He felt the scales vanish and appear. This was a spell he would absolutely have to add to his practice regimen, and practicing it would be unlike anything he had ever done before. Even now, he had to pay attention to his heartbeat while observing the spell. According to the Spellbook, practice would also allow him to control where the scales appeared.
Originally, he had taken that specifically mentioned detail at face value. Now, however, realization dawned on him. It was not merely a description of the spell's intricacy, but a strategy for using it-a strategy for conserving power that had never occurred to him before casting it.
One thing about Heartstring Scales that greatly surprised him was its rate of mental power consumption, unlike anything he had ever seen. Every beat of his heart, every beautiful appearance of the scales, came with a continuous drain on his mental power.
Among the spells he had encountered along the way, some had included descriptions and warnings about mental power consumption. He had paid them some heed at first, but later discovered that even spells supposedly demanding enormous amounts of power were nothing much. Given the quality of his mental power and the speed at which it recovered, he could afford to stop paying attention to such things altogether.
This time, however, he had learned a valuable lesson. Such ferocious consumption really did exist. Earlier, he had complained that there were too few scales. Now that he thought about it, if his heart beat rapidly as described, wrapping him in a mass of scales within a single breath, that one surge of scales and the instantaneous drain it caused might exhaust his mental power completely.
Of course, this was partly because he had only just advanced to the Third Ring. Still, he