Chapter 64 – Think fast. Not that fast!
Eppy clapped her hands together to catch my attention. “So you want to learn how to create magic, huh? It’s good to be ambitious, little brother.” She took the rubber to the blackboard and wiped away what she had drawn, hesitating for a moment when noticing the genitalia that she didn’t see before. With an empty board, she chalked three words and drew an arrow from the leftmost word to the middle to the rightmost. “Mana. Conduit. Magic. These three things are the junctions for every spell. Your mana is driven through a conduit and converted into a spell to create magic.”
I raised my hand like a schoolchild. “What’s a conduit?”
“Wands, staves, orbs, grimoires, crystal focuses, scrolls…” the girl rattled off many different things.
“Are you reading your shopping list?” I asked.
“No! I’m giving you examples of conduits.” She tapped the word ‘conduit’ on the blackboard and started drawing the examples in chalk. “Some are harder to use than others. For a beginner I would recommend a staff or spellbook.”
Someone covered their mouth and whispered to Eppy, “You still haven’t explained what they are or what they do.”
“Oh, yes.” She wiggled her pointer at me. “You use a conduit to funnel your mana and aid with conversion. They’re an essential part of spellcasting. Apprentice mages need a lot of help with channelling their mana, so they tend to use cumbersome conduits. However, when you achieve enough expertise like me, you can use your hands, voice, or any body part as a conduit.”
Tamworth knelt to my level and whispered, “Word to the wise, don’t try casting magic with your phallus. You don’t want it to misfire.”
I wondered, which did I not want to misfire: the spell or my phallus?
“Anyway,” Eppy continued, “you can’t cast magic without some sort of conduit.”
“That’s why they’re called conduits. Because you can-do-it!” said Tamworth.
That joke got a laugh out of me, but Eppy scowled and looked like she’d heard it a million times. It seemed like Tamworth was the type to repeatedly tell bad jokes. We could get along, I thought.
Eppy doodled some crystals onto the blackboard. “Different conduits are more suited to certain kinds of magic. Tammie-boy will tell you that wands made with aquamarine crystals and wood from water-loving trees like willows are the best for casting water magic.”
Tamworth sucked in his lips and gawked at me with wide eyes. “Oh, yeah… I definitely knew that.”
“So you will have to find the conduit most suitable for the type of magic that you create.”
I nodded. “Understood.” I considered crafting a needle made entirely of crystal, so I could use it for both acupuncture and spellcasting.
“Alright.” Eppy erased the blackboard and then threw me the chalk. “Now, go ahead and create the spell you want to make.”
She wanted me to create magic just like that? I felt like I had barely learnt anything. I didn’t want to disappoint after all the effort put into teaching me, so I went up to the blackboard and started writing. I drew a diagram of mana being turned into a spell that would pacify someone so they couldn’t fight. I marked down some crystals as conduits. I emphasised the mana conversion with sparkles and waves. And in the corner, I drew a smiley face. “Finished!” I stood back and admired my work.
“Wow,” Eppy said, stunned into silence. “This is…” She scratched her head, trying to find the right word. “This is stupid. What did you think you were doing?”
Honestly, I had just hoped I would get lucky and create a masterpiece.
“This is why I was against the club president teaching. She sucks at explaining stuff,” said an overconfident student who retreated as soon as Eppy shot them a glare.
“He can’t create magic when he doesn’t even know how to cast a single spell. We should teach him a spell that is somewhat related to what he wants to create, and then he can tweak it from there. You can’t expect someone to swim when all they know is how to drown.” The brown-haired girl spoke up in my defence.
“Fine, fine.” Eppy rummaged through a pile of books that were stowed in the corner of the messy room. “You want to make a spell like that pacifist mage, right? The closest thing I can think of is paralysis magic. You can learn that and then figure out the rest yourself.” She yanked out a thin and dusty book and brought it to me. “Here you go. Read this to learn paralysis magic.”
“Ok.” I flipped through the pages and then handed the book back. “Done.”
Eppy flinched backwards. “What do you mean done? You can’t read a book in ten seconds.”
“But I just did,” I said.
“That’s impossible! Don’t try to act like you’re a super genius, little brother.” She held the book up. “If you really read it all then summarise it.”
“Ok.” I took in a deep breath before saying, “The author describes his distaste for contemporary paralysis spells. He says that paralysis through means of making a creature’s muscles tense is lazy. Plus, it’s useless against creatures that do not have muscles. He then says that he also dislikes paralysis that focuses on altering perception. Spells that paralyse someone by making the target’s mind believe they’re paralysed are worthless, because they rely on the notion that the target has a mind. He says such a spell would never work on a fire mage because they do not have brains in the first place.”
“Hey! What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Eppy grabbed me by the collar.
“It’s not me saying it, it’s the author!” I pleaded until Eppy released me. “He then explains that the best method to cause paralysis is by pausing the flow of time within the target’s physical form. He puts great stress on the ‘within’ part of that. If someone were to paralyse a leaf mid-fall with this spell, the leaf would keep falling but be stiff and inflexible like a rock.”
The brown-haired girl groaned loudly. “This is why I hate spellcrafters. How is stopping time better or easier than just tensing someone’s muscles? They make things too complicated.”
“The book then goes onto explain how to convert your mana into—”
Eppy cut me off. “How the hell did you read all this in ten seconds?”
How did I, indeed. I didn’t know myself. Granted the book was short, but it shouldn’t have been possible for me to read it all so quickly. In my past life, I was pretty good at skim reading newspapers but never this fast. I was now nearing super-human ability with how quickly I could read. My only guess as to how this came about was my high level of Mind.
“You don’t have to explain if you don’t want to or you can’t. You’ve learnt how to cast paralysis, right?”
“Yup.” I nodded.
“Alright, someone roll out Big Pebble.”
“Who?” From another room, I heard the rolling of small wheels. A little dolly trolley was brought out with a giant crystal on top of it. The crystal was white, twice my height, and thrice my width. “What in the world is that?”
“This is Big Pebble, a conduit that’s great for novices. It’s incredibly potent in channelling mana. Put your hand on it and try to cast paralysis on Tamworth.”
“Why me?” the blue-haired boy asked.
“Because I said so,” said Eppy.
I placed my hand on the gigantic crystal and tried to cast the paralysis spell. I let my mana flow into the crystal and then, following the instructions in the book, I converted the mana to stop time within Tamworth who stood close by. My attempt did not seem to work at all. I understood the instructions of the author perfectly, but the spell didn’t work.
Everyone around started clapping. “Congratulations.”
“You did it!”
“That was good for your first time.”
I was confused. I could see no change within Tamworth. “Why are you applauding me?”
“You did it,” said Tamworth. “You paralysed me for 0.01 seconds. Well done!”
I looked at my MP, and it was completely depleted. “I ran out of mana for such a small effect?”
Eppy said, “That’s to be expected with how you scored on the mana conversion test. Don’t worry, this is normal for everyone trying out something new. Even I would struggle to efficiently cast magic in a branch that I wasn’t experienced in. Take Tamworth for example, he’s great at water magic but he’s useless when it comes to anything else.”
“You mean useless when it comes to other types of magic, right?” he said.
Eppy ignored him. “Think about it. You might know how to shoot a basketball, but you wouldn’t be able to consistently score without practice.”
“Wow, your words…” I said. They made me think.
“Amazing, right? I’m pretty good at explaining things despite what some people think.”
That wasn’t what I meant. Her words had me thinking about something else. “You lot have basketball here? Who’s the Lebron of this world?”
“The who?”
“Never mind.”
Eppy drew a graph that plotted my mana conversion efficiency against time. “With practise, in a year’s time, you’ll be able to paralyse someone for a whole second.”
A whole year? That was far too long. I couldn’t spend all my time, depleting my MP every day, to only achieve one second of paralysis. That wasn’t even taking into account how I wanted to cast a different spell. Making my own magic would take even longer. “Wait, if I combined my improvement in mana conversion efficiency with levelling my Soul to get more MP, I could cast it for longer with less practise.”
“Don’t you dare!” shrieked Eppy.
Tamworth made an ‘X’ with his forearms. “We don’t use the System here!”
The other students expressed various forms of extreme rejection to my idea. They didn’t care that the idea would work. They learnt magic for magic’s sake. The result was secondary to all of them, whereas it was primary to me.
I told them all that I wouldn’t use the System to further my magic, with my fingers crossed behind my back.