Ch37.Second Week’s info.

My second week at the Academy I finally started my studies on Magic, last week was very hectic with regard to my clan. I have had barely any sleep, with teaching Nafets about brewing beer, setting up the brewery and starting to make plans to open a bar. I am dead tired, but I don't have anyone who is competent enough to help me out with these things yet, so I will just have to push through the first few months of this busy lifestyle. I am sure that when everything is on the right track, I will be able to hand things over to my subordinates and then I will have more time for myself.

Now from my research on Magic Rune theory, I have found that Runes are mainly found in three areas, namely found in nature, Magical Beasts, and lastly found in certain Natural and Magical phenomena.

Runes found in nature are referred to as 'Natural Runes' and are formed where Magical Energy saturates certain things over a long period of time. I am not too sure on how or why only certain things become saturated and not others that are in a similar environment, it just seems to just randomly occur. Anyway, Runes sometimes form in the center of natural objects such as rocks, trees, plants, ponds and many other locations. There have even been records where the walls surrounding a village suddenly produced a natural Rune.

Natural Runes are a type of Rune that generally has a very direct meaning, such as 'Rock', 'Water', 'Metal' and even 'Cloud', these runes are used as a kind of reaction or associated Rune where, when joined up with another Rune or group of Runes can lead to the creation of various elemental magic. For example a 'Water' Rune used in conjunction with a 'Growth' Rune and an 'Acceleration' Rune can combine into a magic that shoots a jet of water. There are seemingly infinite combinations and uses for these Runes and people are constantly discovering more uses.

The second type of runes that are found in Magical Beasts, called 'Beast Runes', are the type of runes I am most familiar with. These runes are formed within an animal when they absorb enough Magical Energy, thus transforming into a Magical Beast. These Runes generally form based on the Magical Beasts innate talents or to cover up a weakness they had before their transformation.

Beast Runes are the most diverse set of runes and can practically represent anything imaginable, from a 'Thick Skin' Rune with obvious practical applications to 'Big Mouth' Rune which would normally seem useless. The best thing about Beast Runes are that, with enough experimentation, they can be edited and changed to your liking, thus changing the base meaning of the initial Rune to become more in line with your needs. From a single Beast Rune, you can potentially create over 100 sub Runes that have had their affects changed or adapted, then from each of those 100 sub Runes, you can create another 100, and so on. Therefore, Beast Runes are the most abundant type of Rune and variations of them are found in almost every aspect of society and are constantly being studied and expanded upon by Mage Scholars.

The last type of Runes are the rarest as well as the most powerful type of Rune, these Runes that are formed within Natural and Magical Phenomena, such as natural disasters and Energy whirlpools. These Runes are called 'Special Runes' since a single Rune can contain the meaning and abilities of multiple others. These Runes can be found when nature causes a disaster, such as an earthquake, tsunami, volcanic eruption or even a lightning storm. You will generally find that these natural disasters are powered by a single massive Rune.

The reason why these Runes are so rare, is that in order to study these Runes, you will have to face the disaster head on and get to the center of the storm, so to speak, and then study the Rune while the disaster rages on. You will have a limited time to study the Rune as it will disappear as soon as the phenomena ends. These runes are such a rare commodity that anyone who is successful in learning one will generally keep it to themselves and never let anyone know they are in possession of a Special Rune.

If someone were to master one of these runes and successfully add it to their own magic circle, they will almost instantly become a Master Mage. The reason for this is that, once the Special Rune enters your body it tends to break up within you and based on what type of Special Rune you absorbed, it will then rewrite the Rune Circles you have already formed and expand upon them. I don't have too much information on how or why this occurs as anybody who has ever been lucky enough to experience this, tends to keep the secrets to themselves.

What I have found fascinating is that contrary to what I first believed, Circle Magic is not the world's mainstream magic, far from it. Over 10 000 years ago, before the great war, the worlds races were separated and each discovered Runes in different ways, they therefore developed Magic differently. Each Race, due to their completely different physiology and talents, have developed their own magical system using Runes.

The Humans created the system of absorbing Runes into their bodies and through numerous trials and errors, discovered that the optimal number of Runes that should be used to form a circle. This number is between six and twelve, less than six Runes will result in the circle not being diverse enough and you won't be able to form a complete external magic that is of any use. Even though it is possible to create a Magic circle with more than twelve runes, the problem with this lies in the fact that each Rune needs time to create, master and link to the others, thus resulting in the more Runes you use to create your Magic Circle, the longer it will take you to master. Using any more than twelve Runes will most likely take too long to master and result in you running out of time and potential before actually becoming a powerful mage.

Talented Humans aim to form a twelve Rune Circle at each level, therefore becoming much more powerful than those who could only form a circle with Six or Nine Runes. The biggest limit with regard to Circle Magic is that your first circle defines your future, if you aim too high and make a twelve Circle for your first circle, you are forced to form twelve circles on your remaining circles. Therefore, if you are not talented enough, but still manage to form a twelve Circle first, you will most likely only end up becoming a Third Circle Mage due to all the time that was wasted, thus achieving far less than you would have, had you chosen to form a smaller Magic Circle.

Now I don't have too much information on the other races' magical systems, but from my research, I have discovered a few interesting things.

Firstly Elven Magic is the most extreme, they rely on their insane natural talent in magic and comprehension as well as their naturally long lifespan to simply master as many Runes as they can. They are able to quickly form Runes in the air using their Magical Energy and then they are able to combine and form complex magics with hundreds of Runes making up a single spell. They spend their time completely memorizing and understanding a rune, and once they have completely understood a Rune, they are able to form it without much effort. This is one of the reasons that they are feared by many other Races as there are some old Elf monsters that have been alive for over 4000 years and can form a single magic spell using thousands of different Runes…

Yes I know they are a scary bunch, the only real limit to their magic is that they require enough magical energy in order to cast Magic and since they don't absorb Runes into their bodies, the Magical Energy that they absorb, tends to be of a much lower quality than Humans. Therefore they require much more energy to cast a spell of the same level.

Next is the Dwarven magical system, they have taken a completely different route than any other race, well maybe the early goblins were similar but they are long gone. The Dwarves forge an artifact that they form a bond with, they then continue to inscribe Runes onto their Artifact and cast magic by pouring Magical Energy into the artifact and activating the Runes of their choosing through this artifact. The greatest advantage of this is that the time required to cast a magic is almost instant, the downside is that every artifact has limited space to carve runes on to, so they tend to all be specialized Mages.

There are obviously far more specifics regarding the workings of these systems that I don't have access to, however, I still find the idea of these Dwarven Artifacts an act of absolute genius as they can forge multiple Artifacts, each with a different purpose and potentially become a specialist in every field! Unfortunately Dwarves have a very straight forward personality and they don't want to waste time on refining and inscribing multiple personal artifacts as they would rather spend that time on mining or getting drunk. With the protection of the Beastmen, most of them don't feel the need to become overly powerful.

I don't have too much more information on the other Races magic, but from what I have found, the Beastmen tend to use magic in a similar way to Magical Beasts, where they concentrate on a single rune, making that rune more and more powerful until that single rune can overpower any other Magical Spell combination.

I have no information on the Giants magic, I do however have some on the Demons that live far up North in an isolated volcanic region next to the sea, and the Hobbits who live in a hill area to the far West. These races were not involved in the Great war as they were located too far away from the other races and were only discovered long after the war had ended.

The Demons have a Magical Core that can absorb any Rune, thus allowing the Demons to use basically any Rune they absorb almost instinctively. This insane talent has caused them to have a massive ego and resulted in the suppression of a few other races, therefore the Demons are attacked every one in a while by the other races in order to remove some of their talents and prevent them from becoming so powerful that they take over the whole continent.

The Hobbits are a strange race who can naturally manipulate certain Natural Runes; this includes Nature based Special Runes. They have almost no talent Beast Runes or any of the Natural runes that are formed within man made objects, but when it comes to Nature based Natural Runes they can understand and use them after a single glance. Therefore they created their own little system of using these Runes to manipulate nature. They can make trees or plants grow faster and then manipulate these plants to attack their enemies. The most powerful Hobbit in recorded history was one who was lucky enough to witness an 'Earthquake Rune' as well as a 'Lightning Storm' Rune and after that he could cause an earthquake or a storm whenever he wanted. The truly scary part about him was that it costed him barely any magical power, since nature itself seemed to be helping and supplying him with energy. The lucky thing is that Hobbits are a naturally timid and inquisitive race, they hardly ever leave their communities and when they do they will never actively start a fight.

Now with each of these types of Runes, there are different levels involved depending on the system, unfortunately I only have information regarding the Circle Magic system. In this system, each layer they progress, the Runes will become larger and more powerful. For example a Magic Gathering rune you use in the first circle will be the same in you third circle. The difference is that in the third circle, your Magical Energy is much purer and thicker so when creating the Rune it will inevitably be much larger and more powerful, thus enhancing its abilities. This is a very intricate field of knowledge and only those who concentrate on only studying these rules tend to understand the reasoning behind it. There are, however; people who use the exact same Runes from the First Circle all the way to the end, just having that circle becoming more and more powerful. These people are called specialists and they can become very powerful in one aspect, but are completely useless in other aspects.

Just because you don't add a Rune to your Circle doesn't mean that you can never use that Rune in magic, all Runes can be used, it is just that you will have to rely on yourself to form that Rune externally and add it to a magic circle. This process takes time and if you are in the middle of a battle, that extra time will most likely cost you your life. That is why nobody really does this in the Magic Circle system.

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--(Hi All, this is still just a basic explanation of the Magic system and will be further specified and expanded upon later in the novel. I hope I have explained it decently . . .

The most important fact I am trying to convey in this chapter is that the most important part of Magic are 'Runes' and not the system you follow to improve. [e.g 'Circle Mage system'] and can be used in an almost endless amount of ways to improve and become stronger.

I will be creating a character sheet in the Aux Vol as soon as Rob reaches Circle 1 Mage, I will regularly update it so that it is easier to track his progress and Runes.

I hope you enjoyed the chapter and let me know if you have any questions! )--