“This leaves with my original choice, Silver Spire Magic Academy,” Damion said. Now that they had co full circle in this discussion he was feeling the weight of his loss pulling at the edges of his thoughts.
“Indeed, it does,” Ms. Teft said gently.
“What does Silver Spire specialize in?” Damion asked, wishing the conversation would just end.
“Fire and Water affinities,” Ms. Teft told him.
Damion felt a bit disappointed when he heard it was Fire and Water. After hearing that Beryl School of the Mystic Arts had a good collection of Ice affinity magic seals, Damion thought Ms. Teft would reveal that Silver Spire secretly had spells for Ice magic no one else did, and it was the best place possible for him to learn.
“Since Silver Spire doesn’t have a better collection of Ice spells than Beryl School of the Mystic Arts why should I choose Silver Spire?”
“Silver Spire may not have a great number of Ice affinity spells, but it does have the next best thing,” Ms. Teft told him cryptically.
Damion looked at his teacher with a deadpan expression waiting for her to explain. He was not in the mood for guessing gas or lessons.
“What is Ice?” Ms. Teft asked.
“Frozen… water,” the realization dawned on Damion as he answered. Did that an Ice and Water magic seals were interchangeable? But the Magic System did not show him as being able to use Water spells, was there sothing else he needed to do to make that possible?
“Precisely. Since Silver Spire specializes in Water magic and water can be turned into ice and vice versa, we have a decent array of Ice magic seals.”
“What is the drawback?” Damion already knew there had to be one, especially since the Magic System did not already let him do this.
Ms. Teft’s eyes glead when she heard Damion’s question. Damion always had been smart, and she was glad to see he was able to quickly discern there was a tradeoff for converting water to ice.
“Ti and mana. If you use a magic seal that utilizes water, it is an extra step to turn it into ice, thus it takes more ti and more mana.”
“Since the affinities are basically the sa, can a Water affinity mage use an Ice magic seal? Not convert their Water spell to Ice, but straight up use Ice magic, or vice versa?”
“Yes. Ice is considered the advanced form of the Water affinity. Water mages can learn and use Ice magic seals, but they will never be as proficient with them as an Ice mage. And of course, the reverse is true as well. As an Ice mage you will be able to use any Water magic seal, but not as well as if you had a Water affinity.”
“If Silver Spire has more students that can utilize Ice magic, why doesn’t Beryl School of the Mystic Arts sell or trade the collection of Ice magic seals they have? Why don’t all the schools share all their knowledge?”
Damion understood there was a competition between the three magic schools, but he thought they should be working towards the betternt of human society. Perhaps if there was better cooperation between the schools, between the White Zones and Green Zones, maybe his parents would have been rescued in ti. Were they too proud? Or was there another reason the schools did not share spells.
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“Competition between the schools helps to promote innovation. Sharing would certainly boost up humanities knowledge in the short term, but seeing your competition do sothing with magic that you have never seen before can be inspiring. When you then work out how to do the sa thing, differently, it ends up expanding human knowledge much more in the long term.”
“What about people that develop spells? Spell smiths you called them once?”
“That is a profession just like an artificer or a clerk in the Association. Most spell smiths take commissions to create a new magic seal for a guild or a particular mage. Each of the magic academies employ dozens of spell smiths. They study the library of magic seals trying to work out new spells.”
“Is it hard to create a magic seal?” Damion had always been curious about this. Could he perhaps learn to create his own spells or make his own artifacts in the future.
Ever since he had received the quest from the Magic System to learn Nashto, the ancient language of magic, Damion had been curious how spells were made and how magic seals worked.
“It can be. Your ability to create magic seals is directly related to your knowledge of the ancient language. The more of the language you know, the more you are able to put together to create sothing new.”
“Can you teach a little of the magic language?” Damion asked hopeful. He was betting that if he learned a few words, they Magic System would do the rest, just like it had with Otash, the common language of Nerotath.
“Why don’t you summon your magic seal and we can look at one together. Since you know a magic seal, you already know a bit of the language. Now it is a matter of understanding.”
“What do you an?” Damion was confused. He had no idea how to summon a magic seal.
“You used Ice Shard on the Deinosuchus, right?”
Damion nodded. He technically knew a lot more than just the one magic seal, but he did not want to reveal too much at the mont. After all, just rembering one magic seal from when he was 6 years old that he should not have been able to learn is quite different from showing he morized a book full of magic seals.
“Channel your magic like you are going to cast Ice Shard, but instead of sending the magic out of you, summon it to the palm of your hand and focus on the magic seal for the spell.”
Doing as Ms. Teft instructed, Damion was able to hold his mana in the palm of his hand. As he began focusing on the magic seal for Ice Shard, the seal began to form just above his palm.
“Very good. This is how magic seals above tier 1 were passed down in the past. A teacher would summon a magic seal and students would sit around and try to morize it.”
Damion considered what Ms. Teft was saying. Him just keeping the magic seal up was a slow drain on his magic. Nothing his mana regeneration could not handle, but for other mages, without his high regeneration rate, would be hard pressed to keep channeling their magic this way for a long period of ti.
“Now. You already know what this magic seal does. It summons a shard of ice that you can then launch at your target. Everything about the spell, is in the magic seal. Study it and when you understand the different parts of the magic seal, then you will start to learn the ancient language.”
As Damion watched the magic seal hovering in the air above his palm he tried to discern what each of the many glyphs did and how they interacted with each other. After several minutes he released the magic seal. This was going to take him longer than he thought, especially if he had to work out the anings of the glyphs himself.
Thinking back on when he first learned this magic seal, and the others stored in the Magic System, Damion rembered that they had so elents in common. So were quite similar even when they were magic seals of different affinities. With that thought in mind Damion realized he had a way to figure out what at least a few of the glyphs ant.
If he were to review all his Ice affinity spells, or any of the magic seals related to a single affinity, then he should be able to learn the glyph for that affinity. If he then compared the magic seals for say, Ice Shard and Earth Shard, he should be able to learn another glyph. What Damion needed was ti alone. After all, he could not very well reveal to Ms. Teft or anyone else that he knew so many magic seals.
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