Spell Slots

Spell Slots

The novice mages at the Mage Association branches only needed to learn how to cast spells, like elementary school students being tested on applications of the commutative and associative laws.

But someone like him, starting from theory, was essentially being handed the Peano Axioms right away and asked to derive the entire system of arithmetic axioms.

It was not useless; it was simply unnecessary for now.

Zhao Xu had ambitions, but no matter how solidly he built his foundation, he could not spend several years or even over a decade becoming a Level 1 mage like Arthur's native mages.

Players generally took the crash-course route. They learned how to cast and apply spells directly, just as high school students did not study calculus but simply memorized a bunch of derivative formulas.

It was enough to know how without knowing why. Otherwise, the top mage among players would graduate in a year rather than a week.

Crash-course mages were a privilege Arthur granted to Earth's players.

Once the players reached the Arthurian World a year later, their Intelligence would rise to match the value on their Character Cards, and the corresponding spell knowledge would be instilled into them as well.

Even when bragging, they would be able to withstand scrutiny from native mages of the same level.

That would be the natural order of things.

Since Zhao Xu knew he could cheat a year from now, he naturally had no desire to chew through this hard bone now.

In his Previous Life, mage players who transmigrated generally spent half a year to a year fully digesting the knowledge granted by the system. Before that, very few mages could continue leveling smoothly.

"Gate of Arcane teaches differently from ordinary branches," Antinoa said. "If we truly wanted to mass-produce low- and mid-level mages, we have plenty of methods—or rather, the local branches are already doing that."

"So from the very beginning, our training target has been Legendary Mages. Naturally, there is no need to rush you into becoming Level 1 mages."

Listening to Antinoa, Zhao Xu felt somewhat dazed.

It was like arriving at college with an admission notice for a top-up bachelor's program, only to discover that it was actually an eight-year direct doctoral program.

Even his current undergraduate studies gave him the same impression. If someone truly wanted to work, a technical vocational school would be enough. Their undergraduate courses were more of a knowledge system prepared in advance for graduate studies.

Most people were merely part of the base number.

Zhao Xu could understand and even approve of this approach. Having reached the highest institution for mages, if one did not have even a small goal, one would truly have lived like a dog.

The problem was that he just wanted to lie low right now.

He was patient enough to spend more time training, even several times longer than other players. But—

That was based on being able to learn more spells, gain access to more powerful hidden Feats, and pave the way for future Advanced Professions.

He could trade time for greater combat power in the future.

Not for a more solid and reliable mage knowledge system than other players.

Because the promise of becoming a Legendary Mage was simply too far away for him. He could not swallow it within a year.

A solid knowledge system would let him draw spell models, derive how Prophecy Spells underwent structural transformations, and understand the release thresholds of evocation spells, but none of that would increase his Fireball's power by even the slightest bit.

What could increase spell power was either Caster Level or abilities such as Feats.

If Zhao Xu were taking the route of studying spells to improve his level, then sharpening the axe before chopping wood would certainly not be a waste of time.

Unfortunately, he had no such path to take unless Earth would not transmigrate to Arthur for another twenty years.

Yet Zhao Xu had no way to argue any of this with Antinoa.

After understanding that, Zhao Xu could only furrow his brow and continue studying the book.

No wonder he had barely heard of player mages from Mystra in his Previous Life. It seemed they had all been trapped studying on Mystra before transmigrating.

Faced with this situation, Zhao Xu could only sit there blankly. It felt as though he had returned to his final year of high school; even the cashmere cushion on his chair suddenly seemed much harder, digging painfully into his backside.

If The Arcane Path had simply been a history of magic, he would have had no trouble chewing through it. Zhao Xu was the kind of person who could enjoy reading everything from the histories of physics and mathematics to the chronologies of certain games and anime.

But although the book began in the ancient era of the Outer Gods, it only used the evolution of spells as its thread, constantly bringing up all sorts of mysterious concepts.

In the later stages of vocational training, players would determine their own skill systems and decide whether to invest points in them.

Yet even if they wanted to invest points, they had to meet prerequisite requirements before they could improve those skills.

Just like leveling was not something that happened naturally—you first had to accumulate enough experience, then clear the hurdle to determine whether you could level up.

The skill systems included knowledge-type skills, divided into many categories, each of which required separate point investment to advance.

If Zhao Xu had an adjustment of over thirty in Knowledge (Arcana), he could at least make a Knowledge Check and see whether he could automatically retrieve the meanings of certain terms.

As things stood, he could only treat Antinoa across from him as a humanoid dictionary and keep looking things up, making his reading terribly inefficient.

However, Zhao Xu did not know at this moment that being able to open this book without having his mind confused was itself proof that he had received some form of protection.

As he read deeper, even without fully understanding it, Zhao Xu could roughly follow along. He only became more and more confused, until he read—

When he saw that spell slots were explicitly defined by the Goddess of Magic, he could not help but feel deeply moved.

Arthur's spell system used spell slots for everyone, regardless of profession, rather than traditional mana points.

How many spells each person could cast every day was determined by their Class Level, with additional Spell Slots granted by Attribute Values added on top.

At the same time, every mage had to rest for eight full hours, then spend another hour meditating to determine their spells before they could use those Spell Slots.

That was right. Both mages and priests had to spend an hour deciding what spells they would cast that day. They could not wait until the last minute to decide which spell to use with a third-level spell slot.

And once a spell slot was used up, it was gone. It would not recover just by sitting down for a while; they still needed eight full hours of rest before they could prepare those Spell Slots again the next day.

When mages learned spells, they had to copy them into their own Spellbooks. Only then could those spells be used for Prepare Spell.

And as spell levels increased, the number of pages required for copying increased as well.

Therefore, unless mages used the Blessing Book of the Goddess to Scribe Spell, they had to carry around thick Spellbooks.

If a mage lost their Spellbook, it was like a chef losing their cooking utensils. No matter how many ingredients they had, they could not make anything fancy.

Many mages were dragged below the poverty line simply by the cost of Scribe Spell. Priests were different—their divine spells were granted by their gods, who simply let them choose what to prepare. There was none of this nonsense.

Even under such harsh conditions, mages remained monstrously powerful, precisely because their Spell Lists, Feats, advancements, and items were all absurdly strong.

However, Zhao Xu was more concerned with what he himself should choose. According to Arthurian tradition, novice mages would receive a free ordinary Spellbook, and apprentices could copy all Zero-level Spells into it for free.

A Zero-level Spell generally took up half a page in a Spellbook, while a First-level Spell took up one full page.

They could also choose three spells from the local Mage Association's inventory to copy for free.

Back when everyone was dirt poor, these three starting spells essentially determined a novice mage's initial combat power.

As Zhao Xu read, he could not help fantasizing about which First-level Spells he should choose.

Of course, nothing was absolute. The Enlightened Caster Feat allowed one to go without a Spellbook, but it would be troublesome to mention every exception. Besides, there were some things even the protagonist had not encountered in his Previous Life.