“Not yet.” Kent hastily opened the bundle and, sure enough, it was all food.
Not a single book.
He didn’t stand on ceremony—he grabbed a piece of fruit.
It was round, fist-sized, shimmering with a purple glow, and just looking at it made his mouth water.
He was about to take a bite when Niu Niu’s voice stopped him.
“That fruit is mine.
The dried meat is yours.
First, cast the simplest spell—’Detect Poison’—so I can see.” Niu Niu mumbled the order between bites.
Detect Poison was a first-rank instant spell, one of the simplest in existence.
It required no incantation.
Any magic apprentice with even slightly sufficient mana could cast it.
“I…
I don’t know how to cast it!” Kent answered after a long pause.
Niu Niu was so shocked she nearly fell off his shoulder.
“Then try a small fireball!” Niu Niu was now at the peak of fury.
“Fire elements that exist everywhere between heaven and earth, hear the call of your friend—Small Fireball!” Kent hurriedly focused his mind and chanted the incantation faster than he’d ever done anything in his life.
Something seemed to flow out of his head, only to have something else flow right back in.
Then a red fireball the size of an egg appeared in his hand.
Kent was so startled that he flung his hand, and a trail of red streaked toward his pile of firewood.
Magic.
Real magic.
I can do magic!
Kent’s mind went completely blank.
“Put out the fire, you idiot!” Before Kent could even begin to process what had happened inside his head, he felt a sharp pain on his skull—then noticed the huge pile of firewood bursting into flames.
He scrambled to put it out.
Fortunately, the fire was small, and he managed it in a matter of minutes.
“Fire elements that exist everywhere between heaven and earth, hear the call of your friend—Small Fireball!” Kent, ignoring his disheveled, soot-stained state, cast the spell again.
He felt the same sense of something flowing out and something flowing in, but this time he wanted to test the fireball’s power.
Boom!
Kent rushed over to inspect the result and found a small pit carved into the hard stone wall.
He figured it was about as powerful as a crude blunderbuss.
He experimented a few more times and discovered that the fireball went exactly where he wanted it to.
Within thirty paces, he had a perfect hit rate.
Beyond thirty paces, it began to drift off target.
“Niu Niu, do you know how many small fireballs a first-rank mage can cast?” Kent asked.
Niu Niu had an excellent memory and read books frighteningly fast; anything from a book, she absorbed at a glance.
“About twenty.” Niu Niu answered without even looking up.
Strangely enough, Niu Niu had never returned to the pet space, and Kent couldn’t command her at all—because of the soul contract.
Niu Niu also muttered under her breath, “Look at the dreams you have.
Those giant iron lumps can run on water and fly?
You must be insane.” It turned out she had been rifling through Kent’s soul memories.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve cast more than twenty times already,” Kent muttered under his breath.
“Just get more familiar with the incantations.
Some people can even cast instantly.” Niu Niu tossed that remark over her shoulder and went to sleep.
“Wouldn’t that be like a repeating firelock…” Kent was just about to start practicing when he noticed Niu Niu had dozed off.
Quietly, he slipped outside.
“Fire elements between heaven and earth…
Small Fireball!”
…
“Small Fireball!”
…
After countless repetitions, Kent finally felt his mana beginning to run dry.
He guessed one more spell would drain him completely.
But in the process, he had achieved something remarkable: he could now cast instantly—or more precisely, silently.
That made a world of difference.
Chanting the incantation had taken at least two seconds; casting silently took only half a second.
In other words, he could now fire off four spells in the time it used to take him to cast one, and that was only the first benefit.
He also made a startling discovery: his body could store mana as well.
Whenever the mana in his mind diminished, a fresh surge would well up from his body to refill it.
Looking at the dense cluster of scorch marks on the stone wall across from him—at least a hundred, maybe more—Kent realized his mana reserves were over five times greater than others of his rank.
Even a magic idiot like him understood how absurdly strong that advantage was.
“What?
This…
this…
there’s actually this kind of perk!” Feeling the change in his body, Kent couldn’t help but shout for joy.
“Boom!” Just as he was riding the high of his discovery, Kent felt a surge of qi rush up from the soles of his feet.
It streamed straight into his mind, carrying a wisp of fire element along with it.
His nearly dry mana instantly devoured more than seventy percent of it.
Kent calculated that he could recover enough mana for a Small Fireball in less than a minute.
So this is the real benefit of qigong!
Then his thoughts raced further: this was only from holding his posture for one hour.
What if he practiced for two hours?
What if he kept the flow running twenty-four hours a day?
But before he could finish that thought, a sharp pain stabbed through his head, and he fainted in spectacular fashion, the last image in his mind being the tiny, doll-like beauty whacking him with her oversized club.
“Niu Niu…”
What’s wrong with this kid?
Niu Niu thought, hovering behind him.
A first-rank mage lasting this long?
It must be because he just became a mage and his nerves are stretched taut from excitement.
Good thing I woke up in time, or the consequences would have been serious.
After Kent collapsed, he saw Niu Niu suspended in mid-air behind him.
It was strange, really.
As a grass spirit, Niu Niu was supposed to need her wings to fly, yet there she was, hovering effortlessly without flapping them at all.
But Kent was nothing but a self-taught amateur; how could he understand such things?
Fortunately, his comprehension and luck were decent enough that he had managed to gather mana and achieve the status of mage that millions dreamed of.
“Huh?
Something’s not right about this kid.” Niu Niu’s eyes narrowed.
“A first-rank mage can cast at most twenty-odd fireballs.
But there are this many scars on the wall—could he be carrying a mana-restoring potion?”
She waved her hand, and Kent’s body floated up into the air.
But then she caught sight of the dense scorch marks covering the far wall, all left by Small Fireballs.
Her excitement surged—a mana-restoring potion, after all, was a priceless treasure!
Her concentration shattered, the spell was interrupted, and Kent crashed heavily back to the ground with a thud.
Still, he didn’t wake.
And that was precisely what Niu Niu had said: he had been overexcited, his nerves wound too tightly for too long.
If she hadn’t interrupted when she did, his future path of cultivation would have been far more arduous.
Since mental power is an expression of the soul, overusing it carries a real risk of harming the spiritual source—the soul itself.
Kent’s mana reserves were three times those of an ordinary mage, but his mental strength was at best two to three times the norm.
The mental force behind those later fireballs, then, had been stretched and boosted by sheer nervous excitement.
Niu Niu’s interruption came at exactly the right moment.
Had she broken in any earlier, the mental growth born of that excitement would have subsided considerably.
As it was, Kent’s mental gains would now be permanent.
And if she’d struck any earlier, Kent would still have been silently casting spells, vulnerable to mana backlash.
When she interrupted, his awareness had just shifted inward to observe his own body.
So, really, the guy’s luck was anything but ordinary.
“Huh?
There’s nothing at all?” Niu Niu tore at her already sparse green hair, nearly at her wits’ end as she stared at Kent’s completely naked body.
She was certain he was hiding some premium mana-restoring potion or other valuable secret.
So she had hastily hauled him back into the cave and stripped him bare—only to find nothing.
Even weirder, his sleeping posture was strange beyond belief.
When Niu Niu first examined him, he was lying on his back.
But the instant she let go, he shifted back into that odd position of his.
She was frowning in confusion when she suddenly noticed fire elements surging toward Kent from all directions at a speed visible to her mental sense.
That startled her badly.
Meditation was not sleep—the two were complete opposites.
Meditation consumed mental energy to absorb elemental particles, while sleep restored mental energy.
If sleep could replace meditation, then wouldn’t everyone in the world be a mage?
Mages were one in a million, even one in ten million.
How could sleeping refill mana just like meditating?
That was as incompatible as fire and water, as far apart as heaven and earth.
All Niu Niu could do was stare at Kent with wide eyes, completely baffled.