Re:Demon - Reborn as a Demon Book 1

4

Magic lessons turned out to be nowhere near as exciting as expected and soon everyone except Nagi was regretting being born with the capacity. For Nagi, not only was she still excited about going to lessons, but she was eager to learn anything that they were willing to teach her.

Lessons had started out exceedingly dull for the majority of students, since it wasn't about throwing fire or freezing water into blades as every sorcerer in the legends seemed to do, but instead was a series of lectures about the rough basics of how magic worked and the nature of things, which went over almost all of their heads and fascinated Nagi no end.

"Every living thing has the pathways for magic." They were told by Bross, who would be staying until they were trained, then he would move on to the next village or town to instruct them, which was his job. "Trees and grass have them, as do animals and birds. Even the lesser races have them, for they allow the energy of the world to flow through you, giving you life. How much flows through you depends on the openness of your pathways.

"Think of them like rivers, some might be narrow, others wide. This is like the pathways that the energy passes through. To use magic, you must divert part of the flow of that water, but if your river is narrow, then if you tried to divert it, there would be none left, so to keep ourselves alive, we are unable to do so, but if your river is wide, then you can divert it and not affect you."

So far most of the kids understood, though a few seemed to be unable to understand much of anything. Nagi was with him so far, though she knew that his example was flawed, since a narrow river might be deep and a wide one shallow, therefore having the same actual volume of water flowing in them. But she understood what he was getting at.

"The hard part of using magic is not to increase the flow of mana or energy flowing through us, but to be able to divert part of it. That can take years of training to master, but that is not what I am going to be teaching you. Nor how to shape the flow through incantations or other means. Instead, I will be instructing you on how to keep your flow steady and not let it out of control.

"Once the gods show you your path in life, there will be others that will show you how to do all that and what, specifically, is needed for your job. My job is to make sure that you live long enough to get there, so I will be instructing you on how to control your dreams, since this is when we are weakest and have the most chance of losing ourselves and letting the flow get diverted."

The next few hours were spent listening to him talk about ways to keep control, and how the flow worked. By the end of his speech, a number of kids were nodding off, so he let them go, since they were still needed to help out around their houses and it was clear that they weren't going to be learning any more that day.

As soon as he said they could go, the class nearly rolled over each other on the way to the door, all except for Nagi, who went the opposite way.

"Can I help you with something?" Bross asked, noticing one of the students not being have like the rest.

In his experience, he'd probably had a few students that had stayed behind to ask him questions, especially on the first day, so he wasn't all that surprised.

"I was wondering a few things," she said. "Starting with how magic is cast."

"That isn't important to learning control of your energy."

"I disagree. I understand that you have more experience in this than I do, but I feel that knowing how magic is cast would be fundamental to understanding why we might cast it in our sleep. I mean, are the incantations you mentioned actually important if we can cast in our sleep? Wouldn't that imply that they're more of a focus point for us, or am I missing something?"