Chronicles of the True Wizard

He sat on the throne, pulled up the screen, then enabled the map sharing. He input his map and set it to have the towns and his map update each-other. He also chose to notify any residents so that they could also join. He sat and watched the participation number for a minute or so and it quickly jumped to the mid forties.

He opened the name section and stared at it for a while before settling on: "Tripeak-Valley." It was a little on the nose, but it was the best he could come up with.

With all that done he started sifting through the menu. He only got through a few options before getting bored and deciding to leave it for anther time. That or maybe Noah could tell him about any important options in the future.

With that out of the way, Felix left the throne, because it felt weird to him to just hang out sitting in it, and sat on his bed in his room.

Open Profession Selection.

A screen with a list of five options appeared to Felix.

[E - Common] Farmer: Manage crops, plant and harvest a variety of plants. Skills aid in harvesting, sowing, managing and protecting your crops. Evolutions include specializations in specific plant types, high yield, high quality and plant breeding. +3 END, +2 STR, +2 AGI, +3 Free per level.

Plant breeding? Cool but, nope.

[E - Uncommon] City Planner: Plan the direction of a settlement or a portion of one. Designate districts and the locations of specific buildings. Skills aid in planning, foresight and adapting to the evolution of a town. +3 PER, +3 INT, +2 AGI, +3 Free per level.

Personally, boring. Nope.

[E - Uncommon] Enchanter: Inscribe enchantments for a variety of effects. Skills aid in inscribing, planning, safety and stability. Evolutions include focusing on equipment, exotic, household items and combat. +3 DEX, +3 INT, +2 PER, +3 Free per level.

Oh that's interesting, might come back to that one.

[E - Rare] Mayor: As the leader of a settlement, you guide the people and choose the direction of the town. This class levels based on the progress of your town and can even be upgraded as your settlement evolves. Skills aid in planning, leading and managing the town and it's residents. +4 INT, +3 PER, +6 Free per level.

Definitely not.

[E - Special] Arcane Engineer: A profession that focuses on spell form construction, enchanting and the creation of magical contraptions. With skills that can aid with discovery, creation and safety. Evolutions include specializations in any of the focused fields. +4 DEX, +4 INT, +3 PER, +5 Free per level.

Yup that is definitely the one. I did not think I could get spell form construction in a profession, thought I was going to have to do enchanting. Also those stat bonuses are sweet, but now my stats are going to be even more lopsided. I really need to find a better way of working out or find some other way to increase my other stats.

With his profession chosen, Felix decided to check out some skills he could.

Open Skill Selection.

A screen with a list of three options appeared to Felix.

General: [Speed Walking (Common) Walking quickly as a means of traveling. You travel quickly opting not to run or walk, but rather choose something in between the two. This skill can be upgraded. Your form is corrected while speed walking.]

Uh, I don't want The System messing with that kind of thing. I'd rather work on it myself, seems like a crutch to me. I would much rather skills that do things I couldn't on my own. Also, I don't want to waste a skill slot on this.

Caster: [Meditation (Common) Focusing your mind, you have begun your journey on the path of meditation. You have begun to release stray thoughts and focus on a particular task, ignoring distractions. This skill can be upgraded. Your Mana restores itself at an increased rate while meditating (x1.5)] Note: Accepting this skill with remove your General Skill: [Meditation (Common)] as these two skills conflict.

I've already seen this one, and chose the alternative.

Arcane Engineer: [Spell Form Memorization (Common) This skill allows you to remember spell forms that you have seen. Memorizing spell forms is essential if you want to create your own eventually. This skill can be upgraded.]

I have something way better than that already.

Wow, those sucked. I guess I need to find Puzzle Dungeon A or B so I can grind this profession. Then maybe I'll get offered some better options. I'm also not being offered class skills much, I wonder if it's because I haven't used my spell list at all. Maybe I need a new class but maybe I can just evolve this one… hopefully.

I'll just focus on training for the combat dungeon reward run. I've got a few things I want to try and get done for that. First, channeling Mana Bolt and Fire Bolt, either I get rapid firing spells, or I might be able to create a Flame Thrower spell. Second, I am really close to being able to double cast at once and that would be huge, channeling Gust and constructing another spell feels like a good stepping stone to get me there. Lastly, even though it likely won't help in the dungeon run, I want to see if I can use Gust to travel faster, like a sail boat creating it's own wind.

Felix didn't want to practice his spells in the castle and risk damaging it, so instead he went down to the courtyard. Felix sat down and began meditating, he focused on what was different about Gust that let him continuously channel mana into it. He figured if he compared the three spell forms he knew, looking for something that was the same or similar in both Mana Bolt and Fire Bolt but different in Gust, he might be able to modify the former spells to be channeled. That was the hope anyways.

Felix decided to try something slightly different this time. He entered his Memory Palace and walked up to the large table in the middle of the room. He pushed the contents of the table to the side and willed a stack of paper into existence. At first he also made a writing utensil, then quickly dismissed it because he figured he shouldn't need it. He placed three pages at the far end of the table and made the three spell forms he knew appear on them. Under each of the three spell forms, Felix started to individually dissect the spell forms onto pages. He ended up with three columns, at the top was the spell form for a spell, under that was a long line up of pages each containing and individual parts of the spell form.

Now Felix sorted the pages and compared them. He had to redo some of them as he realized it could be split further, and some he realized he had split too far until it was meaningless. Once he was pretty sure his dissections were as accurate as he could make them, he started labeling what the pieces might do based on what he saw and felt from the spell. He listed the possibilities on the corners of the pages and then started crossing out options as he compared the two lists.

Some parts were easy, he already knew which component was the "push" in both Mana Bolt and Fire Bolt. Gust had a similar component, but it was different. He knew which was the shape and element components of both Bolt spells from his previous experimentation. The Gust spell form was very simple which was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, there was less to dissect and understand, on the other it made knowing which part to integrate and how to integrate it into his Bolt spells that much harder.

If the Gust spell form had an element or shape component, he would be confident he could swap some of its components into Fire Bolt and Mana Bolt and test it out, but it didn't. Instead, the Gust spell form consisted of little more than the push component of the other two spells, slightly modified. There were only three components Felix separated it into. The other two spells, had many more than that.

To be absolutely sure, Felix decided to test the components he had dissected. First he constructed a Mana Bolt replacing the shape component with the one from Fire Bolt. Then, he left his library and tested it outside. He tested and refined his spell form components until he was pretty confident he had them separated and identified correctly.

Now came the more difficult step, trying to swap components from Gust into his other spells. He managed to create a Fire Bolt that launched a small ball of fire, then kept pushing creating a small gust behind it and a Mana Bolt with similar effects. While a useless spell, it did provide useful information, if the ring of Gust only pushed a small area alone, one of the other components was a targeting component.

If he knew which component was targeting, that only left the channeling component. The obstacle now, was how to attach that component to the fire and shape components of the Fire Bolt spell, and how many times. The component for channeling, Felix was fairly certain, was an open mana channel. On the other spells, Felix pumped mana into the spell through a mana channel, when there was enough mana, it sealed and the spell cast. On the Gust spell, the mana channel was designed to be constantly open. This was a simple enough modification, but he needed to attach mana threads to multiple parts of the other spells. There were two open mana channels on the Gust spell, which made Felix realize he was casting it wrong as he constructed it and only had one thread attached to it.

Felix spent over an hour figuring out how to construct the spell form with multiple threads attached before he landed on the most effective way so far, to construct it in the middle of the thread, then hold onto both ends. Pushing mana through both ends simultaneously and consistently, such that he pushed the same amount at the same rate through both took another hour. However, the modification made the spell much more effective.

For Fire Bolt, things got more complicated. Felix added two open channels to the outer ring of Fire Bolt, to imitate Gust, and he left the targeting component to piggy back off the outer ring, as it did in Gust. The rest of the spell, Felix wasn't sure what to do. He started with one open channel on the shaping and the fire component of the spell. Then he had to figure out how to construct the spell form at all. It now had four open ends.

Why am I using threads at all, in theory I could just will the mana into the shape I want, right? The threads were mainly for practice when I initially learned to control mana, but using them to construct spell forms seems like it will just hinder me in the long run.

With that thought in mind, Felix spent the next two days willing mana into spell forms, instead of weaving them with threads. He still used a thread to pull some mana out of his body and into the air, but then he willed the mana from the thread into the shape directly instead of maneuvering it as a thread. Mana reacted like a liquid or a gas so there was no reason for him to think of it as a solid thread, which took him embarrassingly, almost a whole day to realize then internalize. He was slower initially, but after a day and a half of practice, his spell form construction was much faster and required less focus.

This alone should make it possible to cast two spells at once, not having to weave the threads where they need to go and pathing around the spell form already saved me a ton of time. It also requires so much less focus. I might even be able to get three at once at this point.

With that out of the way Felix could go back to trying to create a Flame Thrower spell. He modified the spell form to have four open channels then cast it. The resulting spell created a tiny Fire Bolt and launched it, a very short distance, then another fired almost immediately after the first that consisted of little to no fire. He quickly realized his error, but instead of fixing it, he tried something different. He added another open channel to the fire component. This would make it so that he channeled mana into the fire component twice as fast as before, which should allow him to fill the ball before it launched. In theory he could, and should, just vary the amount of mana he pushed down each channel instead of keeping them all the same rate. This was just the fast and simple way of testing this, then he could practice the right way later on.

This time was mostly the same, but he realized another issue, the outer ring was being channeled, meaning it constantly pushed instead of creating one burst then waiting for the next Fire Bolt before releasing another burst. He made it so that the outer ring was no longer channeled but instead he detached it from the rest of the spell. Now he could fill it and it would launch the summoned Fire Bolt then he could wait till the next was finished before constructing and filling the outer ring again. This was almost like casting two spells at once, except the complexity overall was only equivalent to a single spell, so it was only marginally harder than casting a single spell. The results were mostly what he hoped they would be, a rapid fire Fire Bolt. He had some work to do to tune the spell form, work on his aim and vary the rate of fire if needed, but it was a great start and would already be useable in certain situations in combat.

He made the same modifications to Mana Bolt and, with a little tinkering, managed to create a rapid fire Mana Bolt as well. With that accomplished, he practiced the right way of increasing and decreasing mana flow to the spell forms, simply willing more or less mana to flow through specific channels. At the same time, he worked on distributing the mana through the spell form consciously. This made it so the spell required much less concentration to keep stable as it didn't try to inflate on one end. He also stopped visualizing the mana coming from his body into spell forms as a thread. He realized visualizing the width of a thread was limiting his speed. He also figured visualizing by itself was likely also limiting him, but that would require a lot of work and only result in marginal benefits right now when his spells were so simple. He spent a half day practicing until he was finally satisfied. . . . . .