Beginning of magic adventure.

Although the city of Culmen is said to never sleep, there was only one moment in time it was truly awake; that time was the early hours after the sun rose.

Everyone was caught up in the morning rush, wide awake and ready for the day, well, all except Ace.

"How am I not dead?"

Ace questioned himself as he stood up to massage the sore muscles he got from laying in the wrong posture for a long time.

Clearly, the person who put me here didn't put much effort into the task, almost like he flung me on to the bed. Touching my pale white skin, I was surprised at the lack of burn marks.

Last I remembered, I was burned head to toe and half dead, but now my body was healthier than it had ever been. An injury that would have taken years to heal naturally, if never, disappeared without any trace, as if were just a dream, a fantasy.

Was such the power of the bestowed?

To do things that were superior to the natural order of things, to make the impossible possible?

Ace's heart pounded in excitement at the prospect of the supernatural.

"My dreams are a but a step away, all I need to do is pass the aptitude test for the academy."

After taking deep breaths to calm down, Ace noticed that he was in a dark room with the only source of light being the window by the side of the room.

As he looked around more, he found a laptop bag sprawled across the bed, but it was different from the one he had brought to Culmen City.

Ace crawled across the bed to trap the bag, flipping it open to see a new laptop manufactured by the C.M.B.P.

"It's the latest series of C.M.B.P. laptops; the academy is really generous to give this to me; well, I almost died, so, that seems like the least they could do in compensation."

Ace zipped his laptop bag and slung it over his shoulder. Only then did he become aware of the different clothes he was wearing.

"Hmm, it must have gotten burned from the explosion from earlier."

Looking at my new outfit, I marveled at how aesthetically pleasing it was with its ink dark hue and the sparkling gold embroidery at the rim of the cloth.

"Enough dawdling, let's go register for the academy,"

Ace said to himself as he gave himself a light tap on the cheek disrupting his wandering thoughts.

Ace opened the door to see a brightly lit corridor with a series of doors parallel to each other.

'Is this the academy dormitory? It's smaller than I imagined it would be,'

Ace remarked as he walked to the door at the end of the corridor.

Ace opened the door to be met with an old man sitting on a chair reading a newspaper.

"You finally woke up, you sure took your time, Most people are fast at work by now."

Squinting my eyes to recover from the bright light of the morning sun.

The old man put the newspaper down and spoke to me.

"If you don't know where you are, we are at the academy."

'I kind of figured that one out.'

Ace thought to himself.

The old man continued his speech in a monotone voice.

"You were caught in a crossfire between two bestowed,"

"Thankfully you survived; I mean, imagine dying before experiencing the beautiful world of mana." The old man swapped his tone towards the end of his sentence from a monotone voice to one tone full of fervent admiration.

'Was the mana this man spoke of that delightful?'

Ace thought as he wondered what could make an old bestowed such as him, who had both might and riches, speak with such endless desire in his eyes.

Could Mana hold the key to eternal youth? Was that why he was so obsessed with it?

Snapping out his thoughts, Ace asked the question he had both anticipated and feared.

"Have I been detected with the aptitude needed to become a bestowed?"

He barely managed to say that, as his nervousness made it hard to speak.

"No,"

The old man said, causing despair to well up deep inside him. After struggling so hard to come to Culmen City, after almost losing his life, he didn't have the talent to become bestowed. What was he even going to do, Get a job at a boring place he didn't even want to work in, work a boring nine to five for the rest of his life, live an unremarkable life waiting for himself to become a heap of sand indistinguishable from the ground he stood on now.

Ace was sinking into the pit of despair, when the old man said something that reignited the spark of hope in his heart.

"No, I haven't checked if you have the talent to become a bestowed, and even if you didn't have the talent to become a bestowed, you can just get a job at Culmen Bestowed and Mundane Productions: you can also enjoy the mysteries of mana as a mundane employee there."

Clenching my fists, I tried to not let it show how furious I was.

'Damn that old man! He intentionally phrased his words that way to mess with me.'

Trying hard to suppress my fury, I questioned the old man. "So do you know, where I take the aptitude test?"

"Yeah, I do know, after all, I am the one who does the aptitude test." The old man said, beckoning me to the counter he was sitting at.

"Place one of your arms on this orb to test your aptitude, It generally lights up with a green colour if you have talent for vitality, blue for mana, and a transparent white glow for spirit,"

Vitality? Mana? Spirit? Those were new words in my vocabulary, but deducing from my knowledge of the language spoken on Astreal, I roughly understood.

The word vitality had associations with the words, blood and life.

Mana had associations with the words creation and construction.

And spirit had association with the two words; soul and emotion.

I focused on the orb, about to place my hand on it before suddenly the old man interrupted my action,

"Oh, and it doesn't light up if you don't have any talent to become a bestowed."

The old man startled me and reminded me about the fact that I still had the chance of not becoming a bestowed.

I gritted my teeth against each others in my mouth.

Before taking a deep breath to stop thinking about the chance of failure before plaing my hands on top of the orb.

A purple light like a pure amethyst arose from the orb, making anyone who saw it take a deep breath and admire its beauty.