Ophelia ignored the looks thrown her way. Inwardly, though, her worry had eased: one year, three spells — by any measure, that standard was not high. Even though her learning speed in elemental magic was not especially fast, she had no fear of being dismissed.
In fact, that was only the minimum standard. Apprentices of past years had rarely been dismissed for this reason; what truly thinned their numbers was the pressure of examinations across so many courses.
Mage Blake held forth: "Elements encompass all things. Everything that exists within the plane and beyond it, discovered through your naked eyes, through a Mage's perception, through the touch of spiritual power — all of it is element."
"Fire." Mage Blake opened his palm, and a cluster of flame blazed above it.
"Water." The flame vanished, replaced by a globe of water.
"Ice." The water globe froze into a block of cold ice.
"Earth, light, darkness..." Mage Blake demonstrated each in turn. The crowd watched spellbound, lost in the wonder of magic.
"And wind." The Mage swept his hand, and everyone felt a faint wind curl past their ears.
"These are all elemental phenomena you can see directly with your own eyes. Elemental magic is the magic that applies them."
Mage Blake went on: "In the ancient Mage era, the ancient Mages observed day after day and turned phenomena into magic in an extremely crude fashion. That method was inefficient, because even when they comprehended a spell from it, they did not understand the principle behind it — which made the transmission of magic desperately hard in that era. A spell was usually fixed and utterly unstable, and casting it might even backfire on the Mage himself."
Everyone listened to Mage Blake with complete attention. Before they ever set foot on the Mage's path, their intuitive sense of Mages and the wonder of magic had come from elemental magic; that great power to command nature was the source of their earliest reverence.
The optical projection behind Mage Blake lit up, and three runes very familiar to everyone appeared within it.
"Fireball. You should all be familiar with it."
Everyone nodded, especially the apprentices from the barren island — the reason they had reached the academy alive was the power of Fireball.
"This is the first magic a Mage masters. In the ancient times of the Mage Plane, humanity was slaughtered by every manner of magical beast and stood at the brink of extinction; it was the creation of Fireball that let them barely survive and multiply."
Fire was the source of civilization — that seemed to hold in every world, Earth included. It was the use of fire that had let the frail individual human break free of savagery, Adam thought.
"Fireball back then was not what it is today. You should know that once you have masterfully learned these three runes, the Fireball you cast is successful and stable. But in the ancient era, Mages used magic far more dangerously."
Mage Blake paused, closed his hand on empty air, and a staff of archaic design, nearly the height of a man, appeared in his grasp. Mage Blake took out a fire-attribute energy stone and set it atop the staff, then addressed the apprentices.
"The first Mages cast spells relying on energy stones and magic staffs. They set their spiritual power vibrating with sound, and used spiritual power to excite the low-grade energy stored within the energy stone. That was how they worked magic."
Mage Blake signaled the apprentices to pay attention, then opened his mouth and uttered a few simple syllables. He waved the staff; the energy stone lit, and a fitfully burning fireball appeared at the tip.
Adam noticed that although those syllables sounded simple and meaningless, the shifts in pitch made them resonate with spiritual power — and only so could energy be drawn from the ore.
The spellcasting of the ancient Mages seemed to have nothing to do with ether or mana.
Mage Blake put the staff away and lifted the fitfully burning fireball on one palm. "This is roughly the original Fireball. It is too far back in time to verify, and modern Mages cannot fully reproduce it. You can see its condition: unstable, liable to shatter at any moment. Magic like this may well scatter on its own before it ever reaches an enemy."
A target rose before Mage Blake. He waved his hand and threw the fireball at it. The target did not stir; then a value appeared upon it — 0.25.
Mage Blake spread his hands and said, "Very low power. A spell like this today could not even kill an ordinary person."
Adam studied the target, guessing it was an alchemical product working on a principle similar to the crystal ball's. This data-driven approach was undeniably advanced and intuitive; precise numbers displayed the data precisely, free of vague descriptions like "possibly" and "probably."
Adam was still turning this over when he heard Mage Blake say, "Next, the improved Fireball."
This time there was no casting motion at all. An orange fireball appeared out of thin air and hovered steadily before Mage Blake.
"I have mobilized only apprentice-level spiritual power. This fireball is no different from the ones you can produce. Watch."
With a bang, the fireball struck the target and exploded. This time the value displayed was 1.
"Modern magic, supported by knowledge and constructed from runes, has a minimum power of one. The same low-level spell, with four times the power of the ancient magic."
"That is the power of knowledge," Mage Blake concluded.
Most of them had never known what "knowledge" — a word Mages kept on their lips — actually meant, and they still did not understand it now. But that did not stop them from yearning for it from this moment on. So Mages were not some mysterious, uncanny profession after all; so long as one had "knowledge," one could do the same things.
"The essence of Fireball is combustion; the source of its power is temperature. It is an exothermic reaction produced by a combustible acting with a combustion agent. In Fireball and most fire-element magic, the combustible is ether and the combustion agent is mana; mana excites the ether to release the magic."
Adam felt Mage Blake had not fully explained the principle of Fireball — at the very least, he had offered no introduction to ether, that mysterious and mighty substance. To put it in Earth's terms, combustion was the exothermic reaction of a combustible with an oxidizer; in the Mage World, ether clearly stood in for both conditions.
Then does a Mage's power come not from knowledge but from ether?
Listening to Mage Blake, Adam recorded it all in a form he could understand. Clearly, in worlds of this planar kind, the basic physical quantities were not essentially different; the greatest difference — and the reason such worlds possess extraordinary power — is the mysterious ether.
No, spiritual power has to be added. That is, apart from the four fundamental forces, whose form of existence is still unknown, there is a fifth fundamental force, spiritual power, and a sixth, ether. Together these six great forces build the high-magic world.
Mage Blake showed no other magic and taught no other knowledge; he kept building everything on Fireball. Ether was mentioned again and again, which only made Adam more certain of its importance.
So can it be said that everything in this world is created and unified by ether? That Mages are merely using knowledge to explore ether?
Adam knew that his shallow understanding of this world was nowhere near enough to investigate a question that reached to the world's very essence; he did not even know whether the question itself had any practical meaning. But there was one thing he could now be entirely certain of.
And that was that the value of the fragmented knowledge he had obtained from the "virus" had dropped once more. Because ether existed, this world's own magitech science and Earth's science had diverged from the very beginning; whether that knowledge even held in this world was now uncertain. Perhaps it was worth only the faintest bit of reference?
At the end of the lesson, Mage Blake released three rune groups of three runes each: the water-element Water Screen, a defensive spell; the wind-element Wind Blade, the spell William had once triggered from a magic item aboard the ship; and the earth-element Earth Spike, an attack spell.
"The element knowledge of your free first year will not teach you anything profound. Your task for this year is to learn three elemental spells. You may also pay to study the rune groups of other low-level elemental spells in the library, but three is the minimum requirement."
"In the lessons to come, you may bring me the problems you run into while constructing runes. Of course, do not waste my time with stupid questions. I dare say the consequences are something you would rather not bear."
With that, Mage Blake left the classroom. This time the apprentices' enthusiasm rose even higher; unlike the morning's meditation method, seeing the power of magic with their own eyes stirred them far more — especially with the chance to master that power themselves.
To Adam, such simple magic was not the least bit difficult. He had spotted the common ground among the rune groups: Fireball included, each of them contained a rune that was similar, or even identical — the one that guided mana.
As expected, ether is the source of magic.
Over the following week the apprentices sat through every free course. Each instructor had his requirements, and failing any one of them meant dismissal. None of them were difficult, but for some of the less clever apprentices they were still a tremendous trial.
To Adam, naturally, they posed no difficulty at all. Instead he grasped the meaning of the first year's study: it worked like a preparatory program back on Earth, there to pick out, from among the apprentices with qualifying spiritual power, the good seedlings suited to Mage cultivation — and then return the defective goods.
The pressure made the apprentices tense, and the atmosphere for study reached unprecedented heights. With everyone studying, Adam once again became the odd one out; the apprentices all took it that he had given up on himself.