Chương 79: 78 - Enchantment

Early morning. Alexandra was hopping on her right foot with a pastry in each hand. Fucking quest. She made it to the west wing, saw the door to her classroom, and kept hopping by the door. The Iron ranks filing in turned their heads as they walked, watching her. Two hundred more. Flakes of crust were breaking off the pastries with each landing. She'd grabbed them from the dining hall to make it through the class. The professor arrived soon after. Red robes, red hair. Ruby rank.

She stopped at the threshold and looked at her. Alexandra almost lost balance when she saw her.

"Do you need time?" the professor asked.

"Almost done."

"Hmm." She entered the classroom. Alexandra hopped twelve times more before following her in. The room was built like an amphitheater, tiered rows curving up until the students at the back were almost level with the ceiling beams. It hosted at least a hundred students, who were all looking at her. She made herself small and found an empty seat on the far-left side of the first row. Alexandra put her pastries on the desk and summoned her journal.

Hop on one foot three thousand times without stopping (3000/3000) -> Quest Completed: +10 exp, +1 DEX Daily Quest Streak: 25 -> 26 The professor set her satchel on the desk, and the room went quiet on its own.

"Good morning." She looked up.

"I'm Bird." Her eyes passed over the room and stopped on Alexandra for just a moment. Then moved on.

"Enchantment. Who can tell me what it is?" Hands went up. Bird didn't call anyone out.

"It's the imposition of your will onto an object or a space." She moved to the board. Wrote one word. Consent.

"And that is where most of you will fail." She turned around.

"Enchantments are not curses. You are not subverting your target's mana. You are entering a negotiation." A pause.

"This course is taught to all Iron ranks to weed out those who cannot go into it with the right mindset." She reached into her satchel and set a plain wooden disk on the desk.

"By the end of this term, you will make this object want something." She looked at the room." Want something. Not do something. Those are not the same." Alexandra took a bite of her pastry. A few hands were raised.

"I will be taking questions later." She grabbed the wooden disk from the desk.

"I know what you want to ask. How can we negotiate with an inanimate object? With a space?" The classroom was completely silent. Bird did something, and the disk started gently spinning. She let it go. It hovered in the air in front of her.

"The answer is mana," she said.

"It's always mana. Ambient mana, to be exact." Alexandra nodded. This was in line with what Sera had taught her.

"Most people would say that enchantments use ambient mana as a fuel. This explanation is good enough for laymen, but it's far from accurate." Bird turned to the board again and drew a circle.

"This is the disk." She looked back.

"How does ambient mana flow through it?" Nobody answered.

"It's simple," Bird said. She drew arrows along the circle's edge, all moving in the same direction.

"Ambient mana flows. That's the first thing to understand. It isn't static."

"When a spell is applied to an object, the caster overrides that flow with their own mana." She drew a straight line through the center of the circle.

"You've all done this." A few heads nodded.

"Enchantment is different." She erased the line.

"You are not overriding. You are redirecting. You find where the mana wants to go, and you give it a better destination. A purpose." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. She picked up the disk from where it still hovered. Set it flat on her palm.

"The disk wants nothing. It's wood. But the mana moving through it has properties. Tendencies. I will teach you how to read them and how to affect them." She paused.

"That is the negotiation. Not with the object. With the mana itself." The room was silent. Everyone was taking notes. Alexandra had stopped eating.

"Forcing ambient mana produces unstable enchantments," Bird continued.

"They hold, sometimes for years, but they will break. The mana remembers what it was doing before you interrupted it. It was doing it for a reason." She set the disk back down on the desk.

"A true enchantment makes it so the mana never knows anything changed." She paused.

"This is why it takes so long to form a competent enchanter," she said.

"It takes time to learn to read mana well enough to negotiate with it." Alexandra thought about Willow. She'd always assumed enchantments were boring versions of magic. Precise formulas, equations, closer to engineering than wonder. But that was elegant. That was actually elegant. Bird moved back to the board. She drew the circle again, this time with the arrows flowing in two separate currents.

"Different materials carry different mana flows. Wood, metal, stone, each have their own patterns. The environment also plays a role, even more so for enchanted spaces." She looked at the class.

"Today you will learn one of them." She held up the disk.

"Wood. Chestnut wood. It's the best material to get started. The flow is simple, without being trivial." Bird opened her satchel, and a disk floated out. Then another. Then another, until she'd produced more than a hundred. She let them go. They spread across the room in a slow wave, dropping onto each desk with a soft knock. Alexandra caught hers before it landed. Same wood. Same size. Unenchanted, as far as she could tell.

"Read it," Bird said.

"That's all. Don't do anything to it. Don't push mana into it. Read." She sat down at her desk. Nobody moved for a moment. Then, gradually, the room bent over their disks. Alexandra turned hers over in her hands. Plain chestnut, sanded smooth. She closed her eyes and focused her senses on the disk. It was harder. Without a thread of mana feeling the wood, she could barely feel anything. Yet, it was there. Faint, but there. A current, moving in a slow loop along the grain of the wood. Unhurried.

It reminded her of breathing, almost. In through one face of the disk, a long arc through the core, out through the other side. A shadow fell over her desk. Bird was standing beside her, looking at the disk in Alexandra's hands, not at her.

"You can see it."

"Yes."

"What do you feel?"

"A loop. It moves through the grain." Bird was quiet for a moment.

"What do you make of it?" Alexandra pondered the question, took another look at the flow. It went along the grain of the wood, as if it was part of it.

"I don't know how to explain, but it feels like wood."

"It feels like wood. Because it is the wood, at this point. The mana has flowed there since the tree was but a seed, through the entirety of its growth, and even after it was cut down."

"So how do I… negotiate?" Alexandra asked. The students on either side of Alexandra had stopped pretending to work. The girl to her right had her eyes open, head tilted. The boy to her left was just staring.

"The flow you're feeling has a direction," Bird said.

"A preference. If you wanted to enchant this disk, you'd need to convince the flow to change and match your intention."

"How?" Bird looked at the disk.

"That's a topic for our next class. Today, we read ambient mana." She walked back to the board.

"Can anyone tell me what the ambient mana is doing?" A hand went up near the middle of the amphitheater. Bird nodded at it. The student who stood was tall, broad across the shoulders. Close-cropped dark hair. A teenager, like every Iron except Alexandra.

"The ambient mana is flowing through the disk in a loop," he said.

"Continuous. It follows the grain."

"Good." Bird didn't look up from the board.

"What else?"

"It's nourishing the wood. Preserving it from decay."

"Preservation." Bird wrote the word on the board.

"That's correct." She turned around.

"How?"

"The mana runs along the grain, washing away impurities."

"Correct." Bird turned back to the board and wrote.

"Chestnut defaults to these functions because this is what it has always done. The mana and the wood have been doing this together since the tree was alive." She set the disk down. She picked up her satchel.

"Keep the disk. Read it until you can do it with your eyes open. Next class we will discuss intention." She looked at the room.

"Dismissed." Bird left. Alexandra was putting her disk away when she heard the footsteps coming down the tiered rows. She looked up. The tall boy who answered the question. He stopped at the end of her row. Here we go.

"How can you still be Iron rank at your age?" he asked. Alexandra tilted her head.

"Not your business." He glanced at the disk in her hand, then back up.

"I don't get what the professor sees in you." Alexandra stood up.

"Okay."

"That's it?"

"What do you want me to say?" He crossed his arms.

"I've been reading ambient mana for two years. My brother is a Gold enchanter. I've been practicing since I was twelve."

"Good for you." A few people nearby exchanged looks.

"And you walk in hopping on one foot," he said, "eating in class, and Bird spends ten minutes at your desk." Alexandra looked at him. He was fifteen. She wasn't going to pick a fight with a kid.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"I want to know why you're getting favored."

"Zamar," another boy put a hand on his shoulder.

"Let's go." He shook the hand away.

"A thirty-year-old shouldn't be Iron. You shouldn't even be here. Did you cheat on the entrance examination?" Alexandra frowned.

"I'm not thirty. I'm twenty-nine."

"Same thing." Alexandra looked at him for a moment.

"Sure," she said, and left.