As the calm rumbling of the bus turned into a roughly jostling, the pen that Barry had been slowly spinning fell from the gentle grip of his trivial force magic.

  With the plastic accessory clambering to the floor, a slight sigh escaped the disgruntled man’s lips as a small pinch of pink invaded his cheeks.

  Reaching over and picking up the pen off the slightly sticky floor, Bartholomew Von Richten, or Barry, couldn’t help but let his mind wander.

  What about an app that lets people do stuff for you? Like an old fashioned job board. Cork-board? That could be the name. But how would you make sure the people offering the job would actually pay?

  Like most people, the daily commute from his run down apartment down to the bus station and back was eternally plagued by a multitude of minor inconveniences. The distraction that was thinking of endless ideas to escape the boredom was comforting.

  A loud crash forcefully snapped the wandering sales associate out of his reverie. Yet as the young third-rank stepped out of his ostentatious crack in the world, he cast his eyes back to the building he was walking towards.

  Fucking rich pricks. I bet mommy and daddy paid for those classes and network expansions. If I was able to stay in college, I’d be opening a rift without as much as a peep.

  These bitter thoughts continued to mount as the tired twenty three year old missed the lock on his door twice. To an overly confident and enthusiastic observer, the litany of scratches around the lock would be the sure sign of a man with a drinking problem. But unfortunately, liquor was for people who could afford to miss work the next day.

  Stepping into the dingy one bedroom, Barry hung his nice jacket onto his shitty coat rack, kicked off his knock off shoes, and connected his phone to the sound system he ‘borrowed’ out of his old college roommates car.

  With light music playing in the background, Bartholomew began his nightly routine of magic study and mana shaping exercises. For all the advancements that the turn of the century brought, two things had remained stubbornly true.

  First of all, there was no shortcuts for the poor. A rich, or even just decently well off, mage could artificially expand and strengthen their mana network up to a point, and then at around the third rank of power they’d have to actually put in the effort. For a someone poor? It was all repetition and exercises to slowly strengthen the network the old fashioned way, especially when you were poor and had dense mana.

  After two hours of mind numbing shaping practice, Barry’s veins burned and the second immutable truth bore its head. Magic is learned from a physical book. You can’t imprint a mana channel into a screen, no matter how hard a person tries.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Reaching beneath his slowly falling apart coffee table, Barry pulled out Advanced Spatial Fundamentals. The second book of the incomprehensibly named series that was meant to teach a burgeoning spatial mage the basics of advanced distortion.

  The first volume was mainly theoretical, covering the fundamental knowledge and minimum mana shaping skills that a mage hoping to break the previous rules of the world needed to live outside said boundaries. It even gave a framework for a mage to develop their own dimensional storage and short range teleportation.

  The second volume assumed that their audience had used said framework to develop a few spatial spells of their own, and began talking about augmentation to these spells, and how different mana pathways could be used to mutate these spells. That’s about where Barry had been stuck.

  How the hell am I meant to augment a storage spell and make it warp my physical body? I built my Spatial Vault spell by essentially just carving out a random space made with mana, and storing stuff in there with minimum preservation. If I wanted to teleport I’d need to what, store myself in my own storage, then change the coordinates of the exit to my destination? I’m better off making a whole new spell!

  At least Spatial Vault has good bones. I can reuse it for that drying spell I’ve been wanting.

  Closing the large tome and returning it to its resting place under the coffee table, Barry stood and stretched, hearing a crack in his back that had definitely not been there the day before.

  Gesturing with the flick of his wrist, he stored his phone from wherever he had left it in his storage spell before quickly retrieving it, which had the effect of warping the cellular device to his hands.

  Practicing endlessly to sit firmly in the second rank of power did come with some minor benefits. Most people who weren’t rich and weren’t practitioners couldn’t experience the simple luxury that was minor daily applications of magic.

  Meandering through the rest of his night time routine was a simple matter. A long warm shower, a simple meal of pancakes whipped from batter he had stored two days ago with a preservation spell, and an early crawl into the warmth of his bed. But sleep did not come easy to the young ambitious man.

  Lying down late into the night, staring at his water stained ceiling, sleep never seemed to come at all. Instead, his thoughts raced with everything wrong and right in his life, all at once.

  Having enough of the mental rollercoaster, Barry stood. Summoning a random set of clothes from his closet, literally just the first pair of pants, stained blue shirt, and shoes that crossed his mind, he put on a warm jacket and decided to go for a walk within the ever-bustling city.

  Old Berlin was an interesting place to spend one’s days. Rebuilt after the Fourth Mages Conflict, the city was a mix of architecture that looked like it would fit in with the renaissance and high-rise buildings that screamed modernity. Stalking through the alleyways and side streets, Barry walked no direction in particular.

  What am I even doing out here. I hate drinking. I have work tomorrow. I might as well head back.

  But he didn’t go back. For some reason, some force made Barry trudge forward.

  So when the beam of purple energy passed mere inches in front of him, burning the tips of his eyebrows off, and Barry’s eyes followed it to the right, only to find a woman, now clutching at a hole in her side, that force had accomplished its goal.