AN: Yo, your lazy author present you chapter 42 :D, enjoy!

Title say that the school truly started for Aenthar now

PR by Bboybrian

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My first patrol with Eliane Shane went well. We didn't encounter any noteworthy trouble. We chatted a bit along the way, told a few stories of her dealing with trouble. Problems often came from the first year mages who knew a few spells and tried to show off. It worsens when you mix in noble children from rival houses. She also told me a bit about herself, 16 years old, the fourth child and second daughter of Count Shane, whose lands are at the north-east of Tristam. As expected of a noble's daughter, she is haughty and a bit sarcastic, but fair. I didn't hate her at all.

Among the other members of the student council, I also got along well with Ren Brom, Francisco Drega and Irmynn Thum. There was a bit of rivalry between Ren and me in earth magic, and he seemed more interested in fighting than acting like a proper noble and managing people. He was rather easy going, still a bit arrogant like all nobles, but not in a boastful or irritating manner. Francisco is the second son of duke Drega; he was from a kingdom near the south of the caecian lands. He was very interested in diplomacy and foreign trade, and that made him agreeable to talk to.

Why I got along well with Irmynn mostly had to do with the fact that I had elven blood and good grades in math. She liked to talk about the elven village she grew up in, and liked to do her arithmetics homework with me. She came to Lana Academy to learn about language and trade. I didn't have many opportunities to speak with the others, but I was not that eager to, except for Kalima and Gamli. The others looked a bit too smug and arrogant for my taste, at least from the little bit I could see from them, especially Jane. She was often all smiles, but I didn't like it.

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Only after the first week of class and joining the student council did my school life truly start. Each week I had 14 hours of elemental magic lessons, 3 hours of compound magic and 3 hours of alchemy. As a member of the student council I had to do patrol 5 hours per week, and some of them were during the few free hours I had in my schedule. I couldn't afford to slack off on martial arts either so I decided to spar with the girls twice per week, one session on a morning and one on an afternoon, depending on when their martial arts would take place.

For each class there would be a test at the end of each month, and there would be rankings. There was a general ranking for each department for beginner classes, intermediates classes and advanced classes. These 9 rankings would be displayed each month near the entrance of the academy and the entrance of the restaurant building. In each department building there would be a detailed ranking for each class in each category. As a scholarship student, I was expected to be on the better part of those rankings.

There were people with better affinity than me in a few elements, and I could still keep up with them due to my experience in using magic, though barely. I couldn't really notice it in Argot where there were few magic users and when we didn't spend much time using our magic near each other, but affinity really was an important factor between 2 mages of equivalent magic ability. Additionally, I was having troubles in water and darkness magic since I didn't really use them before coming to the academy. At least I got good comments for my relatively fast progress.

Compound magic was the class in which I had the most motivation. There was something I noticed when I was practicing mixing elements. Some elements were hard to mix together, obvious examples such as fire and water, earth and wind, holy and darkness, and body and mind. Also, your affinities with the elements you tried to mix would count as well. If you didn't have a similar enough level of affinity with the 2 elements you tried to mix, it would be harder. Let me say this, weaving mixed elements into a spell is much harder than weaving a single element.

Fireball and waterball are spells that channel the element into a ball and launch it at the enemy. For the same process, the weaving is different; each element is more suited for certain kinds of patterns. Trying to mix 2 elements into a common pattern is unnatural for the elements, thus they tend to repulse each other during the weaving. The more elements you mix, the harder it is to weave, and the more complex the weaving needs to be. Healing magic is a blessing since holy and darkness elements tend to blend well with elements from the spirit sphere.

Even though compound magic was harder than regular magic, being able to bring out more diversified effects with magic more than made up for it. Steam, ice, mud, lava, sand, sound, elemental buffs and debuffs. For someone like me who could use all elements, and with knowledge from my previous world, I could hope to create effects people from this world couldn't think about. I was hoping to develop things like concentrated microwave attacks, laser attacks, and sonic attacks. Maybe I could even reach a level where fission and fusion of elements would be possible. That would be true transmutation, turning an element into another.

During the alchemy class, we were taught about magical materials and concoctions with magical effects. The first kind of potion a mage should be able to make is the mana regeneration potion. It considerably increases the mana regeneration of the target during a limited amount of time. It was not like in a video game, where it would immediately give a certain amount of mana. Potions with those kinds of effects were the rarest and the hardest to make. They required high quality materials that were hard to get. Only people in the highest positions have some, and they use it only for emergencies. Later on, we would learn about magical reagents and catalysts used for enchanting.

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Of course, many people tried to befriend me, but since I had a heavy schedule, I didn't get to talk with them much. 3 out of 4 people who wanted to talk to me were commoners and children of merchants. The rest were nobles, they didn't come to me much, probably to avoid mixing with the other commoners gravitating around me. I could tell from the way those nobles who did approach me did so at times when the commoners weren't too close. If among the commoners there were more guys than girls talking with me, then among the nobles there were more girls than guys. They were probably trying to charm me into joining their family in one way or another.

However, when I told Kerrina and Muriem about it, it clearly made them uncomfortable. They knew it would happen. They knew that more girls would try to become my lover. They had accepted it from the moment we became lovers, but seeing it start was different than just imagining it in the future. Even though for now it was just girls talking to me from time to time, when I told them about my opinion it made them uneasy. They started to act more spoiled with me, asking for a bit more of attention even though we would always be together when not at the academy. It lasted for several days before they calmed down and realized they would always be my favorites.

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For the little time I had to myself in the mornings and the evenings, I continued the observation of the unknown mana inside Komodo. There was mana everywhere in this world; everything around us contained mana of all elements, their ratios varied from place to place, material to material. If this weird mana was present in the monsters, then it should be present in everything else as well. It was hard to perceive this unique mana, it was in fact more correct to say that I could only identify it through the effects it had on its surroundings, like astrophysicists discovering black holes through their effects on their surroundings.

After observing it for so long, and after being around so many sources of mana in the academy, my mana sense sharpened, and I was finally able to clearly sense the element. It gave me the impression of a weird organism similar to the black thing that gave birth to venom in the Spiderman movie, with tentacles randomly extending and retracting. It looked like something unstable and hard to control, something potentially really dangerous. And it really was present in everything else, just with such a weak ratio it was barely noticeable.

Since I was able to sense it, I started to wonder if I could wield it like the other elements. But I wasn't about to try it anytime soon. I will do just like I did when I was little, sharpening my senses without touching it. I didn't know enough about magic to try and manipulate something so predominantly innate in monsters, something that reminded me of a dangerous parasite.

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AN: No dialogs in this chapter, made me feel better :).

Feels like Kerrina and Muriem POV would be nice in one of the next few chapters....