My skills were all, with a few notable exceptions, fair to middling at the start of my twelfth year in this world. I hit puberty at this point and had to stop everything I was doing to slowly modify my body with alteration and restoration magic mixed with a hint of mysticism. I used mysticism to predict when my growth spurts would hit and then use a prolonged mixed spell I created to thicken and elongate my muscles, skin and bones to a minute degree. When used in conjunction with the natural flux my body was in I maximized my growth gains all around. -
There was however one rather large downside to doing this, it really REALLY hurt. It was like having nails dragged across chalkboards but within every inch of my body. I couldn't cancel the process either once I started or I might deform and ruin everything. The pay out was absolutely worth it however. After a whole year of this torment off and on I towered over my peers by at least a head and my body was much tougher than normal. My skin was like semi-hard leather, my muscles dense enough to match even trained warriors in force and endurance and my bones were far harder than normal.-
This ended the most volatile point of my puberty cycle and all that remained was the slow but steady growth phase. For this I had to really crack my head against a wall repeatedly as I tried to devise a passive enchantment to maximize my growth without me needing to actively monitor it constantly. I certainly had the money to experiment with enchanting here but actually translating a spell into an enchantment was harder than it seemed.-
I ended up burning through no less than twenty six thousand gold over my thirteenth year in cheap necklaces and expensive soul gems. Soul gems were pricy things once filled with a matching soul and my enchantments required plain level souls to create. To explain soul levels it was the amount of energy a soul gave when used to fuel an enchantment. They go from lowest to highest Petty, Lesser, Plain, Greater, Grand and finally Pinnacle. They also fell into two categories, white and black souls. White souls were things not from the mortal races like animals, monsters and daedra. Black souls are the literal souls of other people and require a special type of soul gem known as a black soul gem to capture.-
Black souls are used almost exclusively by necromancers however as most enchantments that would need that sort of juice would work fine with Grand souls instead. Necromantic rituals however used the very nature of the souls in black gems to cross the line between life and death. Not all necromancers were evil mind you and the art itself was just another tool but as a general rule of thumb they typically weren't good people and the art is disdained on principal.-
Pinnacle souls were the only sort that sat in a plane all their own. These were souls that contained divinity to some degree and typically only came from soul trapping daedra of especially high pedigree. Technically gods also counted as Pinnacle souls but no one had ever managed to trap the soul of one of those as far as I knew so maybe they were something even higher than pinnacle. I was fairly certain that the souls of dragons counted as Pinnacle souls as well due to the lore on how they came about.-
That was to say they had been normal spirits at one point but while Akatosh was weakened from the creation of the world they attacked and devoured parts of his soul thus turning them into dragons with Alduin being the first to do so. At least that was the lore I knew about them. No idea if it was actually accurate without asking a dragon. Anyways soul filled gems were hella expensive and since I obviously couldn't perfect the enchantment first time for an original enchantment like this that money was bled out in a constant hemorrhage.-
The final result was just what I wanted and let me financially recover from this horrible drain. Honestly I had to thank Mercer for stealing the skeleton key and cursing all the thieves in skyrim with misfortune. It meant guild injuries were at an all time high and that was all money for me. It was honestly the only reason I was able to afford such a high expense. It was sad to watch the once proud and prosperous thieves guild slowly die as people left the profession one way or another though. Some moved out of skyrim for greener pastures and others, well they just died after one slip of bad luck too many.-
Once I got my enchantment just right by the start of my Fourteenth year I finally began to try and learn the Thu'um. I sat on a fallen tree outside the city alone and away from others as I centered myself.
"Fus!" I shouted with no real effect beyond a slight tingle in my throat.
"Fus!" I tried again while focusing my mind on the idea of force, it's very concept.
One attempt after another refining each one as I went and my voice grew hoarse and rough. I was missing something, a sort of extra something that I needed to discover. Merely shouting the word of power for force wasn't enough. Even trying to focus on it's meaning and adding magicka to my throat was failing to elicit much of a response. Not nothing but not anything substantial either. I could only heal my throat with restoration and settle in for a lot of effort.-
It took me two weeks to catch on to the missing "thing" I needed.
It hit me like a bolt of lightning one day while I was making my voice ragged with the attempts.
'To shout is to imbue your vital essence into a word of power and project your will onto the world.'
This little nugget of information had me slapping myself as I remembered it from the game. To be fair it had been well over a decade since I'd played the game by this point so I was having trouble remembering the game in as much detail as originally. I had of course written down everything I knew the moment I fully learned the Dovahzul written language but it was a VERY big game with a lot of stuff so I clearly missed a few things.-
In this case I had been making a mistaken many people probably did without formal training, I confused vital essence with magicka. Contrary to what the term "magicka pool" implied magicka was not innate to anyone but daedra, spirits and gods. Instead it was a sort of left over trait our forms possessed from when the mortal races were spirits of a sort. We innately drew in and stored magicka from the air that in turn comes from Aetherius(the realm of spirits and gods). Basically I was using the wrong energy to try and accomplish this.