Scroll

Two hours later, Jialan woke from meditation. Though his mind felt refreshed, his body could not bear the prolonged sitting. He stretched his stiff limbs, and his spine gave a faint series of cracks.

The young mage bitterly massaged his lower back, his knuckles circling over the aching muscles. "At this rate, I'm afraid I'll turn into a hunchbacked old wizard."

Dinner was crisp, charred white bread stuffed with cured ham, its fat gleaming amber beneath the candlelight.

Jialan's fingers hovered over the wine bottle for a moment before he finally pushed the oak stopper back into place. There could be no mistakes in the Magic Scroll he needed to complete tonight.

Mages could drink as well. So long as it was not strong liquor, ordinary alcohol in moderation could even help improve one's spiritual power.

Night had completely fallen. A thick white candle burned in the silver candlestick on the desk, illuminating the little wooden cabin as brightly as day.

Jialan leaned over the desk. Tonight, he was preparing to make a Magic Scroll.

As everyone knew, advancement for spellcasters was exceedingly difficult. Of every ten apprentices with talent for casting, only two could advance to become Junior Mages.

He had become a Junior Mage at just eighteen, relying on spiritual power far stronger than that of others at the same rank.

As his rank rose, that slight advantage in spiritual power had long since vanished—until he came into contact with scroll-making.

He discovered that he had an exceptional talent for drawing Magic Scrolls. With the same kind of scroll, others had less than a ten percent success rate, while his could reach twenty percent. For some, it could even reach an astonishing thirty or forty percent.

Through drawing scrolls, he found that the prolonged, intense concentration of spiritual power during the process could refine his muddled spiritual power. That was an effect only High-grade Meditation Methods possessed, not something a mere low-ranking mage like him should have had.

The scroll Jialan intended to make this time was the apprentice-level Tier 0 Spell, Flash Spell.

There was one basic requirement for making Magic Scrolls: the entire structure had to be drawn in one uninterrupted go. If there was any break, the spell array's medium and materials would all lose their effectiveness.

He first took a thin sheet of Magical Beast Hide from a wall compartment and gently placed it on the table. Magic Scroll production also had requirements for Magical Beast Hide: the hide had to be one rank higher than the spell.

For example, an apprentice-level spell required Junior Magical Beast Hide. He then took out a palm-sized squat glass bottle inlaid with several magical characters.

The ink inside was unlike the ink he usually used for writing and copying. It had been concocted from a few drops of blood taken from the tip of an Intermediate Magical Beast's heart, combined with precious medicinal herbs and magic powder.

The magical characters on the bottle ensured that the ink within would neither solidify nor evaporate over time.

This special ink was mainly used for drawing rune structures and low-level magic arrays, and it was quite expensive. For a bottle of it, the most basic ingredient alone required the blood of at least an Intermediate Magical Beast, not to mention the precious herbs and magic powder.

Flash Spell was an apprentice-level Light Element spell. Its spell structure was relatively simple compared with other spells, and most spellcasters could learn it.

Every spellcaster had different affinities for different elements, and the power of the spells they cast also varied. Over time, this gave rise to the six major schools: wind, fire, water, earth, light, and dark.

There were also rarer ones, such as the Wood Element. Very few humans specialized in it; most were elves and druids. The Ice Mage was a mutated talent of the Water Element, while the Dark Flame Element was a mutated talent of the Fire Element. There were also the Spirit Element, Summoning Element, Lightning Element, Space Element, and so on.

Even if one did not specialize in an element, one could still cast spells of that element. However, their power would only be two-thirds, or even half, that of someone who specialized in it, and the casting time would be longer as well.

Of course, this only applied to spellcasters of the same rank. If one was a High Mage, this would not occur when casting low-level spells outside one's specialty.

The same was true of drawing Magic Scrolls. If one drew a scroll of an element one did not specialize in, the success rate could be appallingly low. This was especially true for same-rank scrolls of spells outside one's specialty, where the success rate approached zero.

Take Jialan, for example. He was an Ice Mage, a Water Element mutation user. The Flash Spell he was making was a Light Element spell. Though he was only making an apprentice-level spell as a Junior Mage, his success rate was still only around ten percent. That was only because he possessed an outstanding talent for making scrolls.

For an ordinary person, it would simply be a waste of materials. After all, the materials needed to make scrolls were precious as well.

A Magic Scroll was essentially a specially tanned sheet of Magical Beast Hide used as a medium. A Rune Master used a special pen and Magical Beast blood as ink to draw the spell structure onto the medium without the slightest error, then infused it with magic power and spiritual power.

When it was needed, one only had to expend a tiny amount of spiritual power to activate the scroll and cast the spell. It saved casting time and required no additional magic power or spiritual power.

Magic Scrolls were the best means of survival for frail mages, especially low-ranking mages, when faced with sudden danger. However, their production costs were simply too high. Even Jialan, a scroll maker, did not have many on him.

There was another kind of Magic Scroll that required neither spiritual power nor magic power to activate; it only needed to be torn open. However, it was even rarer. Only members of royal and noble families without spellcasting ability used them as a final means of survival. Even Jialan had never seen one.

He worked until midnight. After failing three times, Jialan finally succeeded in making a Flash Spell scroll. Then he dragged his exhausted body into bed.

He planned to meditate until dawn—shallow meditation, of course. Although troops were stationed nearby, this was the borderlands, and unexpected situations could arise. Deep Meditation was unsuitable here.

Meditation could not replace sleep, but with their powerful spiritual strength, mages only needed a few hours of sleep every three or four days.

Jialan's Meditation Method was the most ordinary one used by the military. It could only steadily raise magic power and spiritual power bit by bit. At his current rate, without outside help, it would take him at least fifteen years to advance to an Intermediate Mage. He had heard that some advanced Meditation Methods were three to five times as effective as his, but those were beyond his reach for now.