Aurelius sat in his bed, reading up on the grimoires that Sage Yeltz had lent him.

  Once again, he was taken aback by the sage and her supernatural ability to find invaluable resources like these, which were both shockingly informative and easy to read.

  At the same time, every interaction he had with his ‘mentor’ did much to convince him that she was dancing on the tightrope between sanity and insanity.

  How else could you explain the way that she switched so smoothly between irritable asshole and informative lecturer? Or to explain how sleep deprivation could lead to her kidnapping a TEENAGER from a dining hall of a hundred or so students?

  Closing his book, and ending his reflection on the sage and her unpredictability, Aurelius pondered the sage’s words with another bout of despair.

  50 years for… mediocrity? Weren’t time loops supposed to give its main characters less… insane timelines for achieving some sort of mastery over chosen disciplines?

  Wondering if there was some sort of a way to quicken the pace of his development, Aurelius focused into himself, diving into his soul to examine the blueprint again…

  From the research papers that the sage had thrown his way, quite a number of them explored the time taken to master layers of 3-D soul shapes.

  Despite the fact that his soul blueprint was crafted as a ‘continuous shape’ without clear layers, modern magic theory suggested that it would be much more efficient for him to build up the shape in layers, filling it out from the bottom to the top.

  This would take around 3 layers, judging by the thickness of the blueprint.

  As Aurelius sank deeper into his meditation, the colours of sound muted around himself, and he sank away from his mind and body to craft an abstraction of his soul in his eyes.

  Of course, he did have a baseline soul shape to fill the bottom layer. However, the ‘coils’ and the general outline of the ‘feathers’ needed to be embossed up from them before he would be able to move onto the next layer.

  Such a shape was clearly more complex than that of the 4 elemental shapes.

  Even the fire elemental shape, apparently notorious for its difficulty to learn, had only evenly spread ‘jagged’ edges for its general soul shape, which were clearly less of a challenge compared to filling out the complex outlines of the feathers and the coils!

  That was not to even mention the carvings on the feathers themselves.

  He would need to emboss each feather, and carve into each layer the simplified magic carvings for the spells that he wanted to cast. This was a nightmare.

  He was essentially doing to each feather what mages would do with their souls in a lifetime!

  And if he were to create ‘sage level feathers’ that would mean that he was actively going even beyond what most mages could even hope to achieve with every feather.

  While the pace might pick up after the 50th year, with only refinement to the general soul shape and carving out more of the feathers necessary, it was still a disheartening amount of time.

  He had thought naively that even with the blueprint and its uniqueness, he would achieve a certain level of mastery over it in the timeline of most normal mages.

  Attaining sagehood sounded wild to him even now. Only the most talented of mages who could understand magic intuitively and theoretically, mages like Sage Yeltz, could hope to achieve it in a reasonable timeframe.

  Most mages didn’t even bother after attaining the High Mage certificate, given that achieving a decently complex single layered soul was a chore in itself.

  You just needed that single layer to live a decent well paid life in most industries anyway, and it took a lot of time, training and resources to refine the crafts enough to advance to the second layer.

  Aurelius found his soul materialised in front of his tightly shut eyes, occupying a ‘space’ within him. He focused on his soul blueprint, and attempted to shape his soul to fill its illusory lines…

  Achieving 3 layered shape at the archmage level itself was an insane achievement, where the time and effort taken to stretch the soul into the shape would be unimaginable for normal mages.

  This did make Aurelius feel a sense of admiration for Sage Yeltz, given that she was barely in her mid-30s, and achieved sagehood.

  While the House sages came from their upper ranks to mostly project power and prestige, the Commission sages were relatively respectable for the good work that they did.

  And Sage Yeltz was someone, who on paper could be respected.

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  She was very much a genius at magic, one who had reached sagehood in twenty odd years. Most sages hovered around 50 years old, and each were still regarded as geniuses in their own right.

  Such a feat did not come without intellect and diligence.

  Even Aurelius had to at least admit that she was incredibly intelligent, with the woman apparently being an expert in the field of magical theory as a bloody hobby.

  It was no wonder that she was given the city of Tlacualtzin as her post. She had definitely earned the role in the Commission.

  Aurelius gave up on trying to shape his damn soul. As much as he hated to admit it, such a task was better suited under the guidance of someone like Sage Yeltz.

  Instead, he tried to focus in on its details, a difficult task given the already exhausting nature of a dive.

  His arithmetic carving was a tiny blemish on his soul, and the towering translucent threads of gold made its simple shape look pathetic in comparison…

  “Boo.”

  Aurelius nearly jumped out of his skin, exiting his dive abruptly.

  “AHHH”Aurelius screamed, as the backlash from the hasty exit hit him like a train.

  He retched, feeling the full brunt of nausea in his stomach. Aurelius could swear that he could see the river to the spirit realm in that split second…

  As his vision returned to him, he looked up at a smug looking Mr. Tona, clearly satisfied with himself.

  “WHAT do you WANT?” Aurelius asked, his voice shifting in tone as he suppressed his half digested dinner from the afternoon from exiting from the wrong hole.

  “What, I can’t see a student of mine?” Mr. Tona asked innocently.

  “First of all, Sage Yeltz is my mentor, and you filled in for a single session dammnit.” Aurelius replied, tapping the sides of his head to orient himself with the thumps it made against into skull.

  “That’s the thing. I come with good news kiddo.Yeltz wants me to take you for Tuesday and Wednesday for training.” Mr. Tona replied with a wide smile.

  Aurelius almost vomited on the floor right then and there, his disbelieving noise unfortunately getting caught up on its way out with his dinner.

  “I mean, it would be pretty useless for me to come in once every few weeks to train a little bit of spearmanship for you. Where’s the continuation in that?” He asked rhetorically.

  “And my mathematical genius of an apprentice just happened to mention that you are basically useless as a mage for the next… 50 years? Hohoho, you might be burying me by that time!”

  This comment made Aurelius’s face scrunch up even further as he held back a torrent of curses.

  “I’ve always wanted to see if I can raise a proper spearman. Perhaps my 5 year contract with the Commission will create for me an interesting experiment, hm?” Mr. Tona laughed humorously, assaulting Aurelius’s still sensitive ears.

  Aurelius was horrified, to say the least. 5 years training with this… intolerable man? What kind of sadistic torture method was this? Just the geezer’s presence in the room was making his brain turn slowly into soup!

  Aurelius prayed to the gods to get this terrible, overly cheerful, and completely overbearing man out of his room silently, massaging his temples.

  And for the first time in forever, it seemed that the gods answered his prayer.

  “...Ah, look at the time. Yeltz seems to have eaten into quite a little bit of my evening." The old man commented, clicking his tongue as he glanced at his wristwatch.

  Then, he proceeded to promptly walk to Aurelius’s window.

  “You see, my lovely wife is back from some weird writer’s event, and I plan to take her to explore the options that the night streets of Tlacualtzin can offer.”

  Opening the window carelessly, the old man saluted Aurelius goodbye, clearly in high spirits. And with a wide smile, the man… jumped.

  Aurelius blinked several times to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating as he hobbled quickly over to the window, half expecting to see a greasy, wrinkled stain on the pavement.

  Much to his disappointment, as he looked down from the ledge, he saw the former sage floating on a sheet of… mana infused ice.

  The man waved goodbye towards Aurelius on his makeshift hoverboard, drawing attention from the gaggles of students still walking around the school grounds.

  Then, with a tilt of his body, and his trench coat fluttering cooly in the night winds, the man accelerated out of the school grounds, and promptly disappeared in a line of geometric shapes.

  Aurelius was left with only insults in his mouth, now sour and unpleasant from the bile that had made their way up…

  Party tricks. How annoying indeed.

  ???

  The Tower

  “Bombs.” Archsage Livia repeated.

  “You called me back for… Bombs.” She asked again, smiling sweetly.

  Archsage Andrew shrank back a little at the threatening aura that his colleague released with her statement.

  As one of the highest ranking members of the Commission, he wasn’t scared by most things, but interacting with his fellow Archsage Livia seemed to always give him chills…

  “...Look, we don’t know the extent of the threat right now.” Archsage Andrew replied, avoiding eye contact and staring past the woman in an attempt to remain cordial.

  In response, the Archsage raised her hand to point up and down, referring to the building of Commission employees that Archsage Andrew had at his disposal.

  “I’m not being responsible for whatever mess happens in this backwater kingdom because of your absence! I’ve been tossed around like some… whore for the past 2 years!”

  “It’s not my fault that the damn Southern Empire erupted in a civil war!” Andrew whined, flailing his hands around in protest, leading Archsage Livia to raise her eyebrows in question, clearly suggesting that it was in fact, his fault.

  “Yeltz says it could be Fae! And even if it’s some damn cult, you and I both know that it’s most likely going to be related to the Devils!”

  “If I screw this up this time, everyone else in the Directorate might just end up advising the Cabinet to kill and replace me! That’s not fair to me! I still have 15 years left!” He whined, undeterred by Archsage Livia’s impatience.

  Archsage Livia continued to smile, closing her eyes as an aura of unbelievable evil continued to leak from her figure… It seemed as though she was smiling at the thought of Andrew… dead.

  After short consideration, she nodded at the nuisance in front of her, dismissing him authoritatively, leading Andrews to smile awkwardly.

  With a thumbs up, and small beads of sweat rolling off of his neck, the man teleported away quickly from what was his temporary office, eager to leave the presence of Archsage Livia.

  She summoned a cup of water and teabag from her office cabinet, and promptly heated up the water with her magic, sending floral aromas dissipating throughout the room.

  Sighing slightly, the sage started to sip on her tea, and thought slowly to herself.

  Earth mages are truly useless…