Aurelius was very uncomfortable.

  His back still hurt a little from his time napping in that small cell, and Sage Yeltz was being very intimidating at the moment.

  All he could do was nod along to whatever this crazy woman was ranting to him about and go along with the flow of things until she let him and his ass go.

  “Yes. I’m sure you understand it now.” Sage Yeltz rambled, the dark circles under her eyes stretching enigmatically with her wide, insane smile.

  “See, boy. Can the components of an airship fly on its own?”

  “No! Of course not! The power of flight is an emergent property of its constituent parts, where engineering has taken the property of magic and density to create a unique construction, one that can achieve what seems impossible!

  “You see, magic as modern mages use are built on simple components that each have a function, in the general shape of the soul and in the carvings that are engraved into it.”

  “It is a good way for building spells that follow the formulaic pattern. However, there are usually limits to the ‘information’ you can carve into the soul. When it becomes too small, the ambient mana just can’t channel itself through your soul to create an effective spell.”

  “As you know, physical and abstract applications for each elemental magics have different primary components of soul carvings. And the limited ‘area’ in the soul is the tradeoff that mages have to make in specialising in abstract and physical applications of magic.”

  “For example, a densely carved soul will wield abstract magic better, but will clearly be unable to channel mana for physical applications as easily. It’s like trying to fill a bucket with holes. The mana ‘slips out’ of the overlapping areas of the soul.”

  “Exceptions to this include some arch-sages, and those who are practiced in both disciplines as a dual expert. But dual experts still all lag behind the effectiveness of spells that specialists can attain.” She explained, talking mostly past Aurelius with a lecturing tone.

  “I have given you materials to learn how spirit soul-blueprints fade to leave the applicable information in the material world. The ‘abstract’ imprints are components of elemental shapes and carvings, and they fade away or merge with the larger structure of the soul-shape to form the ‘lowest common denominator’ of its shape.”

  “I suspected that might not be relevant at all for your blueprint, assuming that it seemed to be a unique and unknown transference spell for the soul blueprint that allowed you to retain much of the information on your soul”

  “But I was wrong!”

  “Your soul blueprint has indeed faded like all of the spirit blueprints! It’s just faded in the areas that are not as apparent!”

  “Your soul-blueprint is in itself a shape! Including those feather-like appendages! What has faded and merged with the structure is actually the information carved into each of those appendages!”

  “What! You may ask! How does that even work?” She yelled, raising her hands up into the air and… laughing like a maniac.

  She started to write and draw onto the whiteboard, jotting down formulas and notes as she continued to talk.

  “Ah, I believe that you have an arithmetic soul carving?” She asked, her head snapping up and staring intently at Aurelius.

  Aurelius smiled nervously, cold sweat dripping from his forehead, as he nodded in response. Was this woman… ok? Perhaps it was drugs? Or maybe she just… snapped from some sort of stress…

  “WONDERFUL. Yes. It’s an elegant solution! An amazing, delicate solution!” Sage Yeltz yelled out, her voice thundering around the room.

  “You see, soul carvings have to achieve a certain size, increasing with the complexity of the carvings. The lowest level of them are carvings used even in non-magical applications, where you concentrate a very small amount of your soul to create a ‘charm’ in your soul to store in your body.”

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  “However, spells usually take a lot more surface area, given the complexity of the manipulations required.”

  “But Quetzalcoatl has shown me how to overcome the limitations of the surface area!”

  “You just need to amplify and concentrate the mana in the soul itself!”

  “That’s what he meant by a ‘shortcut’. It just means that we have not actually attempted to innovate far enough from the basic elemental shapes! The carvings and shapes have been discovered and inspired from nature. And it’s clearly not been refined enough!”

  “We have overlooked mana channelling and the loss of mana efficiency over the general shapes and carvings!”

  “Of course it doesn’t work! It’s like pushing water through a gigantic hose. Clearly a smaller hose is going to shoot the water further.”

  “We have been lacking the shapes that could amplify and channel the mana efficiently in our soul!”

  “And that’s exactly what your soul contains. It uses basic magic as a baseline to amplify and channel mana into a high speed, compressed state, and you can effectively bypass the surface area limitations of normal soul carvings!” She concluded, looking ecstatic.

  Aurelius frowned slightly at what she was suggesting. She was honestly quite coherent and eloquent when talking about mana even in her… potentially drug fueled state.

  Given that basic magic manipulated mana directly, rather than through the conduit of soul carvings and elemental mana, it seemed possible that one could… ‘compress’ and ‘speed up’ mana…

  But then, what were those feather-like appendages that grew out of the soul-shape?

  “AH! I forgot. Your little feathers!” Sage Yeltz yelled out, putting another powerful stroke of her chalk onto the blackboard.

  This nearly caused Aurelius to jump out of his seat. Was his mind being read right now?

  Aurelius pushed all of his… ruder thoughts back down deeply into the recesses of his brain, and filled his brain with a serene, emptiness.

  “Here’s the insane part.” Sage Yeltz said, furiously scribbling onto the blackboard.

  “Those little feathers are actually capable of storing… around maybe 1/13th of a normal single layered soul shape?” She said, tweaking her calculations enthusiastically.

  “No, it’s closer to around 1/14th.” She said, doing some sort of… complex mathematics.

  “Isn’t that crazy?” She yelled in admiration, stroking her blackboard almost… lovingly.

  “You literally have thousands of those feather-like things.”

  “You could have the effectiveness of hundreds, if not, thousands of mages. Forget archsages. You could wipe out half the spirit realm on your own if you had that kind of soul-shape. And I’m talking about doing that in their domain.” She muttered, water dripping from her voice.

  “The soul blueprint left to you by Quetzalcoatl is likely a reflection of what gives Him the power that He has. That leads me to believe that the accounts are accurate in that particular regard… What could he possibly even want…” She mused.

  However, it didn’t seem to bother her too much, given that she immediately went back to scribbling on the board with a casual wave of her hand to brush off the thought.

  “By my estimation, you will need around 500 years to fully master this particular soul-shape, with all of the feathers attached.” She muttered, finishing up another round of calculations and flipping the board over to start up another row of them.

  “But it will take around 50 years to master the soul-shape to start using some magic at the magister level…” She mused.

  This caused Aurelius’s eyes to widen.

  Did she just say that it will take half a millennium to master his soul-blueprint?

  And what was that about 50 years for the magister level magic?

  “What was that?” Aurelius asked, taken aback enough by the idea to boldly ask his question.

  “Oh, your soul is a 3-D shape, no doubt about it.” Sage Yeltz started vaguely.

  “But unlike the other soul-shapes, you need to stack the soul without carvings first. At least, that’s what I suspect in terms of the layout that the shape has.” She replied.

  “It doesn’t make sense for you to fill out the ‘feathers’ before the structure for amplification is finished.”

  “But of course, the general idea of amplification and compression can be used for other mages to boost the efficiency of the spells. Essentially, you’ve given mages the tool to overcome the bottleneck of mana efficiency." She said unworriedly.

  …What. Aurelius thought to himself.

  So… it seemed that Quetzalcoatl was not lying about him being stuck in this… loop for centuries to millenia…

  The 500 years didn’t even quite include the… part about figuring out how to kill the immortal god…

  And he’s supposed to last 50 years with… what… magic comparable to high tier craftsmen? And what kind of training was included in that… 50 years?

  Sage Yeltz finished up the last of her calculations, in which she promptly summoned a stack of papers and a typewriter.

  This particular typewriter was… huge, with more keys that Aurelius was familiar with.

  It seemed that it had some special characters included as part of its keyboard for mathematical formulas and magical formulas.

  The sage started to type away furiously, jotting down notes on her pieces of paper.

  And… completely ignoring Aurelius…

  However, the furious typing didn’t last too long, as the sage started to type with less intensity with each passing minute, and her eyelids seemingly drooping ever so slightly…

  “Thud.”

  The sound rang throughout the room after less than 5 minutes.

  And Aurelius would be kindly screwed over once again by fate, as his kidnapper kneeled over onto the floor and promptly passed out in deep slumber…