Arcane Apocalypse 9 – Elements and System Exploration

9 – Elents and System Exploration

The book snapped shut, leaving Mia to massage her strained, and probably bloodshot, eyes.

She had just binged the whole thing. Although it wasn’t that long, only a hundred or so pages. Mia had to read slowly though and go over so parts multiple tis to ensure she understood them.

At least it was worth it. Why this wasn’t included in ‘what an initiate mage would know’ she didn’t know. She would have called her class knowledge a scam, but it did let her explode things with magic, so it sort of worked as advertised.

Anyway, Mia understood a bit more about elents in general, and her elent specifically. Surprisingly, the section about the arcane elent was the longest.

Turns out, every enchanter, alchemist and artificer had to have at least a Minor affinity for the elent. Almost every crafting profession needed the crafter to manipulate arcane mana, mostly just tiny amounts, but still. Arcane was the elent that handled non-magical energies and materials the best.

Earth could manipulate solids, Water could manage liquids, and Air could control gases, but Arcane could handle all three simultaneously. Only to regular stuff and with much more effort, but that usually wasn’t much of a problem in those crafting professions since most of the work was done through specialised implents, which negated the ntal strain.

There were two other things she learned that were huge. One was how one’s affinities were determined, and another, that having Superior grade arcane affinity was considered a death sentence in the ‘mystic realm’.

Let’s start with the first! As it turned out, her scale taphor was more fitting than she thought. Every single person has a sort of inner energy in their spirit, which is made of a mixture of positive and negative energy. The ratio of those two was what decided the person’s affinities. And affinity was the most important thing for determining the potential of soone. It restricted classes, magic, skills and sotis much more. If the book was accurate, the entire System determined what to give to whom based on their affinities for the seven essential elents.

If she put 100% positive energy at one end of the scale and 100% negative on the other, she could just put the seven pins for the seven elents at equal intervals and have a sowhat accurate model.

Light affinity was born of an overwhelmingly dominant positive energy, Darkness affinity the sa for negative and arcane sat happily in the middle at the equilibrium.

The rest were spread out evenly. Fire and air were both on the positive side of the scale, with fire coming after light and air just before arcane, while water and earth mirrored it on the negative side of the spectrum.

As for the second thing. Superior arcane affinity ca about when one had equal amounts of positive and negative energy. Even a deviation of a hundredth of a percent would downgrade it to Major, and if there was more than two entire percents of difference, Minor it was.

The book even had a nice little illustration.

Spoiler