MAGUS INFINITE

I sat cross-legged in the center of the small chamber, the Inscriptions on the walls glowing faintly around me like a constellation of frozen light. The irony was not lost on me that a Sovereign of Darkness had built what can be seen as a temple of light in the heart of his own prison.

The more I saw and understood about life, I began to appreciate the duality of nature, but I was not here to read Seed’s words; I was here to write my own.

I looked at my Titles, Heaven Beast Tamer and Demon Slayer, and I quietly switched out Demon Slayer for Lightning Arcanist, and I immediately sensed the effect.

At this point, my soul could feel the nature of my Titles more closely, and with Demon Slayer equipped, I could faintly sense the distant Earth Gates, and I could almost taste the stench of the Soul Flayer and other demonic presence in this place that I was not going to be investigating at this point.

This Title was made to hunt demons, and the pleasure it gave me when I killed demons was unequalled, but this was not a place for hunting, but for learning, and in that case, Lightning Arcanist was a far more suitable option than any Title that I had.

This Legendary Title had several powerful active abilities, like Arcane Efficiency, that made all my lightning skills and disciplines cost thirty percent less Anima, even further reducing the cost of my spells if I was casting Adept Tier and lower, meaning that with my Anima regeneration rate, as long as I keep casting only lightning spells, I could essentially have limitless Anima available to me.

There was also Law Resonance, Greater Storm Sense, Domain Affinity, Lightning Incarnate, and Storm Favor.

Any one of these was incredibly powerful, but all of them were combined into a single Title, and after fighting and killing multiple Arcanists, I know that there was no way they had a Title that was similar to this one, or it would be very challenging fighting them, not even to killing them, even as a Death Titan.

I believed that the Titles I acquired must pull from my actions and my foundation as a mage, and not all mages in existence could have done what I had done, or had a body like mine, meaning that if they had this same Title, I doubted it would be the same as mine, nor possess a tenth of its effects, after all, some of these abilities were pulled from my Celestial Tier skills.

There was a reason why this was a Legendary Tier Title, but it also had one powerful effect that made it essential at the moment, and that was Arcanist Authority, which accelerated my Lightning Resonance growth, and most importantly, it gave me the ability to perceive and interact with Lightning Law Shards directly.

The creation of the Law of Flesh that came from the fusion of five Law Shards, my Endurance, and Titan’s Marrow under the pressure of powerful Celestial Essence had shown me a path to the Sovereign Tier, and I had to do something similar, but I would not have the pressure of the Earth Gates, nor would fortune favor me the second time... If I were going to learn the Laws of Lightning, I would have to excavate them by myself.

Switching Titles made my breathing a bit longer, and an unconscious weight I had in the back of my head vanished as Demon Slayer was placed aside. I had always been aware of demonic energies in this place, and Demon Slayer only highlighted this problem, and now that it was gone, I was able to breathe again.

Everything came into focus, especially my domain that rippled around me in strange waves that I was not fully noticing before.

The room changed, well, not the room, but you understand what I mean; it was my sense of it. The Stillness of the Storm was suddenly cheaper to hold, like I could breathe easier because I stopped clenching my jaw, and the walls of inscriptions came into a kind of focus that was spectacular, and something in the back of my head went very quiet... the rage, the loss and the pain... they slowly faded away.

And in that quiet I heard, of all things, a memory of the Academy slipped into my soul.

∞

I was fourteen, and it was the ninth day of my first term. It was raining on the north cloister so hard that the gutters had given up, and the sound of it came through the high windows of the second-floor teaching hall as a flat grey roar.

At that time, I did not know that mages had the power to control the weather, and they could have stopped this storm if they wanted; instead, they let it pour out its fury until it was spent.

In the storm, Aldenmere smells like wet stone and lamp oil and chalk. I have been in these halls hundreds of times, but this was the first time I was able to cleanly perceive this smell, and what was amazing was that this was coming from my memories... It seemed I was able to gain more truths from my past when I went back to my earlier memories.

There were fifty-one of us in Cohort Twelve, all in grey, with the blue lidless eye on our backs and no crosses inside it, and we knew even then that not all of us would be worthy of that cross, not all of us would reach the level of Adepts.

I glanced to the side at Bari, the boy that I made friends with on my first day at school, or at least, I hoped we were friends. He came from a wealthy home and wore nice clothes. Even now, he had bribed a second-year for a seat by the brazier and was already asleep behind his own arm.

I think he had invited me over, but I pretended not to see. I wanted to observe him a bit more before I decided whether I wanted to move forward with this friendship. Children of his standing could afford mistakes, but I do not think I could make bad friends here, or I would not be able to afford the consequences of this.

I pushed the book for the next class closer to me, Foundations of Enquiry, a rather voluminous tome with hundreds of pages, and I wondered how long it would take me to read and understand all of it.

At the back of the book was a name, Halloway, one of the major families of the Academy, and the first Sovereign of the Academy. I did not know what a Sovereign was, but I could faintly understand the significance of that Title even as a boy.

Our teacher, who was coincidentally called Halloway, came in eleven minutes late, dripping, with a canvas satchel and a cheap iron lantern, and he set the lantern on the demonstration table and looked at us for a while without saying anything, which we would later learn was his whole personality... You know, those silent brooding types. By all the lights in heaven, was I slowly becoming this sort of person?

Master Halloway was not a great mage; that’s what I heard some people say. He was an Adept who had been one for a hundred and fifty years and would die one, and he taught first-term foundations to fourteen-year-olds in a hall with a slightly bad roof... but if I was to be fair to him, he was the first person who taught me how to think like a mage, and this made him a great mage in my book.

”Right,” he called out without any indication. ”Someone tell me what magic is.”