Uriel's training at the academy was not easy. The first six weeks were devoted only to the theory of magic, its history and meditations under the supervision of teachers. You can imagine the endless alternation of two hours of lectures about magic, which was not even available to young adepts, and meditations of the same duration. Classes lasted twelve hours, six days a week. After the rather measured classes at school, the current pace was exhausting. And his head was constantly pounding from trying to feel his aura.
According to Uriel's new knowledge, the only way to use magic was to interact with it through his aura. A magician differed from a non-magician by having one special area in his aura - a kind of command center. With proper development of his abilities, a sorcerer would gain the skill to control his aura, as well as all other parts of his body. However, as they were told in the history of magic, there was a second way of controlling the aura, which, however, was inferior to the first in all but one way.
Since the aura moved together with the body, was "glued" to it, and also slightly changed according to the emotions, it was possible to create the simplest spells when performing certain actions, usually looking quite ridiculous, and experiencing certain emotions. This was the method used by some of the barbarian shamans. Explaining the pros and cons of this approach, they were told the following: first, the speed of creating spells was negligible. Where a mage needed a few seconds, a shaman would spend five minutes or more on the same thing. The second was the complexity of the spells. For higher magic sometimes required dozens of minutes of painstakingly building their weave[1], and then followed the stage of checking for mistakes and fixing them. It was impossible to perform active movements for dozens of hours. In addition, the shaman could not check his spell - because he did not see it. The third was research. As it was already mentioned, shamans didn't see magic, so they couldn't investigate it at all.
The only good thing about their approach was that anyone could become a shaman. Since they didn't control the aura directly, they didn't need a command center. Even though a non-mage's aura was much weaker than a warlock's under any circumstances, it would have been enough for a few fireballs. In the end, the balance of power was such that even the weakest archmage, under more or less equal conditions, would defeat all the remaining shamans in the world at once.
So Uriel trained to be a respected mage, not a pathetic shaman. Or so he told his acquaintances. In fact, he was rather adrift. If he had his way, the student would have cut his workload in half. But no one asked him, of course. He had to sit through the lectures with a bored face, and meditate with an exhausted face.
It must be said what Uriel and the rest of the students did not like about the meditations. It was the following: a Mage from the teaching staff was affecting the aura of the student in a certain way. He felt it in his time - the effect was felt by unpleasant sensations in his head, and something else unclear. It was this obscure sensation that the student had to identify, separate from the other sensations, somehow "merge" with this sensation and then resist. As the professors said, as soon as the magician resisted, it was as if something clicked in his head, or a string broke, or something like that. After that, the sorcerer would begin to see magic and control his aura with ease.
It seemed to Uriel that if that stupid string didn't break within a week, his head would. After all, they only meditated with breaks for lectures. Not much of a rest for anyone, let alone a merchant's idle son. Here his own power played a cruel trick on him as well. Because his aura had very high parameters, it was more difficult to affect it, which meant that he needed more time to awaken his abilities than mages with weaker aura. There was a rumor among students that in the least prestigious academies everyone had already moved on to the next stage of training. In the First Academy, after a month of training, only a third of the ninety-one wizards who entered learned how to control their aura. They no longer practiced meditation, but continued to attend the rest of the lectures. The awakening phase was to last another two weeks. If any sorcerer failed to awaken abilities in time, he was considered incapable of doing so in principle. Such students were expelled from the academy. However, their number was not great, maybe one or two.
So in addition to the headaches of meditation was the stress of potential expulsion. But expulsion from the academy did not seem to frighten his roommates at all-the familiar William, Munith, a dark mage from a poor family living in a city slum, and Piresht von Schwartz, a future mental mage. Piresht had already begun to see magic, and William and Munith were accustomed to such strain, as both were excellent students and were fairly confident in their talent. While Uriel's only energy left after his studies was to lie down on his bed and stare at the ceiling, or sometimes, when he wasn't so tired, at the wall, these two had energy left for endless arguments. The Dark Mage was unhappy with the unfairness of a world in which his parents had to work from morning till night to eke out a miserable existence, while the families of all his neighbors could do nothing for generations and live happily ever after.
Uriel was not interested in this conversation. Given that he was not an aristocrat, and there were no mages in his family, it was obvious that his ancestors had once lived no better than Munith's family, but had they managed to get rich? They did. Why be indignant then. Everybody's free to do what they want. Some work twelve hours a day, and some work with their heads. And in any case, no one prevented them from moving to the countryside, where certainly no one starved, and did not beggar, if they are so committed to honest work with their hands.
Only William argued with the dark wizard. He was an aristocrat. That is, according to many, he was higher than others on the social ladder without merit. William van Meir didn't think so, mostly pointing to the merits of his ancestors to his country, the fact that nobles don't come from thin air, and the very frequent possibility of a personal nobility. It was also possible to get an inherited title, but it was an extremely rare event, the reason for which was usually to save an emperor or an empire, or something equally important.
But the light magician was only getting into arguments because of his character, which made it impossible for him to remain silent when he heard something he didn't agree with. No, he would have been more enthusiastic before, but his attitude had changed dramatically since the Archmage's speech. Before the speech, he had been thinking in terms of class, but now he was dividing people into mages and non-mages. That made more sense to him. He probably wouldn't care if he lost his nobility. He felt like a mage and wanted to be one. Crassus' speech resonated with many hearts.
The only one who really wanted to debate Munith on this subject was Piresht. As an aristocrat, he had entered the academy only to increase the power of his family, and he couldn't imagine himself apart from it. But von Schwarz was always gone, appearing in his room only to sleep. His three roommates wondered what and where he was doing. It was forbidden to leave the academy, and it was also forbidden to study magic on their own at this stage of training. The academy, of course, had an excellent park, but objectively it was impossible to spend so much time on it. William made a suggestion that he might be communicating with girls, to which the dark mage replied that he would not be surprised if he was "communicating" more with boys. The three mages spent all their free time in the living room lazily talking and studying.
The living room actually consisted of one large common room, with five doors. One went out into the hallway of the dormitory, and the other four led to the small bedrooms of each mage. This was due to the fact that the academy was built a long time ago, and there were far fewer mages enrolled back then. This also changed because the population grew, and consequently the number of sorcerers increased, and because the methods of searching for future potential mages had improved. Previously, the space of all their five rooms was allotted to one apprentice. For the same reason, there had long been plans to rebuild the academies and increase their space by the same four times. But mages have always had more preferable places to invest. Research wouldn't do itself, and adepts could squeeze in.
Uriel went to his last meditation class of the day very thoughtful. They had been given a lecture on types of magic and mana (or energy). It turned out to be far from the same thing. The types of mana that were available to first-year students to learn about, were: mana of the elements - air, fire, and earth; mana of life and death; mana of darkness and light; and "raw" mana. There were many more types of magic. In addition to the directions that bore the same names, there was mental magic, astral magic, domestic magic, necromancy and demonology, the magic of order and chaos, and much more. Some of these directions were full-fledged faculties, like the magic of life, others were taken only as separate courses, such as domestic magic or the magic of creation.
Every kind of energy was contained in nature within things like itself. Earth mana was in the earth and rocks, life mana was in living organisms, death mana was emitted from death of a living being, and so on. "Raw" mana was in the astral, and was also the basic filling of the aura. The reasons and purpose for the existence of this mysterious substance were not clear, nor was its relationship to the material world. It was even boldly suggested that mana had no effect on the world at all. This made some sense, since draining mana is the second thing every sorcerer learns. Draining energy from inanimate objects did nothing. If all of the earth's mana was taken from a stone, it would simply "empty" in magical vision, and all of the nearest earth's mana would start rushing toward it until the balance was established. Every mage has been through the principle of communicating vessels, and it was no surprise to them.
Some strange things started to happen if, for example, you drained all the life mana from a living organism. Intuitively, it looked as if it should lead to death. In reality, absolutely nothing happened. Neither according to the words of test subjects, nor according to the results of their examination. The only thing that happened was that the life mana rushed more actively into their bodies, just like in the case with the stone. Intentional infusion of the same life mana into a wounded person did not result in the slightest improvement of his condition. These and all such experiments have been conducted for thousands of years, but there has been no change.
Interestingly, back in the early days of magical science, an experiment was performed that was supposed to clarify where mana comes from. A person was placed in a room that was tens of kilometers underground. The magician, clearly monitoring all the mana around him, drained the mana from the subject. New mana immediately began to flow into him. The magician kept his own life mana from expiring by an effort of will and controlled its content in the area. Mana did not decrease anywhere, but it appeared in the subject. it turned out that the energy appeared from the void.
Sorcerers already knew the energy conservation law, which applied to the material world as well as to the "magical" one. If mana could not come from nowhere and was not generated by the object in which it was, then it was coming from somewhere else. And only a thousand years ago, it was suggested that mana was taken in our world from the elemental dimensions. In fact, the discovery of these dimensions almost immediately led to this assumption.
The elemental dimension represented some space or place, or perhaps state, where elementals lived. These dimensions corresponded entirely, with one exception, to types of energy. And that mana in each of them was probably infinite. It was not entirely clear what the elementals were, some embodiment of their types of energy. It was known for sure that they were born, that they either didn't die or lived for a very long time, that it was impossible to kill them, or not yet known how. Elementals could be summoned into the material world, paying with "raw" mana for which they performed the tasks assigned by the mage. Professors promised to tell more about this at the elemental magic course.
There was no dimension for "raw" mana. As it has already been said, it was the main filler of aura, and especially aura of the mage, and, consequently, after the mage spent some of it, it gradually began to accumulate in his reserve again. In the same way its content was increased in the astral, and the aura was replenished there more quickly. But according to the professor's assurances, the astral was certainly not a dimension, trivially because in the elemental dimension mana is the very fabric of reality, and in the astral "raw" energy is simply an increased amount. There were other differences that were going to be explained already in the astral magic course.
Uriel was equally impressed by the way mages use this mana. To interact with the material world, a mage needed spells. The framework of the weave was created with the help of an aura. It looked like a very complex three-dimensional scheme with different blocks and their bundles. Then the spell was filled with mana, activated, and voila, firestorm was ready. Now, what was the difference between a firestorm and an air tornado? Only filling it with the appropriate type of mana. That is, fire or air mana. If the mage wanted to affect a living being directly, he used life mana, if he wanted to affect light, he used light mana, and so on.
But where does a mage get the different types of energy for his spells? There were several approaches. The first was to directly store the mana of the desired type in his aura, having previously spent some "raw" energy. This could also be done in two ways. Or you could pump mana directly from the object that contained it, but that didn't always work. You can't get water mana in the desert, land mana in the ocean, or death mana where no one dies. This method is good for its economy and speed, but bad for its lack of versatility. More recently, some hundred years ago, the ingenious elementalist wizard Altair completed his life's work - spells based on the use of raw mana to obtain the desired energy from the elemental plane. They were created for every known type of energy. Their disadvantage was in turn the loss of energy. The efficiency of the spell depended on the affinity with the magic in question. If the affinity was excellent, only a few percent of the energy was lost to conversion, and if it was poor, fifty or seventy percent could be lost. The advantages and disadvantages of the method are quite obvious.
The affinity with types of mana also influenced how much energy of a certain type a mage could store in his aura. For example, Uriel could fill his entire aura with life mana, but not more than twenty percent with fire mana, because the affinity with it was very low. But storing mana in the aura was not the only solution to the problem. The same spell – energy converter could be used in another way – embedded in another spell. Then the process of creating spells looked like this: the magician created the structure of the required spell, the same fire tornado, built a fire mana converter into it, and filled the spell with " raw " mana. After activation, it took a few seconds to convert the energy, and then it worked like a normal spell. The disadvantages of this method were a slight delay, a little more complexity, and a big loss when converting to a low affinity mana type. On the plus side, any type of energy was always at your fingertips.
In fact, all wizards combined both approaches. The mana with which they had a poor affinity was stored in the aura in advance, and the rest of the reserve was set aside for raw mana, ready for conversion into the right type of energy at any moment.
There was one last approach to the whole thing. You could leave the spell unfilled with mana, but add an energy pump (to pump mana), a filter (so that only the right type of mana gets into the spell), and some self-restoring blocks. This method was not for combat, but for peaceful spells. For example, a mage could leave such a weave to cause rain somewhere in the sky and after a month, after accumulating the right amount of mana, it would rain there.
Uriel had not learned so many new and interesting things in one day in a long time. He couldn't wait to conjure something more effective, or to leave a delayed spell for some mischief. With thoughts of future achievements, he entered the meditation class in the crowd of his fellow students.
[1] A weave is the same as a spell. This name has caught on in the magical environment because the finished spell resembles a huge weave of threads.