“Tomorrow?” I repeated.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “It’s just that… well, it’s sowing season, and my father lost his arm last year. I’m the eldest son, and without me, my family might struggle to finish planting our fields. Could… could I come after we’ve finished?”

  The Magus looked at me, his expression unclear, and I was worried I might have blown my chance. But after a moment, his expression softened. “You’d miss the start of the term, so delaying would be ill-advised,” he said. “But I suppose we can’t just leave your family to starve, either. Show me your fields.”

  “Uh, yes sir,” I answered, following him out of the chapel. I guided him past the village square and down the road that led to my family’s home, and past it to the fields we worked. Torra glanced up—I noticed she had barely made any progress on the row I had been working on when I left, suppressing a scowl—and she called over to my father.

  The two made their way over to us. “This is my father, Hildan, and my sister, Torra,” I said, introducing them to my sponsor. “Torra, dad, this is Magus Somnial.”

  The Magus inclined his head. “I have decided to sponsor your son for entry into the magic academy of Ivarnel,” he stated. My sister went through a complicated set of expressions that oscillated between excitement for me and sadness that I’d be leaving the village. My father’s brows simply furrowed slightly.

  When Hildan had woken up and learned about my revelation, he had mostly just scoffed. I wasn’t sure he really believed it. At the time, he was still lost in his grief, so he didn’t really comment on it, and I never practiced in front of him to draw attention to it.

  After Tomelia was born, and he started getting his life back together, he had come out once to find me practicing out back. I had been releasing balls of mana, basic depletion training, then recharging through the breath.

  “Magic, huh,” was all he had said. He watched me practice for a little while longer before walking away. I had seen him watch me a few times since then, but we never discussed it.

  It wasn’t clear what his thoughts were on it. I think that maybe, had he not have lost Toldan, he might have been happy for me. It didn’t seem like he was upset that I had gained the ability to do magic; his concern was likely what Berrel had stated about the family getting by.

  I shook off the memory when Somnial spoke again. “Tovar tells me you have yet to turn over your fields?”

  Hildan nodded gruffly. “These fields extend from there to there,” I said, pointing. “You can see the rows I’ve already finished. It’ll probably take another two to three weeks to finish.”

  If I work myself to the bone. Probably more like a month.

  “May I?” Somnial asked, inclining his head towards the fields and looking at my father.

  “Uh. Go ahead,” Hildan answered, confused.

  “Then please step back a bit,” the Magus said.

  Somnial closed his eyes and began muttering under his breath. As he spoke, motes of light emerged from his mouth, turning into symbols that swirled around him.

  I could feel the change in the local mana. It was shifting, being bound by his command. This is a proper magical chant of this world, I realized.

  He continued to chant. And chant. Then he chanted some more.

  Huh. That’s a long chant.

  Finally, he finished his spell, the mysterious symbols swirling around him rapidly. Upon completion, the mana blew outward, flowing into the field, the rows carving out under the power of the spell, tilling the field I would have spent weeks breaking my back over.

  Hildan, Torra, and I gaped at the field and the Magus.

  “There, that should do it,” Somnial said, dusting his hands off. Not that he had gotten them dirty at all in the process of turning over practically an entire field. “So, Tovar. We leave tomorrow. You can find me at the chapel in the morning.”

  And with that, he walked away, leaving us speechless.

  After a few minutes of staring at the fields, Hildan finally spoke.

  “Magic, huh.”

  “Wow,” Torra added.

  “Yeah,” I concurred.

  “Well,” Hildan said after a beat. “We still have to sow. It’ll go faster with all three of us. Let’s get to it.”

  * * *

  Berrel was upset at the rapidity of my unplanned departure, but after a winter of preparing for this, it wasn’t news that I would be leaving. With the hardest part of the fieldwork sorted, Hildan and Torra would have no issue finishing up, and they’d be able to weed through the summer. Harvest would be tough, but Tomas was reaching an age where he could feasibly help, and the kindness of neighbors would take them the rest of the way.

  Packing was effectively trivial, since I had almost nothing to my name in this life. Under the cover of darkness, I dug up the goblin swords I had claimed the year before, and wrapped them in burlap. I hoped to maybe sell them in Ivarnel in case there was something I needed to buy.

  After a teary-eyed goodbye from my parents and younger siblings, I made my way towards the chapel on my own. I was surprised that saying goodbye had been so hard. Despite attempting to remain aloof, particularly with my parents, I had nonetheless bonded with them, especially my second-life siblings. Torra and I were close despite our differences, Tomas had finally grown up to the point where he was his own person and becoming interesting in his own right, and I wouldn’t even get to see Tomelia grow up.

  I had one more stop to make before leaving town, which was conveniently adjacent to the chapel. I stood in front of the gravestone for my younger brother Toldan, though it marked a mostly empty grave, as his body had been taken by the goblins. The men of Redding had recovered a small skull and some bones when they raided the goblin nest, which we all assumed to be Toldan’s remains, and we had buried him here.

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  Crouching in front of the stone, I placed my hand on the grass growing in front of it. “By the time I get back, I’ll be strong enough to kill any goblin that threatens my family,” I promised him. I closed my eyes, said goodbye, and stood to leave.

  Somnial was standing a short ways behind me. He glanced at the stone, and back to me.

  “My younger brother,” I explained. “Killed by goblins last year.”

  “Ah,” Somnial said, leaving me to either elaborate or move on.

  “That’s how my dad lost his arm, too,” I continued. I thought back to the feat of magic that tilled our fields. “Is there a magic that could grow it back?”

  “Growing back a lost appendage would be... a substantial feat. There are probably only a handful of mages who can perform healing magic to that level,” Somnial answered. “Unfortunately, I am not one of them. My talents lie elsewhere.”

  I nodded. Once I thought about it, I figured if he could have, he probably would have done that rather than the one-time boon of tilling our fields. “Maybe I’ll focus on that,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” Somnial said, inclining his head towards the grave. “Though, forgive me for overhearing, it sounded like your focus might lie elsewhere.”

  I glanced back at Toldan’s grave.

  “Is it possible to gain enough force to protect people and also the magic to recover?”

  “The issue, as with so many things, is time,” the Magus said, sighing and looking up at the sky. “Our lives are finite, after all.”

  Mine isn’t, I thought. It might just take me a few go-rounds to get there.

  “Come now,” Somnial said, motioning back to the chapel. “Let us be on our way.”

  The Magus had a carriage waiting nearby, and the driver took my belongings and loaded them for me.

  Somnial glanced at my meager property, frowning slightly. “I will arrange to get you some new things before the academy term begins,” he said, seeming slightly uncomfortable.

  I nodded. Guess he didn’t realize quite how much poverty I’d been living under. Wonder what his background is.

  “How far is it to the domain’s capital?” I asked.

  “It is about a week-long journey,” the Magus answered.

  So, six days. This nation had five work days, one for each of the Five Guardians, followed by one day of worship, which was also a day of rest.

  “We will have to camp the first two nights,” he continued. “From there we should be able to find accommodations for the remainder of the trip.”

  I knew that we were way out in the boonies—the village didn’t have an inn, after all, and rarely got visitors, aside from tax collection—but it hadn’t even occurred to me that we would be able to find inns outside of the capital. The villages closer to the center of the domain must be closer in size to towns, if they had inns, with more regular traffic between them.

  “I assumed we would have to camp the entire time,” I confessed.

  “Thankfully not,” Somnial said with a snort, giving me another tiny glimpse into his world. His life was probably a good deal more comfortable than mine.

  I was curious why he had decided to make the trip out here and sponsor me. He hadn’t seemed all that faithful, when he appraised me, nor while we were alone in the chapel or graveyard. It was possible that he had prayed when I wasn’t around and I was just misreading the situation, but compared to Umbor, or even Mishel, it didn’t seem like faith was that high on his list of priorities.

  Mishel had suggested that the domain would be interested in holding onto those with magic potential, so at first I had thought this would just be business and that the Magus was a civic representative or something. Except Somnial said that he was sponsoring me, not the domain. Again, it was possible I was misreading that without asking for clarification.

  Not that I was going to pester him for answers before we had even left the village. Now that I had said my goodbyes, I was excited about the journey ahead. I’m going to go to school for magic! I didn’t want to piss off my sponsor before we even left and ruin that chance, now that I was almost on my way. The details, for the moment, mattered less than the end result, since my goals transcended this life entirely.

  We set off.

  I had wondered if Somnial would begin my education immediately, preparing me for the academy, but the old Magus retrieved a book and spent the entire first day reading it. Clearly, the man didn’t have much experience with children, because if he did, he wouldn’t have expected an eleven year old kid to just sit there silently while he read, especially given that child’s situation.

  He was fortunate that I wasn’t a child internally. At first, I enjoyed the changing scenery, watching the village disappear into the distance, and later, studying the woods we traveled through, curious about the larger world. Once the scenery revealed itself to be a whole lot of the same thing, I switched to meditation, breathing exercises, and practicing cycling my mana.

  Nonetheless, during the second day, after already spending hours of feeling my ass bruise from the rough road and lack of shocks in the carriage, I needed a distraction.

  “May I ask what you’re reading?”

  Somnial’s gaze rose from his book, as if surprised I was there.

  “Ah. I’m studying a grimoire.”

  “Oh. Is that how you learn magic?”

  “Hmm,” Somnial said, shutting the book. “You really are starting from nothing. I suppose I can give you a basic education.”

  I held back from rolling my eyes. Finally.

  “Casting magic traditionally requires three things: infusion, invocation, and intention,” he explained. “Infusion is the process of imbuing your voice with mana as you chant. Invocation is the process of chanting itself, which requires knowledge of the spell. Intention is the shaping of your thoughts as you complete the chant. Through these three, we shape our spells, and put our mana out into the world to evoke our designs.”

  That explained what Somnial had done to the fields. The magic symbols that came out as he spoke was the combination of his vocal mana infusion with his invocation, combined with the intention of turning over the field.

  My own [Mana Manipulation] differed from that, though. Intention was critical, of course, and there was a process of infusion, internally, separate from invocation. Invocation seemed to resemble my breathing technique. The power of speech was only possibly through sending air out through our vocal chords, and I knew how to exhale mana. That was probably the jumping off point for infusing an invocation. Perhaps I could use bridging to concentrate mana in my mouth to make spells more powerful.

  “Your own revelatory skill, being chantless, lacks structure,” Somnial continued. “That’s why the light fizzles out upon your release. Once your intention is disconnected, it loses form. If you learn the proper invocation for a light spell, you should be able to create a light that lasts hours, maybe even days, given the right infusion of mana.”

  “Interesting,” I said, processing the explanation and comparing it against my limited knowledge of the world so far. “What’s the invocation for a light spell?”

  Somnial surprised me; he laughed. It was a breathy thing, and sounded like something he didn’t do terribly often, which was a shame. “Pardon me,” he said, shaking his head. “If only it were so simple to teach.”

  He lifted the grimoire.

  “This entire grimoire contains a single spell.”

  I looked at the book. It wasn’t a massive tome, but it was still much more massive than I would have guessed a spell would be. “It seems... long, for a single spell.”

  “It is a rather complex one, admittedly,” he said, setting it back down in his lap. “Even basic spells require a sizable chant.”

  “But… you didn’t read from a book, in the field yesterday,” I said. My eyes widened as I came to a realization. “You had it memorized.”

  “You will too,” Somnial said with a nod. “Trying to infuse your invocation with intention while sight-reading is virtually impossible. One must intricately know the entire spell, by heart, in order to shape it.”

  Oof. No wonder he said I’d also need a strong Mind in addition to Will. This is going to be a chore. Still, once I learn it, I’ll gain the skill, right? Will I still need to chant, once I do?

  Somnial’s spell had been fairly large, but he didn’t chant for that long, certainly not long enough to recite an entire book of words. I said as much, and he smiled.

  “Shorter spells can still be very powerful, with enough mana. As for this one, well,” he said, looking out of the carriage at the passing trees. “I have been doing this for a very long time.”

  I didn’t push any harder, since it sounded like he had secrets he wasn’t ready to reveal. I’d figure them out in time. Or I wouldn’t, and I’d learn all I could despite that. In any case, so long as I gained skills and stat points, I was making progress. I had, presumably, years of study ahead of me to figure it all out.

  The Magus reopened his grimoire and began reading again, but paused, looking up at me once more.

  “Ah. You are literate. Right?”

  The expression on my face likely gave away the answer.

  “Ah. Hmm. That might be a problem.”