most basic magic. Even among Tier 1 magic, this is at the very bottom. It’s very easy. All you need to do is gather the mana from your heart to the palm of your hand like this.”

Shiin.

A shining ball of bluish-white mana appeared, floating above her hand.

“There. You see? It’s very simple magic. Someone like you, who has high mana sensitivity, should be able to do this easily.”

“Now you try it.”

Closing my eyes and opening my palm, I tried to do what she had just done.

Gather the mana from my heart to my palm…

Shiin.

“Like this?”

“Yep, just like that.”

“Now that you can do that, let’s go straight to the next stage.”

The ball of mana floating above her hand started to catch fire and turned into a fireball. Master then stretched her arm, and the fireball shot toward the nearby wall, leaving a scorched mark.

“This is Tier 1 magic: Fireball.”

“All you need to do is add the properties of fire to the mana.”

“How can I do that?”

“Magic is a technique to force your own will upon the world by using mana. You remember that, right?”

“Yes.”

“How do you think we mages do that?”

“Hmm…”

How do mages force their own will upon the world? What did she do when she used magic?

I tried to remember everything that had happened this past week. Every time she used magic, she always did something first. Like when she used magic to clean herself from sweat, she snapped her fingers and the magic activated. According to Physician Hong, when Master Elara saved me using her magic, a big circle with an intricate pattern appeared too. There must be some kind of connection, like her snapping her fingers and that circle have the same role in activating magic.

“…I need to give it a command?”

“Exactly.”

“How?”

“The simplest way is to speak it out.”

“Speak it out? I actually need to tell my mana what to do?”

“Not quite.”

“Speaking it out isn’t for the mana. It’s to strengthen your conviction.”

“Words have power, kid. Look at merchants. They use words to influence other people so they can sell their wares. Words have an inherent power to cause change, change in others and also in yourself.”

“So speak it out. Think about what fire is in your mind. Use your words to strengthen the image of fire, what kind of thing it is, what its shape is, and use that to command your mana and turn it into a fireball.”

“Hmm…”

So basically, I just need to have a strong image in mind, right? Fire is fire. It’s hot and burning. In this case, it will use my mana as fuel. Since the name of the spell is Fireball, it’s fire in the shape of a ball. So, the word I should say is…

“Fireball.”

The moment that word came out of my mouth, the image of a ball of fire vividly appeared in my mind, and my mana, as if accepting my intention, changed its shape and turned into a ball of fire.

“I-I DID IT! I USED MAGIC!”

As I was about to celebrate my first time using magic,

“Ah, idiot. Don’t lose focus.”

“Hm?”

The ball of fire floating on top of my hand fell onto my palm.

…

“AHAHAHA!! WHAT AN IDIOT!! HAHAHA!”

Master Elara was on the ground, holding her stomach as she couldn’t stop laughing.

Damn it, so embarrassing.

I could only keep quiet while holding my hand that was burned to minimize the risk of her teasing me.

My hand had already healed, thanks to Master Elara, who cast healing magic on it perfectly while laughing at me.

“Ahahaha! In my twenty years as a mage, this is the first time I’ve seen something like this… Pft! Ahahhaha!”

It took a while before Master Elara finally calmed down. She still giggled a bit, but at least the training could continue.

“As you now know, you need to keep your focus when you use magic. If you lose focus, then the magic can either disappear, act erratically, or just fall like that. Heh.”

“Anyway, try again. This time, don’t lose your focus and make sure you shoot it.”

Sigh.

“Fireball.”

Fwump!

A ball of fire once again appeared, floating on top of my palm. My eyes looked at the wall where Master Elara had shot her Fireball before. Aiming at that wall, I gave another command to the Fireball.

“Shoot like an arrow.”

The ball of fire shot off my hand, flying straight toward the wall I used as a target. Another scorched mark appeared on the wall’s surface.

“Haa… I did it.”

“Yes, you did it. That was good.”

“The aim is still off, though.”

“Then you need to work on that as you train using the Fireball spell.”

“Right. There’s something I want to ask.”

“Hm?”

“When you use your cleaning magic to clean your sweat, you didn’t say anything and just snapped your fingers. And according to Physician Hong, when you healed me after my duel with Seolhwa, there was a big circle with an intricate pattern drawn in it. What was that?”

“That? Well, the method to strengthen the image in your head to activate magic isn’t exclusively through words. It can be anything as long as it can achieve the same effect. I use the snapping of my fingers as a trigger to activate simple magic quickly, as I’m already familiar with them.”

“Then what about the circle?”

“That circle contains the formula to activate the healing spell to heal you. It’s a Tier 6 magic, so just using my imagination is not enough. A more advanced technique is needed to use it, hence the circle.”

“What’s a formula?”

“It’s something you will learn later. For now, just focus on learning the basics.”

“For now, what you need to do is keep using the Fireball spell and familiarize yourself with it. That way, you can activate the spell and shoot it much quicker than you are now.”

“How quick?”

Master Elara stretched her arm and snapped her fingers again, and then,

BANG!

A small explosion happened on the wall we used as our practice target. There was no damage, only another scorched mark. Well, a bigger scorched mark.

“What the… That fast?”

“Yeah. That fast. Once you get used to the spell, you can just modify it. Put in more mana to strengthen the spell, make it explode on impact, change its shape. The strength of basic magic like this is that it’s so simple that it’s easy to use and modify. Of course, the power is much weaker than higher-tier spells, though.”

“I will have to leave for about a week to search for Edmund. In the first place, I’m in this country to search for him after all. So I will give you a task.”

“For a week, you need to keep using Fireball. Use all of your mana until it’s empty, then start absorbing mana again to refill it. If you do this for a week, you should get familiar with the spell to a battle-ready level.”

“Battle-ready? Am I going to fight someone?”

“Well, yeah. After a week…”

Master Elara pointed at another person at the training ground beside us.

“Fight your cousin again.”