The Death Mage that doesn't want a fourth time

14 The lessons of applying anti-aging to the teacher

At Vandalieu's sudden request to be alone, Zadiris opened her eyes wide in surprise.

「Alone, you say?」

「Yes, it's a very important matter.」

As Vandalieu spoke to Zadiris with an unusually firm tone, Zadiris wondered whether he had decided to finish his training and leave the village.

She had heard that he was headed for the country of Orbaume, beyond the mountain range to the east of this Devil's Nest. However, he had not yet finished learning no-attribute magic, Mana Control or Alchemy. Zadiris wouldn't tell him to make this village his home, but she wanted him to stay a little longer.

「Very well. Let us speak in my house.」

Thinking that she should persuade him to stay longer somehow, she picked up Vandalieu in her arms and headed for her own home.

「... I can walk myself. I'm going to be two years old soon.」

「You are not two years old yet, boy. Did you not say that a while ago and trip over a stone?」

Vandalieu had thought that he had come closer to adulthood now that he was nearly two years old, but from others' point of view, he was but an infant who had come just a little closer to becoming a young boy.

They entered Zadiris's pit dwelling in which Vandalieu normally received his lessons on magic. Inside, there were alchemy-related tools that Zadiris had invented herself, as well as a crystal ball that apparently had some use sitting in a conspicuous spot.

If there were a cauldron, then this might have been the perfect description of the home of a witch straight out of a fairy tale, but such a cauldron was absent.

「Say, boy. If possible, I wish to teach you all of the spells that I know.」

Zadiris spoke with a serious expression as she sat down on the rug. They were not words of gratitude for saving her life or of wanting to repay his contributions to the village, but words expressing her expectations of him.

「Boy, you have no real talent in the normal sense of the word. I am sure that you have noticed yourself that you are learning slowly. However, you possess a lot of insight and sense that compensates for that.」

The insight and sense that Zadiris spoke of were ideas from the fictional works that Vandalieu had read and seen on Earth, the information that he had obtained from spirits in Origin and the power of imagination that was derived from those. Vandalieu, being aware of this, didn't think that it was insight or sense or anything worthy of praise.

「Most importantly, you possess that outlandish amount of Mana. If you were to devote yourself to study, it would not even take you a hundred years to become a great mage that I could not even compare to.」

Simply possessing a lot of Mana didn't make one a powerful mage, but the size of one's Mana pool was still a component that couldn't be ignored. In this world, the level of a skill increased the more one used it. Therefore, a large Mana pool was essential to support the repeated casting of magic necessary to increase the level of one's skill.

For humans, the bonuses to skills they received from magic-related Jobs were important, but even those Jobs required certain skills to be at certain levels to obtain the Jobs in the first place.

And so, for both humans and monsters that wished to become mages, the first step was to learn basic magic and do everything they could to increase their Mana pools. In the case of monsters, it was common to give up without being able to put in the effort required or die before becoming a mage, so a lot of it depended on their talent for magic.