Chapter 20. Fireballs
Rhys sped through the fire spell manuals, only to find himself completely lost. It was like the words were oil, and his mind was water. He had to read every word a dozen times before it sunk in, and even then, he struggled to comprehend the meaning.
He leaned back, letting out a breath. The problem was obvious. It wasn’t trash, so it was hard for him to understand it. He couldn’t easily comprehend the manuals due to their lack of familiarity with trash.
Even so, he refused to give up. He picked up the manuals and pored over them again, forcibly putting the words into his head. He’d lived an entire lifetime as a trash mage, who was never able to so much as sense mana, but had never given up. He wasn’t going to throw in the towel this easily. The words might be hard to understand, they might not stick in his mind, but he wasn’t going to give in. He was going to learn an ignition spell, whether the ignition spell wanted him to learn it or not!
He studied the manuals deep into the night, poring over the words over and over again. At last, enough of the spell stuck in his mind that he felt he could give it a shot.
Day broke in the distance. Rhys lifted his hand. Carefully, he dragged his mana through the shapes indicated in the manual, pressed it into a form, and then pushed.
Nothing.
Gritting his teeth, he threw himself into the manuals again. Only when Cynog showed up with a roar did he abandon them. The two of them sparred for the allotted three hours, and then Cynog ran off to class, and Rhys limped back to his manuals. Once more, he forced himself to keep reading over the manuals.
Comprehension eluded him. Words flashed past his eyes, but meaning refused to materialize. It was like he was reading in a foreign language, but he recognized the words. The words meant something to him. He just couldn’t put it together past that base level understanding.
No, it’s like reading high level math, he realized. He could ‘understand’ the letters and symbols of e^(i*pi)=-1, but he didn’t actually comprehend anything about what that meant. It was just letters and numbers to him, with a few symbols mixed in. It might mean something to mathematicians, and it had probably meant a whole lot to Euler when he’d written it for the first time, but it was gobbledygook to Rhys. That was exactly what reading these manuals felt like. It didn’t matter how many times he forced himself to read the manual over and over again, it wouldn’t matter.
He lacked some fundamental understanding about the formulas on the page that he would never be able to intuit out of nowhere, because he wasn’t a math genius. If he had a good teacher, he might be able to learn them even though he wasn’t a math genius—or in this case, an ignition spell genius, but where was he going to find a teacher like that in Infinite Constellation School? The only instructors who actually did their jobs had their hands full getting the lowest level mages up to snuff, and from there, mages were expected to figure things out on their own.
Rhys sighed, putting the book down. Was it impossible? No. But for now, he was beating his head against a wall, and as a piece of trash, he didn’t have a head hard enough to beat it down.
But that was fine. He was still young. He still had plenty of time. He could learn these spells later. Putting the ignition manuals safely back in his ring, he returned to his other pursuits. Namely, recovering from Cynog’s beatings, and practicing Trash Intent.