15 White Forest (09)

Small fires continued to appear and disappear around Zed while he walked. He was making his progress in learning different magics.

Even though it was hard, in the beginning, he eventually came to learn them slowly. After putting down fire he made air surrounding him a little dry and controlled his mana to cause friction between air. Slowly small sparks started to go off.

He stopped after a while because the dry air started to become moist again.

'Maybe now I should try using magic circles?' Zed thought to himself.

His grandfather mentioned to him that because it required too much concentration and calculative capabilities slowly mages began to break down in their enormous mental burden.

So they started finding ways to make it less strenuous on the mind. But even after centuries, they could not discover a suitable way. They could only use mana as their sole support.

Eventually, a genius was born who solved this issue but not for mages only.

He was a genius in the truest sense; while travelling to different countries this he met a mortal woman who was a simple villager.

He stayed there for a few months helping villagers in their lives and eventually he got interested in the woman. She was not particularly beautiful or young but also a widow.

Because age did not matter for the mage he did not pay attention to it. But as time passed the woman aged along with it making him realise she was at the end a mortal.

He could not accept to part with her so soon; so he would help her with his mana. He would modify her body slowly to make her live longer.

But even the solution came with difficulties because her mind could not keep her body in control.

It was too difficult for her to keep it going for a longer period of time.

The mage not willing to give up began researching, they even had to travel to other villages and settlements because of how long their lifespan was.

The mage had already figured out how to make her life longer without making her crippled but knowing and doing were two different things. That was to have her become a mage.

After travelling and researching with his fellow mages he narrowed his search on runes. It was not that he did not think about this technique before but he wanted her to be independent as well and not everyone was capable of going through the same process as these awakened mages.

The first way he thought was to inscribe her body with runes by him but that would only end up making her his puppet in a way and he did not like that idea.

So he began to work with others and they eventually came with a solution. Nature.

Mages needed to have strong minds wich normal people could only have after decades of self-reflection and efforts. And even then an only small number of them would awaken naturally.

They devised a rune made of mana that would allow nature itself to calculate things which normally a mage would. It took them many years of hard work and most of all efforts to convince nature to do this.

Nature allowed as it would make her close with those living beings. They were all part of her but eventually, they would find their own unique existence and would distance themselves with nature but not completely for they would still depend on it to survive.

Mana would let them connect with nature more closely.

It was not difficult to teach and make mortals feel mana the problem was that they could not connect with it.

This discovery also solved mage's problems of having to do too many calculations. The task they left for mana to do on its own was now done by a new and more stable form.

They began to make mana circles for different spells which even mortals could learn after learning about mana.

The difference between the two was that awakened mages used a magic circle as support to share their mental burden while performing spells. Magis circle were designed by them to give mana a proper and stabilised shape and form.

They used magic circles as controlling devices and they only needed to make adjustments and changes according to the surrounding environments, mortal people, however, used the magic circle as a complete way for their spells to work and depended on it completely.

They could not make their magic circles flexible and adaptive to different situations and only use spells in magic circles as they were.

Awakened mages solved their problem of burdening mind with calculations and mortals found a way for them to break their limits.

Then came other difficulties but this time only for mortals because as soon as mages found themselves a way to lessen the burden they retreated and left other things for mortals to solve.

Mortals because of not having a strong mentality could only do so little. They not only required to remember proper runes they could not control those magic circles completely.

The only thing they were capable of doing was manifesting magic circles.

They neglected the logic behind the spells, the effects of those spells, the required adjustments depending on the environment. Instead, they left these things again on those who researched it.

Many variations appeared of a simple spell of controlling water. Some only worked in specific situations, some only worked when done by a specific person and so on. Then they found spells which can adjust themselves depending on the surroundings just like awakened mages did.

But these spells would be calculated by nature and this resulted in them having too much power.

According to the theories only that is, it was easy to create these spells on paper but almost impossible to perform them. They were too much complex that only real awakened mage could achieve them and even that with much difficulty.

And because of how much power these spells had it was also impossible to write them in a complete form. These spells were separated into many parts and that was the only way to keep a record of them.

Just like these many other spells were created and thought of but only to end up helping awakened. It was not that awakened mages did not research these spells but they only thought of them as a spell and moved on because it was only matter of time before they achieve it themselves so why to bother nature about these things, but for mortals, these magic circles became perfections of power.

Then they found ways to utilise spells in different ways like performing magic circles whenever needed but it took too much time to do so so they thought to keep complete magic circles in their consciousness or because of the burden of always keeping them active, make them incomplete and only complete them when necessary or make items inscribed with spells or inscribe your body itself.

But these techniques made awakened only glance at them and nothing more.

In this chaos, the mage who started this for his woman achieved what he wanted and now began researching how to make mortals capable enough to live alongside awakened.

And he found out that only when they truly awakened themselves would they achieve that and forcefully awakening would only result in an unstable mentality.

Because now that the mortals were capable of controlling mana to some extent they could live much longer than before. But because now they came in contact with mana before awakening themselves it became harder and harder for them to awaken naturally.

They could not free themselves from their bidings as awakened mages did. The only reason Zed could do was because of his special circumstances which were he experienced life so long that those bidings did not affect him.

But they also evolved slowly many new species and races appeared because of alterations done by mana. And some were good and some were bad.

That mage continued his research and his work paid off he discovered a unique existence named Blackseed. It was actually one of the fruits found around the dragon's settlements or in other environments with highly concentrated mana.

This fruit despite being born in highly concentrated mana did not make mages and dragons stronger. Dragons loved them because after squeezing its juices it tasted like high-quality liquor. And strong awakened mages used them rarely for closing their senses because of mental breakdown having too much to concentrate and even meditation would lose its effect so this fruit was a perfect solution for them.

Just because it was found in man concentrated environment did not make it a sweet fruit but it developed a strong resistance to mana making it an extremely rare delicacy in the magic world along with many other similar objects and existences.

It was a different story altogether for mortals though, if anything it was a poison to them. This fruit had a neutralizing effect on mana making dragons love it very much.

He discovered that if after a mortal mage consumes this unique fruit they could neutralize mana for a short period and have a chance to awaken but if they were to fail they would require a tremendous amount of mana to neutralize this fruit's effects and achieve balance again.

So only extremely strong and those who were capable of having to spend enormous mana would choose to awaken truly. Those mortal mages who awakened themselves without depending on outer source though were geniuses even amongst mages.

But they continued to involve in mortal affairs after awakening making original mages disdain them.

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Zed began making a basic magic circle for practice and slowly moved on to the difficult ones.

After making use magic circles he could perform different spells in a more stable way. He continued doing practice until they reached a small stream.

After making their camp they relaxed a bit because it was refreshing to stop doing whatever they were doing and just laze around.