Magic Made Simple

Chapter 4: Upgrades

Maybe I was being a bit greedy wanting to improve a skill that could already kill a goblin with a single well placed attack. I didn't see it that way. I was thinking of it more as research.

Probably the biggest reason I'd gotten into the field of physics was because I had a deep desire within me to understand how things worked. I wanted to know why things fell, why light could only move so fast, and the underlying rules behind so many other natural phenomena. Finding out about mana was like I had just unlocked a whole new branch of magic, and I got to be the one to trailblaze the research on it.

When I cast my mana bolt spell, I can feel the magic within my body moving. It was hard to grasp exactly how it was moving, but it was. The only details I could really feel right now was that a part of my mana broke off from the whole, formed a ball, and shot out of my hand or my wand if I was holding it. I wanted to find some way to improve that, or failing that to make my own spell.

At first I had started by repeatedly casting mana bolt, observing exactly how it worked. The first thing I had seen that looked important was that it did not fall as it traveled. It remained at a constant height. It would go until it hit a tree, or fizzled out after about 30 meters.

Now, why wouldn't it fall? Did it not have mass? Everything with mass needed to be affected by gravity, that was a hard and fast rule. Rather, it had been back when things were normal. Maybe it wasn't quite the same in this "new universe". I was still trying to wrap my head around that, but it was a problem for a later date.

My working theory would be that mana wasn't exactly a physical thing, instead being an energy. There were of course plenty of flaws with this guess, but as of right now it's all I can really come up with. Now, if we are getting technical, energy can have mass, sort of. Energy can in theory be turned into mass, and vice versa. Turning mass to energy was how nuclear power plants made so much power. E=MC^2, very useful equation.

Well, it was a very useless equation with my current dilemma. This is all just to say that mana was kind of energy, and kind of physical mass, but seems to arbitrarily decide to not work in the ways that you would expect either to work.

The way I wanted to improve my spell was to both add some more mana to the attack and to make it move faster. That would hopefully make it stronger and easier to aim.

Before I learned to improve a spell, I needed to learn to manipulate my mana. I spent some time trying to make it budge, and found it actually surprisingly easy to manipulate. It felt like moving around some water, with it having momentum behind its movements. I grumbled a bit to myself again about how it could have momentum without having weight, but that was a distracting problem I would need to figure out later.

After I felt like I had a good enough grasp over my mana, I tried creating a bolt of mana without casting the spell. It was weird, because the spell itself made it feel almost automatic. I just tried to copy the exact feeling. After only a few minutes I felt like I could recreate the spell without too much difficulty. Then, I tried to add some mana, making it more potent. That worked pretty well, and it was now leaving larger and larger craters in trees the more mana I put into it.

While doing all of this, I could feel the spell almost "adapt". Using it, I could now automatically use more or less mana just by willing it. It seems that once I proved I can do it on my own, the spell helps to allow me to do it on the fly. It was nice and all, but I didn't feel like I would have had much trouble making a bolt in the middle of a fight even without the spell.

Next, I tried to see what would happen if I pushed mana out of the end of my wand really quickly. Not in a ball or any other shape, but in an uncontrolled release all at once. That had different results than I'd expected.