Chapter 3:
A Textbook of Magic
It had been roughly two years since I’d been reincarnated. My legs had finally developed enough that I could walk.
Also, I was finally able to speak this world’s language.
✦ ✦ ✦
Having decided to give my life an honest shot this time, I first needed to make a plan.
What had I lacked in my previous life? Study, exercise, and technique, that’s what.
As a baby, however, there wasn’t much I could do. Nothing much beyond burying my face in someone’s chest when I was picked up, anyway. Whenever I did that to the maid, she made no attempt to mask the displeasure on her face; clearly, she wasn’t a fan of children.
Figuring that exercise was something that could wait, I began learning to read books around the house. The study of language is a crucial thing; almost one hundred percent of Japanese people are literate in their own language, but many of them neglect their study of English or hesitate to interact with people when abroad, so much so that the ability to speak a foreign language is a valued skill. With that in mind, I decided to make this world’s writing system my first subject.
There were only five books in our house. I didn’t know if that was because books were expensive in this world or because Paul and Zenith weren’t big readers. Probably some combination of both. As someone who used to own a collection of several thousand books—even if they were all light novels—the situation was tough to come to grips with.
Still, even five books were enough material to learn how to read. The language of this world was close to Japanese, so I was able to pick it up quickly enough. The written characters were completely different, but the grammar was close to what I was familiar with, which thankfully meant I mostly needed to learn vocabulary, a good chunk of which I’d already been exposed to. My father would read to me, which allowed me to readily pick up words. My new self being better at learning things probably had something to do with it, too.
Once I could read, I found the contents of our books pretty interesting. I’d never had fun studying at any point in my life before, but after some thought, I realized it wasn’t that different from hunting down new information about online games. And that wasn’t so bad.
Anyway, I wondered if my father knew that his infant son understood the things he was reading. I mean, I was cool with it, but I figured a normal kid my age would throw a temper tantrum or something, so that’s just what I did.
These were the five books in our house:
Wandering the World, a reference guide to the various countries of the world and their unique characteristics.
The Ecology and Weaknesses of Fittoan Monsters, which detailed the various monstrous creatures of the Fittoa Region, where they lived, and how to deal with them.
A Textbook of Magic, a wizard’s manual of attack spells, ranging from the Beginner to Advanced levels.
The Legend of Perugius, a fairytale about a summoner named Perugius and his companions, who battle a demon and save the world in a classic good-versus-evil epic.
The Three Swordsmen and the Labyrinth, a tale of action and adventure where three master swordsmen of different styles meet and head into the depths of the titular labyrinth.
Those last two were essentially fantasy novels, but the other three made for good study. It was A Textbook of Magic that particularly drew my attention. As someone who came from a world without magic, the chance to read actual documentation on it was very relevant to my interests. Reading the book taught me some of the fundamentals.
First, magic came in three types: Attack magic, to do battle against others; Healing magic, to treat the wounds of others; and Summoning magic, to call things forth. And that was it. There seemed to be lots of other things you could do with magic, but according to the textbook, magic was something birthed and developed in battle, and therefore not used much outside of combat or hunting.
Second, you needed magical power in order to use magic—meaning, anyone could use magic so long as they had magical power. There were chiefly two ways of doing this: using one’s innate magical power or drawing on the magical power imbued in an object. Either would suffice. There weren’t specific examples, but I got the impression that people who did the former were like their own power generators, whereas the second type had to use batteries.
In days of yore, the book said, people had largely used the power within their own bodies for magic. But as research on magic progressed, things got more and more complex. Accordingly, expendable sources of magical energy were developed at an explosive rate. People with strong magical reserves had been able to make do, but those who had little power couldn’t cast even basic spells, and so the old magical masters developed ways to draw power from things other than themselves and channel that into magic.
Third, there were two ways of performing magic: incantation and magic circles. This didn’t need too much explanation: It simply referred to reciting words or inscribing mystic patterns to cast a spell, respectively. In the old days, magic circles were the chief source of magical power, but in modern times, incantations were far more commonplace. In older times, even the shortest magical incantations took one or two minutes—not exactly something you could use in the heat of battle. But once you’d inscribed a magic circle, you could use it over and over again.
Incantations started becoming the norm when one magician succeeded at greatly shortening them. The simplest such incantations were reduced to around five seconds, and consequently became the only way people utilized Attack magic. For the more complex rituals involved in Summoning magic, where greater efficiency wasn’t attainable, magic circles remained the primary means.
Four, the amount of magical power someone had was pretty much determined at birth. In your typical RPG, you gain more MP as you level up, but things didn’t work that way in this world. Almost everyone was stuck where they were.
Almost everyone, which implied that some people changed over time. I wondered which group I’d fall into.
The book also said that one’s level of magical power was inherited. I knew my mother was able to use Healing magic, so maybe it was all right to have some expectations for myself. Still, I was uneasy. Even if my parents excelled at this sort of thing, I wasn’t sure my own genes would be up to the task.