Magic Missile Prototype 01

Qing focused on the mana, and the light he had released started dimming down. He felt proud of himself for achieving something, and a warm sensation spread across his back as he walked towards his mother. "I did it, Mom! Look!"

"Now, imagine this rune," Qing's mother drew a colorless O rune in the air. "This rune will be the basis of this spell. Elemental spells will have a different base and color." She drew a circle around the rune. "After forming a rune, you can develop a circle around it to increase the spell's grade. In this case, the spell would be a grade-one spell since only one circle is around it."

Qing tried to create the O rune by dispersing the small light on his fingertips. He thought of the morning he played around with his slime summons and tried to envision mana-like slime. The mana slowly changed, forming a line, and then a small circle slowly formed in the middle of the line. Qing concentrated more, trying to split the whole line and forcing more and more mana into the hole.

As he forced more mana on the middle of the segment, the circle slowly formed into an ellipse. He noticed that the outer portion of the spell was breaking up. He was too focused on creating an opening on the line still, so he slowly added more mana to the entire area of the ellipse. Qing reinforced the sides of the ellipse and forced the ellipse to be wider to form a circle. However, the circle was not forming regardless of what angle he stared at it. He closed one eye, trying to make out a circle, but it still looked like an ellipse no matter how close he got. The top and bottom parts would end up too wide, or sometimes one area looked like a perfect circle, but the other side started inverting inwards. Qing continued to concentrate as he attempted to perfect the circle like a baker kneading bread.

Suddenly, a wild Anya had appeared. "Boo!" she shouted, surprising Qing and causing him to lose his focus on the magic. The mana he had been focusing on shaping formed into a small missile.

Grandpa Bai had followed Anya as she ran to Qing's backyard to surprise him. He had decided to wait at the entrance to wish Qing a happy belated birthday after spending a night evaluating his attitude towards Qing when he asked to learn "Recovery" from him. As he got closer to the door, he noticed strong magical energy building up near the house. He had felt it earlier but assumed it might be Qing's mother using 6th-tier magic to water the plants again, which he had warned against before.

"That mage is wasting mana again," Grandpa Bai grumbled as he rushed to the left-side entrance to the backyard, ready to give Qing's mother another scolding on how she should preserve her mana. As he turned the corner, a beam - no, a missile made of mana - suddenly shot at him. He had reacted fast enough to catch it and watched it slowly dissipate from his hand. "Fourth-tier magic," Grandpa Bai quietly remarked as he assessed the damage to his right hand. "At least she was conserving her mana."

Looking up at the flurry of leaves from the spell travel, he noticed Qing and Anya's figures in the background. Qing's mother had cast a barrier around all three of them, but he couldn't determine what tier the barrier was.

"Sit down," Qing's mother said, looking at Grandpa Bai's silhouette in the smoke.

"What does 'sit down' even mean?" Grandpa Bai screamed at the three. "You almost killed me." He proceeded to layer multiple casts of heals with an O rune on his hand to recover.

"Stop casting," Qing's mother quickly urged grandpa Bai.

"Old man, you are still brute forcing your way out of the problem," she motions for Qing and Anya to focus. Qing's mother often told him he should go to the library and read about how much magic evolved remarking about how Grandpa Bai could survive on "primitive" magic.

"Let me show you a trick," Qing's mother proceeds to cast heal with the O and 水 rune as the basis on grandpa Bai's hand. "Qing that rune there was the rune for water. If you add water to a heal spell it amplifies its healing. Which in turn lessens the mana potential mana cost."

Qing watched as his mother cast the spell on Grandpa Bai's hand. He noticed the different runes used for the spell and how they combined to create a more potent healing effect.

"Wow, Mom, that's amazing! I had no idea you could add different runes to spells like that." Qing was intrigued and eager to learn more about magic.