Chapter 7 The Way Of Fire

I slept nearly for a day, but I felt a lot better now. It was time to go and do some paperwork so I could get some free lessons. When I pulled the chair away and lifted the bar, I realized that I didn’t have to unlock my door—it was already unlocked.

"Well, that’s mildly concerning," Now I’m glad that I always remember to put the bar down and a chair in front of the door. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do the same when I left my room, but I didn’t leave anything behind that would be worth stealing.

It took me a bit of time to find the proper paperwork and to fill it out to get my free magic lesson. There were a few more lessons I was going to get for free, but I first wanted to start with this one. The look on the receptionist's face when she realised what she was looking at was priceless. I don’t think many even knew about this as a possibility and just paid for the lesson.

The lesson was in one day, so I spent today just walking around the city and the Guild compound, getting to know all the places. One thing I had now was money, and while I didn’t have a lot of it, I could buy some items, perhaps even another skill crystal, but the problem was I didn’t have any idea what my build could or should be.

Maybe there's a trainer here that could help figure out what I’m good at. I should look into that after the free lessons. There were about 30 people in the class with me the next day, waiting for the teacher. Almost all of the teachers I had were old, so I was a bit surprised when a young-looking woman walked in, wearing the attire of a professor.

"A good day to you all. I will start immediately. First of all, I know that basically all of you call it magic, but the thing you use to power your skill crystals is actually called mana. It is produced by your heart crystal, and the stronger you get, the more of it you will have. Every single one of you has access to the magic passive tree that is coloured blue."

"Because of that, everyone thinks mana or magic inside of them is blue. That is not strictly correct, but it's also not wrong. It simply depends on the person, and it really doesn't matter. While most only use their mana, or what it’s called commonly—magic..." She let out a heavy sigh. "It’s something I have tried to fight for quite a while now, but I’m just going to keep calling it magic. Damn peer pressure," she said quite softly, but we could still all hear her.

"Anyway, what most don’t know is that you can use your magic for other things besides powering skill crystals. You could actually learn to cast magic, although it's incredibly slow and really hard and mainly used for non-combat applications. There are, however, a few things I will teach you today that will help you with survival."

"Every one of you can concentrate and channel your magic. Each of you, with a little bit of practice, can also influence that magic to have an elemental effect. It won’t save you from a blizzard, but it is possible to channel magic into your own body with an element of fire attached to it to warm you up a little bit.”

“The most useful, I think, I have found is that with enough concentration you could actually create a flame on top of your finger, so you could always have access to fire no matter the situation."

She then produced the small candle-sized flame on top of her finger in just an instant. "Of course, for you, it will take a while longer. There are other uses as well—not that helpful—but for example, doing the same thing but with your entire hand the cold affinity, you could actually cool down your drink. This exercise also has another effect, that it helps you channel magic better, which in part helps you activate your skill crystals faster, and you could push more power into it."

She then made a few more demonstrations; all of them looked quite useful, but I could see the reasoning for why the small flame would be the most useful. She then explained a little bit more about channeling and how to move magic around your body. It seems that the skill crystals acted like a focus point, making it a lot easier to channel magic into it, but you could do it without that focus point as well, although it was really hard.

Every single one of us was instructed on how to produce that small flame. I concentrated on trying to move the magic surrounding my heart crystal towards my left hand and then to be above my finger. My concentration was broken when someone yelped.

"Yes, be very careful, because if the flame touches your skin, it will still burn, so make sure to project the magic a little bit away from the finger—that's the hard part," our professor instructed.

Did she purposely wait for someone to mess up to tell us that? Well, whatever, I continued to focus. Some others had also succeeded, but their flame was barely there compared to the professor. Then I finally felt it—the magic gathered at my fingertips, and just by thinking about fire, it started to burn like a candle.

"Oh, another one of you succeeded—oh, but that flame is quite big. I guess it’s time to start teaching you guys about affinity. You see, this individual has taken the fire affinity node," she said while pointing at me. I didn’t comment on her mistake of assuming that. She then went to the blackboard and started to draw.

"You see, the magic passive tree starts out like every other one with two general nodes improving your magic a little bit. The second node immediately branches off into the main tree and a side branch that has five nodes. If you pick one from the side branch, you will specialize in one of these elements: fire—the most common one; cold—the second most common one; lightning—the hardest to control but the strongest; wind—the most versatile; and earth—with the best defensive capabilities.

"Whatever you choose, know that your main tree will completely change from what you picked, and the other four choices become unavailable to you. Only do this if you're absolutely certain of your choice, as this choice cannot be undone by anything. After your tree is changed, there are a few nodes you can pick to give you access to more specialized affinities and even a chance to pick up another major one.”

"There are so many builds that I won’t get into this; otherwise, we will be here for months. That being said, almost every build goes a little bit into the magic tree, as the first few nodes are quite useful to increase your magic capacity. Another note to give is that specializing does give you 10% resistance in that specialization, and you need that 10% if any of you are aiming to get close to the theoretical maximum of 90% resistance to an element."

The lesson was quite densely packed, and she barely stopped talking, but I managed to absorb all the brilliant information she was giving. I now have multiple exercises to help me increase my magic channeling capabilities and a much better idea about the magic passive tree as a whole. There was a lot to absorb, but my main question was why my magic seemed to have a fire affinity. I guess I knew where to put my level up.

Back in my room, I concentrated on finishing the level-up and activating the first node of the magic tree. As soon as it lit up, the next part of the tree was revealed. There was the main branch that split into three pathways ending in nodes that improved my magic in different ways more than just the general small improvement the first and second nodes would give.

There was also the side branch the professor talked about. There were five choices there, and I expected one of them to be lit up and the others unavailable, but that wasn't the case. I wasn’t specialized.

Well, damn it, now I didn’t know what was going on. At first, I expected that perhaps because of the fire immunity and because the fire affinity node also gave fire resistance, it would have also been selected, but it wasn't.

This was starting to get really frustrating. What happened to my original plan? I would get a heart crystal with the generic strength boost and just follow the most popular and well-understood path to power. Now I had to scramble without even truly understanding why certain stuff was happening to me.

Well, perhaps it’s still selected and it’s just not showing up for some reason. There was an easy way to figure that one out, as the professor said that when you specialize, you couldn't use the other affinities even while doing magic without skill crystals. So I sat down and started to concentrate with a glass of water in my hand.

Half an hour later, I drank water that was distinctly colder than it was before. So no, I still had access to every affinity; it just seems that my fire one is perhaps not as strong as if I was specialized but certainly stronger than it should be.

So is this the situation of the best of both worlds? All of this started to feel unfair. If I was someone else who told me about their powers and they did what mine do I think I would be jealous, fortunately I wasn’t someone else, so I could feel at least good about having those advantages. Is this what winning the lottery feels like?

I had three more classes to take, and one by one I went to get my free admissions. The first one was their four-day course on general crafting. Now, I likely wouldn’t be able to do basically anything impressive with crafting, but what it gave me was a lot of knowledge on how much things were worth and what to keep and not.

After that, I did the same with alchemy, which was a three-day course. It was, of course, only the basics, but I should now be able to recognize the signs of plants that could be good for alchemy, and while I most likely wouldn’t know the prices or even what they would be called, at least I should be able to make a little bit extra money.

The final one was a two-day course on the basics of path building. It has been a day since that ended, and my brain still hurts. At least now I knew that I wasn’t special about getting free passive skill points, as the teacher called it. Apparently, you got free points or lit-up nodes if your heart crystal synergized with a node, like, for example, improved strength, which would mean that you would get five more nodes unlocked in the attack tree for free.

That actually made me feel a bit better, but that wasn't always the case. He said about 70% of the time your heart crystal would not unlock anything, and if it did, the average was only about four free nodes. On average, from all adventurers who start their adventure journey, only about 0.1% reach level 100 and above, and it takes them quite a while to do so. I, on the other hand, already had more nodes unlocked than most when they reached level 100.

My advantage was massive, but that didn't really mean much if I couldn’t leverage it properly. That bird that carried off someone exactly like me wouldn’t even be halted by my resistances, and I would be carried away exactly the same way as him.

What I needed was gear, skill crystals, and skill gems that worked well together, that just didn’t add together but multiplied their advantages. It was time to do a lot of reading—a lot of it. I needed to delve into path building to figure out how I could leverage my advantages the most.