A touch of light reading
Half a year passed.
My parents finally let me walk around the house by myself. Soon, I had gone to every nook and cranny of my home. I found a small, dimly lit room hidden in the corner of my house that overlooked the Garden of the Forgotten.
I would often sit there and contemplate what I would do with this newly given life.
After a while, I had formulated a plan for the next few years or so. I needed to learn certain skills to be able to whatever I wanted in the future. A few of them were quite obvious, like being literate and able to speak this world's language fluently.
Speaking of the world's language, I had only realised that I have been conversing in a language that was different from the English I was used to speaking in. It had seemed that Eostre had given me basic knowledge on how to understand this world's language.
On the other hand, Eostre forgot to give me the ability to understand the words written down. All the signs and words written on labels looked like Ancient Greek to me.
That fucking useless goddess.
Anyhow, literature was important. How else would I be able to write down any of my thoughts? Or understand any of the books written in this world?
So, I started searching for books to read around the house.
I quickly found the bookshelves that were in my parents room. As I was still too short to reach the books on the bookshelves, I sat down and waited patiently for one of my parents to come stumbling into their room to help me.
Sure enough, Maria came looking for me. Seeing my on the floor, not saying a word, she gasped in surprise.
"Spectre, are you ok?"
"Mama, can I have book?"
Curse my baby language. The grammar is so broken.
Maria looked surprised at my request. I guess it's unusual for a baby to request for a book at the age of 3 and a half.
"Sure thing, baby! Do you want Mama to read it to you?"
It would certainly be made easier to identify what she was reading with the words anyway.
I nodded my head. Maria picked me up and propped the book in front of me. She started to read to me.
Maria did this every night before my bedtime. Before long, I could identify the words quite easily.
After that, I started to read the books by myself.
My parents quite a number of books. However, most of them were on the same topic, so I just picked out three that I could read to learn more about this world.
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Typhon's World proved to be a very informative book above the world I was bored into. I had information about the different countries, continents and beings that reside in this world.
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Like the title stated, the book provided detailed explanations, graphs and characteristics of beasts known throughout the world. It also stated tactics to defeat such beasts, which would prove useful to me if I was ever in a sticky situation with any of these beasts.
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This book interested me the most. I was eager to learn magic as it has proven itself to be an irreplaceable part of everyday life here. Hence, I was eager to read this book to learn how to control the mana in my body.
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I picked up the book about magic and opened it. Reading through the contents, I grasped a few basic contents of magic.
1. All types of magic were classified by the type of element or power they use to operate, as well as the content of the magic.
The content of magic were broadly classified as these:
Some magic overlap with each other, such as some
2. Magic can only be used by providing "energy". This "energy" is usually mana from a person's mana pool. There are a few exceptions though.
Sometimes, scrolls are used to for
Mana can be regenerated naturally over time. There was some chemical formula for it, but I was too lazy to learn it for now.
3. Mana could be increased over time, but it was hard.
I was disappointed by this fact. This meant my daily breathing exercises did not amount to much. All that good and diligent effort for nothing.
4. Magic could be produced by four things.
A. Incantations. Incantations uses your vocal sound waves to materialise into matter in spells.
B. Wands. Wands reduces the time to say incantations to almost nothing, by utilising cores in the wands to carry out magic instead. Usually, a flick of a wand is all people need to cast magic. Cores in the wands can amplify a magic user's magic without costing mana.
Basically, a magic spell that can create one ice cube with a certain amount of mana can be amplified to twenty or thirty more ice cubes with a wand.
C. Scrolls. This is used by releasing the condensed forms of mana to form magic. Simple.
D. Magic Matrices. Magic Matrices were the magic circles in the light novel I used to read. They're large drawings on a surface to activate magic. Users pour magic into the Magic Matrix to activate it.
That was the basic contents of Magic.
I was eager to start performing magic, but I was not confident that I would have enough mana to be able to utilise magic. So I just kept to reading about magic instead.
I still did my breathing exercises. The book did say it was an effective way of growing your mana pool.
And so, I lived a relatively normal life for the rest of the year.
My parent never really questioned the things I did. They assumed this was part of the "King of Phantoms" bullshit. How naive are parents?
Anyway, I constantly thought and dreamed about the day I could perform magic.
It was not until the day I blew up the house did I learn that magic could be dangerous also.