The Strongest Spellblade

The small palm sized metal ball hit the side of the maze and a buzzer went off. I slowly adjusted the thread of Mana that twisted through the maze so the ball was no longer touching.

“You are losing structure at this location. Tighten up your curve here,” the instructor used a rod to point out the portion of the maze I was sending a Mana thread through. I carefully made the adjustments. “Continue.”

The training method for Mana Manipulation was highly structured to maximize level gain as quickly as possible. It was an instructor not a Tutor. A Tutor would have high skill levels in the skill and skill levels in Tutoring or Empowered Tutoring. An instructor knew the skill, but they followed a detailed lesson plan that a professor had created in the College of Advancement or in one of its affiliated training halls.

The idea being that a student would perform certain steps in various tasks and the instructor would correct them. By completing all tasks a student would maximize the skill in question. The gain from the structured teaching method offsetting the lack of teaching skills the instructor had.

The instructor just needed to know the steps and have the equipment on hand to teach a student. Learning was then determined by how quickly a student could complete the various steps.

Even with targeted training like this, it wasn’t abnormally fast, just very consistent and dependent on how quickly one was able to learn. This kind of structured learning was what the College of Advancement was most known for. That’s why even people who dropped out before their seventh year were considered quite successful, since they would have mastered several skills.

The speed of learning ultimately came down to each individual and how quickly they were able to work through the lessons. For Mana Manipulation I had to extrude a string of Mana from my body and work on controlling that string to move a metal ball through a maze. Well less of a maze, since I knew the path, but more of an obstacle course.

I had to keep my thread in position while moving it up and down to get through each opening to the next vertical passage which would have the next gate on the opposite side. The buzzer went off as the metal ball touched a side of the maze. I carefully moved it away and the buzzing noise stopped.

“You let your Mana thread become distorted here and here,” the instructor pointed out with his rod.

“I can’t move the Mana thread anymore,” I replied just before it complete broke apart. The instructor flipped a switch to stop the buzzing.

“You lost your mental conception of the Mana thread. You need to picture it clearly to maintain its cohesion outside of your body.” The instructor moved the metal ball back to the start. “You are two thirds of the way through, but the last third is the most difficult. Tighten up your curves. Now try again.” A flip was switched I brought my hand forward extruding a Mana thread.

I could sense the Mana thread, but it wasn’t me, but an extension of my body. It was hard to precisely describe. As my skills improved, this feeling would increase. It was also why Mana Sense was a key prerequisite skill before doing Mana manipulation. If one couldn’t sense their own Mana, it was far too easy to make mistakes and progress would be a massive struggle.

The point of an instructor wasn’t to learn quickly, but consistently. The goal being to master a tier 1 skill in half a year, a tier 2 skill in a year, and a tier 3 skill within a year and a half. Higher tier skills were more difficult than just a base multiplier though. While the College of Advancement made it seem like a tier 3 skill was just three times more difficult, that aspect had come from the weight of skills on one’s soul.

In reality, gaining levels for higher tier skills was more difficult for most people. It wasn’t their fault, but just the difficulty for higher tier skills was greater, but not something that could be easily measured. That was why there were no standard time frames for tier 4 skills that were suggested by the College of Advancement and no one had mastered a tier 6 skill.

I had asked my mother about this while she had been training me, but she had told me every level was a struggle at tier 6. There were no easy paths or shortcuts unfortunately, like the College of Advancement had created for lesser skills.

After seeing the training and feeling how quickly I was advancing, I understood why my mother didn’t want me to learn like at the start. It would have created a poor mindset. There was no self-discovery, just following a lesson plan. I guess my mother’s training was like an instructor for combat skills. They weren’t as easily leveled in a safe environment.

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Also leveling skills wasn’t the end goal. I was beginning to understand why the College of Advancement had never produced a supreme legend. When things became tough, it would be too easy to stick with what one already knew and had accomplished. It was also why it wasn’t a melee combat focused school.

The best combat teacher was the Dungeon. While tutors could teach skills and help refine them, fighting was the fastest way to improve combat skills. The simple fact was that I had too many skills that needed to be leveled up.

A student at the College of Advancement was expected to gain 100 tier 1 skill levels every three months. That was the minimum requirement. Graduates earned anywhere from 3 to 5 times that much. I had talked with the instructors Thoron had arranged for me. Earning 2,000 skill levels per year would ensure someone would graduate at the top of their class.

Most graduates would get power leveled after graduation and work. About a third would return to the College to continue learning as a teaching assistant with the hope of becoming a Professor one day. Another third of graduates would die either in the dungeon or by doing something stupid trying to push skills to new heights. The last third would we hired as top advisors for other institutions, corporations, or nations.

Even my mother with her connections and my father with his wealth weren’t able to hire a graduate from the College of Advancement to Tutor me. Such individuals would rarely lower themselves to tutoring a single person just starting off with tier 1 skills.

My main issue was that I had too many skills that needed to be trained to a higher level.

Most entrants would focus on a single skill chain, like runes, and devote all their effort and time to specific skills. While it might seem that only studying tier 1 skills would make things easier in the College of Advancement, that wasn’t the case.

In years 3 and 5, tier 1 and then tier 2 skills stopped counting for the purposes of comparing students to each other and only tier 3 skills or higher would count. The end of years 3, 4, and 5 saw the number of students reduced in each year by a tenth, from 10,000 to a 1,000 and then all the way to 10.

Everyone got 3 years to try and do their best, but the environment was designed to be incredibly cutthroat. For Tutor Damian to make it to year 5, meant that he made the cutoff of 100, but didn’t make the cutoff of 10 that would eventually go on to graduate.

The more I learned about the College of Advancement, the more I knew I needed to be able to push myself and gain skill levels. Especially for being the number one student. The top three students earned a scholarship and the top student from each year got a single tutoring session with The Mathemancer, the founder and dean of the College of Advancement.

As a supreme legend, similar to my mother, getting a single day worth of tutoring from him was insanely valuable. The reverence people spoke of The Mathemancer put into perspective how valuable the year my mother had spent training me actually was.

The buzzer went off and was then turned off. My Mana thread had broken completely. “These three locations were unstable in your Mana thread,” the instructor pointed out as the small metal ball was moved back to the start. I took his words and internalized them and started over on the exercise.

This exercise was important since Mana Manipulation made spell skills a lot easier to master. Similar to how Mana Sense made Mana Manipulation easier to master even if they weren’t part of a skill chain. Some skills had synergies outside of skill chains.

Most people tried to master Mana Manipulation before year 4 in the College of Advancement. That way they could work on tier 3 spell skills to more easily gain tier 3 skill levels and not get kicked out. The competition was insanely fierce, since each year someone remained in the College of Advancement greatly changed their possible jobs once they left.

The graduates got their pick of job, but it made a huge difference being kicked out in year 5 or year 3. The first thing anyone would ask would be what year you made it to if you said you were from the College of Advancement. The dwarven instructor that was instructing me on Mana Manipulation only made it to year 3.

That was why he was working in a training hall. And if he didn’t know Thoron, he would have struggled to get even this job. There were only so many positions for instructors and Tutors. This kind of training was on the more expensive side, which made it a struggle for regular people or dwarves to afford such training.

I was paying a gold a day for this kind of training. While I could have gotten it for free at the College of Advancement, I wanted to mentally prepare myself for this type of training. The only other option was going into the Dungeon. And I had enough of that after spending a year down there with my mother.

Even after going to the 8th layer, it was a grind, an incredibly exhausting grind that I needed a break from. While my mother could say that was weakness, I had no doubt she had taken breaks during her decades in the dungeon. And while fighting Champion monsters in risky battles would push me further, I had way too many skills.

That was the real problem, that I couldn’t do anything about. My foundation was too large. Instead of 20 skills at most, I had 64 skills the last time I checked, not counting the tier 6 curse skill I was afflicted with. I only had a few junk skills, the rest of them I needed to level up. Runes Mastery and Weapons Mastery would be a struggle to get long term. I didn’t want to even think how long whatever resistance end skill I needed would take. All of this meant that I needed to keep working as hard as possible to advance my skills.