Magic Power and Spiritual Power

Expressionless, Eleven tossed the petite, adorable "goddess" into the excited crowd of "burly men" surrounding her below, like a killer with no feelings!

Ignoring the churning swamp mud behind him, Eleven turned and flew toward Rakao Village. Besides turning in the job and collecting his reward, he still couldn't get Warren's Telepathy Magic out of his mind. He very much wanted to learn this new way of using Spiritual Power.

After turning in the job to the old village chief, Eleven once again sought out Warren, who had been beaten until he looked like a mummy.

"Hey! Are you all right?" Eleven greeted Warren somewhat awkwardly.

"What do you think?" Warren rolled his eyes at Eleven irritably. "What do you want? Wasn't your job already settled?"

"Yeah, it's not about work. I came to learn magic from you." Eleven scratched his head and, without beating around the bush, told him honestly.

"Learn magic? From me?" Warren could hardly believe it. A mage as powerful as Eleven had actually come to him to learn magic. "But I don't know anything except Telepathy Magic!"

Warren studied Eleven carefully and confirmed he wasn't joking. With a helpless shrug, he held out both hands, wrapped up like rice dumplings, to show he had nothing to teach.

"That's exactly what I want to learn. Could you teach me Telepathy Magic?" Eleven looked at Warren with the eyes of a kitten or puppy.

"Uh, I suppose I could." Eleven's gaze made Warren uncomfortable all over, but he answered helplessly, "The thing is, I don't know how to teach anyone. It's magic I awakened naturally."

Eleven could relate to what Warren said. He had been born with his superpowers too, and if someone suddenly asked him to teach them, he wouldn't know how either. Still, he didn't give up and immediately took a different approach.

"Then could you describe how you circulate your Spiritual Power? Maybe I can try doing it your way."

"Spiritual Power? You mentioned that before too. What exactly is Spiritual Power?" Warren looked thoroughly puzzled.

Eleven had forgotten that Warren didn't know about Spiritual Power, so he explained briefly, "It's the energy you control when you use Telepathy Magic."

"Huh? You mean magic power?" Warren was even more confused.

"No, I mean... Wait, do you control magic power directly?"

Eleven was about to continue explaining when he suddenly realized something was wrong. He quickly stopped to ask, then gathered a ball of magic power in his palm and showed it to Warren. "This is magic power. You control it directly to cast magic?"

"Yeah! Don't you?" Warren looked at Eleven as if he were an idiot, but his expression suddenly grew serious. Could it be that powerful mages don't control magic power directly, but use that Spiritual Power instead? Could this be the secret to getting stronger?

Across from Warren, Eleven fell silent too, though he was thinking the opposite. Do other mages all control magic power to cast magic? Then what does that make me?

At that moment, Eleven suddenly realized that what he had been using all along might not have been spiritual-attribute magic at all, but superpowers! Although both involved mixing Spiritual Power with magic power, the way he used them was fundamentally different from everyone else's.

Ordinary mages seemed to produce magical effects by circulating magic power in a particular way. So as long as they had Spiritual Power, they could learn to cast spiritual-attribute magic. It didn't matter even if they couldn't freely project their Spiritual Power like Eleven, because as long as the magic power circulated correctly, their Spiritual Power would be released by the magic formed from it.

Eleven's ability, however, was the exact opposite. Every time he used it, he first mobilized his Spiritual Power, while magic power merely served as fuel to support it. Spiritual Power was in control, and magic power played only a supporting role. Although without magic power, Spiritual Power would be far less effective for both attack and exploration, magic power wasn't indispensable.

No wonder he had been utterly baffled whenever the guild master and the others talked about paying attention to the circulation of magic power or changing its course. He had never circulated magic power at all—or rather, he simply didn't need to.

"Um, how do you circulate magic power?"

"Um, how do you circulate Spiritual Power?"

Eleven and Warren spoke at the same time. Afterward, they looked at each other and laughed. Well, this was great—they could learn from each other!

Meanwhile, at the Fairy Tail guild.

Gray shouted in dismay, "Cana! Do the reading again! How could I possibly have the best luck today?!"

Cana glanced with a hint of disdain at Gray, who was running around naked. "That's the result. It can't be wrong! Besides, what's so bad about having the best luck?"

Gray (°Д°): "What's so good about my luck? I stepped in poop barefoot this morning! You must have gotten it wrong!"

Cana (￣∠￣): "That's because you run around naked everywhere without shoes!"

Gray: ...

Just then, the guild doors were suddenly pushed open, and a girl with scarlet hair strode in as though no one else were there.

The girl wore clothes that looked like a ragged sack and carried a thin bundle in her hand. She wore an eyepatch over her right eye, which seemed to have been injured. After entering, she didn't speak to anyone, but began looking around at the messy guild.

"Who's this brat?" Wakaba, sitting nearby, turned to glance at the little girl and asked, sounding annoyed.

Macao, his good buddy sitting across from him, chimed in helplessly, "Why's another weirdo shown up, huh?"

The red-haired girl completely ignored the two chattering old men behind her and muttered to herself, "So this is the place Grandpa Rob told me about..."

Eleven stayed in Rakao Village for several days. Learning a magic properly was no easy task, and it was even harder when the teacher himself only half understood it and couldn't answer most questions.

Eleven was smart, though, with excellent comprehension and memory. On the third day, he finally succeeded, casting magic by circulating magic power to activate his Spiritual Power for the first time.

"Warren, can you hear me?" Eleven asked Warren over the telepathy channel.

"I can hear you. Absolutely perfect!" Warren gave Eleven a thumbs-up to show he could hear him clearly.

Eleven let out a long breath. He had finally learned a magic. This was the first magic he had ever learned!

But Eleven wasn't all that happy, because he found that using magic power to operate his Spiritual Power was extremely awkward. Although that was partly because he wasn't practiced at it, Eleven felt the greater reason was that this method really was far, far less efficient than using Spiritual Power directly.

Eleven frowned, feeling that real magic didn't seem as useful as he had imagined. So he carefully tried mobilizing his Spiritual Power to imitate the path it had just taken when activated by magic power.

To his surprise, it actually worked!