The Diary of a Middle-Aged Sage's Carefree Life in Another World: Volume 1 [Parts 1 to 3] by Kotobuki Yasukiyo

Author:Kotobuki Yasukiyo
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 3: The Old Guy Solves a Girl’s Problem

The horse-drawn carriage slowly made its way along the path, jostling Zelos around as he unraveled the magic formulas in Celestina’s textbook. He worked to remove any unnecessary parts from the formulas while also adding in parts that were needed for them to work properly.

As he worked, the formulas sprang from the textbook to float in midair inside the carriage—it was quite a spectacular sight. Some letters disappeared and others were added, changing the formulas into different shapes as the time went by. The whole process was unbelievably fast—and for Celestina, it was entirely new, something she’d never experienced the likes of before. Her eyes shone bright with amazement.

Her grandfather Creston, meanwhile, was overjoyed to see such light in his granddaughter’s eyes. He silently thanked the gods for his meeting with Zelos.

In spite of that, he didn’t actually believe in the gods—mages, by nature, tended to be the logical, skeptical type.

Humans truly were a fickle species.

“Okay, I’ve finished taking a quick look through. Now it’s time to try things out. Shall we give it a shot?”

“This one is...Torch?”

“Mm hmm. It’s a fairly basic spell that anyone should be able to use, so I chose that as the first one to simplify. For the most part, I just reduced its mana consumption, and changed it so that it could use external mana.”

“Whatever do you mean by ‘external mana’?” Creston chimed in.

“You can think of it as the flow of mana that builds up in nature over time. You can use your own mana to call on it, then spend that instead of your own mana to activate a magic formula. It seems like all the formulas written in here only use the caster’s own mana for everything; that puts a huge burden on any mages trying to use them.”

“I’m not sure I follow. Isn’t being a mage all about using the mana in your body to reshape matter and make things happen?”

“Hmm... You’re not exactly wrong, but you’re not entirely right either. Formulas really only exist to help casters use the mana that’s out there in nature; if you’re just spending your own mana to activate spells, you’ll use it all up in no time. And end up ‘out of mana,’ as they say.”

Zelos was starting to realize that this world’s understanding of magic was leagues behind where things had been in Swords & Sorceries.

Nature contained a fixed amount of mana; even if it got converted into a different form, it wouldn’t take long to turn back into pure mana and disperse. While you could use magic to change it, only its properties would change—the mana itself would still exist, as it always had, and it would eventually revert back to its natural form. Changing the properties of mana allowed casters to inflict attacks on enemies, as well as protect themselves from the attacks of others. That was how magic worked. Some spells could interfere with a person’s mind, but those worked by keeping one’s internal mana in a modified state, and even then the spell would eventually fade.

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