Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 29 – A Trip to the Library

“I’m sorry for judging you, Tom, you were right, that was awful,” Emily complains as she walks through the hall with Tom and Hester after class.

“Told you so.” Tom grins smugly.

“Goddess, I hope the other required classes I have aren’t that bad.”

“What else do you have? We probably have more crossover,” Hester asks eagerly.

“Geopolitics, maths, and English. Oh and I’ve signed up for hand-to-hand combat, but that was a personal choice.”

“We have geopolitics and maths too. Are you literate?”

“Yes, why?”

“Then skip English. Apparently it’s a very basic course to make sure commoners are literate, so it will be completely useless to you.”

“Ah, I see, thanks.” Emily nods, grateful for Hester’s advice.

I’ll have to look into dropping the course later.

Reaching the transportation rooms, Emily says goodbye to the twins and heads back to her room. A couple of minutes after returning to her room, a system notification pops up.

¯¯¯¯¯

Chain-Quest failed: True Magical Genius #3

_____

Checking the time, she sees it failed exactly twenty-four hours after she left the classroom yesterday. Dismissing the notification with a nod of understanding, she swiftly returns to her spell-creation experiments.

A few hours later, Emily closes her notebook with a sigh.

“Maybe I was a bit overzealous: I still don’t understand what these lines and shapes do.”

Sitting back in her chair, she opens her status and stares at her progression page while biting her thumb.

Should I set this aside as a side project and focus on progression first? Maybe learning some magic knowledge will help, I’ll go to the library after lunch.

With a decision made, Emily moves to her bed and sits down cross-legged to meditate.

***

“Why do you have your notebook with you?” Hester asks while drinking a spoonful of her soup.

“I’m going to the library after this to do a bit of research. Wanna come?” Emily says, taking a bite from her wrap.

“Sure, I want to look at a few books on spellcasting too. I’ve made no progress so far.”

“I’ll come if I can I piggyback on your access level,” Tom says excitedly.

“Sure, but what do you even need it for?”

“I want to see what history texts are limited to nobles only!”

Emily stares at Tom with exaggerated surprise.

“What?”

“Nothing, I’m just surprised you gave an intelligent answer.”

“Hey! I’m not dumb!” Tom complains as Juliana and Hester laugh at Emily’s response.

Wiping tears from her eyes, Hester adds to the conversation: “He may look like that, but he’s actually pretty good at history. There’s a reason he was the one dad made give tours.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ignoring the twins bickering again, Emily looks to the sulking Juliana and asks her a question.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just wanted to go with you guys, but I have a stupid lesson after lunch.”

“Haha, you can join us after your lesson. I’ll be there for a while, even if these guys leave quickly.”

“Really?” Juliana asks, her eyes glistening with expectation.

“Would I lie to you?” Emily says with a grin. “Besides, I’m probably going to want your advice on what to research anyway so I’ll be glad for your company.”

“Yay!” Juliana cheers, bouncing in her chair with excitement.

How does she have this much energy?

“Hey Emily,” Tom calls over, finished arguing with his sister, “What are you going to spend your points on by the way? You got loads yesterday.”

“Wait, how many did she get?” Juliana asks while Emily considers her answer.

“One hundred and forty!”

“Woah!”

“I’m not really sure,” Emily finally answers. “I hadn’t thought about it till now. Maybe I’ll use it in the training rooms.”

“That’s a great idea, you could get like seventy hours in a gathering array with double mana density for that much.” Juliana enthusiastically nods at Emily’s idea.

“Gathering array?” Tom asks.

“Ah, sorry. Those are only available in the B-grade training rooms,” Juliana says sheepishly.

“Tsk, never mind.”

After finishing their lunch, Juliana gives each of the trio a hug and leaves on her own as they head towards the library. Walking into the giant room, they pick a small table, with easily enough room for four people, and sit down. Emily takes out her silver crest from her robes and taps it to the centre of the table. As the invisible sound barrier covers them, Tom places his hand on the table and makes his request.

“B-grade history texts.”

Emily raises an eyebrow at his request.

“Wait, you can ask for books by their grade?”

“Yeah, this library request system is really helpful. You can ask for books by grade, topic, author, length, pretty much any requirement you can think of!” Tom grins proudly as he answers.

“He spent over an hour making weird requests when we first came here to try and trick the system,” Hester adds dryly.

“Hey! You weren’t meant to talk about that!” Tom complains with a slightly embarrassed blush.

“Haha, nah I respect that, thanks for the information,” Emily chuckles and pats him on the shoulder.

Ignoring Tom’s smug gloating to his sister and the books landing in front of him, Emily places her hand on the table and considers her first request.

Before I look at spell creation, I think I need a solid base on the elements.

“Five C-grade elemental theory, Five B-grade elemental theory.”

After waiting for a couple of seconds, two neat stacks of books build up on either side of her. Picking up the first book from the stack on her left, she reads the title, ‘Elemental Fundamentals’, before opening it and reading it from the start.

Flipping through the pages and absorbing the information presented, Emily quickly dismisses the book as useless. The entire book centres around the theory of each element being locked to a designated personality type and completely contradicts Emily’s ability to use so many completely different elements. Taking a few quick notes on the personality traits given for each element just in case, she turns slightly and pushes the book through the barrier, letting it be carried away by the flight magic.

Emily repeats this process with the other four books from the first stack, making notes on a few barely useful scraps of information and finishing in only thirty minutes. Moving onto the first book of the second stack, she reads the title ‘Basic Elemental Theory’, then notices the author ‘Jenny Forsythia’.

Slightly surprised, she opens the book with higher expectations. Reading through the first few pages, a small smile grows on her face, and she quickly begins making notes. The book follows similar principles to those Jenny spoke of in class but goes into far more detail on each element, with examples of their natural appearances, along with their common magical and non-magical usages. It also looks at the links between each element, going as far as creating links between what mages of Ulea call ‘Higher form elements’, and seemingly unrelated common elements, like lightning and wind.

She has some interesting ideas that are closer to the system’s knowledge. I’m excited to see if she can work out mental magic from my explanation of the brainwashing spell.

Emily smiles as she moves on to the other books in the stack. Halfway through reading the fourth book in the stack, a system notification appears along with a familiar yet different feeling of information filling her head.

¯¯¯¯¯

Magic Knowledge learned: Basic Elemental Theory

_____

Instead of completely new knowledge flowing in, the information Emily spent the past hour and a half learning expands and self-corrects until a new understanding of the elements is born in her mind.

Jackpot!

Smiling, Emily checks her progression requirements and sees basic magic knowledges sitting at 2/3.

Now I just have to work out what else constitutes magic knowledge. I’ll talk to Juliana about it when she gets here. For now, let’s look at magic circles.

Removing the elemental theory books from the desk, Emily makes another request.

“Five B-grade magic circles.”

“Wait, you’re done with those ten already?” Hester looks up from her reading and asks Emily with obvious confusion.

“Yeah.”

“How can you understand all this technical mumbo jumbo so quickly?” she asks incredulously.

Emily tilts her head in confusion at the question.

“But it’s all perfectly straightforward, what is there to not understand?”

Hester narrows her eyes at Emily’s answer before sighing and looking back down at her book as she mumbles: “Damn genius!”

Wait.

Emily quickly opens her system and pulls up the description of her Magical Genius talent.

¯¯¯¯¯

[Magical Genius]

User is a natural-born mage.

-Grants instant comprehension of new magic [Knowledge]

-Mana strength increased by +50%

-Increased aptitude for creating new spells

_____

Does the instant comprehension of magic knowledge help me understand technical language or something? All these books seemed perfectly easy to read but come to think of it, Juliana did mention only using C-grade books so far, and all those C-grade elemental theory books seemed far too simple to me.

Blinking away the system with a new appreciation for her talent, Emily starts reading the books on magic circles. After sinking into her research for another hour, she is startled by a sudden voice over her shoulder.

“Whatcha reading?”

Jumping a little, Emily looks to the side and sees Juliana leaning over her with a wide grin. Letting out a breath and relaxing, she explains:

“I’m looking into magic circles because I was trying to create my own spell earlier but couldn’t understand what the lines and shapes within the magic circle were for.”

Juliana moves to sit on the seat beside Emily.

“I see. So you’re doing something ridiculous again.”

“When isn’t she?” Tom mutters quietly, barely looking up from his book.

“How is this ridiculous, isn’t it normal for mages to make spells? How else do you guys get all your spells?”

“Yes, but not normally first circle mages. We stick to buying spells from the information hub. After all, the spell creation course is intermediate grade for a reason.”

Emily quickly notes the name of the book she was reading, before getting rid of the stack next to her.

“What does the course grade have to do with it?”

“While it’s not enforced, most basic courses are for first circle, intermediate for second, and advanced for third. So, you doing something considered an intermediate course is weird!”

“I see,” Emily easily accepts Juliana’s comment before changing the subject. “Anyway, I’m trying to work out what subjects I should be researching at the moment because waiting for classes is taking too long. Can you help me work out the general topics I should be focusing on? Please?”

“Sure! I’ll do my best,” Juliana says happily while opening her notebook.

After thirty minutes of going over her notes and trying to split everything Juliana has learned over the past year into specific subjects, Emily is left with a short list in her notebook to focus on.

Natural mana formation

Elemental theory

Chants

Mana manipulation

Meditation techniques

Reagents

Arrays

Runes

“That’s pretty much everything I can think of,” Juliana says while leaning back and stretching. “As long as you have a working meditation technique and focus on your element though, quite a lot of that isn’t needed. But I hope it helps.”

“It’s perfect, thank you!” Emily says with a wide grin, giving Juliana a quick hug before turning back to the table to request more books.

I’m not sure if it will be considered a magic knowledge but let's look at meditation techniques first. I don’t know if what I’ve been using is any good: it’s just a random way of breathing Anna taught me to calm down.

“Five B-grade meditation techniques.”

Once more, a stack of books forms on the desk next to her, and Emily picks up the first one, ‘The Channels Within’, and starts to read. The book immediately grabs her attention as it goes into detail on the internal mana circuits each mage forms, and how to use a rhythmic flow within them to increase the amount of mana gathered and even passively compress mana before it reaches the magic circle.

Her notes are slowly filled with more information, with each book having slightly different views and opinions from the last. With every book she reads, Emily streamlines her notes and begins forming ideas for a new meditation technique.

Picking up the final book from the stack, Emily raises an eyebrow at the odd name, ‘A Study on Magical Beasts’.

Why did I receive this when I asked for books on meditation techniques?

Opening the book, she reads the first page.

Magical beasts are creatures who have been exposed to vast quantities of mana since birth. Unlike mages, their usage of mana comes naturally, and their development in power is completely passive.

Through this study, I aim to understand the methods beasts enact to draw in atmospheric mana even in motion, to supplement my own growth.

First, we shall start with a Blazing Salamander, a rare creature I found when travelling to the volcanic region in the south of the Lerus Isles…

Emily swiftly devours the book, before looking at the author and requesting any other texts they produced, along with more resources on general meditation techniques. With her focus fully on her research, time flows smoothly until a system notification interrupts her.