Today was a big day for Noctis; he was finally going to conjure his first magic circle.
Lira was on standby, ready to help if sothing were to go wrong. He had been cramming up on the theory for weeks, and its been over a month since he began to learn the way of the sword and marksmanship under his aunt.
Enough of that, taking a deep breath, he rembered the process of conjuring a magic circle.
The weeks of studying various E-rank spell structures and magic spells starting with E-rank, F and E-rankers are able to use these spells.
He was going to try the spell structure for a Lightning spell called Lightning Arrow.
It was a two-layered spell, the outer layer consisting of UFS for the Zephyr resonance, and then he constructed the inner circle, which has the spell structure for the lightning arrow.
Having completed the first step, he pointed his finger straight ahead at a target 20 ters away.
The mana flowed from his core to the tips of his fingers, and a faint purple mana started to form the magic circle he had constructed in his head.
The magic circle finished forming within a few seconds, completing the second step.
The third step requires him to either go straight for the fourth step or add a few additional changes to the magic circle.
For example, he can change the spell's paralyzing potency effect, its speed or make it split into two arrows midway.
He changed the speed of his spell a little higher and moved on to the final step.
The final and fourth step was to channel the right amount of mana to the magic circle. Normally the spell needs 50 mana to power it, but since he increased its speed, he would need to channel an extra 15 mana to it.
The magic circle would fail if he doesn't channel the right amount of mana—less or more than it needs.
If he wants to channel more mana, he would need to go back to step 3, add his changes and then proceed with step 4.
Noctis channeled exactly 65 mana to the magic circle, as it glowed with faint purple sparks and morphed into the shape of an arrow made completely out of lightning.
Aiming at the target, he released the spell as it shot straight ahead with a burst of speed and struck the target.
The spell charred a small part of the target, and he could notice faint lightning sparks running through the target, indicating that the paralyze effect had taken effect.
All of the four steps may seem like they had taken a minute or two, but it only takes around 20 seconds or more to complete them all.
The more a ranker gets proficient with their mana and the spells, all four steps can be completed in an instant.
Lira smiled as her face was proud of her student having successfully conjured a magic circle. She was like a ntor to him for the past few weeks, helping him with various problems related to magic.
Noctis smiled as he was so excited that he wanted to jump around and scream like a kid who had just found a new toy. Holding the excitent back, he analyzed the process, trying to find a way to shorten it.
"Improving my mana manipulation should increase the projecting step, and I should try to apply additional changes while still constructing the structure still in my head. Hmm, I should focus on that," murmuring to himself, Noctis rubbed his chin as he glanced back at the target and his hand.
Lira heard his murmuring about what to improve, and she stepped forward and explained.
"Young master, you are right on about improving your mana manipulation, but don't try to add changes while still constructing the spell. To do that, you would need to learn in-depth knowledge of the inner circles of each spell. It's better to focus on the other area."
Noctis nodded as he asked another question, "So how else am I supposed to increase my casting speed?"
"The E-rank spell took you around 19 seconds to cast; constructing the spell took 6 seconds, projecting took around 7 seconds, the changes you added took you 3 seconds, and the final step, channeling your mana, took 3 seconds." He was a little surprised that Lira managed to calculate all of that..
"Improving your control over mana would decrease the ti in the second step, which is 7 seconds. Now the other areas you need to improve are step 1 and step 4." Lira lifted her right hand, and an orb ford in her palm instantly.
"Resonance mastery: Having better control over the elents will improve the speed of converting your pure mana to the respective elental mana needed for the spell."
"Oh," Noctis held back his surprise and thought about it, 'I thought the mastery would only improve having better affinity to the elents, and I didn't expect that it would affect the conversion process.
Lira continued as she dispersed the green orb, "6 seconds was the ti you took to construct the spell structure; with enough practice, you can shorten this to a second or an instant. and this also affects the 2nd step while projecting the magic circle."
Taking Lira's advice, he noted it down ntally, planning to improve on them.
"Thanks, Lira; it would have taken much longer to figure it out myself." He thanked her with a smile.
"No need to thank , young master; I am more than happy to teach you", Lira covered her mouth with a little surprise and said joyfully.
Noctis let out a small laugh at her response before he turned back to practice his other spells.
After nearly an hour of practice, Noctis stood with the support of the wall, panting a little; he had exhausted his mana.
He had two resonances, also known as twin resonators. It was quite rare but not impossible to find. His resonances were Zephyr and Umbra..
The zephyr had control over wind, lightning, and weather. Noctis was a little confused with the weather counting as an elent; he had thought a storm, wind, and lightning were all in weather, so why were they separate?
Only after researching a little and asking Lira about it, the weather elent is like a semi-jack-of-all-trades elent. It has control over fog, rain, increasing the temperature, lowering it, etc.
Although the weather elent has other elents' effects, it's weaker than its counterpart, and other elents could easily overpower it. It only has the diversity of different elents, just like how weather encompasses various natural phenona.
His second resonance was umbra—control over darkness, shadow, and illusion.
The E-rank spells he learned were Lightning Arrow, Lightning Slash, Wind Blade, Breeze, Mist Form, Dark Touch, and Mirage.
Glancing at his mana on his blue screen,
[0/865]
'That's enough for today,' Noctis let out a sigh as he steadied himself and walked back to his room.
'Due to that assassin attack, I must have missed encountering her; now I can't find her anywhere in the city, Katherine, who's a major character in the ga's story.'
Katherine was a professor in training at this ti period, and she would join Ethereon University during his 2nd year. It would be good if he could help her now and maybe make her join the university during his 1st year.
But now it looks like he would need to scrap that plan for now.
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