Grinding the phosphorus proved to be easy enough, and he found that by pulling on Alchemical Dismantling, he could make the granules a really consistent size with a minimal amount of work. Lefi had a Skill that worked almost identically to Dismantling of course, so he was almost as good as Edwin at it right off the start, and by the end he was even better.

Edwin knew he shouldn’t be jealous, but it was kind of hard to not be. This was supposed to be his thing, but of course Lefi could match him even here. But no, Edwin was being supportive, so he’d see how far he could push the adventurer- no matter how frustrating it could be to watch the totally-not-a-protagonist outclass him in everything.

It’s not like I should have expected anything else… oi, shut up me.

No, he was not going to get all mopey and socially self-destructive anymore. He knew that people wanted to be with him! He was a valuable team member, and wasn’t that what he had always wanted? He loved being the sort of person that could help out, and explaining things to people was something he truly enjoyed. He was supposed to be happy, darn it, and he would not let his emotions get in the way of that.

In any case, getting enough phosphorus proved to be quite easy, but it also presented a bit of a dilemma. How was he going to get the explosives dry without them igniting? Once the water was gone, he could seal it in an apparatite container and hope that whatever miniscule amounts of air were trapped alongside it wouldn’t be enough to make it explode.

A few tests confirmed that yes, the granules did indeed ignite if he left them out for an extended period of time to dry, but he eventually managed to get a system down. With a bit of help from Rillah (this was quickly becoming a team effort), Edwin was able to make a coldbox at refrigerator-like temperatures, well below what phosphorus needed to ignite, and let the granules dry there. Of course, it took a fair bit of time for the granules to dry, definitely longer than was feasible for Rillah to stay there constantly channeling magic into it.

So, he cheated a bit. He used Basic Thermokinesis on the container it was stored in but added almost no heat to the system, instead allowing the Skill’s inherent insulation to help keep the interior cold.

He was really proud of that workaround, even if it meant that he lost a night of sleep to keep the system properly chilled for long enough.

By working quickly, he was able to load up a lot of apparatite casings, and while there were some small fires that broke out inside some of his shells, none of them grew out of hand, and Edwin considered the entire endeavor a success.

Initial explosive tests were confusing, because when he tried to use Firestarting on the capsules, nothing happened. Even Infusing the skill didn’t do anything beyond creating a tiny puff of smoke.

Then Edwin realized he was being stupid. Phosphorus didn’t have any internal oxidizer. It was that very fact he was relying on to keep the fuel stable, but he had still managed to forget that when actually trying to blow it up. Hm. Some changes to the plan were required.

A bit of testing showed that they worked as Edwin hoped. Bomb Throwing didn’t seem to activate, possibly because he wasn’t throwing it? Or maybe it didn’t count as a bomb? Anyway, if he dispelled the phosphorus' casing and exposed it to free air then applied Firestarting, the end result was a lovely fountain of ridiculously hot flames and sparks.

Now, all that was left was to turn it into a gun.

The end result looked a lot like a miniature potato cannon. A grate sat at the end of the barrel right before it opened into the explosives chamber and a specially-made apparatite projectile was loaded in. He released the container of phosphorus and ignited it, ducking behind his barrier- a very solid wooden table tipped over on its side. Given the solidity of the construction, it was probably overkill, but…

BANG

Edwin suddenly felt like his shield was very inadequate as his prototype exploded. Fortunately, the fact it was made of apparatite meant that instead of sending deadly shrapnel all over the place, blue sparks slowly settled to the floor, but that didn’t stop some unexploded phosphorus from raining all over his workshop, igniting and filling the room with smoke. He was once again reminded of just how glad he was to have Fresh Air.

…in hindsight, he wasn’t sure what he expected of a literal glass cannon.

Three iterations later, he’d figured out how thick he needed to make his gun not explode, but the scales he was working with definitely weren’t enough to be usable in any practical sense...

Was scaling it up probably just going to be a waste of time? Maybe. He’d need to rework most of it once he had better explosives with their own oxidizers, but… he’d come this far. Who knew what sort of things he might learn? Certainly not him. That’s why it was an experiment!

Edwin cracked his knuckles.

He was going to need a bigger gun. And… Edwin looked around at the chaos repeated explosions had wrought in his lab, the white haze hanging in the air.

...He should probably do this outside.

Version two of the gun was complete. Its walls were significantly thicker, had a 2 meter barrel and 1 meter blasting chamber, had a screw-on cap for allowing more air into the chamber after each shot, used a well-fitted stone for a projectile instead of an apparatite bullet, and had a thousand little improvements over its little brother.

And now, in a small meadow close enough to Sheraith that it was feasible to fly a really heavy apparatite object to, but far enough away that the sound was unlikely to reach the city, he was ready to test it.

Edwin dismissed the phosphorus' casing, releasing almost a full kilo of powder into the combustion chamber, and quickly joined the others as he dashed behind his blast barrier, a few stones ripped from the earth and arranged into a low wall. He anxiously peered over the rocks and focused on the phosphorus. Hopefully this was close enough…

Firestarting.

BOOM

The noise shattered the natural soundscapes of their surroundings, sending flocks of birds cascading into the sky, shaking the clearing and knocking more than a few leaves from the nearby trees to the ground. White smoke drifted up from where the gun had landed, but the clearing primarily smelled like freshly cut wood and upturned dirt, which…

“That was awesome!” Yathal expressed his glee, a sentiment clearly shared by Kyni.

Inion looked similarly impressed, though didn’t say anything.

Lefi was clearly taken aback, “That was without a single Skill?”

Rillah gave Edwin an encouraging pat on his back as he nodded to Lefi, “I’ve never seen anything like that, and you say you can make even cooler stuff than that?”

Edwin nodded absently as he looked on with absolute glee at the (intentional) devastation his creation had wrought. Even without Bomb Throwing activating at all, the stone had utterly demolished the tree it had been aimed at, leaving only a splintered trunk and a significant amount of shattered wood behind. He’d need to get Lefi in to test its efficacy against Skilled opponents, but it would be amazing at imparting a lot of kinetic energy very, very quickly.

His enthusiasm was dampened slightly when he looked at the barrel. It had been thrown across the clearing, and several parts had broken, including part of the barrel. Edwin sighed. That would take forever to fix, to say nothing of figuring out what he would need to do in order to prevent that level of recoil from happening again. At least it hadn’t exploded this time.

Two test firings later- about one week after his first test, thanks to the absolutely insane amount of apparatite he’d needed to conjure- Edwin had figured out that if he didn’t want the recoil on the gun to send it flying, he’d need to make the apparatite body so big and bulky that even he couldn’t lift it easily. At first, he’d tried using supports that would lock the barrel in place, bracing it against a nearby tree and digging into the soil, but apparatite just wasn’t strong enough, apparently. The next model would need to include handholds, because he was not reconjuring the exterior and had forgotten them until it was too late. At least he’d been able to make it on-site.

Yes, it was functionally immobile unless someone wanted to personally pick it up, and stuck in a random clearing miles from the nearest city. Yes, it required him to repair a bunch of the parts every time he fired it. Yes, it used an absolutely absurd amount of phosphorus per shot fired. But those problems could be fixed.

He could make it out of metal and figure out a better recoil-absorbing method (Wheels, perhaps? Or maybe when he used metal the bracers would be strong enough.), he could experiment with better propellants (particularly ones with their own oxidizers) and projectiles. A lot of this would probably be invalidated once he started messing around with magical explosives anyway, but he was glad he’d done it for the lessons learned. It would be a long-term project for certain, simply because of the scale of everything he needed.

But he would make it work.

Because despite all of its issues, a simple fact remained:

He had a cannon. All other arguments were invalid.

Previously, Edwin’s efforts to learn about magic had been stymied by insufficient information. He was mostly limited to just himself and his own experiments. Inion had never been very useful either, because she said she didn’t know how to teach the basics. When he’d pushed for some instruction anyway, he’d just been left confused.

Considering he wanted to start to dive into magical explosives, Edwin figured he should probably make sure he had a slightly better grasp on both halves of that statement before rushing forward recklessly. Fortunately for him, he finally had another mage to talk to!

“Mana is all around and inside everyone, just like blood or breath,” Rillah explained, sitting cross-legged, “But most people can’t touch it, any more than most people can control their heartbeat. When you woke up your mage talent by getting the attribute, you started being able to touch it.”

“I mean, I’m still pretty sure I wasn’t magical before then.”

“Of course you were. That’s how you got Basic Mana Sense. Anyway, you said your mana started at 1, right?”

Edwin nodded.

“Yeah. It was just really weak. But once you could touch it, that’s when your Skills started including it in their effects? That’s the difference between a mage and someone who just managed to get a magical Skill.”

“I might have misheard you, or Polyglot might be acting up,” Edwin frowned, “But you said that the way you know someone is a mage is because their Skills include it, and then promptly said that someone with a magical Skill isn’t always a mage.”

“Basic skill,” she clarified, “Someone who’s a mage has magical tier 1 Skills.”

“Okay, but… sure. Shelving that for the moment. So… how does a mage use their magic for anything, then?”

“It’s a bit like using a Skill,” she explained, “But without the System, it’s all much harder. For me, I imagine my magic as a storm that changes with the seasons. It’ll be a hurricane, blizzard, rainstorm, or drought.”

“Droughts aren’t a type of storm, though?”

“Yes, but shush. I’m making a point. The more I call on my magic, the weaker the storm gets and it takes quite a bit of time to recover. I know another mage who views their mana as a reflecting pool where powerful reflections can disrupt the surface, another who visualizes it as a stream and they can only use so much at a time but with no real exhaustion, and a third who pictures their workings as plants they grow, and the larger the growth the more powerful their magic.”

“What do they all have in common?” she prompted.

“They all have some kind of limit,” he caught on, “It doesn’t really matter what, just that it exists. You can call on lots of power, but not consistently. The mirror guy can only use so much power before things go haywire, and the stream… a similar thing, but just visualized in a different way? Then the plant guy is the opposite. The longer he spends on it, the stronger it is, but without other restrictions?”

“Nice! Yes, magic isn’t unlimited. Incomprehensibly vast, but limited all the same.”

“So what does that mean for me?”

“Well, the first step of using magic is calling on it. To do that, you need to know what you’re calling on. Close your eyes and think for a while about what your magic looks like to you, and what that means.”

Edwin nodded and closed his eyes, poking at his mana pool with all his senses.

“There’s definitely two conflicting feelings… is that bad?” Edwin thought for a moment, trying to visualize the energy, “One part of me feels like it’s a fire or sun that’s radiating power, but I also feel like a pool of water that can empty out.”

“It’s not ideal but also not uncommon. In fact, most people have conflicting ideas about their mana at first, and overcoming that is the biggest step to actually controlling your magic. Molding them into a clear, singular picture of what your mana is like will be a tremendous help in your casting, as it will naturally tend towards directly enacting your image into the world. Like how I can use weather magic so easily. But you definitely need to be able to call all of your magic at once, so it should all fit together neatly.”

Edwin frowned, and she continued, “Look at mine. Because of my magic, it took me a long time to bring it all into a single concept. I had to figure out how to incorporate the unpredictability of the seasons, the overwhelming chill of a blizzard, the untamability of wind, the life-giving rains of spring and the heat of summer all into one. Of course, now it’s obvious how they should fit together, a single eternal storm whose form changes with the seasons, but it took me a really long time to put it together.”

Edwin nodded as he closed his eyes to visualize his mana pool. It was definitely a pool, and he could still feel the miniature sun nestled between his collarbones that was the source of his magic. The sun could burn away, the pool could empty out. Hm. Light, heat and water…

His mind flashed through possibilities. Lava? No, definitely not right. Molten steel? Eh, similar problem. Maybe nitroglycerin? No, that still didn’t feel right.

What about a volcano? If the sorts of magic he could use was tied to how he visualized his mana, volcanoes were pretty hard to beat for sheer power and versatility.

Ooh! No, what about a hydroelectric dam? Incorporating electricity directly into it and really go wild. Hm. No, no. It didn’t fit. Also…

“How complex can this be?” he asked.

“The important thing is that you can visualize it properly. The better you can visualize it, the easier it will be to use magic.”

“So simpler is better?”

“Generally, yes. If you need to spin some elaborate yarn as to how all of your magic fits together it will be exceptionally difficult to use for anything but the most basic of powers. I heard of one mage whose magic apparently took the form of the entire Bronze Sun, and all its inhabitants and magic within. It’s probably just a story, but it was said that although he had an impressive array of capabilities once he was actually able to use it, but it took him outright hours to properly visualize his magic to use it.”

“Oh, so I need to be able to picture it whenever I use my mana?”

“Unless you directly use a Skill, yes.”

Okay, so the hydroelectric dam and volcanoes were definitely out.

He needed a practical way to visualize his ability to trickle out mana like drops of water, but also adequately reflected the power crackling within it and was positively radiant. Some kind of radioactive liquid, maybe? His mind raced, Visualization helping him imagine a hundred different possibilities. What else would…

Oh.

Oh, of course.

A triumphant grin crept across Edwin’s face.

Congratulations! For firing a cannon, you have unlocked the Artillerist path!

Congratulations! For creating a prototype weapon of war, you have unlocked the Sapper path!

Congratulations! For successfully creating a Visualization for your personal mana, you have unlocked the Schooled Mage path!

Level Up!

Skill Points 895→939 (Average level: 49)

Adaptive Defense Level 32→33

Alchemical Analysis Level 34→35

Alchemical Dismantling Level 42→45

Alchemy Level 91→92

Basic Thermokinesis Level 28→31

Bomb Throwing Level 51→52

Fey’s Caress Level 38→40

Flight Level 50→53

Fresh Air Level 34→38

Improbable Arsenal Level 33→34

Longstrider Level 35→40

Numeracy Level 44→47

Outsider’s Almanac Level 134→135

Polyglot Level 68→69

Prototyping Level 34→36

Ritual Intuition Level 30→34

Sapper’s Apparatus Level 54→57

Skillful Assessment Level 42→45

Watchful Rest Level 31→34