Black Iron's Glory

That day after school, Claude went to Eriksson’s jetty as the small fishing boat was getting its final coat of paint. After drying for five days or so, it would finally be able to sail. Claude, Welikro and Borkal went there to help Eriksson paint up his beloved ship.

Eriksson went home and brought quite a lot of ingredients for the barbecue they would be having to celebrate the completion of the boat. After they finished their hearty meal, they chattered for a good while at the jetty before returning to their respective homes.

By the time Claude reached home, it was already really late. When his mother heard him enter, she complained, “Why are you home so late? Are you hungry? There’s something in the kitchen for you to eat.” Claude gave her a cursory response before he started washing up. When he was done with that and was about to head upstairs, the snowhound heard him from his sister’s room and started crying out. Claude scolded it in a hushed voice. The intelligent pup stopped making noise right away.

After he entered the attic, he lit the oil lamp in his room and lied on his bed, taking out the diary of Landes and preparing for a read before he slept. If he were honest, Claude had to admit that Landes’s diary was a far more interesting read than the biographies of other famous people. One wouldn’t see the famous people bring up their experience of being bullied in school, for one.

But after he read through only two pages, he jumped from his bed, far too surprised to process what he had just discovered. Claude found some detailed explanation of how Landes learned meditation and even included diagrams and training techniques for it.

That means I can start practicing meditation as well… Claude forced his urge to yell out loud in joy down. After such painstaking attempts to locate any information about magic, he didn’t find any. Yet, it showed up when he was least expecting it!

Never would he even dream that the secret to start practicing magic would be inside Landes’s diary. If he had discovered that earlier, then he would’ve already toiled away at learning the mystical arts the moment he returned from Egret instead of tossing the two diaries aside and wasting a month of time.

“I thought the diaries would only have some unimportant record of events. Why am I always so unlucky? Who would’ve thought that I would find the meditation technique inside a diary?” mumbled Claude to himself.

Ah, for someone who could even remember the names of those who bullied him, why wouldn’t he write down what he learned during his journey to become a rune magus in his diary? Magus Landes must be quite proud about his memory. Maybe when he wrote the diary, he was thinking of how he could become a rune magus earlier than those who ostracized him.

Claude suppressed his excitement and continued to read.

As expected, Landes’s showing off was apparent from his writings. He wrote in the diary about how they had fallen behind.

So what if you’re richer than me and liked by the instructors more? So what if you look down on me and bully me? How did that work out for you? I only needed three months of meditation practice to be able to start circulating the mana in my body and become a first-ranked rune magus. Now, you have to call me ‘teacher’ when you see me. Hahahahaha…

As expected of a genius. Nevertheless, Landes didn’t fail to thank Tawari, who had patiently taught him every step on the way, in his diary. Without Tawari’s guidance, Landes would’ve never been able to become a first-ranked rune magus so quickly.

Usually, an apprentice magus with elemental affinity of seven or eight would take a year or a year and a half to become a first-ranked rune magus, and that was under the assumption that the apprentice received full guidance from their instructors. Otherwise, it could take them up to three whole years, unless they managed to figure out the key to meditation themselves.

Becoming a battlemagus on the other hand was more troublesome and would take up to two or three years. They would have to train in other battle magic hand sigils and techniques alongside meditation as well as their physical capabilities.

But the good thing about becoming a battlemagus was that there wasn’t any complicated relationship between students and instructors. Even though battlemagi candidates were only students, they would eventually become the comrades-in-arms of the battlemagi instructors in the future. Nobody would leave their backs open to comrades that hated them after all.

Take for instance the female apprentice magus that had stayed in the tower for five whole years. According to Landes, she didn’t have good talent for magic. She only had an elemental affinity of six and should’ve been disqualified. But as her family was rich, they gave the evaluating magus a huge sum as a bribe and she was brought to the tower when she was fourteen.

During the first three years, her family fared pretty well and they would send a large tribute to the tower. But during the fourth year, her family offended the magic tower faction of another area during one of their trading trips. Loenk wasn’t willing to show up for the sake of her family and merely watched as they fell to their ruin, leaving the girl in the tower as an apprentice.

Now that she no longer had the financial support of her family, she learned incredibly slowly given her already lacking talent in magic. So, she had no choice but to become the lover of a five-ring rune magus and supervisor of the alchemy lab, who was also valued heavily by Loenk. Only then could she stand firm in the magic tower. But even so, she had stayed for five whole years in the tower and still wasn’t able to become a first-ranked rune magus. So, her five-ring rune magus lower wasn’t able to help her out with anything else.

It was said that Archmagus Loenk angrily declared that if she couldn’t become a first-ranked rune magus when she was twenty, there would no longer be a place for her in the magic tower. She would only have two choices: pack up for home or sign a contract to be a slave for life. She only had a year’s time left.

Back then, Landes didn’t understand why there was such a huge difference in learning speed between those who have an elemental affinity of six and nine for example. Had Tawari not strictly forbade him from sharing the meditation technique he learned to that girl, Landes might’ve done it out of pity to help her become a first-ranked rune magus as soon as possible.

With nobody to brag to and share his joy about becoming a first-ranked rune magus so quickly, Landes could only write down how he felt in his diary. Even though by the time he started writing it, he was already a third-ranked rune magus, he could still clearly remember the joy he felt when he first made it through the first rank after his successful mastery of the meditation technique. He also recorded even more of the insights he gained after his successful advancement.

To mortals, magi were scary and mysterious figures who wielded supernatural powers and could control everything in nature. They could easily use magic to kill the savage and ferocious magic beasts and construct structures and buildings commoners didn’t even dare to envision. They were on the pinnacle of the world and was worshipped by the mere mortals even more than the gods were.

But Landes described in his diary clearly and simply the source of a magus’s power. Through training in the meditation technique and absorbing the unseen, but present, elemental essences in the natural world into their bodies, the magi were able to convert and store the energy as mana they could control. The key was that the magus had to imagine his own body as a vessel. The more mana a magus could store, the higher their rank would be.

Landes noted in his diary that Tawari told him some mysteries about the world of magic which the instructors often hid from their students.

Magi from the first to the fifth ring were considered low-order magi. The division between the fifth and sixth ring was the one between low and mid-order magi. Both meditation and the effects of a spell would change qualitatively after crossing that divide. However, the knowledge required to break through that barrier was entirely monopolized by the white silver magi nobles, who weren’t willing to leak them. In the world of Faslan, the fifth ring was the limit for magi of common birth.

Magi from the sixth to eighth ring were collectively known as mid-order magi. For instance, Loenk, a seven-ring magus, was one of them, and he was one of the elite of Faslan and was also a member of the magic authority. Nine-ring to twelvth-ring magi were of the high order. Currently, there were only seven nine-ring magi in Faslan and the council of the nine ring which they were a part of was the highest authority in the entire world. No magus dared to disregard their orders.

According to legend, magi above the twelvth ring would embark on a path to godhood. However, there hadn’t been any magus that successfully made it to that level in the past two millennia. Grand Archmagi were nothing but a thing of legend at that point of time in Faslan.

The key to becoming a proper magus as an apprentice was training in the meditation technique. With the shortage of magical resources building up over more than three thousand years since the inception of the magical civilization, inefficient techniques that consumed more resources than necessary had been phased out.

The meditation techniques available to apprentices and low-order magi were limited to only two to three kinds that didn’t consume any kind of resource,, but they relied on the user’s own understanding of magic and collective experience. As long as one’s talent for magic was high, one could become a five-ring magi after time and rigorous training.

Landes drew a proper hexagram on one of the pages in the diary to explain the meditation technique taught to apprentice magi in great detail. The formal name for that technique was called Hexagram Meditation.

When an apprentice began the training, he would have to relax his body and empty his mind of any thoughts without falling asleep. Once that was done, he would feel a void and ought to visualize a hexagram in that void with his mental power. Soon, he would feel the presence of many glowing points in the surrounding space and those points of light were the essence photons that existed unseen around the world. They would be attracted to the hexagram and congregate around the points of the hexagram.

What an apprentice would have to do was to do his best to move the essence photons to each of the points of the hexagram, with the key being picking the kind of essence that one was most attuned with. In Landes’s case, since he was most attuned with the fire element, his absorption of fire element essence photons would be much faster than those of other elements and he could fill up the six triangles of the hexagram with fire essence photons in a much shorter time.

After that, the apprentice could convert the essence photons gathered around the points into mana to be stored in the body. In some sense, the hexagram drawn in the mental void was like a well and the points were its opening. The six triangles of the hexagram would be the columns of the well.

The way it was different from a normal water well was that the apprentice would have to convert the essence photons gathered in the six triangles of the hexagram into mana before it could be stored in the ‘well’ at the center. When the central well of the hexagram was filled with mana, the apprentice would be able to channel the mana from his body to the outside world, making him a full-fledged one-ring magus.

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