With so many new spells to master, time began to fly by at an absurdly unbelievable pace, and I started kicking myself again for thinking it was ever a good idea to do something like take an additional entire primary school of magic as a courseload. And as if the extra spells from taking the transmutation wasn’t enough, the spells that I needed to learn for the second year of applied mage combat were absolutely ridiculous. Luckily, the course was primarily focused on statescraft and learning how to be polite and not offend people with absurdly more power than you possessed, rather than being quite as focused on fighting. We did still make a handful of trips out to the Isle of Dreki to fight against paid off pirates, bandits, and rioting family members unhappy with the shifting balance of power on the island, but it was far less than the year before. That meant I had more time to focus on the things that I needed to do: cast spells.

  Given the preponderance of spells I had to master, I started by taking the easiest spells from each of my courses and nailing them down. Learning to cast the create food and water spell, dead man’s casting, temporary masterwork, banish, and summon giant formica swarm wasn’t exactly easy, but nor was it the kind of absurdly difficult task that it had felt like the year before, when I had been trying to balance learning arcane passage, animal morph, and dimension ward.

  Between my rapidly expanding ether pool, my improved ability to regenerate my ether, and my far more advanced ether shaping techniques, I could practice more often, for longer periods, and with much more effectiveness than I ever could have dreamed when I’d first come to this school. The thought of the weeks I’d spent working to form a simple weirlight felt distant.

  Once I had learned those few spells from that short list, and stored the worst curse I could brew up within my dead man’s casting, I at least had proof that I’d been working on something rather than spending all day being lazy. Thus, I was able to shift to the hardest task out of all of them: learning a fifth circle spell. I wasn’t sure if it was coincidence or good luck, but all three of the fifth circle spells I knew fell within my chosen schools of magical expertise – planar adaptation was abjuration, while both greater paralyze and wall of stone were transmutation. That didn’t inherently make them easier, but it was better than having to tackle a fifth circle spell in a totally new school of magic, unlike the ones I was familiar with.

  Out of all of them, the one I had the least ability and expertise with was greater paralyze. It utilized principles of the enchantment and possibly necromantic schools of magic, alongside physical muscle action that bordered on the work of restoration, all while touching on life force and mental threads. That made it the perfect choice. If I could master the greater paralyze spell, then I would have climbed the mountain, so to speak, and everything else would be downhill. After all, if I could cast greater paralyze, then surely learning a spell of equal circle with elements I was more familiar with was doable, and any fourth circle spell I learned should be as easy as learning third circle was to be now!

  I wasn’t sure that there was any actual magical backing behind that thought process, or if it was simply psychological, but in the end, it didn’t matter, and I was able to turn my attention fully to learning the greater paralyze spell. There were three main exceptions that drew me out of that process, and they were each important enough in their own right that I couldn’t be overly upset about having my progress interrupted.

  The first was the utilization of imbuements and rituals. I still didn’t have an appropriate magical serpent to utilize for the staff to serpent spell, but between the occasional missions for Gerhard, my work at the Charm and Fable, and the fact that I could purchase goods at cost, I had enough liquid cash to pick up all of the ether crystal dust I needed for the spells I was working on, including the two thousand three hundred I paid for the weight of ether crystal used in contact otherworldly sage.

  Casting the imbuement for mend rope was easy. I didn’t have much of a reason to worry about learning or casting a first circle spell anymore, and it literally took me less than a day of studying to master the spell well enough to reliably cast it, and create the imbuement. Learning the spell for heatless flame was a little bit more complex, but not that much, and it only took the better part of a day to manage. Speaking mirrors took either two days or three weeks, depending on how it was looked at. It took me two days to learn it, but it was also a significantly more complex spell than the others. It took three weeks to actually complete it, as I was forced to custom order a paired set of mirrors in the student market in order to have good efficiency for the spell distance. I didn’t quite manage to reach the maximum theoretical range, but I got close.

  Finally, I turned to affinity application. The spell was technically an imbuement as well, and I wanted to create something with my own magic – the trouble was figuring out what to make. I had no real desire to make more weapons. I didn’t use a sword or arrows, after all, and a bleeding curse was the most obvious solution for what sort of magical item I could make that would be useful, rather than detrimental. In the end, I created a bracelet that generated a permanent magical aura based on the localized amount of ambient ether, generating bad luck in combat for anyone targeting me. In order to get it to work for me specifically, I had to weave my blood into the bracelet, but that was fine. Once I had the proof of concept, I got blood donations from all of my friends, and crafted passive defensive curse bracelets for them as well.

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  “You should sell these at the student market,” Jackson suggested one evening. “I suspect students would buy these if they wanted a bit more protection, in a form that’s harder to predict or dispel. Arcane armor is great, but everyone here can expect and counter it.”

  It was an interesting proposition, and one that I wasn’t inherently against. I would need a sample of the person's blood in order to craft the bracelet specific to them, but I didn’t need it to create a field around the bracelet. If they needed to be worn specifically on the left wrist, then I could offset the bubble of protection to be roughly in the center of where most humans, elves, dwarves, and treefolk’s bodies would be. It did make the spell less ether efficient, as it was guarding an entire area that encompassed a person, but that was something I could live with. I wanted the best for my friends, but I didn’t want to tie up all of my limited free time working with random students' blood samples.

  I also had no real interest in running a shop, especially since I worked most weekends when the market was open, so instead I tracked down an artificer student in my year, the brightly haired fellow who had taken the course with me. I needed to get approval from professor Silverbark in order to sell them through his shop, but after we spent a while going over the design, and he was convinced of their safety, he gave the go-ahead, and I started pricing them out. The artificer was going to be taking a fifteen percent commission, since he’d be doing the work of selling them and displaying them on the limited space in his stall. I was proud of the fifteen percent – he’d started wanting to split the profits fifty-fifty.

  To my surprise, the bracelets actually sold. Not every single one of them was sold over course of the first weekend, of course, but four of the ten I’d created had sold, and I’d made an actual profit from them. It wasn’t much, but it was something I’d made on my own. I wasn’t going to start a cursed enchantment empire out of this tiny seed money, but it was still important to me.

  All of my affinity imbuement antics must have inspired Salem, because he created channeled mental defensive bracelets that would cast a mind shield around the person wearing them. The ones he made for himself and for me were a bit more customized, since we’d undergone the rite to create a permanent mental defensive layer, and thus needed something that interacted well with that, rather than clashed. He also began to make them with semi-regularity and sell them through the same artificer I’d struck the deal with. We spent a lot of time in our fused workshop, iterating on designs and learning spells, and I found it immensely gratifying. We both pushed one another to move forward, and both brought new insights to the table when it came to spells like greater paralyze, making steady progress.

  Of course, those weren’t the only rituals and imbuements I had to work on. There was also the true tongue… thing. It was strange, acting a bit like a ritual, and a bit like an imbuement. Whatever it was, I was able to construct the spellform on the floor and begin working out the spell, chanting it over and over again as magic flowed through the components, until eventually, the spell took root in my spirit, and I felt the construct form.

  “How’d it go?” Salem asked, and I blinked.

  “Woah. Your accent is… not gone, but diminished. Much less intense, that’s for sure.”

  This time, Salem was the one to blink and stare at me.

  “That sounded like Hydref. Textbook perfect, to the point it’s a little offputting, but s’ definitely Hydref.”

  “Interesting. I… Weird…”

  Seren piped up and said it sounded like when I spoke to him in flametongue, and it wasn’t unnerving at all. That made us speculate as to whether or not a person’s actual knowledge of the language influenced the spell, and that since I knew flametongue before casting it, I was less textbook, and more how people actually spoke. In the end, we had no answers, but it was fun to speculate, and we spent a little more time fiddling around with my new translation magic before Salem went to work on casting the ritual-imbuement on himself.

  While that might have been the first thing slowing the progress of my spellcasting ability, it wasn’t the only thing. The second was the continued improvements on the massive ritual that I’d be casting to layer a curse around Yushin’s core. I had also expected this one, so I had no problem with it, and we were making steady progress. We completed the first iteration of the spell and began to work on improving it, and there were a lot of areas where it could be improved. It was while I was idly iterating on the sections around destiny magic when the real second slow-down occurred, or at least the most surprising part. The familiar, warm voice of Fable came from behind my ear, as he appeared without me hearing or smelling a thing.

  “Fascinating. Most of the affinity rituals I see on… in Cendel… aren’t half that complex.”

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