Ever since the catastrophic disaster in which the madness of the Great Arcanist Karsus caused the light of Netheril's civilization to completely fall, the rules of the Weave had been changed by the second Goddess of Magic, resulting in everything modern wizards did being built upon the Weave.
The advantages of this were obvious. For one, the threshold for becoming a spellcaster had been lowered!
It might sound a little unbelievable, but according to statistics, there were now far more spellcasters on the continent than there had been during Netheril's era.
Even though Netheril had implemented universal education and begun spreading magical knowledge among the populace, the rate at which Arcanists emerged was still extremely low. Scholars who had studied texts from the Netheril era had once made a startling discovery: on the Floating Cities that modern wizards regarded as dreamlands, there were actually not that many spellcasters who truly held the title of Arcanist. Taking a Floating City with a population of one hundred thousand as an example, fewer than six hundred registered Arcanists actually lived there.
Some might say that six hundred out of one hundred thousand was already a very high proportion. If you looked at it that way, it was indeed true. After all, the success rate for modern spellcasters was at most one in three thousand, perhaps even lower. But that was far too one-sided a view. One had to remember that those figures came from Floating Cities!
The Netheril Empire did not consist solely of Floating Cities. In reality, the Netheril Empire had been enormous. Its territory had encompassed nearly half of Faerun, with a population exceeding tens of millions. And what sort of people had been qualified to board and settle on the Floating Cities?
To put it simply, they had all been