At this moment, Ray was walking around the library of the Academy.
After being sealed, he had been quite surprised by the idea of libraries. While waiting for the day the Entrance Exams would be held, Astra had convinced him to visit a public library, not only to gather some materials for his studying but also for him to finally leave the house and see for himself the world he had woken up to.
At first he was surprised, pleasantly so. The amount of knowledge stored in such buildings was immense, and yet, the public library turned out to be just a fraction of what a great library could truly be.
When he first arrived at the Academy, he had taken note of its existence while trying to find his classroom along with Cù Sith and Tiana, but he was only able to visit it a couple of days later for a General Studies assignement.
At the time he had been truly amazed.
The Academy's Library was set in a completely different building from the rest of the campus, perfectly set between the Dorms, the Class Buildings, and the Research Faculties.
It had five floors full of shelves filled top to bottom with various types of books. It seemed to be a paradise for any erudite.
Or so it seemed, until Ray was tasked to actually browse the library to find a book.
The Academy library was run by an old librarian whose unique affinity had turned them into a ghost. So for the last hundred years, he was the sole librarian of the Academy Library, and oh gods, was he awful at his job.
The books were not organized by genre but in chronological order. So, for example, if an author published a two-volume work, where the first volume was published in a year and the second was published a year later, they would be separated by who knows how many books were published in between.
Books like fiction could be found between magic research books and history books. It had been an unfortunate experience of finding a history book about himself titled "The Dark Era of Rex Draco" right beside a romance book titled "This Evil Dragon Has Fallen for Me" with a black-scaled dragon on the cover.
The library was organized in a way that the older the book, the easier it was to reach it, that is, on the first floor the oldest books could be found, and on a shelf the books at the top were the more recent ones, while the books at the bottom of the shelf were the older ones.
At the entrance of the library, encased in demonic glass, a type of glass found in the Glass Plains courtesy of his brilliant self, was the oldest book that the academy possessed.
It was a book that he had held before as a young dragon, and at the time it was already hundreds of years old. At this point it should already be over a thousand years old, but it still was in quite good condition.
But it was not the reason why he was here.
This morning they had Magic Studies. A class oriented solely to magic and magecraft. According to their teacher, an old mage with a long beard, at the end of the year they would present a self-study about any type of magical research and that it should be a year-long effort.
Before the next class, they needed to choose and present a book or topic to center their research on.
Ray was not that interested in that, and so he decided to go to the library and choose a book that focused on an area where he already had expertise, so either Fire magic or mana applications in general.
That's what he was doing in this place.
He silently walked around the area where the books of the Age of Monsters were, which was around the end of this first floor and the entire second floor.
As he walked around the first floor, he noticed there were no interesting books to choose from there.
'The start of the Age of Monsters—what were people doing in those first eighty or so years, not writing anything? Oh, right, they were running away from me.'
Those had been the years he had been most active, after all, with the exception of the time during Gideon's generation.
Was this what people in the East recognized as karma? Although receiving retribution over his actions with homework was not exactly how he had envisioned karma.
After another failed search, Ray moved towards the next aisle, where he found a redhead buried in books and papers.
Recognizing her instantly.
"What's up, Mara?"
"Eh?!!!!"
Startled, Mara stood up in an instant, one hand on her chest.
"It's you, Ray. Gods, you scared me."
"It seems you were pretty engrossed in your books. Already working on the Magic Studies Project? Isn't it pretty early for that?"
Mara looked confused for a moment.
"Ah! This has nothing to do with that, this is personal research. My project for Magic Studies is just a drop in what I actually want to study."
"Which is?"
"Unique affinities."
Ray's eyebrows rose in interest.
"I thought you would study more about the concepts in elements that I told you."
"Yes, this is partially that. What I want to do is to learn how to manipulate the concepts themselves without the need to use elements and then use those to create 'Unique' affinities for me to use."
"Is that even possible?"
Unique Affinities were, in essence, similar to elements. However, instead of being centered around an element of nature, they were centered on a phenomenon.
"It is! First, I'm studying the exact differences between Unique Affinities and Elements. Phenomenon and Elements would be the correct term, I guess. For now, I have three samples: Cù Sith's Soul Reaper Hound, Tiana's Blood Forgery, and a Senior's Circuit Domain."
'Circuit Domain?'
"And with this I can infer there are three types of Unique Affinities. Cultural ones like Soul Reaper Hound that were shaped by Humanity's Culture and ability to influence concepts with it, Cù Sith's Affinity was born from the legends surrounding a beast with the same name."
Mara's eyes brightened every second she talked. Ray resisted the urge to chuckle at her expression of eagerness to share her findings.
"Then there are types like Tiana's Blood Forgery, which are mutations of normal elements. In her case, it's a mutation from normal blood magic that was influenced by the Amazon's blood, which was supposedly blessed by the God of War long ago, allowing their blood to subconsciously be able to shape into battle equipment."
Ray nodded.
That made sense, the blood element was deeply connected to concepts like life and war, as well as the physical blood that exists in living beings, therefore, someone's bloodline, which was blessed by a deity, especially one that embodies a concept that it's deeply tied to, is bound to cause reactions to one's affinity.
"As for the Senior's Circuit Domain. Well, I still don't know much about it. All that I know is that it's completely different from the other two. It does not follow any culture, that I know of at the very least, and it is not born from a divine or lineage-related circumstance. I can't even study it properly, so I don't even know what exactly it does, except that it is similar to what you did at the end of your fight with Stelle."
So she had noticed the difference between my gravity and dominion magics.
As if noticing that she was talking too much, her hands suddenly flew towards her mouth.
"Sorry, I was talking too much."
"No worries."
It was nice to see her so excited, as if she was a child in a candy shop, not that Ray would admit anything.
"Ahem. Anyway, for now I am studying exactly how to create a magic circle that abandons the elements entirely and focuses solely on the concepts behind them. But that has been a dead end for a while."
Ray listened and nodded.
"Remember when Professor Caius said that there was more than one use of Intent? Although we can't sense it, we all use Intent for every single action, and that includes when we refocus certain parts of our mana to go into certain concepts of the element we have affinities with."
He took a breath before continuing.
"I can't say for certain how it works with magecraft, but perhaps the reason behind your magic circles not working is that the parts needed to make that possible are not fueled with enough Intent, or the Intent there is not refined enough."
Mara listened attentively.
"What you say makes sense. At the core of it, the various elements of a magic circle, like the geometry, the runes, and even the handsigns or chants, are meant to serve as beacons of our Intent, allowing us to do things outside our natural capabilities. If a higher level of Intent is needed to advance, that would be an understandable development."
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Author's Note: One more chapter, hope you enjoyed to onece again dive into the power system and also the bit of interaction between Ray and Mara.
Check Out My other Nove: This Novel's Plot has Completely Changed