17 - The Mystery of Magic

My body has changed a lot over the last few days.

The fat covering my belly was starting to disappear, my arms, which had been thin, were slowly becoming thicker with the appearance of muscles, my legs were also becoming more toned and stronger, even my posture was getting better.

But my body wasn't the only thing that had changed about me.

I wasn't foolish enough to use Neurological False Feedback just to develop my body, after all I didn't even know how to fight properly.

The use of it on my body was only to keep me healthy and to satisfy a vain desire I had in the other world to have a beautiful body.

If at some point I needed to engage in combat, the best way to do it would be to use magic.

Not only because I had an extremely high amount of Mana compared to Players of my Rank, but also because I could boost my Mana even further by using my game.

If I dedicated 100% of my game's boost to my body, every 1 hour I would receive the result of 1 hour of gym, if I used 100% of it for my magic, every 1 hour I would receive the result of 1 hour of meditation.

Just like training in a gym, meditation is also slow and the results take time to appear.

Even if I meditated for 10 hours, my Mana would only increase by 0.1 units.

If it were that easy to increase the amount of Mana, the number of Players trying to become Game Creators would be much higher than it is today.

But despite the slow growth, the last few days with the game increasing my Mana have started to pay off.

By dividing the Neurological False Feedback into 50% for my body and 50% for my Mana during all the hours of the day that I was awake, my Mana rose from the original 68 MP to 68.2 MP.

It was a small improvement, but the higher the game climbed in rank, the bigger this improvement would become!

At this point the game already had 50 MP stored, when another 50 MP accumulated I could convert this into 1 MP more for my total amount of Mana, and considering the speed this was accumulating now that I had more Players, it's likely that tomorrow I'll already be able to convert my first MP from my game!

The more the game grows, the faster the Game Core will accumulate MP, until when there are around 2,000 average Players per day I'll finally get 2 MP per day.

From then on, the time I would spend making improvements to the game would decrease even more!

But not only would the game's development improve, but I could also practice magic without a guilty conscience!

Since I came to this world, in order to make the best use of my time and not delay my future development, I've only focused my MP on developing Runestone.

Now that the game was stable and the number of players online was rising steadily, I knew that as long as I saved 65 MP to develop 5 cards a day, the rest of the Mana I would have available after recovering at noon would be free for me to spend on whatever I wanted.

And I couldn't wait to experiment with magic!

Before the fusion of the two memories, my talent for learning magic was terrible, to the point that after confirming that I couldn't learn magic from books, I gave up everything apart from meditation, which would help me with Game Creating.

Now with the otherworldly memory, a Theo who never had the chance to experience magic in real life, being limited to experiencing this kind of thing only through games, anime, movies or other media, I was itching to try it again.

Sure, before starting I did my duty of developing the 5 cards of the next Patch in the Runestone, rested and meditated to recover the Mana I spent doing that, had lunch and only at 3pm was I free to practice.

What gave me the confidence to try it again was realizing that after merging the two memories, my talent for learning Game Creating had improved by leaps and bounds.

I was still studying it on a daily basis and although the content was getting more and more difficult, I was still managing to follow the book's teachings and learn everything that was available to me.

'If my talent has increased like this for Game Creating, maybe it has for Magic too, right?!'

Looking at the large book in my hand with the title [Spells, Runes and Everything Nice!] I let out a laugh as I imagined the appearance of the author who decided on that name.

Opening the first page, the feeling I felt when trying to learn Game Creating after the merger returned!

[Magic, as a fundamental expression of the world, is the art of shaping the energy that permeates all things. Although many believe that magic is a gift reserved for the few, the truth is that it is available to more people than you might think. However, manipulating magic requires discipline, concentration and a deep respect for the invisible forces that surround us.

For beginners, the first step is to understand that all magic is born from three essential elements: intention, which is the clear purpose of your desire; focus, which guides the energy in the right direction; and energy, which is drawn both from the world around you and from within yourself. Without the balance of these three pillars, any attempt at magic is doomed to failure or, worse, disaster...]

Reading carefully, my mind began to absorb the book's explanation like a sponge.

Some of this knowledge I already knew because of my memories of this world that tried to study magic in the past, but most of it I didn't remember, so I just read and learned as if it was the first time I'd come into contact with it.

[Although magic may seem like a complex and mysterious art, all great knowledge begins with the simplest steps. A magician's first challenge is to learn to feel the mana inside them. This subtle energy that flows like a silent river through the body. Only after understanding this internal flow should you move on to control, shaping and directing the mana in harmony with your will. Only then will you be able to practice controlling the mana outside your body.

This is the foundation of all spells, because manipulating energy in the external world requires absolute precision. When Mana leaves the magician's body, the reaction of this with any ambient energy can generate intense interference that will affect the spell, without control of this Mana a disaster can ensue...]

The more I read about magic, the more fascinated I became.

Instead of ethereal knowledge with confusing explanations written by someone without a methodology, the way this book taught magic was as didactic as any other subject I had studied in the past.

Feeling Mana and controlling it internally is something I already knew how to do, after all the exercise to practice it is meditation, something I use very often.

The only thing I had yet to learn was how to control Mana outside the body.

This was the point that seemed so difficult for me before the fusion that I gave up.

But this time I wouldn't give up.

My goal was to read the book up to the part where it explained how external Mana control worked and try to learn even better every explanation the book provided.

Although I had to re-read things I already knew to get to this point, I didn't skip any paragraphs and read the book with total attention, picking up on details I had missed when I first learned about it.

I'm sure that just from what I learned by reading it I could improve my meditation by at least 15%!

When I finally got to the part about out-of-body Mana control, night had come and the dormitory was already getting dark, making me turn on the light to continue reading.

Reading this part that I hadn't mastered was more difficult than what I already knew, but as I read I began to notice small mistakes that I made when trying to control Mana outside the body, for example:

Reading carefully I noticed a small part talking about how my breathing influenced the flow of Mana.

Before, I thought that my Mana dispersed for no reason when I tried to shape it outside the body, but I realized that it was because of my body's irregular breathing that deregulated the flow of Mana.

When a mage made his Mana leave his body, the flow of Mana had to be synchronized with his breathing.

Another thing I noticed was the lack of focus when trying to imagine complex forms for the Mana, my mind would become so scattered that when I managed to get the Mana out, it would get out of control.

To make sure, I kept reading the book until I was sure the subject had changed, even learning a basic spell to create a sphere of light.

So, placing the book next to me, I stretched out my hand and began to feel the Mana in my body.

Following all the steps taught in the book, I began to control the Mana inside my body.

Making sure I was doing everything exactly as taught, I finally controlled the Mana to pass through my outstretched hand.

Surprisingly, the sensation was very similar to controlling Mana in Game Core to create games.

Within seconds a small sphere of light blue Mana was floating in my palm.

If I stopped using Mana it would fall apart in a few seconds, but as long as I kept my control over the Mana, the longer it would last.

According to the book, this was a good way for beginners to learn to control Mana outside the body. The longer the Mana remained outside the body and the more complex the form the Mana took, the more fruitful the training would be.

At first I just kept it in sphere form, which was the simplest, as my two-world excitement was exploding at finally being able to do real magic.

After the excitement died down, I started playing around with different shapes until I felt comfortable enough to stop and try a real spell.

Remembering the book's explanation of how to do the 'Luminis' spell, I started controlling my Mana to try and replicate it.

Strangely, my Mana wasn't responding in the way I was controlling it.

Just as I was about to give up on this attempt to try again in another way, I realized something.

My Mana was getting stuck on the tip of my finger, just like when I played cards in Game Core...

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