Seed Of Speed

For the next two days, aside from when he left to relieve himself, he spent at the table with his nose in a book or scroll. He was not alone though as Tovao, Rainshower and Moonfall visited him a number of times, often bringing a meal with them. When the library thinned to just one or two people besides himself, Diego would walk up and down the corridors of books and add them to his databanks. He did not notice it back in the oasis when he scanned the clan's library, of course the wealth of knowledge from the clan could not compare to here, but he could feel this strange expanse in his mind. Although he could access this information, he would have to know what he was looking for and could not remember it like he could the states and capitals as he was taught in school. He would have to take the time to truly study the material if he needed that level of knowledge.

On the morning of his third day, when Moonfall brought Diego breakfast, he made a point of tossing his last scroll into the air as she walked up. She summoned two plates of food and two mugs of a juice that had a similar taste to coffee, despite its green color, from her storage space and sat down.

"I see that you've finished," she said with a smile.

"Yeah, but this is about my limit for sleepless nights for now," Diego said with dark bags under his eyes as he snatched the coffee-like drink.

Moonfall giggled and picked up a piece of fruit then began nibbling away.

"So Moonfall, Master told me you about to finish your first golem. Could you tell me a little about golem making?" Diego asked while they ate.

"Of course, junior-brother," she said with her trademark excited smile. "The most critical part of golem crafting is creating the core which will act as both the heart and mind of the golem. There are three classifications for the different types of golem: Tool, Servant, and Guard. Three golems could have identical body structures and crystalline pathways, but have different ranking depending on the amount of work and skill the creator put into forming their cores.

"Tool-class golems are the most basic and common type of golem and have a variety of different uses. They are typically unable to communicate and can only follow the simplest of commands. Normally, they are used in mines or to tend fields, but they are also used to make flying sh.i.p.s.

"Servant-class golems are able to mimic human intelligence. They are much harder to create, so only they normally sought out by wealthy mortals to act as eternal servants. Once they are bound, the golems will forever be loyal to their master and can serve a mortal family for generations. They are also used by the sect to act as merchants since they can not be bribed or haggled with and will do their duty to the letter.

"The Guard-class golems are much like the Servant-class ones, but their intelligence can rival a human. They are able to wield weapons with varying degree of skill and can strategize. It is a big step between the Servant and Guard classes, even if it does not seem like it by my description. Without actually studying it, its hard to understand the intricacies of the craft."

===========================================================

Hidden Mission Complete!

- Learn about one of the professions within the world: (Golem Crafting)

- Awarded: 100 skill points

===========================================================

(What's this, Katalina?)

::I said there would be more ways to earn skill points once you reached the sect. By withholding the knowledge of the mission, I can increase the reward given to you. The ones I've hidden are ones you would easily stumble across on your own efforts. It's only when there is something important or urgent that a mission will appear for you::

"Would it be okay if I watched? Golems sound interesting," Diego asked.

"Of course, junior-brother!" she beamed.

Diego yawned, "I'm going to back to my room and get a nap. Should I report to Master first?"

"No, I'll let her know you've finished. I'm sure she'll send you your schedule today and your classes will start tomorrow," Moonfall replied with a smile.

"Thank you, senior-sister," he said standing up.

Moonfall walked with him out of the Great Library and through the first half of his journey back to Apprentice Street before parting to head to her classes. The street was mostly deserted but there were a few people loitering around. Diego head straight up to his room and mumbled a message to both Tovao and Rainshower that he was out of the library and sleeping, so that they would not come looking for him. Then, without so much as removing his boots, he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep.

Six hours later, Diego woke up and stretched as he set up. He pulled out his talisman and channeled some of his energy into it. As he expected, there was a message from Shadowbolt, telling him his schedule. Fundamentals of Illusions, Mind Arts, and each of the seven elements, these classes would take up nine hours of his day, six days out of seven. With meals and cultivation, he truly would not have any time to take any other classes.

(Would a cloning spell help my problem?) Diego asked as he changed his clothes.

::Of course, so long as the clone is not destroyed, you can rejoin with it to gain its memories. Once you practice the spell some, you should develop the [Parallel Thinking] skill then you will be able to negate this drawback by maintain a mental link with your clone::

(Good, now, I think it's time for that crash course.)

Diego entered his cultivation room which was similar to the one back in the oasis. He activated the formation and sat down in the center of the room. Unlike his old one, this formation provided a purer form of chi instead of the Solar Energy. Although he could only use a portion of the energy, it would still have a beneficial effect on his body and speed up his advancement. A breath's worth of time after he shut his eyes, his body naturally active his [Scarlet-Gold Skin] as he spilled into his mental plane.

The azure world now had a professor's podium placed in front of a hovering blackboard. There was even a desk and chair combo where Katalina obviously excepted him to sit as she was behind the podium. Her normal casual wear had been replaced with a woman's casual suit and her short hair was now long but pinned up in a tight bun. Amused, Diego sat down in the chair and imagined a pencil and notebook like he had manifested his spear in the past.

::Good to see you taking this seriously, Diego. The study of magic is essentially the study of all things. Just because this world's magical knowledge is flawed, the very nature of magic will protect your secret by hiding itself, just as your bardic abilities hide the words of your song. Another person's magic can not be deciphered without writing down the Spell Sigil. The [Mimic] skill is only possible because of my vast amount of magical knowledge, but I still need to see the sigil to recreate it because there are just too many different ways to cast the same basic spells. Take the first spell you learned, the [Flash Point] spell::

The seven, strange runes that had been on the spell scroll when he had first learn magic now appeared on the blackboard behind Katalina, but now, he knew what the runes meant: Gather, Bright, Burst, Light, Steady, Hold, and Release.

::The Spell Sigil uses seven runes, but that is fundamentally unbalanced despite it being a functioning spell. The most basic of spells can actually uses just five runes, but of course, the spell would be even weaker than one with seven. To achieve true balance within a spell, you must use nine runes for the nine elements. You already know the first seven, but remaining two are concepts you are aware of: Space and Time. Whether these simpletons realize it or not, they already use Space or treasures like token would not exist. It's quite likely that the knowledge for Time has been forgotten as it is a difficult element to master, and without it to directly balance out Space, they have dismissed Space as an anomaly of magic::

Two new runes squeezed their way into the circle of runes on the blackboard.

::By adding in the runes, Cycle and Void, it changes the [Flash Point] spell to this::

Katalina raised a hand and pointed her finger. A bright burst of light erupted from her fingertip then faded, just like when he used the spell. She did the action a second time, but this time, the light was twice as bright and flickered repeatedly before being snuffed out.

::Both spells use the same base seven runes, but adding in the two new ones increased the power while reducing the cost. The difference in power will only magnify as you use more complex spells that have more rings to the sigil. The spell based off of the seven-rune principle can only support fourteen runes in the second ring while the nine-rune technique has eighteen, twenty-one versus twenty-seven in the third, and so on and so forth…::

In the outside world, only ten hours passed, but Katalina's lecture went on for a hundred within the mental plane. Aside from runes relating to Time and Space, Katalina restricted what all she taught him to the knowledge he had already gathered. That meant they were limited to mostly theory as he had not been able to purchase any spell scrolls yet, but even so, she had deconstructed the few spells he had and created ten new spells with the pieces. When she finally released him, Diego felt his head was splitting with the amount of information she had tried to cram in there. He skipped dinner and decided on going back to bed, mentally exhausted.