The Three Stages of Mental Power

Although Manus's Spirit Sea was called a sea, it currently looked like nothing more than an exceedingly vast lake—at least, from Manus's perspective.

It couldn't be helped. Compared to the centuries of accumulation before his transmigration, he had only been seven years old since arriving in this world. No matter how extensive his experience was, he could not conjure mental power out of nothing.

Yet at the center of this lake, a transformation was quietly taking place. The liquid at its center flowed continuously toward a single point.

A spellcaster's mental power had two measures: quality and quantity.

There was no universally accepted standard for the quantity of mental power, but its quality could generally be divided into three stages.

At the first stage, mental power appeared gaseous, like a mass of mist.

It should be noted that this "appearance" was a subjective projection of consciousness. Mental power itself had no distinctions such as shape or color, yet it displayed certain characteristics according to a person's perception.

For example, mental power in the form of mist was an appearance formed from traits such as instability, illusoriness, vagueness, and susceptibility to interference.

At this stage, a person's memories were unreliable and easily disrupted. For unclear memories, the mind could even automatically fill in the gaps with other clear fragments, making one believe their memories were lucid and complete. This was an exceptionally dangerous flaw during spellcasting.

At the same time, a person's mental will was also easily influenced and controlled by outside forces at this stage. Without prior precautions, they had virtually no resistance to Enchantment School magic.

For these reasons, spellcasters whose mental power remained at this stage could generally only serve as apprentices and assistants.

Before the quality of their mental power improved, no amount of accumulated quantity would allow them to advance to the next stage of study at an academy or present themselves as formal mages outside.

At the second stage, mental power changed from a gaseous state into a liquid one. This was the stage Manus had previously been in, and it was the most crucial and fundamental requirement for becoming a formal mage.

Compared with the previous stage, this meant mental power became more solid, less susceptible to outside interference, and naturally stable when unaffected by external forces.

At this stage, mages could actively and effortlessly control their emotions—indeed, this was also a requirement for transforming the quality of mental power into a liquid state—and exert a certain degree of control over their memories.

For instance, remembering what they wished to remember and forgetting what they wished to forget.

Unless subjected to powerful external interference, mages at this stage could guarantee perfectly accurate memories of even extremely complex spell models for at least a day. Naturally, how much they could remember depended on the quantity of their mental power.

Mages usually devoted most of this precious capacity for perfectly accurate memory to memorizing important spell models, ensuring they could cast those spells at extraordinary speed when needed. Thus, this memory capacity was also called Spell Slots.

Furthermore, against mental interference, a mage's mental power had stronger resistance than in the previous stage.

Just as a mass of mist would change violently in a breeze, while a pool of water would be affected only slightly.

Of course, when faced with forceful interference, liquid mental power still did not possess particularly strong resistance. It could only give the mage a window between noticing the influence and being controlled when facing mental effects of roughly equal quality, allowing them to cast the appropriate spell in response.

The final third stage was the solid state.

This represented the ultimate solidity of mental power. Not only was it immensely stable itself, it could even ignore external influences to a certain extent.

Apart from a very small number of spells or the aid of certain magical items, Enchantment School magic cast by mages whose mental power was in the first two stages would have no effect whatsoever on mages in the third stage.

Thus, some mages called this stage the true qualitative transformation of mental power, claiming that this alone was mental power's one and only transformation.

It was obvious that these mages only said such things after reaching the third stage, but judging by the results, there truly were many mages who supported this view.

After all, the three-stage classification of quality was merely a standard set by people, a tool for helping one understand and recognize oneself. Viewed through a different standard, the same traits could project entirely different forms.

After undergoing the transformation in his previous life, Manus himself had also felt that this claim made sense.

Unlike the second stage, which could be reached through training one's restraint and control over one's own mental power, and was basically achievable as long as one could steadily enter meditation on their own.

To enter the third stage, one needed not only sufficiently powerful control over one's own mental power, but also an opportunity and a core.

The improvement of mental power during the second stage could be seen as an increase in the viscosity of a liquid. Throughout this process, mental power became increasingly solid, but no matter how solid it became, it could not, as it could after transformation, completely ignore Enchantment School magic from the first and second stages under normal circumstances.

There was a clear and distinct dividing line between the second and third stages. On either side lay an essential gap that quantity could scarcely overcome.

This did not exist between the first and second stages, and it was also an important argument for the theory that the transformation between the second and third stages was the true and only threshold.

Setting aside the specific arguments of this minority theory, there were two conventional ways to cross this boundary.

The first, and also the most standard and stable method, was to find a "Condensation Nucleus" for mental power to transform from liquid into solid, much like a solute crystallizing after a solution became supersaturated.

This Condensation Nucleus was not a physical object, but an illusory concept. It could be a pursuit, a belief, a goal, a person, or a relationship...

Whatever it was, only two core standards mattered for a mage seeking transformation.

First, it had to be sufficiently unique to the mage themselves. In their heart, nothing could compare with it.

The essence of this requirement was the principle behind the transformation itself: one needed a core around which they could gather all their mental will.

If this condition could not be met, it would probably be like placing several Condensation Nuclei of different sizes into a supersaturated solution during crystallization. Would that make a mage's mental power stronger? Or would it make the mage weaker?

No one knew, because none of the mages who had undergone such an experience lived long enough to record the sensations and changes that followed such a transformation.

The second standard was that the Condensation Nucleus had to be sufficiently stable.

If the Condensation Nucleus was destroyed, and the core for which one had mobilized all their mental will was gone, then the best possible outcome would be falling back to the second stage—

This was why every textbook, record, and document that mentioned this method strongly discouraged using a person or a relationship as a Condensation Nucleus.