This new world I had woken up to was very strange. I could feel the difference with every breath I took. When the air filled my lungs a warm energy would diffuse through my body. It was a nice feeling, a warm current flowing through every part of my body before it slowly gathered in my stomach. After I grew bored with observing the blurry world around me I tried to manipulate the energy that had gathered in the last few hours. It was difficult, like trying to hand water in my hands so instead of trying to force it I focused on controlling its flow. It immediately became easier but seconds after I tried to move it beyond where it had gathered, it dissipated across my body. Immense exhaustion started to overwhelm me and before I could stop it I fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke up I could see the light on the wall from the sun peeking through the window behind me. I looked around the room in confusion, trying to clear the fog in my brain. After a moment the fog cleared and I remembered falling unconscious after playing with what I was assuming was some sort of magic or mana. I turned my attention to my breathing in order to follow it back to my "core" and a few minutes later I could feel the warm current again and found a large amount of mana. It seems to gather during my sleep as well, so I dived into trying to manipulate it again. Only this time I did not try to move it too far and instead moved it in interesting paths.
As time passed more mana gathered and I grew more adept at making more complicated paths. One day while I was playing with my magic, I had folded it into another strange shape. It kind of looked like half a table with corkscrews along the legs. When I caught up and completed the path I was hit with a strange sensation of CONNECTION. When I was able to shake myself out of the strange state I had fallen into I realized the path had maintained its shape without any concentration on my part. It looked like it would not dissipate any time soon however magic was not flowing through it. When I tried to run my magic through the path again I felt that feeling of connection again, though not as intense as last time.
I spent the next few minutes running my magic through my first rune, I had decided to call it a rune as it sounded cool. I found out that when I ran my magic through the rune my magic would decrease, so I was careful not to use all of it and pass out again. When my magic was starting to run low I stopped using the rune and started to run my remaining magic through new paths. I was curious to see how many circuits I could find. Had I reached a threshold in complexity and would find more runes as I gained more control or would I only be able to find one every couple of months? I got my answer a couple months later when I found a new rune and it only took a single month to find the third one.
I knew that it would be years before I could actually experiment with any of my new spells, so I had a lot of time to practice. As the years passed I learned about the world around me and explored my growing magic. It did not take me long to discover the more often I drained my magic the faster it would grow, I also noticed that as I grew up my sensitivity to magic dimmed so I made sure to spend time just following my magic's natural flow. Learning the new language was a headache but I was excited I had been born in the world of Fairy Tail. As for how I knew, it was actually embarrassing that I didn't find out sooner. The orphanage where I lived was in Magnolia. Now that I finally figured out what world I was in I started to make plans for my future.
I knew that I would be a powerhouse when I was older but I would need to know how to use my runes. So after my fourth birthday I started to spend time in the woods behind the orphanage practicing with the dozens of runes I had made over the past few years. I wasn't sure how to start so I tried to move the rune away from my core. When I reached the edge I paused for a moment before moving it over the edge. Or I would have if the rune was able to, but when it reached the edge it did not move further. I tried a little harder and felt a stabbing pain, so I stopped and tried to move my magic instead of the rune. It sort of worked, as in I started to glow.
I wasn't really interested in becoming a firefly so I moved on soon enough. I had a difficult time controlling the magic outside my body but I was able to trace glowing lines in the air. That gave me an idea, so I tried to trace a rune in the air with my magic. It took a few tries but when I finally succeeded the rune inside my core started to resonate with the one I had made. The rune I made started to glow so I waited, but after waiting for a minute nothing happened and I let it fade away. I fell on my ass when it faded completely as keeping the rune manifested outside my core was draining. I thought back to why nothing happened and realized that I had used the first rune I discovered, the connection rune.
And it wasn't connected to anything, so I chose a fire rune to use instead. It took a few tries to get it right but when I did it blew up in my face, literally. Once I blinked the spots out of my eyes I tried again, this time putting about half of the power into it. This time flames traced along the rune. It didn't really do anything else, but as long as I supplied magic it would continue to burn. I stared at the flame, stunned by the fact that I was actually doing magic. A smile grew on my face before I started to laugh, the rune fizzled out while I was distracted. Once I calmed down, I started to experiment with the fire rune.
It seemed like I had to keep in mind the rate of flow and the stability of the rune as different variations caused slightly different effects. Making the flow faster required the rune to be more stable but caused the fire to burn brighter while a slower flow required less magic and produced a smaller flame. Once I was running low on magic I decided to stretch, I knew that I was going to need to be stronger if I was going to be a mage of Fairy Tail. By the time I was out of breath my magic had recovered so I tried some of my other runes. I was only able to try a few before I had to go back but they produced some interesting effects.
The lightning rune was similar to the fire rune, but when I tried a non elemental rune I was surprised. The rune had no visible effects but I could feel myself beginning to tire, I shook myself awake and stopped. It was good to know now instead of later that my runes would affect me as well. I tried a few more but it seemed like my luck had run out and none of them had a visible reaction. I walked back to the orphanage for lunch, "ALEXANDER! Where have you been?!" I flinched when I heard the matron and turned around, "Um..Exploring?"
She looked like she was about to start breathing fire but she took a deep breath instead and pinched between her eyes. "I know you are curious, but next time can you tell me before you leave?" I was surprised she didn't mind me going back there, she saw the look on my face and smirked. "I know that if I tried to stop you, you would just go behind my back. So instead just tell me when you leave, that way I won't worry as much." I looked down at my feet, I didn't mean to worry the Matron, I was just so excited to experiment with my magic. "I will, I'm sorry." She raised my chin in the air before smiling, "Why don't we go get some lunch and then you can go back to your exploring. Just remember not to go too deep into the forest."
After I ate lunch with her I went back to the woods and continued to practice until the sun started to set. After that I went home for the night eager to fall asleep so tomorrow would come faster. The next day I went back to the woods, but this time I was going to do something different. I wanted to try to use more than one rune at a time, so I tried one of the runes that looked like it could be connected to other runes. I tried my fire rune and a rune that didn't do anything yesterday. It took about three times the amount of magic to use the combined runes. If I had to guess it was 1 portion to each run and one for connecting the runes.
Once the runes were stable I waited for something to happen but I was disappointed. It was the same thing as using two runes once but I wanted the runes to combine and produce an effect that is more than 11. It wasn't that hard to find the solution, I had to connect the runes so my magic could flow from one rune to the other. It took a couple tries to connect the runes and not cause an explosion when I tried to run magic through it. But finally I got one and a flame about a foot long and twice as hot as yesterday. I studied the spell, keeping it active for as long as I could. After about a minute the rune matrix started to destabilize, fearing an explosion I cut off my magic.
After that I sat down, I knew my magic was going to take a long time to practice. It was a good thing I started so early cause this was going to take years. So I stood up and got back to work. The fist tithing I wanted to try was seeing if I could connect the two runes I had used in different ways. It took until just before dinner to find another one, this one was more complicated but the effect it produced was confusing. The flame didn't burn or produce any heat and as far as I could tell the only way I could tell it was there was that I could see it. I thought about the runes I had used, Amplification and Fire. If the first success was amplifying physical properties of the fire then maybe the second would be more like a boost to fire magic.
I walked back to the orphanage after I succeeded in making my second spell, my thoughts raced to the future trying to imagine all the different spells I could make in the future. It took me over a year to find a limit to the number of runes I could manifest in a single spell. With each rune needing one portion to manifest and one portion to connect to another rune the cost would rise quickly. I am guessing that when I started it was only three judging by how much my magic improved since then. I knew that I would need to improve faster, as I had ideas that would need at least ten runes, and sometimes a whole lot more. It took me the rest of the day to think of a solution, I would make my first artifact.
It would take a while to save up enough money from doing chores around town, but this would improve my magic immensely over time. But in the meantime I was going to push myself, coming up with spells that would push my control and not just go through every single combination. Once I started to add more runes, the amount of spells I could make would be too large to count and my growth would slow. In the future I want to be able to use spells with more than ten runes and craft artifacts which would have hundreds if not thousands of runes.
Over the next month I put together enough money to buy a mat that was made from black bamboo. A material that absorbed the light around it, and caused total darkness where they grew. Once I bought the mat I made three different arrays to put in it. A barrier array that would absorb magic overnight and keep it contained within the barrier. The next array would simply calm my mind, allowing for deeper concentration. The final array would allow me to absorb magic faster, increasing the amount of magic I would absorb with every breath I took.
It took me two weeks to imprint the arrays on the mat. At first I thought that I would just have cast the spell matrixes on the mat, but they would fade after an hour. I tried different catalysts like sap, blood, and even spit. Those would last for about a day before they started to fade and a week before they were gone. The last thing I tried was carving the arrays into the mat using my magic. However I did not want to mess up using the only material I had, so I practiced on ordinary bamboo I bought until it was perfect. That took longer than I thought it would, I had to not only shape my magic and keep it stable but the runes were not two dimensional.
This caused a lot of problems, I could not see through the material so I was doing it purely though sensing my own magic. Another problem came up when I realized that the mat was very thin and the corresponding array would have to be very thin. It did not take long to rework the array to something smaller and even longer to practice enough with the new one. But a month after I started to practice my carving I finally finished carving the array into the bamboo mat. When I finished and ran my magic through one cycle a pulse seemed to go through the mat before it faded.
When I tried the mat I was surprised how much easier it was to increase my magic. I knew that this speed was only because my magic capacity was so small, and it would probably slow once I reached a certain point. But in the future, when my growth speed slowed I could upgrade the arrays. When I finally dragged my head out of the clouds I focused on meditation until my magic was filled again. When I opened my eyes only an hour had passed and I smiled, with less time spent regaining my magic every time I was low would also allow me to experiment with even more rune combinations. The concentration array would also help with making more complex spells.
Now that I finished my first artifact I was ready to spend the next few years exploring the depths of my magic. The complexities would keep me interested for a long time, as when I improved in one area it would expand my magical horizons. The number of runes I discovered and the amount of runes I could control in a single spell, not to mention the fact the runes could fit together multiple ways. I knew for now I would not need anything to track the spells I was making as they were not very useful yet. The runes themselves would grow more powerful as I grew older and I gained more control over my magic, but my magic's strength would lie in its adaptability. Making a spell for every occasion would build my arsenal to massive proportions and I would need a way to keep track of it in the future.
