Noble Mage (1'084 Words)

Death and rebirth, things I have thought about more than once in my life but ultimately never really came to any certain conclusion, until they happened.

My demise came in the form of a train accident where the entire thing derailed, and I got thrown out of a window only to me turned to mush as the train fell on top of me.

Things happened to sudden for me to really understand at that time and the fact that I was able to open my eyes right afterward also didn't help with my shock.

From being squashed by a train to being reborn as the oldest child of a noble family in another world.

It took me a month to fully calm down and even begin to change my mindset and start coming to terms with the past.

Luckily there is something in this new life that I took a great fancy to.

I'm of course talking about magic.

A supernatural force allowing people to manipulate elements to their wishes.

Like that I started to delve into the topic of magic while trying separate myself from the person I used to be, for now I am Sasha Zaratul, oldest daughter of the noble Zaratul family.

With me being a baby that hasn't even passed the one-year mark yet my research about magic held itself to theories and self-examination.

I tried different forms of mediation, from trying to sense my surroundings to trying to sense my insides.

The later yielded some results after a couple of weeks of effort.

Inside my body I could sense something coursing through every notch and canine of my being while following certain paths.

A month after this discovery I managed to memorize the paths leading through my body which are very similar to a blood circulation system.

These veins contain and produce something which I for now am going to simply call mana.

From what I managed to figure out is that these mana veins produce mana and store it, but once the storage is full the excess mana leaks out of veins and dissipates into the surroundings.

When I turned one year old, I managed to get my hands on some books, nothing interesting but it allowed me to familiarize myself with the language which I can already somewhat understand, but hearing and reading are two different things so I'm going to start learning as soon as possible.

By the time I became two years old I could already read and talk, but I kept it in measures as to not alarm my family too much.

In regard to my family, my father Viscount Reiner Zaratul has his territory somewhere at the edge of the kingdom we are part of and from what I managed to figure out there isn't much going on around here.

That is a big plus in my books, but it seems my mother, Viscountess Diana Zaratul, had other plans and it was revealed to me that I'm going to be a big sister soon.

Before the age of three I attempted for the first time to manipulate the mana from my veins and was surprised by a certain detail that I oversaw in the past.

As I drew the mana from my veins, I noticed that it held certain properties that I connect to water.

I hadn't done anything other than draw it out, so I was curious as to why it held such properties and dived into my research until the birth of my younger sibling, Raphael, forced me to put things on halt to interact with my newly expanded family a bit more.

The little rascal was a lot of work different from me who had been well behaved for most of the time but it did make the mansion a bit more active so nothing bad.

In my research in regard to my mana's properties I found certain taints inside my mana veins which seemed very similar to them and after a few experiments came to the conclusion that these taints are in fact something like affinities for certain elements.

A few trips to my family's libraries and I managed to get my hands on some magic related books.

With their help I manage to expand my knowledge regarding this worlds magic system of this world and pick out some flaws.

This world's research in regard to magic is stuck in the elemental theories, meaning they hardly every use or even think about using pure mana for anything.

Of course, this discovery made me quite excited, and I restart my research with new vigor.

Two more years pass and I'm now four years old.

In these two years I started examining these taints in my mana veins which I think are affinities for elements a bit closer and ultimately tried to interact with them.

It took a while, but I managed it and started to clean my mana veins off any affinities.

Such a thing would be seen as self-mutilation in the eyes of this worlds magicians as everything magic related is tightly bound to a person's affinities.

Affinities allow a mage to more efficiently utilize their mana as the conversion of pure mana into an elemental mana will be much smoother and faster if one has a high affinity for it.

Bu there is a catch to that.

A high affinity for one element means low affinities for any other element.

You can imagine it like this, a person's mana veins are a blank piece of paper and affinities are different colors.

From what I've found out a normal person mana veins will have at least a tiny affinity to every major element, meaning that the blank piece of paper is completely covered in colors.

If one has a high affinity with an element then the amount of space that color takes up is bigger than others, but even then their mana wont be purely of that element as there will still be bits and pieces from other colors.

For an affinity to be the most efficient it would need to cover the entire paper without leaving a single place empty.

But even then there is a drawback as the conversion of that pure element into any other will become extremely hard, so my thought process of course went to what would be the best affinity for me.

And like that I ended up starting to purg all traces of elemental affinity from my veins until hopefully none remain.