“Concentrate damn it!” Silas roared in his unfortunate apprentice’s ear. “You’re not paying attention.”

Arthur had almost jumped for joy when the old mage had asked him to be his apprentice, unfortunately, magic was hard. It was rather frustrating doing the same thing day after day and making almost no progress. However, as he reminded himself for the umpteenth time, this is what he wanted and dreamed of for so long, an actual teacher who knew what they were doing with mana. Silas was in the mage guild, and while he still hadn’t told Arthur precisely how strong he was, the old man was strong enough to be put in charge of a dungeon town, albeit temporarily.

Taking a deep calming breath Arthur carefully extended his mana instead of unformed globs of power he forced the magic to compact into small threads. Painfully slowly he began to weave the threads together forming a small glob of beautifully woven threads. Carefully, this was the part he kept messing up, he tied off the strings of power holding his spell. Staring in shock, Arthur realized he had done it finally, almost two months of constant effort and haranguing and he had finally managed a basic mana bolt.

“Well done Arthur. Now we can finally move on to the fun stuff.” Silas was rubbing his hands together with glee as he looked around the clearing they were in. Arthur had wondered why they were practicing outside the town, right up until his first spell went wrong. It didn’t explode exactly, it wasn’t fire mana, but he had taken a good chunk out of a rock as it crazily flew around like a balloon with a hole in it.

“What’s the fun part master?” He was almost afraid to ask.

“Come on boy, just call me Silas, keep the bowing and scraping for the nobles.” Nobles appeared to be a bit of a sore subject with his new master, and Arthur tried his best never to bring up the subject. “Anyway, now you get to actually use the spell on something. See that tree over there right? Well throw the spell over there and see what happens.”

Arthur was a little reluctant to throw away the pinnacle of weeks of effort but he dutifully lobbed the glowing ball of threads at the tree. He wasn’t really expecting much to happen, his old mana bolt probably would have barely put a mark on the tree. He was more than a little surprised when the spell blew its way halfway through the tree before sputtering and fading. The young mage stood slack-jawed and stared at the tree, sure a few of his failures had been fairly destructive but he hadn’t thought he could do this much damage intentionally.

Silas grabbed his shoulder and laughed at his startled expression. “Now that is why you learn to cast spells properly. It’s going to be tough at first, but a properly formed mana bolt will be far more effective and cost a fraction of the mana of that old mash of mana you called a spell.” Arthur blushed a little at the description of his first spell, in his defense he had no idea what he was doing. “Now you just need to practice making it over and over again until you can cast it in a combat situation. It’ll be hard with you being only in tier two but practice makes perfect and this will make you even better at handling mana when you eventually get to tier three and unlock mana manipulation.”

“Unlock mana manipulation? I can already manipulate mana though.”

Silas grinned mischievously. “Yes you can but getting to tier three grants you a huge boost to your ability to manipulate mana, like fine control, and the ability to form it into complex shapes. The system doesn’t tell you exactly what changes when you evolve your class but as far as we, the mage guild, have been able to tell the first three class levels across all three energy types are rather similar.” Silas took a breath fishing a water pouch from somewhere and took a drink before continuing.

“Right so the first class obviously unlocks whatever energy type corresponds to that class, like mana or chi. It also lets you sense your energy which is essential to being able to manipulate it. Tier two classes then grant what we call ‘affinity’ for your energy, this makes you better at using your energy. It's not quite control but more that the mana is more in tune with what you want, better under your control, more a part of your will.” Arthur nodded this was similar to what he experienced after evolving his class. “Tier three classes then expand the fine control of your energy, letting you use it much more precisely than before. It's interesting because these three classes have very similar development across all three energy types. After you get to tier four classes things get a little more complicated.”

Arthur scratched his head and nodded, but something was bothering him. “But a few of the skills you gain from evolving your class, particularly the tier three skill, seem like something that you could just train for. You don’t need to have class evolutions to give you better control, you can just practice until your control is really good, right?”

Silas chuckled and shook his head. “You are technically correct Arthur, however, the sheer amount of training you need to do to develop the skill that evolution grants in an instant is immense. There was an archmage that devoted her life to studying other energies, and eventually, she was able to sense them and even interact with them to a small degree. However, she wasn’t even able to get close to the abilities of even a tier-one chi or chakra classer. It would take you centuries at minimum to develop your control manually to achieve the skill that evolution will grant you naturally.” Arthur squinted his eyes, still not convinced with the explanation.

Silas shook his head and rolled his eyes. “I suppose a demonstration is in order though as you are clearly not convinced.” Arthur watched as his master’s neutral mana poured forth from the old man. Delicately, almost effortlessly the mana shaped itself into threads so fine they looked like wisps of cobwebs. All around the old mage the threads of his power worked together weaving a passive tapestry of power around him. The dense shell of power formed in only seconds and Arthur was left gapping at the display of spellcraft. Reaching out with a hand he felt the complex weave of mana around Silas, his hand stopped like it had hit a stone wall.

Silas smirked in pleasure at his student's stunned expression. “A little bit more difficult to pull off than the basic mana bolt but this is one of the most useful spells that we mages use. It's called mana shield, which is a bit on the nose but I suppose the name gets the job done. As you can see it's rather sturdy and can stand up to physical attacks, and most basic mana attacks quite well.”

The mana shield faded as Silas stopped feeding mana into his construct. “They’re not practical to keep up all the time but in a fight, it's one of the first spells you’ll want to cast.” Arthur nodded vigorously, he was a lot less durable than any chi classers he was around so having some form of protection would be important. “Mana shields are also the next spell you’re going to be learning after you can get more of a handle on the basic mana bolt spell.”

Arthur nodded in understanding then hesitated. “Teacher, if evolving my class to tier three gives such a boost in control, what’s the point in practicing at all until I tier up? Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to level as fast as possible and then practice spells after I’m better at controlling mana?”

“You would think so right? However, the practice you’re doing now isn’t going to waste. The evolution bonus you get from your third-tier class is basically a flat bonus onto your existing control. So let's make some arbitrary numbers here, say your control is at two right now and someone who never practices with their spells has a control of zero.” Arthur nodded his head following along with the explanation. “When you both get to tier three hypothetically say you each get a bonus of ten to your control. Your control would now be twelve while the other guy who never practiced would just be at a control of ten, do you see what I’m getting at?”

“I think I get it, training my control is important now even if I’m going to get a big boost to it later.”

“Exactly, now I’m going to head back to town you keep practicing mana bolt. You’ll need to be much faster with it if you ever want to get actual use out of the spell.” Waving goodbye to his apprentice Silas trotted away back in the direction of the dungeon. Arthur sighed to himself, it was going to take him forever to get proficient at this spell. With a shrug he set to work, calling out small strings of mana to weave together again, nothing to be done about it but practice.

Valens growled in frustration as the rune that he had so painstakingly carved blew up, again. He had managed to make a few runes that worked, but that was more due to sheer dumb luck rather than actual skill. One solution he had found for making the runes easier to create was to make them larger. For most people making a massive rune would probably be harder than making a small rune but for a dungeon, it was quite the opposite. The larger size wasn’t an issue for the core and it allowed him to recognize mistakes and fix them before the rune blew up on him.

That being said the larger runes were rather impractical to actually use, arrays needed a lot of runes working together and making that many massive runes was impractical even for a dungeon core. That being said he had managed to get Magnus to show him a few more different runes including the runes for fire and water. That might have been a mistake, the fire rune was even more volatile than the mana rune he had started out on, and how in the world did a rune for water still blow up when he messed something up?

Regardless, progress was being made which was good. It had frustrated the core for the longest time that he had just not been doing any better with his runework. Magnus had repeatedly told him just to wait until his aura was stronger, but waiting was boring. At least now he had found a bit of a workaround he could use until his aura got stronger.

Valens took a cursory look over his dungeon, just to be sure everything was working. He might have gotten a little wrapped up in his runes and he couldn’t quite tell how long he had been working. Everything seemed fine, for the most part, adventurers were roaming around the dungeon as always. His monsters were doing well, populations growing nicely on the seventeenth floor. That was a rather large number of adventurers on the upper floors though.

Come to think of it the number of adventurers had been slowly increasing, and he wasn’t sure he like what was happening. Sure more adventurers meant more idiot humans who got themselves killed in dumb ways. However, it also meant more of his monsters were being killed, and at some point, there wouldn’t be enough monsters to maintain his ecosystem. A quick check alleviated his concerns somewhat, there were still plenty of creatures on his floors, and his precious ecosystem wasn’t in danger of collapse, yet at least. He’d have to come up with a solution soon though the populations on his floors were still declining, maybe Magnus would have an idea to try.