His vacation and adjustment period had both ended perfectly. Naturally, his next efforts would go toward modifying spells.
This was also something Ruger had been pondering all along. He did many things each day, whether practicing spells or enjoying the company of different friends, but his mind never stopped working. Or rather, he spent his days in an intermittent process of reflection that sometimes looked like simply spacing out.
Through his conversations with Mahama and the others, and through books at various levels from several wizards in different fields, he continued to reap rewards. He gained insights that helped with his ideas, even as they gradually drove the questions he was pondering into more difficult territory.
Expanding his knowledge and experience broadened the avenues of his thinking, but while that helped him work through his problems, those wider avenues inevitably gave rise to more questions.
In that sense, it was sometimes rather funny. There seemed to have been no progress at all.
Yet something had changed fundamentally. Those books, for instance, had not brought the dramatic progress he craved. They had even given him more to ponder and worry about, consuming more of his time and energy. But they had genuinely helped him, too. That time and energy had been worth spending.
He also came to understand that the predicament before him was the same one faced by those who had to forge their own path: the original creators of spell sequences, the teachers of those who taught others.
On one hand, they had to satisfy their own desires and make up for their shortcomings. On the other, they wanted to pave the way for the future, yet their perspective remained limited by their present level of strength.
And so, they struggled onward.
In Mahama's words, it was a very