Aethernea : Soulbound [Book 1]

Episode 141 - IPOMQ

Previously:

Friday, the last day of Muni entrance exams, Special exam. As it turns out, the Spell Replicating exam Kiel chose was not designed to test spell replicating ability, but rather, to test for a special talent that can only be revealed through the process of spell replicating. Kiel is tasked to spell replicate several artifacts, including Clay Mines. Unfortunately, an accident happens while testing his Clay Mines and an explosion occurs. Examiners are thankfully fine but they start arguing with each other. They give Kiel a final artifact, whose enchantment he doesn't need to replicate but to just draw it out. However, Kiel finds that the enchantment is too small and he can't sense it clearly with his mana sense. In this stressful situation, Kiel manages to see a flash of light inside his head for a brief moment, showing him how the enchantment looks like. After he successfully draws out the spell design of the enchantment, examiners get excited and ask Kiel to be their disciple. Kiel is confused and they explain how professors in Muni are required to mentor students and start telling him the story of Alann Farhice and how he discovered a special ability.

* * *

Anyone else would have dropped the matter at this point, but Alann Farhice didn't do so. Something didn't feel right to him.

Looking at those new and old enchantments, he had asked the workers: "Why has your 'handwriting' changed?"

Their answers were surprisingly similar - they felt it would be better "this way". They followed their own intuition when it came to weaving the enchantment.

Do talented mages have a strong intuition when it comes to casting magic? – Alann pondered. But if that was the case, then why was it that mages with even greater talent than those workers needed years of experience to improve their spells?

This intuition, sense of right and wrong, what is better and worse – it wasn't something granted by talent, but rather, experience!

* * *

Episode 141 – IPOMQ

Experienced mages could estimate the quality of the spell by its mana density and weaved pattern, but they had to base this on its similarity to the officially accepted spell pattern. Only if they had used the spell countless times would they be able to develop a sense of quality for their spells beyond the confines of the widely accepted spell pattern.

Quality was not something mages could inherently sense, it was something they estimated based on their previous experiences in using the spell!

These workers shouldn't even be able to gauge the quality of the spell let alone develop this "intuition" for they had never used the enchantments they created! They didn't even know what these enchantments did!

And then Alann came to a startling realization – could it be that these workers have a special ability that allows them to sense the quality of the spells they had created, without needing to use them or accumulate experience? Some kind of inner meter of spell quality?

Alann's conjecture turned out to be correct. Those workers could pick up an enchantment they had never seen before, weave it a couple of times and intuitively feel which one of their attempts was the highest in quality, no matter how minuscule the difference.

Kiel internally sighed seeing the excited examiners as they were talking about this discovery.

If you asked him, this power didn't seem all that useful. It could help one evaluate oneself, and make fewer mistakes, but in the end, without hard work and talent, one's ability as a mage wouldn't improve much. It was like a sense of aesthetics, just being able to tell that a picture was pretty wouldn't give you the ability to paint a pretty picture.