I leaned against the tree outside of my house, trying to spot where Gold had made his nest. I knew he liked to make his houses out of rocks and dirt, but I’d never seen him roosting out here.

I turned my head to my side and a hand shot out in front of me.

“As requested, Master Silver.”

My heart jolted at the sudden intrusion, and then I saw the man’s one-eyes mask.

“You scared the-” I paused.

It wouldn’t be proper to start shouting in surprise. I didn’t want to ruin their impression of me that quickly. I looked down at the hand in front of me. There was a box clutched within his fingers.

I lifted it gently from his palm and with a kick of his foot he disappeared, leaving me alone with the box in my hand.

The symbol of an eye was carved on each side.

I took my thumb and opened it gently. There was a green lapel pin inside. It was shaped like a flower, with a yellow bulb in the middle. The scent of mint rose from it and caressed my senses.

It had only been a few hours, but the church had managed to find an exact replica of Amanda’s.

They weren’t willing to give the old one back until they were sure it wasn’t dangerous. I think that meant it would never be given back.

Instead, I had asked for a replacement. I didn’t want Amanda thinking I had robbed her family. Thankfully, that fell within the boundaries of what the church was willing to do.

Or maybe the results of my measurement had given them more confidence in me.

I dug my hand into my inventory and brought out my texting regent. The front of the book was starting to look like a high school artists page. It was filled with symbols that belonged to the various members of my class.

I even had Alexis’ symbol to contact him.

‘Hey. I left the pin in my blazer pocket. Want me to return it today?’

I held the emerald flower in my palm as I sent a message to Amanda. I didn’t want to leave the matter unresolved for even a second longer than I had to.

Misunderstandings could be messy.

‘It’s not a big deal, I’ll see you on Fue!’

Amanda’s reply was swift.

‘By the way, my mum said you looked dapper in the suit. Agni agrees.’

I smiled.

The church hadn’t found anything suspicious about Amanda’s mum, lifting a weight off my heart.

I heard a chirp above my head, and I looked up to see Gold staring down at me. He didn’t join me at the bottom of the tree, instead, he was scratching a new symbol into the bark.

Each stroke of his talons was calculated and precise.

I didn’t know what kind of regent he was turning it into, But I could recognise a couple of the symbols he was scratching.

I had seen them in the scrolls at the Zodiac library.

“You’re already hard at work in the morning.” I spoke. “You should be an official student too.”

Gold looked down at me and squawked.

I recognised that tone.

It loosely translated to, ‘I don’t have time for that nonsense.’

Or maybe I was projecting onto him.

I had my own homework to do each day. If there was something I didn’t miss at all from Earth it was homework. I could appreciate it more, especially when I actually had an interest in the subject.

Otherwise, it just seemed like a waste of time.

I pressed my hand against the ground and my earth manipulation skill spread underneath me. The mana in the ground greeted me, awaiting my request.

I didn’t usually sit outside when practising my magic. It wasn’t a matter of safety, I just felt more at ease in my room surrounded by dirt of my own making.

For this exercise. my closeness with nature helped my magic progress and more importantly, the dirt in the ground wasn’t created using my abilities.

It was a mix of different substances and materials.

“Okay. One with earth but separate from each other.” I muttered.

Tago of the earth had taught us how to separate the different materials underneath us. It was a slow and tedious process to master, but it would provide an exponential increase in speed and technique when using earth manipulation.

My homework was to explore the different materials in the earth around me and separate them from each other.

It was also part of the pre-requisite training prescribed to learn the skill, ‘earth separation’, although I didn’t have any intentions of going that far with my homework.

At my level of technique, I couldn’t separate materials properly. It felt like trying to separate salt from sugar.

I closed my eyes and took a breath.

I could hear the crunch of the dirt underneath my feet. My fingers ran over the ground, feeling it’s texture and warmth.

Inside my mind a picture formed of the world around me. There was mana everywhere, it inhabited the pebbles and stones around me, and it sailed through the tree I rested my back upon.

I tried to look for slight differences in the sea of earth mana around me.

Visually a pebble was easy to distinguish from an equally big pile of dirt. When using my magic senses and not my eyes, the two were almost identical.

The trick, as was often the case, was time.

I sat against the tree for an hour, connecting with the earth around me.

The first difference came to me when I shifted the earth around me and noticed some sections of mana were closer together than the others.

I raised the material into the air, and when I opened my eyes I saw a single rock in front of me.

Success.

I breathed a sigh of relief. That was the tenth attempt, and the others had all been dirt.

I wrote down my observations in my system library, and then stood up. I waved my hand and the loose dirt clinging to me fell to the ground.

That was one set of homework done.

I dropped the rock and it tumbled onto the grass. Then I tried something different. I held out my hands and on one side I lifted the rock back into the air, and on the other side I held up some of the dirt.

It felt like I was splitting my concentration in two. My head began to ache, and I put the two materials together.

It was like dropping saltwater into a freshwater lake. It was impossible to tell the difference between the two, but it didn’t matter for manipulating it. My head instantly cleared as I found myself focusing on the earth as a whole, instead of trying to separate it.

Even though I was using earth manipulation for both actions, one was significantly harder than the other.

I was used to working with pure materials. Not mixed ones. It was a side-effect of my earth creation skill.

Gold saw my struggle and flipped down onto my shoulder.

“No pain, no gain.” I scratched his neck. “How are you going with your project, buddy?”

He shook his head.

Whatever he was doing to that tree was going to take a lot more time to complete.

“My dad takes months to make things half as complex.” I shook my head. “You’re on the right track. In fact, you’re already way ahead of me.”

Gold preened and let out a content chirp.

“Speaking of which. I think it’s time I caught up with you.” I pushed my hand against the tree and stood up.

My symbols homework was to create a regent.

A proper, working device that could be either a magic item or an onze. It couldn’t simply be a symbol that lit up when activated.

Apparently, he had deemed my knowledge of regents and symbols to be high enough to make the attempt.

My dad agreed.

‘Champ, if anyone knows when a student is ready, it’s the professor.’ He had said. ‘The man made me what I am today.’

For my homework there had to be a proper array, with a base symbol and several other symbols connected to it. There would also be a sub-array attached to it.

It was a daunting task. My problems had always been lack of experience, and lack of materials.

Anybody could scribble a symbol onto paper or carve it in stone and then activate it. All that took was time and practice.

Regents were different. My dad had been clear about that from day one. There were quite a few reasons why scribers weren’t commonplace.

The biggest were the knowledge required for making regents, and the money barrier that would stop a noble in their tracks.

If I did buy materials to make a regent, and I failed, that was it.

I could write ten thousand symbols on pieces of paper, or carve them into sheets of stones, but the moment I screwed up on a regent that didn’t require those two materials, I would be done.

I couldn’t afford a second chance.

It also wasn’t easy to make a fully functioning regent out of the materials I did have. I had an infinite amount of stone, but all the earth materials I conjured were made out of mana.

That ruled out most regents that didn’t use earth mana or symbols as a base.

Both types of regents were susceptible to this. Unless the stone was specially treated, it would interfere with the mana magic items gathered, and it would negatively impact an onze.

I walked into the house and made my way to my room. I had created a desk specifically for this task. On it were a series of materials, including a pen.

The pen was a special kind of regent, lent to me by the school.

It was used for carving symbols into regent materials.

My dad could create regents by placing the materials inside his inscriber, but I didn’t have that advantage, and Pernacles wouldn’t accept my regent even if I could use the inscriber to make it.

On my desk was a set of materials.

Each was a different type of strengthened glass. There was one transparent glass, and the two other materials were an opaque red and blue respectively.

Professor Pernacles had handed them to me. Enough for three tries.

He had also given me access to a simple array scroll that I had memorised.

When this project was complete it would be a container ball, similar to the dodgeball ones. Except it would hold only earth.

I had suggested the type of regent myself.

He didn’t expect me to finish it straight away, in fact, it was a task for the first month of my studies. He would assist me every day, although he didn’t want my dad helping me.

He said that consulting my dad could easily turn into a crutch that would prevent me from bettering myself in the future.

I admired the handiwork I had already completed in my materials.

The first red glass-like material had already been used up. I had scratched a line in the wrong direction and the material was rendered useless. I had two more tries. It was responsible for the second layer of the array and would hold the symbols for shield and defence.

The transparent glass material would hold the base symbol that held everything together, the protection symbol.

Together the three symbols would form a basic hardening of the materials that composed the regent.

That much was simple and could usually be done with ordinary symbols. The hard part was connecting the symbols for earth, containment, and nature. They would form their own sub-array that connected with the main one and gave a purpose to the symbols that focused on defense.

This would make the regent focus solely on containing those elements. If anything tried to enter the regent without permission, whether it be an attack or a foreign element, the regent would harden and block it.

It was a lot simpler than the lava dodgeball, which allowed users to control the elements contained within, but it was an important foundational step.

Almost every regent had some form of hardening applied to the materials.

The array for defence was the most common one, and so it was the most important one to master.

I leaned over the materials and focused entirely on them.

This was going to be the rest of my Crijik. Tomorrow my free time was going to be filled to the brim by Unice’s celebration, and I didn’t feel like falling behind on homework.

Not the important homework, anyway.

The pen regent vibrated in my hand as my mana flowed into it. The tip glowed with light and when the regent was fully charged the end was sharp enough to carve through the materials with ease.

The first symbol I needed to complete was the protection symbol on the transparent glass.

Sweat dripped from my forehead as I pushed the pen into the glass. I had already completed 90% of the symbol over the last week, but it was slow business.

It didn’t help that this was a material I hadn’t worked with before.

If my hand trembled, or the pen shook in the wrong direction, I would lose all my progress.

Hours passed as I carved into the glass. Occasionally I would tidy up the loose ends of glass that the pen carved out by covering them with dirt and throwing them into my inventory.

The rays of sun disappeared, and the light of the moon shone through the cracks in my ceiling.

My hand paused as the final line connected to the other sections of the symbol. The material glowed as the finished symbol was inscribed into existence, and a grin spread across my face.

I’d done it.

[You have unlocked the skill: Symbol Inscription (basic)]

It was about damned time.