Chapter 43 - 42: Inside the Academy

Chapter 43: Chapter 42: Inside the Academy

The old man looked at him for a long moment, then laughed a little and turned back to the list.

"Good. Step aside, then. There are others waiting."

Noah moved to the side, while some of the students went on looking at the pouch he carried more than at him.

To them, he’d given up an instructor for a hundred magic crystals. But to Noah, he’d given up childish eyes that could get in the way of his progress.

Once the selection process was completed, Noah left the administration building and went to his room. It was smaller than his room in Lupton, but it was his own and what he needed to live in. There was a bed, a table, a cabinet and a room with some tools, almost as many tools as Robert had brought out earlier. It was more like a training room now. The Academy was bigger than it had seemed from the bottom of the stairs, separated into levels and corridors and a number of stairways. He found the residences, the library, the labs and other halls new students weren’t allowed into.

He went over the map until he’d memorized the main routes he needed. He saw no reason to spend a day walking the corridors just to see the places with his own eyes. The library was the one place he had to visit immediately.

The next day, he arrived at it using the map without asking anyone. It was much bigger than he’d expected, shelves running in several rows, but the part open to new students didn’t hold the advanced knowledge sold for magic crystals. What he found was better for his current purpose. General books on the history of mages and noble blood.

Noah wasn’t after a new technique. First he wanted to know what this world actually knew.

He read for a number of hours then came back the next day and the day after. Some of the books repeated what he’d learned from Robert. Blood quality generally raised a mage’s ceiling, draining mana and then recovering it helped to get things going, and noble blood was the center most of the known training methods turned around.

He found nothing about the gates.

And he found nothing like the Magic Marrow he’d discovered on his own.

He continued reading and this time focused on alchemy. And soon he understood why it took up so much space in the Academy. The great noble houses didn’t start from the same starting point as the Academy did. They had bloodlines, the better blood and the resources that had been established in the families over generations. The Academy had built so much of its strength on students those houses weren’t willing to spend their best resources on. Children of branches, the mixed-blooded and illegitimate sons, with far fewer high-quality-blood holders among them.

So the Academy had tried to solve the problem from another angle.

Alchemy couldn’t turn a middle-quality blood holder into a high-quality one. Blood quality still set a limit the potions couldn’t easily remove. But it could feed the blood and the body and raise the blood’s ability to regenerate during training, along with potions where mana was recovered, compounds for training injuries, and materials to prepare the blood before some of the tougher stages.

Noah read a few pages, then closed the book a little.

It made sense.

If the Academy couldn’t compete with the houses on blood quality, then it would compete with them on how efficiently it used the blood it had.

And that also explained why herbs, beast blood, rare materials, and magic crystals had become such a large part of the Academy’s economy.

He went back to one of the books about magic crystals. Most of what was in it wasn’t new. The crystals held dense mana, were used as fuel for tools and formations, and in alchemy and as currency among mages. But a short paragraph about attempts at direct use stopped him.

The book warned against pumping mana directly into the blood. It muddied the blood and made the quality of the mana in it worse, which made it harder to regenerate later inside the blood and harder to train. Alchemy worked with herbs in the stones and noble blood to convert raw mana into a more stable form, closer to what the blood could take in. That’s why a potion made from a limited amount of mana might give a mage a better result than trying to consume that mana directly.

Simply put, without mana stones the whole potion idea became useless, and that was what made mana stones so important in the Academy. Noah started drawing a few conclusions. Maybe Robert hadn’t been poor or isolated as he’d thought. The book explained mana stones were useless to him given the quality of his bloodline. For him there was nothing more practical than the classical refining of the blood, as Robert had taught him.

Noah looked at the page for a few minutes before a sudden thought struck him and he remembered things he’d read in his teens.

He’d read many novels about martial arts and cultivation and magic in his past life, and the image of a stone holding concentrated energy meant one thing, more or less. Resources get absorbed, and power rises. For a moment he wondered if noble blood was a method similar to cultivation, warped into its current shape by poor resources, or if other parts of the cultivation system had been lost.

Maybe he was imagining it.

But he had something he could test.

Noah went back to his room that evening, shut the door and set the map and the borrowed books aside. Then he took out the heavy pouch the old man had given him and put one crystal from it on the table.

It was blue, glowing faintly, almost, under the low light in the room, but the moment he touched it he felt the dense mana inside it clearly.