Chapter 2:

A Guidebook to Magic

It has been just about two years since I was born into this world. I could walk now, and I was developing pretty well. Also, I've become fluent in this land's language, so it made finding stuff out a lot easier.

My parents' names were Zenith and Paul Greyrat, and the maid's name was just Lilia. Looks like not everyone gets family names. My name was Lumina Greyrat. Not too bad all in all.

Well, now that my life is starting to pick up some steam, I wanted to plan things out. The main things that stuck out to me were the things I had lacked previously. Study, motivation, and will.

As an infant, however, my ways of going about improving those were limited. I couldn't do nothing much aside from talking to the household residents. Also, one thing of note. Lilia seemed to be taking a liking to me. She would talk to me, carry me around, and generally just pamper me. I guess I'm starting to like her too.

That aside, I was wondering if there was an easier way to educate myself. Not like I could ask about the whole world as a two year old. The first thing that popped in my head was written books. I scoured the house for them, and ended up only finding five. I thought it over some, and came to the conclusion that this world didn't look like it had any way to print words onto paper, so books themselves would probably be wildly expensive.

Anyways, with those five books, I began teaching myself to read. Thanks to my parents reading me bedtime stories, I had a base level understanding of a few key words. The grammar and such was similar enough to what I was used to, so I picked it up within a few months.

Now that I was able to read, I found out just how interesting these books were. I was decent enough at studying in my old life, but I never did it voluntarily. But now, I can't put a book down.

A book in particular stood out to me. A Textbook of Magic was filled to the brim with information that was completely fascinating to an otherworlder like me. There were three main types of magic. Healing, Offensive, and Summoning. All were split into further classification, such as the four schools of offensive magic: wind, water, earth, and fire. However, I was drawn to Healing magic the most.

Before I became shut-in, I was really interested in biology. Not like, obsessed or anything, but I had a passion for it. I knew most of the principles behind traditional medicine and how bodies worked in general. I spent some time wikipedia diving when I was locked away in my room and became pretty knowledgeable. God knows why I never tried to apply it to anything.

Anyways, before casting any type of magic, you had to have magical power, or mana as they called it. Using this, you either drew magic circles to lay down a predetermined spell to activate later, or used incantations to cast them manually.

Back to the mana that I mentioned, it was written here that you were born with a set amount of mana. That really surprised me. What if people were segregated based on the amount of magical potential they had? That sounded pretty bad to me.

However, I did read that a certain group of people did improve over time, so I wondered exactly how that worked. Magic power was also supposed to be up to genetics, with strong mages having offspring that were equally or less talented than their parents. So, maybe I could inherit some good genes from my mother?

If I wanted to start practicing magic, there was no better time than the present. I got on memorizing the incantation for a few basic spells, and when I thought I had memorized enough for now, I decided to try to put it into practice.

I'd put off offensive magic for later. I wanted to try healing magic first. It wasn't the easiest thing for a beginner to do, but I decided to try anyway. I walked over to the wall, and took a deep breath.

WHAM! I kicked the wall, and held in a yelp. That must've done the trick. I took off my shoes, and held my hand over my foot. I began to recite.

"Let this… divine power be as satisfying nourishment… giving one who has lost their strength the strength to rise again, Healing!"

Sure enough, a dim glow appeared from my palm. It felt like blood pooling in my arm, which felt quite uncomfortable. I breathed a sigh of relief as the pain in my foot softened. It wasn't completely gone, but it definitely hurt less. My very first magic spell. How touching.

It wasn't complete, though. When Zenith treated my head wound, all of my pain was gone. But my foot still sorta hurts. So I decided, Let's try it again.

WHAM! Ow… I seriously needed to find a better way of doing this. I pressed my hand to my foot.

Concentrate, Concentrate… I felt that sensation again. I shut my eyes and tried to focus on how exactly it felt. Blood coursing through my veins, like a flow of water. Yeah, This is probably it. I set my mind to it.

Heal, Heal, Medicine, Nurse, Treat, Heal… "Hah!" I exclaimed, opening my eyes. All the pain in my foot was gone. "Eh? Wait." I hadn't said the chant? Was that book lying to me? It definitely looked well researched. But then…Why?

I mean, the book didn't say anything about incantationless magic, but I could do it, so that meant it probably would have to be an excessively rare skill. But why was it so easy to do? I was a total newbie, a novice, and yet I managed to pull it off? It just didn't make any sense.

I tried to make heads or tails of it. Maybe saying incantations just made the spell fire automatically? That would make teaching and practical use a lot easier. For one thing, you wouldn't have to concentrate every single time you wanted to fire a spell. I'd imagine it would be a pain to do all of that in the midst of a battle.

But the fact that it exists means it has to have some use. Maybe some people do find it easier? Perhaps you could be more precise with the magic if you did it solely in your head. It may actually be not that hard to pick up, but people over time get used to chanting so much that casting without incantations is practically impossible. That could make sense.

Or, even. I could be harboring a secret skill that barely anyone uses. I'd be a total badass. But I'm probably getting ahead of myself. I decided to leave it at that for a while. Back to magic casting.

I reluctantly went to slam my foot into the wall again. WHAM! Geez, I'll start working on offensive magic starting tomorrow. I began to focus on healing my foot, when my body started to feel heavy. Is this exhaustion? Probably magic related. If what the book said was true about the magical power, I was screwed if this was all I had. I decided to try one more time just to satisfy my curiosity, and I promptly flopped to the floor, passed out.

"Seriously, Lumi. When you get tired you have to go to bed before you fall asleep."

I woke up to see that I had fallen asleep with the book in hand. Man, I really need to piss.

I rushed to the bathroom. So, my magical power really did suck. That doesn't make me feel very confident going forward. What could I do to improve? Would I even improve at all? Jeez.

The next day, I tried out offensive magic. I decided on wind magic for my initial school of magic. I successfully cast the elementary wind spell "Gust," which just shot our room temperature air in the way a blow dryer would but with less force. It was short lived, however. It only lasted around a second. I tried to cast it without incantations, and managed to do it after a few tries.

I managed to hold it for six or so seconds at maximum before it fizzled out. After that, I began to become tired. If I went off of what happened yesterday, I would probably pass out again if I pushed it. I noticed it took a lot more time for me to get tired than it did yesterday. Probably because it was my first time casting. I left it at that for the day.

The following day, I went back to practicing healing magic. I tried experimenting with it, and one such example was with my fingernails. I chipped off a bit of my fingernail with another, and tried to see what would happen if I were to cast healing magic on it.

Nothing happened. I wonder, was stuff like fingernails not in the criteria to be healed? I decided to take a big risk in the name of science to try to dig deeper. I would probably regret this.

I took a candle holder, placed my finger on the table, and slammed it down.

"YEOOWCHH!" I exclaimed. Why did I ever think this was a good idea? My mother burst into the room with a worried expression. How was I going to explain this?

"Aw, you poor thing! You have to be more careful when playing. Come here." I brought my finger with the fingernail cracked to her, and she held it in her hand. "Let this divine power be as satisfying nourishment, giving one who has lost their strength the strength to rise again."

My cracked fingernail stopped bleeding, and sealed itself together. Looks like I found out how that works. Looks like it has to be wounds that actually affect the body rather than conditional things like hair and fingernails.

I probably would have found an easier way to do that, but it's too late now. I thank my mother with a smile and she steps out of the room.

I go back to casting Gust and after a bit of trial and error, I can hold the air current for eleven seconds. That's certainly unexpected. What happened to the MP being fixed at birth? This could mean a number of things, but I decided to give it a week until I drew any conclusions.

And so that week passed. With each passing day, my limit doubled. By the end of it, I could cast a gust spell for twenty minutes. I'd been deceived! That book lied through its teeth, seriously. Maybe this was a way of adults putting kids down by saying that they would never improve no matter what? Pfft. What a joke.

Maybe I should cut the author some slack. I entertained the idea of me actually being a badass. I could see it now. This version of myself is kind of a looker, so me all grown up and with secret skills and unlimited growth? I'd woo men and women alike. Back to reality, the more logical conclusion would be that practicing over time, like a muscle, would improve it as long as you practiced enough.

I'd heard that exercising during adolescence would make your progress skyrocket, so maybe it was something like that. But I would prefer me being a badass over something like that. Well, either way, it looks like the only thing I can do now is train.

The day after that, I decided to take my MP to the limits. I screwed around with the other schools of magic. For fire magic, I cast "Heat Hand" since it was the only thing I could do indoors without burning the house down. It was basically like having a heater except your hand was the output. For Water magic, I cast "Waterball," which was self explanatory. I also fiddled around with "Ice Blade" which created a crude replication of the sword I had seen my father swing around. As for Earth, I cast "Rock Bullet" and played target practice with a few candles. It was a really fun way to pass the time.

Another thing I found out was there were even further classifications for magic spells. All the spells I'd been casting were classed as "Elementary Tier." The full list is as follows, with the spells growing stronger in order: Elementary, Intermediate, Advanced, Saint, King, Imperial, and Divine. Spells of the last tier could literally shake entire continents. Anyways, most people barely got past intermediate their whole lives, so I was on a good pace.

You yourself could be classed too. Although, it would be more like a title. If you cast a Fire spell at Saint-tier, you'd be a "Fire Saint." It was simple enough to follow.

If I had to pick a goal, it would be to one day become a Saint class mage. That sounded great to me.

Anyways, back to my experiments. I came to find out that Waterball was a lot more interesting than I thought. I could control the size to a point. However, when I tried casting with both hands, I could only cast two droplets. Eventually, I managed to get them both to equal size.

And that was when, I had a thought. What if I could make these fly?

It only took two months, but I managed to do it. It looked like spells had an order of operations set that could be altered by the user. First, shape. Second, size. Lastly, speed. Then the spell would be released. It was a really interesting revelation.

Maybe magic wasn't so outlandish after all? Well, now I have a clear goal. Practice incantationless magic until I can do it effortlessly, and increase my MP to its limits. I wonder how my parents would react when they realize their little princess can cast without incantations? I can't wait to show off.

Authors Note:

I tried to change up a few things to avoid retelling an extremely similar story. Lots of bigger changes coming soon. AxA shall be no more.