Zoey felt like a completely new woman when she woke up from her nap. Her mind was in a flutter and her heart was brimming with energy. Since she had so much energy, Zoey went over to her weights. She originally planned to do some boxing drills but decided to settle with just lifting some weights. Three sets of twelve reps with a max of three-hundred pounds weight. But before she got started, she made sure to warm up with some light exercises like push-ups, squats, lunges, and sit-ups with the hand-sized weights next to her bench press.

It was only seven pm, if she did some boxing drills, it’d probably be around eleven pm or twelve am before she felt satisfied enough to stop her training. With the weights, it would only take half an hour or an hour at most. There was still a lot she had to do tonight and she still had school in the morning. Exhausting herself and not getting enough sleep wasn’t an option that Zoey considered. It would be bad if she neglected to take care of her physical and mental health.

But! A certain skill popped up in Zoey’s mind that could possibly be raised by neglecting her health. Endurance. Could Endurance be raised just by refusing to go to sleep and continuing to strain her body and mind? It was an interesting thought that Zoey was not afraid to risk her health because if it could, she could get more done without wasting time on sleeping when she could be doing other stuff.

Zoey’s lips slightly turned up as she thought about the possibility of her never needing to sleep again because of Endurance in the future. She never really thought about it before, but sleeping really does cut into a lot of time that people could use for other things. If the average person slept for eight hours a day, then that would be how much in a year? Unable to do mental math as well as she probably should, Zoey had to grab her phone and click on the calculator app. Eight times three-hundred sixty-five days equals two-thousand nine-hundred twenty hours.

2,920 hours are spent in a bed doing nothing. The average person lived for about seventy-nine years according to the internet. Since Zoey was 17, she had to subtract her current age from that average if she wanted to know how many hours, she would waste by sleeping for the rest of her lifetime. 79 – 17 gave her 62 and 62 years was 22,630 days. 22,630 x 8 = 181,040. Meaning, Zoey would waste 181,040 hours just resting in a bed when she could spend that time doing other things!

Apparently, it takes at least two years or six months to become world-class at a single skill if practicing in the most efficient manner. Two years would be 5,840 hours while six months would be 1,460 hours. So if Zoey believed the two years claim, she could master thirty-one skills in her lifetime starting now. With the six months claim, she could master one-hundred twenty-four skills over the course of her life.

All this math was causing her head to smoke but this was very important! How many people could become skilled in more than one or two skills over their life? Most people wasted their time just by trying to live life instead of trying to gain new skills. So, imagining herself with 31 or 124 skills compared to the average person’s number of skills, made her think just how much crap she could learn by using those hours usually wasted on sleep.

So, Zoey hoped that Endurance worked on her mentally just like it did for her physically because she was about to find out very soon tonight. After her warm-up exercises and small math break, Zoey finally got started bench pressing. She played a playlist of her favorite songs as she worked out because she felt it was unusual to not listen to music while working out. The song that was playing now was Figure Moving by Lizzy. It was an upbeat move your body type pop song. While Zoey couldn’t dance at all, she could definitely do something like looked like dancing to this song!

Hours went by of settling everything Zoey needed to get done today. She did her training, finished her homework, researched which fighting game was the most popular on the biggest live streaming website, bought the game, and saved the best for last... Studying magic!

Studying about Dirty Fighting V and studying about magic definitely couldn’t be done together. Just a quick look at some of the mechanics surrounding Dirty Fighting V made her realize that mastering a fighting game wouldn’t be as easy as she thought. And she knew for a damn fact that magic would only be harder. While the system would definitely be helpful in learning both of them, Zoey knew she had to use her own brain to understand them both rather than relying on the system like she wanted to.

The magjistar tournament was coming up next Monday. She could always teach her brother how to become a professional at Dirty Fighting V. This meant, her focus this week should be solely about learning about magic. If she had the time, she could watch some videos on pro Dirty Fighting V players, like during lunch at school or something. So, Zoey grabbed Lindsay’s stacks of notes on magic and started studying.

Mahna is the heart of magji.

Mahna is present within everything in the visible and non-visible world. The air we breathe, the rocks that lie on the ground, the plants that grow and populate our planet. Mahna is everywhere around us but the mahna a person can use is only within their own being.

There are special cases of there being people, daemons, and creatures that can take the mahna of others but not much is known about them. There is also no known connate magji or learned magji that can absorb the mahna of others.

Without mahna, performing magji is impossible.

To find out one’s connate magji, they must first be able to sense and control their own mahna to a proficient level.

A magjistar’s connate magji usually surfaces around the age of five or six and are completely unique to their respective users. If someone hasn’t awakened a connate magji by that time, they most likely do not have one and must learn a branch of magji on their own.

Magjistars that awaken a connate magji are seen as more talented than those that don’t but as far as history goes, the most powerful magjistars are not always those born with connate magji. But most of the well-known strongest magjistars and daemons are known to have connate magji.

Since you were born a normal person and didn’t awaken your mahna until now, you are most likely a magjistar that will need to go down the learned magji path. There are many magji volumes that you could try to learn.

Some of the common and easy to learn branches of magji are earth magji, water magji, wind magji, and fire magji.

While some of the harder and more difficult to learn branches are combo magji, static magji, cloning magji, taming magji, luck magji, summoning magji, blood magji, control magji, mud magji, healing magji, …

Zoey could barely believe there were so many different types of magic she could learn. Just how the hell did anyone create all these types of magic branches?

I say that these are harder because all the information given about the magic is deceptively simple. To advance to higher heights and use more complicated techniques from these magji branches, you must rely on your own understanding and experience during training or battles. Oh, you also cannot pick a different branch of magji to learn once you integrate the magji technique into your body. So, choose carefully.

After reading this, Zoey decided to look at her options more carefully. There wasn’t much in terms of explanation for the branches of magji, just their names. But most of their names told Zoey exactly what the magji was about. Her main focus was thinking about which branch would fit her fighting style best. While it was easy to think of her strengths, she also had to think of her weak points. Those weak points being long-range and mid-range, limited options for attacking, and just a lack of knowledge on the magical world in general.

The final point can be solved just by reading these notebooks long enough. The second weakness can be dealt with by choosing a branch of magji or adding more moves to her Ultimate Boxing other than punches, throws, and tackling. It felt wrong to Zoey to add kicks, elbows, and the like to her Ultimate Boxing but if she ever ran into a ceiling because of it, she wouldn’t hesitate to do so. The first weakness, that could only be solved by choosing an appropriate branch of magji.

But Zoey had to be careful. She was at her strongest at close range and needed to make sure to supplement that strength with the right branch of magji. This meant, she had to choose a branch of magji that would both increase her strength up close and deal with enemies far away. Either closing the distance between Zoey and her opponent or being able to fight at a distance with just her fists.

“I guess, I'll choose this...” Zoey playfully grinned.