Paragon of Mana

I hate all those high noble brats.

After spending a week in the hunting town of Desir, that was the only conclusion Ember had come to. He didn’t like any of them. Even Benny, whom he had a good impression of at first, had returned his spider construct broken. Much less an apology, the boy didn’t even admit he’d broken it.

From the outside, the construct looked the same, but when Ember tried to manipulate it with mana, he found that a couple of its legs were not functioning properly. Being the only adult among them, however, Ember did not make much of a fuss.

He tried to fix the construct. Unfortunately, although he could detect whatever was wrong within, fixing it seemed to be beyond his capabilities. Even when copying similar scripts from the other functioning legs, he had no clue how to proceed without smashing it apart. He had no tinkering skill and was even more unsure about engraving those fine scripts on his own.

Thankfully, what he lost in the mana construct, he gained through the mana lessons from Lady Evelyn. Every night, she would instruct Elin and Benny on mana foundation, and since they were staying in the same inn, she would summon him to impart much of the necessary knowledge he had been missing.

Ember knew he would learn all of this once his formal mana lessons began, but he didn’t believe the tutor his family could afford would be as enlightening as learning from a silver-ranked mage. Mages were a rare breed of people, and if one filtered out anyone below the Silver rank, there were barely a handful of them in the entirety of Seynhold. From what he knew, House Blackstone barely had five Silver-classed ascendants, and none were full-fledged mages.

The most significant lesson she imparted was on the mana circulation method that would allow him to open more of his mana apertures—and more apertures meant he would be able to store more mana. He managed to open three apertures without even trying. Beyond the apertures, Ember began to see clear improvement in both his Mana Accumulation and Mana Circuit.

According to her, there were 360 mana apertures in an ascendant’s body, and they became harder and harder to open as one progressed. Even after reaching over level 150, the number of apertures she had opened was merely a little over 200.

"Is the mana aperture more important than the number of breaths of mana?" Ember had asked.