Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

“Assuming the dragon and statues are the biggest problems we run into, yeah,” she retorted. “But what if there’s an ice elemental further in?”

“We need to survive the dragon first,” I pointed out. “I don’t think we’re equipped to do that yet, unless we can figure out a way to bypass it entirely. If ice shields are too specialized, maybe I’ll just make us higher capacity shield sigils. And we can ask Jin if he thinks he can handle the dragon through invisibility or something. But since we don’t even know how to unlock your door, I don’t know how far speculating will get us.”

“Fine, fine.” She sighed. “But I get the first improved shield thing.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay.” Turning to Marissa, I asked, “You need anything?”

She blinked, pointing a questioning finger at herself. “Me?”

“Yeah, Marissa. You’re a part of this team. It sounds like you did great in there, but I’d still like to know if you’d benefit from anything else.”

She blushed openly at the compliment. “I, erm, s’pose I could use somethin’ that makes me hit harder? If that wouldn’t be too much trouble for you, m’lord Corin.”

“Sure. I seem to be making gauntlets into a theme, and you punch things. Would wearing a gauntlet interfere with your techniques?”

She shook her head. “No, m’lord, many Guardians use gloves or punch knives. I’d prefer somethin’ light, though, if ye don’t mind too terribly. I like ta move my hands.”

Hm, maybe cloth gloves, then? But they don’t store a lot of mana… I’ll have to think about that.

“Makes sense. I’ll see what I can come up with.” I scribbled ‘ Gauntlet of Punching’ down on my list and turned to Patrick. “You got any ideas, Patrick?”

Patrick brightened at finally getting his turn. “Something to amplify my spells. Give them a little more kick.”

Not a bad idea. Might be good if we could get him to the point where he can handle that shadow monster in one or two hits.

“Amplification items are tricky, but I’ve already done a little research on them. It’ll probably have to be a single element one for now. You good with something that makes your fire spells stronger?”

His eyes went wide and he vibrated with enthusiasm. “I’d love that.”

“Okay. I’ll see if I can put something together, but you’ll probably need to help me build it, since it’ll take fire mana.” I looked at Marissa. “Also, I might need your help for your own gloves, Marissa.”

Marissa nodded. “I’d be glad to serve you.” She was still blushing a bit. I didn’t understand why.

I wrote down ‘ Fire Amplification Amulet’ below Sera’s gauntlet. “Okay. I think we’re good for now. Let’s plan to meet up and talk about ideas again in a week. We’ll grab Jin next time, too.”

After that, I nudged them gradually out of the room. I had a lot of work to do.

The next few days involved a lot of studying.

Professor Vellum had assumed that telling me that using my attunement was already draining my mental mana would make me more comfortable using it directly.

She’d been wrong. It had the opposite effect.

I was now deathly afraid of using my attunement at all.

I knew it was irrational. I hadn’t suffered any obvious side effects from using the attunement, and I knew that other people used their attunements actively all the time. The attunements were built for people to use them.

But I still couldn’t get past the idea that I was going to burn out my mind.

So, I turned to alternate ideas for how to make my attunement stronger.

I dug through books, bothered teachers, and nagged second year students for ideas. Advancing attunements was one of the main goals of any student, so there were lots of studies on different ways of doing it.

Most techniques were designed to supplement practice with the attunement itself. Some of them were attunement-specific exercises. Summoners tried to make as many small summoned fragments as possible, or to quickly summon and dismiss the same one. There were different schools of thought about how Elementalists should train, but usually they involved casting the biggest spell you could and then resting and doing it again.

For Enchanters, the most popular method was just to enchant progressively stronger items, but relying as heavily as possible on the mana that was directly connected to your attunement.

So, pretty much the exact opposite of what I’d been doing.

I hit up the Divinatory and learned that my mental mana had advanced from my minimal use of my attunement, but only a bit. I’d gone from starting with 18 at the beginning of the year up to 22.

I was informed that most students had somewhere between 30 and 60 mana in their attunement’s location by this time in the year. I was lagging pretty far behind in that area, but I’d improved my right hand’s mana considerably. It’d gone from 24 at the start to 40, just under double.

Apparently, having more mana somewhere outside of my attunement was a very bad idea , because I got scolded for it by no less than three different students and teachers before I left.

No one seemed to be able to tell me why it was so bad to have my mana unbalanced like that; they just seemed to be regurgitating what they’d heard elsewhere. Still, I tried to internalize a core part of the message. I really needed to bump that mental mana up as quickly as possible.

On the plus side, I knew my enchanting was working for improving my mana. I’d just been improving the wrong type.

My first idea was looking into a way to shift my mana from my right hand into my mind. That way, I could keep training the same way and just convert the mana over.

So, I did some reading on that. Apparently shifting a person’s mana balance was an entire field of study , and strongly connected to ongoing research in how to make artificial attunements. There were some promising studies coming out of Caelford, but the essence of what I learned was that I’d need to study for years to even start attempting that kind of thing.

It was a fascinating subject. The idea of making artificial attunements appealed to me on a very fundamental level. I kept some of the books and planned an eventual trip to Caelford to talk to some of the researchers there, but for the moment, that was nowhere close to a viable approach.

Next was looking for ways I could boost my mana without exercise. This was, of course, also something that had already been heavily explored by others. Virtually everyone wanted to avoid doing work, or find ways to make it more efficient.

I found out that they were having a relevant lecture in the alchemy class the following week, so I dropped in on it. The teacher, Professor Zou, was a short woman that looked like she hailed from Dalenos.

“Many of you have asked me how to distill enhancement elixirs. The answer is simple: don’t. You are not ready.”

She pointed to a student. “Yun. Why do Enchanters not transfer mana into other attuned?”

The student stood. “Every person has slightly different mana, Professor. The body resists and rejects foreign mana.”

Professor Zou nodded. “Yes, this is true. You may sit.” As the student sat back down, she lifted one of the vials from a stand on her speaker’s podium. “This is the simplest of enhancement elixirs. To create one, a student must learn to collect their gray mana into a liquid state, which is already a feat that most students cannot learn until they are of Carnelian Mage level. Then they must purify it. Even some Citrines cannot do this through their attunement alone. Instead, we have studied how to distill mana. But an ordinary still will not work for this purpose; heating the mana to evaporate it will alter it toward an affinity with fire.”