Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume 1 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

A Textbook of Magic 

It had been roughly two years since I’d been reincarnated. My legs had finally developed enough so that I could walk. 

Also, I was finally able to speak this world’s language. 

*** 

Having decided to give my life an honest shot this time, I first needed to make a plan. 

What had I lacked in my previous life? Study, exercise, and technique, that’s what. 

As a baby, however, there wasn’t much I could do. Nothing much beyond burying my face in someone’s chest when I was picked up, anyway. Whenever I did that to the maid, she made no attempt to mask the displeasure on her face; clearly, she wasn’t a fan of children. 

Figuring that exercise was something that could wait, I began learning to read books around the house. The study of language is a crucial thing; almost one hundred percent of Japanese people are literate in their own language, but many of them neglect their study of English or hesitate to interact with people when abroad, so much so that the ability to speak a foreign language is a valued skill. With that in mind, I decided to make this world’s writing system my first subject. 

There were only five books in our house. I didn’t know if that was because books were expensive in this world or because Paul and Zenith weren’t big readers. Probably it was some combination of both. As someone who used to own a collection of several thousand books—even if they were all light novels—the situation was tough to come to grips with. 

Still, even five books was enough material to learn how to read. The language of this world was close to Japanese, so I was able to pick it up quickly enough. The written characters were completely different, but the grammar was close to what I was familiar with, which thankfully meant I mostly needed to learn vocabulary, a good chunk of which I’d already been exposed to. My father would read to me, which allowed me to readily pick up words. My new self being better at learning things probably had something to do with it, too. 

Once I could read, I found the contents of our books pretty interesting. I’d never had fun studying at any point in my life before, but after some thought, I realized it wasn’t that different from hunting down new information about online games. And that wasn’t so bad. 

Anyway, I wondered if my father knew that his infant son understood the things he was reading. I mean, I was cool with it, but I figured a normal kid my age would throw a temper tantrum or something, so that’s just what I did. 

These were the five books in our house: 

Wandering the World, a reference guide to the various countries of the world and their unique characteristics. 

The Ecology and Weaknesses of Fittoan Monsters, which detailed the various monstrous creatures of the Fittoa Region, where they lived, and how to deal with them. 

A Textbook of Magic, a wizard’s manual of attack spells, ranging from the Beginner to Advanced levels. 

The Legend of Perugius, a fairytale about a summoner named Perugius and his companions, who battle a demon and save the world in a classic good-versus-evil epic. 

The Three Swordsmen and the Labyrinth, a tale of action and adventure where three master swordsmen of different styles meet and head into the depths of the titular labyrinth. 

Those last two were essentially fantasy novels, but the other three made for good study. It was A Textbook of Magic that particularly drew my attention. As someone who came from a world without magic, the chance to read actual documentation on it was very relevant to my interests. Reading the book taught me some of the fundamentals. 

First, magic came in three types: Attack magic, to do battle against others; Healing magic, to treat the wounds of others; and Summoning magic, to call things forth. And that was it. There seemed to be lots of other things you could do with magic, but according to the textbook, magic was something birthed and developed in battle, and therefore not used much outside of combat or hunting. 

Second, you needed magical power in order to use magic—meaning, anyone could use magic so long as they had magical power. There were chiefly two ways of doing this: using one’s innate magical power or drawing on the magical power imbued in an object. Either would suffice. There weren’t specific examples, but I got the impression that people who did the former were like their own power generators, whereas the second type had to use batteries. 

In days of yore, the book said, people had largely used the power within their own bodies for magic. But as research on magic progressed, things got more and more complex. Accordingly, expendable sources of magical energy were developed at an explosive rate. People with strong magical reserves had been able to make do, but those who had little power couldn’t cast even basic spells, and so the old magical masters developed ways to draw power from things other than themselves and channel that into magic. 

Third, there were two ways of performing magic: incantation and magic circles. This didn’t need too much explanation: It simply referred to reciting words or inscribing mystic patterns to cast a spell, respectively. In the old days, magic circles were the chief source of magical power, but in modern times, incantations were far more commonplace. In older times, even the shortest magical incantations took one or two minutes—not exactly something you could use in the heat of battle. But once you’d inscribed a magic circle, you could use it over and over again. 

Incantations started becoming the norm when one magician succeeded at greatly shortening them. The simplest such incantations were reduced to around five seconds, and consequently became the only way people utilized Attack magic. For the more complex rituals involved in Summoning magic, where greater efficiency wasn’t attainable, magic circles remained the primary means. 

Fourth, the amount of magical power someone had was pretty much determined at birth. In your typical RPG, you gain more MP as you level up, but things didn’t work that way in this world. Almost everyone was stuck where they were. 

Almost everyone, which implied that some people changed over time. I wondered which group I’d fall into. 

The book also said that one’s level of magical power was inherited. I knew my mother was able to use Healing magic, so maybe it was all right to have some expectations for myself. Still, I was uneasy. Even if my parents excelled at this sort of thing, I wasn’t sure my own genes would be up to the task. 

*** 

For the time being, I decided to try my hand at the simplest magic I could. The textbook included both incantations and magic circle spells. Since the former was now mainstream, and I had nothing to draw a magic circle with, I opted to start by studying the incantations. As I understood it, as the scope of a spell got larger, the invocations involved got longer, until you eventually needed to use a magic circle in concert. But if I was starting out with simpler things, I ought to be fine. 

The most proficient of wizards, the book said, could cast spells without incanting anything at all—or drastically shorten the incanting time at the very least. I wasn’t sure why training allowed people to circumvent the incantation, though. After all, the amount of someone’s magical power didn’t change; there was no leveling up and no corresponding increase to maximum MP. Maybe with training, the amount of MP spent on the spell decreased? But spending less MP wouldn’t make the process less involved, would it? 

Well, anyway. Whatever the case, I just needed to give it a shot. 

With A Textbook of Magic in my left hand, I held out my right and began to recite the words. 

“Let the vast and blessed waters converge where thou wilt and issue forth a single pure stream thereof—

Waterball!” 

I felt a sensation like blood pooling in my right hand, and then, as if that blood had extruded through my palm, a sphere of water about the size of my fist manifested itself. 

“Gah!” I yelped at the strange feeling, and a moment later, the ball of water fell and splattered onto the floor. 

It looked like concentration was required in order to maintain a spell. 

Concentrate… Concentrate… 

I could feel the blood welling in my hand once more. That’s it. There we go. Yeah, this feels right. Once again, I held out my right hand, forming an image in my head as I recalled how things had gone the last time. I wasn’t sure how much magical power I had, but I figured that I couldn’t just keep using it over and over. 

My plan was to practice one thing at a time until I could pull it off. I would form the image in my mind and play it out, over and over, and try to enact it upon reality. If I tripped up, I would call that image back to mind until I had it perfectly emblazoned within my head. 

This was the same way I’d practiced combos in fighting games, back in my previous life. Thanks to that, I almost never screwed up a combo during a real match. Hopefully that meant my training methodology would be sound here, too. 

I drew a deep breath. My blood coursed through my body, from my toes to the top of my head, collecting in my right hand, filling it with power. Then, I felt that power pop into being before my palm. Now, bit by bit, so very, very carefully, my thoughts fell in line with the beating of my heart. 

Waterball, ball of water, water, wetness, wet…wet panties… 

Whoops. That kinda just slipped in there. Getting back to it, then… 

I buckled down, and set my mind to it: water, water water waterwaterwater— 

“Hah!”I cried out in pure reflex as my hand shot out before me, fingers spread. In that instant, the ball of water came into being. 

“Whoa, what?” 

Splish. 

In my moment of shock, the ball of water plopped to the floor. 

“Wait.” I hadn’t shouted an invocation, had I? But then… why? All I’d done was put myself into the same mental space as the last time I’d tried the spell. Did incantation not matter much when reproducing the flow of magical power? 

Was using magic without chanting really that easy? That had to be a high-level skill, right? “If it’s that easy, what’s the point of the incantation at all?” I mused aloud. Here I was, a complete beginner, and I’d successfully pulled off a spell without any words at all. I’d simply focused the magical energy of my body in the front of my mind and then willed it to take shape. 

That’s all it was. Which implied that the incantation wasn’t really necessary after all. Anyone could do what I’d just done. 

Hmm. Perhaps the incantation was an activation trigger for the spell, where uttering the words would create the effect without having to focus on the energy coursing through your body. That had to be what it was. Sort of like the difference between manual and automatic transmissions in a car, where you could still take manual control if you really wanted to. 

“Using an incantation allows magical effects to trigger automatically.” 

This had some huge advantages. First, it made for easy teaching. Rather than needing a convoluted explanation about feeling the blood coursing through your veins converging and all that, casting a spell by chanting words was both easier to explain and easier to understand. And then, as one’s studies progressed, the idea of the incantation being an indispensable part of the process would naturally take root. 

The second advantage was that incantations were easy to use. Attack magic, by its very nature, was something that needed to be done in the heat of battle. It was a lot faster to rattle off a chant than it was to close your eyes and stand there humming as you tried to concentrate. Also, in the heat of the moment, it was far easier to blurt something out than it was to go through a series of minute gestures. 

“But maybe some people do find the first option easier…” 

I flipped through the book, but there was nothing about casting spells without incantation. That was odd. What I’d just done hadn’t been all that difficult. 

Maybe I had some kind of special talent, but I doubted it was something that others weren’t able to tap into at all, I reasoned. A magician typically used incantations from when they were a beginner to when they became a master. After casting thousands or even tens of thousands of spells, the body grew accustomed to the incanting; even if they did try to cast a spell wordlessly, they wouldn’t know how. Therefore, it wasn’t something that was ordinarily done, and hence the book said nothing of it. 

“Yeah, that does make sense!” After all, I was hardly ordinary myself. That was cool, right? Sorta like having a sneaky trick up my sleeves. Did she just activate the Crime Catalyst without an Oratorio? But that catalyst is usually just supposed to open up the channel! 

Oh, now I sure was interested! 

Okay, okay. No getting ahead of myself. I needed to calm down and keep my cool. My past self had gotten all caught up in this feeling, too, and we know how he turned out: someone who puffed himself up because he was better with computers than the average person, then got way too cocky and failed hard at life. 

I needed to keep a level head. Restrain myself. The important thing here was not to think of myself as being better than other people. I was just a beginner. A n00b. I was like a novice bowler who just happened to land a strike on my first toss through dumb luck. Beginner’s luck—that’s all it was. I needed to buckle down and focus on studying instead of mistaking this for some sort of innate knack. 

All right. I had it: I’d first attempt a spell by chanting the incantation, then practice single-mindedly by mimicking how it felt without using the incantation. 

“Okay, let’s try this again,” I said, holding my right hand out in front of me. My arm felt vaguely heavy, and my shoulder like I had something big weighing it down. This was exhaustion. Had I been concentrating too hard? 

No, that couldn’t be right. I was a (self-styled) low-end MMO master who could go without sleep for six days when grinding. No way had this paltry mental exertion drained me that much. 

“Am I out of MP, then?” What the heck? If someone’s magical power was determined at birth, did that mean I only had enough MP to cast two Waterball spells? That seemed way too low. Or maybe since this was my first time, I just had less magical power to work with? No, that didn’t make sense. 

I tried once more, just to make sure, and I wound up passing out. 

*** 

“Honestly, Rudy,” my mother said, “when you get tired, you need to go to the toilet first and then get to bed.” 

I woke to find I’d fallen asleep with the book in hand, and wet myself in the meantime. Dammit. I couldn’t believe I’d wet myself at my age. That was humiliating. Dammit. How could I— 

Wait. I was only two years old, right? Wetting myself was still forgivable at that age, yeah? 

So, it seemed my magical power had been too low after all. That deflated my mood some. Still, even if all I could muster was two Waterballs, what mattered was how I used them, I supposed. Maybe I should concentrate on conjuring them more quickly? 

Ugh. 

*** 

The next day, I still felt fine after conjuring my fourth Waterball. It was after the fifth that I started to feel tired. 

“What the hell?” 

Given my experience the day before, I knew that casting another would cause me to black out, so I decided to stop. 

And then it hit me: That put my limit at six Waterballs—twice what I’d managed yesterday. I stared into the bucket that held five spells’ worth of water and wondered why I’d been able to do twice as much as the day before. Had I been more tired because it was my first time? Had the spells consumed more MP because it was my first time casting them? 

I’d cast all my spells today without incantations, so I doubted it had anything to do with that. I had no idea. Perhaps my abilities would grow further the next day. 

*** 

The following day, my Waterball count increased significantly. Now I was up to eleven. 

What was the deal? It felt like the more I used the spell, the more I was able to use it. If I was right, I would be able to pull off twenty-one the next day. 

The day after that, just to be on the safe side, I only cast five before calling it a day. 

The day after that, though, I managed twenty-six. It looked like I was right—using the spell more frequently did allow me to cast it more. 

I’d been lied to! What was all that stuff about a person’s magical reserves being set at birth? People were just assigning limitations to talent when it didn’t have any. How dare adults tell children where their limits were?! “Guess I can’t take what this book says at face value, then,” I muttered. The stuff written in the book seemed to take the perspective that there were limits on what a person could achieve. 

Or maybe it was talking about how things worked after training one’s skills? Perhaps the book was saying that there was an upper limit on magical power that no further amount of effort and training could get you past. 

No. It was still too soon to come to that conclusion. For now, that would just be a hypothesis. Maybe it was like… maybe someone’s power increased as they grew up, or something. And using magic during childhood might rapidly cause that upper limit to increase. Which meant I alone had a special quality that—no. I’d already said I wouldn’t consider myself special. 

In my former world, they said that exercising while you were growing let your abilities develop more rapidly; conversely, after you were done growing, improvement only went so far even with intense effort. We might be talking about magic in this world, but the realities of how the human body worked couldn’t be that different. The principle was still the same. 

Which meant there was only one thing for me to do: continue honing my skills as best I could while I was still growing up. 

*** 

The next day, I decided that I would continue to push my magic to its limits daily, which increased how much I could use it. As I could recreate the right feeling, casting a spell without an incantation was easy enough. I hoped to master the Beginner spells for each branch of magic before long. 

By “Beginner spells,” I meant the most basic spells that could be used for offense. This included spells like Waterball and Fireball, as well as other even more entry-level spells. 

Spells were broken up into seven levels of difficulty: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Saintly, Kingly, Imperial, and Divine. Typically, magicians with training could use the Advanced spells from the discipline of magic they focused on, but could only use Beginner or Intermediate spells from the other schools. Once someone was able to cast spells of a rank higher than Advanced, they were acknowledged as a Fire Saint or Water Saint or whatever, depending on their chosen branch. 

Saintly magic. I kinda hoped to be that good someday. My magic textbook, however, only included fire, water, wind, and earth spells up to the Advanced level. Where was I ever going to learn Saintly magic, then? 

No—I shouldn’t dwell on that so much, I decided. In RPG M*ker, if you start out by making all your strongest monsters first, odds are it’s just going to be frustrating. You need to start with the low-level stuff, like slimes. 

Although I personally never managed to complete anything in that game, even when I did start with slimes. 

*** 

The Beginner-level water spells listed in the tome were as follows: 

Waterball: hurls a spherical projectile of water. 

Water Shield: causes a spout of water to erupt from the ground, forming a wall. 

Water Arrow: launches a bolt of water roughly twenty centimeters long at a target. 

Ice Smash: strikes an opponent with a mound of ice. 

Ice Blade: creates a sword made out of ice. 

These were all Beginner spells, but the amount of magical power they required was very different, taking somewhere roughly between twice and twenty times as much as the basic Waterball spell. For my fundamentals, I stuck to water magic; if I tried fire magic, I might accidentally burn the house down. 

Speaking of fire magic, the amount of magical energy you put into a spell affected the temperature of the results, so it stood to reason that Advanced ice spells worked the same way. But despite the fact that the book claimed both Waterball and Water Arrow were supposed to fly through the air, I wasn’t able to get them to do that for some reason. I wasn’t sure why. Was I getting some part of the spell wrong? I couldn’t really tell. 

A Textbook of Magic did say something about the size and speed of spells. Maybe, after conjuring my projectile, I needed to imbue it with additional magical energy in order to control its movement? 

I decided to give it a try. “Huh?” I murmured as my sphere of water grew larger. “Whoa!” And then: Splash! 

“Oh…” 

I’d dropped it on the floor again. 

After that, I experimented with making the Waterball bigger and smaller. I tried creating two Waterballs at once, then attempted to change their sizes separately. 

I discovered a few things, but still didn’t manage to make any of my spells fly. 

Fire and wind spells remained floating in the air, since they weren’t subject to gravity, but they fizzled out and disappeared after a while. I tried using the wind to move the hovering orbs of flame, but I got the impression something wasn’t right with that. 

Hmm… 

*** 

Two months later, thanks to a mistake in my studies, I managed to get a Waterball to fly. As a result, it finally became clear why incantations were a key part of the process. 

All incantations followed a similar process: spell genesis, size determination, speed determination, and then activation. The caster was the one who regulated those two intermediary steps before completing the spell. 

First, the caster called forth the shape of the spell they wished to use. Next, there was a window of time where they could add additional magical power to impact its size. Third, after the size had been determined, there was another window for the caster to adjust the spell’s velocity. Finally, the caster released the finished spell from their hand. 

That was how it worked…or at least how I understood it, anyway. The trick was to add magical power in two discrete stages after the initial casting. There was an order to it. Unless you did something to adjust the spell’s size, you couldn’t move on to adjusting its speed. It made sense that if you tried to change the spell’s speed first, you’d only make it bigger and nothing more. 

In that vein, when using a spell without incanting, the caster had to hold that entire process in their head. That sounded like an inconvenience, but it did shorten the time it took to infuse the spell with the power to affect its shape and speed. This allowed for a spell to be pulled off a few seconds quicker. 

I was also able to tweak the process of creating the initial spell. For instance, this wasn’t listed in the book, but it was possible to freeze a Waterball and turn it into an Iceball, and that sort of thing. If I kept up my studies, maybe I’d be able to pull off the Kaiser Phoenix (heh!), or something like that. 

Lots of things could work; it all just depended on what ideas came to mind. This was starting to get fun! 

Still, fundamentals were important. I needed to build up my magical potential before I started experimenting. 

So, yeah, now I had two items on my training regimen: increasing my magical reserves and making silent spellcasting second nature. Setting goals that were too grand upfront would only lead to disappointment. The trick was to start small. 

Okay then. It was time to buckle down and do it. Every day from that point on, I practiced my Beginner-level spells until I was on the verge of passing out from exhaustion.