Formation Spells

When Isaiah woke up, it was already afternoon. The sun shined intensely through the window as the wind ruffled the curtains, a cool breeze encompassing his body, greatly contrasting with the intense heat.

He lifted his hand, trying to control the sunlight shining through his window, but it was in vain. "Seems like due to my poor mana sense, my excellent mana control is limited to only my mana," he noticed he had trouble sensing the mana within the sunlight.

He turned his attention to what he could control, his own mana. He opened his palm and let light shine out of it, his palm looked like it was painted with ethereal light. He tried to compress and focus the light as much as he could, he pressed his palm on a piece of paper, and while it left his palm imprint, it wasn't completely burnt. Due to his low mana capacity, it was weaker than he imagined.

He took his notebook out and started drawing a formation, he simply called it "Heat Formation". After he was done, he moved his mana according to the formation pattern within his palm. This time, when he pressed his palm to the paper, it went right through it, burning it to ashes.

It seemed like he would have to mix formations with spells to create sufficient power. This was not a common method used by other mages. Isaiah guessed many reasons for it; for one, it required a long casting time if one wanted to enforce a spell using a formation. One also needed a high level of mana control to create and then activate the formation within an acceptable time limit. Most mages with decent mana pools would rather use more mana to empower their spells as opposed to the less efficient way of using formations, but using formations to enforce his spells fit Isaiah's strengths and compensated for his weaknesses.

Isaiah finally got out of bed, but he didn't plan to stop his spell creation just yet. He got a cup and poured some water into it, now was the hard part. He wanted to simply warm the water within the cup; however, the current "Heat Formation" would most likely crack the cup altogether. It was a lot harder to simplify formations than one would initially think. First, each formation required a certain amount of mana to activate, but what if the mana inputted wasn't the mana you wanted to output?

This was one such example; he simply wanted to warm the cup, which required less mana than it took to activate the formation. So, he would have to get rid of the excess mana somehow, but he couldn't just let it dissipate as it would influence the part of the mana he needed, leading to the failure of the formation.

"Whatever, I can handle this later," he proceeded to concentrate the mana within his palm and warmed the water by using a simple spell; he had at least that much mana. That obviously didn't mean he gave up on the idea of lightweight formations, but he had different plans for that, which would have to wait a bit more.

Isaiah first took off his clothes, then tended to his wounds once more, reapplying the medicine. His mana was sealing the stitches in place; if not, his wounds would have opened long ago with how active he was. After that, he wore a sleek white suit since he was now a light mage, he decided to dress for the theme for today.

He got down to his café soon and got inside to see Lily working hard just like usual. Soon, they would finalize the deal regarding the "Mana Boost Method", and he would receive a huge sum of money from there. He needed to find projects to invest his money into.

He snapped his fingers; a light flashed quickly, catching Lily's attention, who quickly got up and greeted him with a slight bow, "Oh! Good morning, Sir." She peeked at his injuries, which had already healed a little compared to yesterday due to the increased constitution of Rank 1 mages.

Seeing her worried for him made Isaiah chuckle, "Good morning to you too, my favorite employee." He winked. This made Lily chuckle as she was currently his only employee.

"Did you check for real estates like I told you to?" Isaiah asked, which prompted Lily to pass him a paper filled with potential real estates to buy.

He looked through the list; there were many real estates for sale that caught his eyes, but one, in particular, stood out to him. It was located in a very popular center; it looked directly towards the Second Emperor statue whom historically loved entertainment. The area surrounding the statue was the largest entertainment district of the empire. There were many bars, pubs, brothels, whatever night entertainment you can name, however, there were no casinos.

Isaiah knew the concept of gambling wasn't foreign to this world, and due to his research, knew that there were many failed casinos in the past. It was all due to mages. They cheated money from the house and were a pain in the ass to catch, forcing casinos to close before their losses piled up.

Isaiah, however, had a solution to this problem; it was formations. Now obviously, it was not like no one had ever thought of using formations to monitor casinos. However, to the residents of this world, it seemed like a dumb idea; on paper, the return of the casino was too low to sustain such a system, which would require a constant supply of expensive mana gems. Also, people with access to said formations were few and far in-between; even Isaiah had yet to gain access to the method to power formations through mana gems. He could only do it with his own mana for now.

He, however, being from a different world, knew the potential money the casinos could make; as long as he shouldered the cost of the initial investment, money would soon start to rain upon him.