This also meant that the barrier could potentially be circumvented by finding things the detection spell did not classify as an “attack”. I’d have to study that. I didn’t want to hurt the other students, of course. I just figured it would be good to know what tactics potential threats might use against me, since the pin was my only real defensive tool.
The two detection functions used mental mana, which I was ostensibly specialized in. The third, the shield itself, used simple gray mana — which I also had a lot of.
That meant I could, in theory, recharge the item by myself. Or, eventually, I could make more on my own.
My first several attempts to recharge the sigil ended in failure.
The biggest problem was that I couldn’t force myself to move my mind’s mana. Most likely because even the idea of using mana from my brain terrified me.
Was I going to permanently damage my brain? Tear away my own memories? Kill myself outright?
All of the above were possible if I used up too much of my mental mana. I knew that, and I knew that other people still used their mental mana all the time without any difficulties.
I also knew it would get easier and easier once I got started.
I still couldn’t do it. I kept thinking back to what happened to my great grandfather.
Alaric Cadence had been the pride of our family. He was a war hero, famous for ending the Six Year War between Valia and Edria in a duel.
He was the one who elevated our family from merchants to the “Noble House of Cadence” as a reward for his victory.
He was the reason my father and my uncle had become duelists. They’d lived in his shadow, just as I always would.
And he had died without recognizing his own son’s face.
He’d only been forty years old when it happened.
No hero was immune to the costs of war.
In Alaric Cadence’s case, the price had been subtle at first. He’d laugh about forgetting something simple, like where he’d put a piece of clothing. Absent mindedness that anyone could easily dismiss.
Forgetting a few faces of people he hadn’t seen in years? No problem.
By the time it was obvious that he was overusing his mental mana, he could barely care for himself. Our family spent every resource at their disposal seeking answers, but it was futile. No damage caused by the overuse of mind mana had ever successfully been repaired.
I had never met the man, but I knew his story. I saw it written in the face of my grandfather, every time he looked at Alaric’s portrait. I saw it in the way my father’s hands trembled when he prepared for a duel.
It had been my mother who actually told me the tale. Perhaps my father would have told me eventually. Or perhaps he was too afraid that his own life would end in the same way.
Grandfather remembered me last time I spoke to him, but I always worried that there would come a time when that would end.
The fear that story instilled was a part of me, something bone-deep that no level of rational thought could simply dispel. And, while I told my mind that I would not let fear break me, I didn’t have to.
All I had to do was bend — and the fear had won.
The fear always won.
Ultimately, I ended up recharging the barrier part with gray mana successfully first. It was in that process that I realized that the item didn’t have a capacity-limiting rune like the ones we’d learned about in my permanent enchanting class. That meant, in theory, that I could overcharge it until it exploded.
That’d be bad.
Fortunately, I was able to compare the strength of the aura to what it had been when Teft had filled it up prior to my last class and easily get it into a similar range. I didn’t know what the tolerance was for error on refilling the item, but I figured it wasn’t something where a tiny bit of extra mana would make it burst and annihilate me.
I still erred on the side of “too little” mana, though.
After a day of rest, which was more than I strictly needed, I tried converting some of my gray mana in my right hand into mental mana to use for recharging the other functions. That would have circumvented my fear of using the mental mana directly from my brain.
I failed at that for the rest of the week.
During that time, I got a little more used to talking to Sera and Patrick again. Roland remained taciturn, but I saw him from time to time as well. I didn’t see much of Jin.
In the following week, I hoped to get a little more insight into my mana conversion problem in my attunement class. Magic theory class talked a lot about the ideas behind attunements, but the attunement class was where we learned more about the exercises and practical applications of all attunements.
Converting mana from one type to another was something every attuned would have to do eventually, so it was something we’d be practicing in there.
Unfortunately, that particular class ended up covering a lot of the same information that Professor Orden had about attunement levels, like Carnelian, Sunstone, etc. This time, it was in the context of focusing on how we could work our way from “Rank E Quartz” to at least “Rank B Quartz” before the end of the year.
Interestingly, the attunements teacher also confirmed something Orden had implied: people with multiple attunements could have completely different levels with them. Orden had called herself a Carnelian-level Enchanter, but she was conceivably much more powerful at illusions or summoning or whatever other strange attunements she had.
The power of an attunement corresponded to the amount of mana in that specific part of the body, so I’d have to train my mental mana in order to make my attunement stronger. That was going to be a problem.
The school only expects us to hit Rank B in Quartz by the end of the year, but I need to get all the way to Carnelian in a few months. That’s going to be a lot harder. Rank B in Quartz only requires about 25 mana, which seems very doable.
Getting to Carnelian, however, requires about 60 mana. I haven’t checked since that first time, but I’m still probably around 18. I’ve got a long way to go.
Professor Conway was a rust-bearded gentleman in a tweed suit who seemed entirely engaged with his own lesson. Once the material he was covering started to become less familiar, I refocused my attention to it.