Chapter 47 - 46: The Breakthrough

Chapter 47: Chapter 46: The Breakthrough

Chapter 46: The Breakthrough

After a careful study of Charles’s information, and going by his current means, Noah decided to go into seclusion.

He shut the door of his room and began a seclusion that lasted three weeks. Aside from buying the food he needed and a few necessaries, Noah barely stepped out of his room at all.

Ninety-seven mana stones had been left with him after his first experiment. Keeping to his daily consumption limit, he started to progress bit by bit.

The process remained the same. The raw mana entered the blood, heavy and unstable. He pulled it into the Magic Marrow, where most of the rejection vanished, and it turned into mana he could control. He pressed what had built up toward the second gate.

Each day the gate’s resistance dropped.

Then, all of a sudden, in the middle of the first week, Noah felt a violent burst of mana in his Magic Marrow that left him dizzy.

It opened.

Noah stayed still before a smile appeared on his face.

He’d entered the middle grade.

At first Noah had thought the difference would be one of quantity, letting him use stronger spells like the man on the Magic Balloon. But it was nothing like what he’d expected.

He moved his finger first.

Then he drew a small amount of mana to his palm.

It gathered without him needing to focus on it.

He tried again, and this time he made a thin layer of frost over the table. He didn’t have to think about the mana’s movement inside the blood, or steer it to his arm and then turn it into his element. The moment he wanted it to happen, it moved, like a part of his body rather than some foreign energy he dragged out with his blood.

He looked at his hand for a long while.

At the low grade, using magic had already become familiar, but it still took intent and focus. Now it was hardly different from raising his arm.

So this was the difference.

He kept consuming mana stones instead of coming out of seclusion. After the second gate opened, the surplus began to gather inside the new space, and by the end of the third week he’d used up sixty-three whole stones.

Three stones a day for twenty-one days.

Thirty-four left.

Noah was alarmed to find that the second space was filled to 67% using the scale he was used to. Using mana stones for training consumed a lot of mana, and it was scary to see how quickly the first part of the second space filled up. Once he reached 50 out of 100, each stone only managed to fill one percent, and the number kept dropping.

By Noah’s current estimate, once the space filled past seventy percent he might need five hundred to a thousand mana stones and a years of seclusion to succeed in breaking the third gate.

If anyone heard Noah complaining they’d have gone mad. Even the most famous genius in the empire had barely managed to break the second gate in his Forties, but Noah had done it before turning fifteen.

By what Noah had read earlier back in House Lupton.

He released a large amount of mana in the training room, then stopped it before it could turn into a spell. The cold spread until it froze the tools nearby.

He hadn’t used even a speck of his reserve.

He drew the mana back inside, but his mind stayed on what he’d felt.

If he let out everything he had and turned it to ice without trying to hold anything back, he was no longer sure the walls of his room would be the limit of the effect. The whole student residential area didn’t look as big as it had three weeks ago.

I could freeze it.

A frown came over his face.

And maybe, if most of the ones in it were students who hadn’t reached the low grade yet, kill a good number of them before they even had time to resist.

The thought gave him no rush of pleasure. The lives of dozens in his hands was a tempting thing.

Noah sat on the edge of the bed.

His father had been a middle-grade mage for years.

Had he been this strong the whole time, and even so kept avoiding House Charlemagne, never even seeking revenge?

Just how strong were the Platinum families exactly? And since the gap between a low-grade and a middle-grade mage was this vast, how much power did a high-grade mage hold? They were all weapons turning over in Noah’s mind.

Noah let out a breath. Lucky for him he’d hidden his breakthrough well.

The next day he came out of his room for the first time in weeks.

He didn’t need to announce it. The Academy’s system was lax to a degree, and it didn’t even care if you skipped the lessons or dropped them. Aside from your instructors, nothing much mattered.

It didn’t look strange.

From there he headed to the section where books and techniques were sold to students. He didn’t need anything meant for a middle-grade mage. Buying something like that now would be the most idiotic way to open himself up to investigation.

By what Charles had mentioned a while back, House Charlemagne had a bad reputation, it seemed, and trying to buy a middle-level copy for drawing might expose him to being pulled in and questioned, out of fear it would leak to House Charlemagne. Beyond that, Noah didn’t have enough crystals to buy anything useful anyway.

So he searched among the techniques a low-grade mage could buy and use, but with enough room to become dangerous when a larger mana reserve backed them.

He found the first after going through several books.

Silent Frost Arrows.

The mage’s technique was simple: they make long, narrow ice arrows, load them with as much mana as possible and fire them at high speed at a fixed point. They were not built for wide battles, but for precise long-range killing, especially when the target didn’t know where the strike came from.

That was why he liked it.

He bought the book for ten mana stones.

The second technique took him longer to find.

But the last line of its description was what made Noah buy it.

Sky Step.

It wasn’t a flight spell. At its basic level it uses mana to fire a strong push from the body, letting the mage leap tens of meters or change direction in the air. Using it repeatedly needs good control, since an error in the angle of the push might throw the mage toward the ground instead of saving him from it. But with enough mana it can let you fly for a short while despite its enormous consumption, which had brought it down from a middle-grade technique to a low-grade one.

It was common knowledge that a high-grade mage, once his control and reserve reached a sufficient level, could use mana to become a supernatural being and fly.

Flight was the main sign that proved you’d reached the high mage rank.

He paid another fourteen stones.

Ten were left with him.

The moment Noah finished the two transactions, no one paid him any mind before he turned away quietly.

And went back to his room to begin training.