Chapter 13: Untalented
The class continued through the morning, right up until noon. The old teacher delved into the history of magic and then even deeper into the specifics of mana nodes.
Zephyr now fully understood the depth of how fucked he was. He’d been dealt a terrible hand when it came to magical talent. He was the lowest of the low. And the gap between him and his colleagues would only widen further and further the more they progress.
To summarize the rest of the lecture; Basically, after a person awakens their mana core, the core begins to develop naturally, somewhat like a magical organ. As it grows in magical energy, it reaches various bottlenecks of growth that are essentially a qualitative leap in power. People are classified in tiers based on how many evolutions their mana cores have gone through.
This is where things start to skew hard. Building up to each evolution after tier one, a person has the chance to open new mana nodes in their core, based on the multiplier of their base mana node count.
So, for example, someone who awakened with two mana nodes at Tier One, after evolving to Tier Two, would theoretically have the chance to open up to four new mana nodes. At Tier Three, up to eight.
’Which means that someone like Jet or Kathelyn, at Tier Two, would theoretically be working with up to thirty-two mana nodes..." Zephyr thought absentmindedly where he sat, as the other students streamed out of the auditorium and toward the cafeteria.
’And they’re just going to keep pulling further away at each tier... At Tier Five, they’d both be working with a cap of 256 mana nodes. And I... I’d be stuck with what Jet started off with.’ He let out a dry, mirthless chuckle and leaned his head back.
Regardless of his natural inclinations, he was still human. A very tiny part of him had still held on to the hope of what could be. But reality had made itself very clear. The talent gap was massive... And oddly enough, he felt a strange sense of... Peace?... in accepting it.
’Maybe it’s just the finality of it?’ He exhaled slowly just as Anna and Helga appeared, climbing the stairs toward him. He stood to meet them as they reached him.
"Hey— what’s with the melancholic look on your face?" Anna asked with a raised eyebrow.
"You look like you just accepted a terrible fate or something."