The Truth of Magic - Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Spell Slots
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

The Wizard Association would ensure that new wizards would only learn how to cast spells like how you would only learn commutative laws and associative laws in elementary school.
But now he was studying theory from the beginning, so that was as good as getting him to use Peano Axioms to prove the entire number theory. 4
It wasn’t useless, but it wasn’t necessary at the moment.
Zhao Xu had ambition, but even if he had an excellent foundation, he didn’t have the time to spend years or decades to just become a Level 1 Wizard like the characters that were native to Arthur.
All the players were basically on an express route and just went straight to learning when and how to cast spells. It was like how one just memorized a bunch of derivative formulas in high school instead of really studying calculus for itself.
As long as it worked, it didn’t matter how they got there. Otherwise, the first wizard to finish his apprenticeship would have taken a year, not a week.
Becoming a wizard quickly was a special right that Arthur gave to the players from Earth.
After all, after a year, all the players would enter the world of Arthur for real and their intelligence would be as high as their character stats, and they would also absorb all the relevant knowledge of magic.
Then they would be able to challenge a wizard already within Arthur who was at the same level as themselves easily.
That would be considered a natural process.
So since Zhao Xu knew that he could cheat the system one year later, he didn’t want to go through all this hard work now.
In his previous life, after all the wizard players had transmigrated, they had mostly taken about a year and a half to fully digest all the knowledge that the system gave them. Before they were done digesting this information, very few of them were able to level up.
“The way The Arcane Gate teaches is different from ordinary academies,” said Antonya. “If we just wanted to create a batch of low-level wizards in bulk, we have our own way of doing that. Or rather, you could say that that’s what the other academies in other places are doing right now.”
“So right from the beginning, we are grooming people to become Legendary Wizards. So there’s no need to make you a Level 1 Wizard in such a hurry.”
After hearing what Antonya said, Zhao Xu was a little stunned.
So he had a special notice of acceptance letter only to find that he was enrolled in an 8 year direct Ph.D. course after reporting to the school?
He already felt that his current course in the university was just academia right now. If he wanted to enter the workforce quickly after graduating, then he could have just gone to a vocational school instead. Basic degree courses like the one he was in right now were actually preparation for postgraduate school to pursue a path in academia. 1
Most people just finished the basic degree.
Zhao Xu could understand and even approved of this method. He had come to the best academy in wizardry after all. If he didn’t even have some goal for himself, then he was wasting his time here.
But the problem was, he couldn’t afford to be like this now.
He had the patience to take a longer time to learn and it didn’t matter even if he took a lot more time than everybody else.
But that was assuming that he would be able to learn more spells and be able to attain more hidden and powerful feats in order to lay the path to getting a Prestige Class later on.
He could use time in exchange for becoming more powerful in battle.
And not to be more knowledgeable in the ways of a wizard than the other players.
Becoming a Legendary Wizard was a great goal, but one that was too far away for him to reach it in a year.
If his knowledge of the system was solid, he would be able to draw models and understand how to adapt the concept of divination spells and how to maximize his level of evocation spells. But it wasn’t going to increase the actual damage level of any spell in particular.
The only thing that could increase the damage level of spells was either the level of the one casting the spells or the capability of the Feats one had.
If Zhao Xu was going to go down this path of immersing himself in the study of wizardry in order to level up, then, honestly it wasn’t a waste of time because this knowledge would go a long way in the future.
But unfortunately, he didn’t have this choice. Maybe if everyone transmigrated to Arthur in 20 years instead of one.
But this wasn’t enough for Zhao Xu to argue with Antonya.
After he understood what was happening, he could only frown and continue studying the book in front of him.
No wonder he had never heard of any wizard player who had been allocated to Mystra. They were probably stuck studying all the way until the transmigration.
Zhao Xu could only keep a wooden expression on at the scene before him. He felt like he had gone back to his final year of high school and the woolen cushioned chair he was sitting on suddenly started to feel hard and his butt began to hurt.
If the book ‘Road to Arcane Magic’ was a simple text on the history of magic, then he wouldn’t have any trouble absorbing it. Zhao Xu loved reading anything from the history of game and animation development all the way to the history of physics and mathematics.
But even though this book did start from ancient times, it focused only on the evolution of magic and kept mentioning all sorts of concepts that he had no idea about. 1
After each player completed his character class training, he could look at his Skills and decide whether to use his modifier points or not.
But even if you wanted to do that, you had to fulfill all the requirements before you could proceed with doing so.
It was just like how leveling up wasn’t something that eventually happened. You had to accumulate sufficient experience before you were allowed to even go through the stage that would allow you to level up.
One of the Skills available was Knowledge, and there were different categories that required separate points in order to level up.
If Zhao Xu’s Knowledge (Psionics) had a modifier of more than 30, then he could go through a check to see if he could automatically remember some jargon.
Right now, he could only use Antonya as a walking dictionary to search and read continuously, so using something like this would be highly ineffective.
But Zhao Xu didn’t know that the fact that he could open this book and not be completely befuddled was already because he had received a blessing of sorts in the first place. 2
As he continued reading, Zhao Xu didn’t hope to fully understand and just kept reading first. He got more and more confused until he reached this part…
When he reached the part that said that spell slots were determined by the goddess of magic, he gasped.
The spellcasting system of Arthur relied on spell slots, regardless of what character class you were, and not the traditional way of determining how powerful you were.
Everyone had a limit on how many spells they could cast each day, and this depended on the character’s level, as well as additional slots that their Ability Scores afforded. 2
At the same time, all Wizards had to rest a full 8 hours, then go through 1 hour of meditation to prepare spell before being able to utilize their spell slots.
That’s right – Wizards and Clerics had to use an hour to decide what spells they were going to cast that day. There was no way to suddenly decide on the spot to use a Level 3 spell slot to cast a spell there and then. 6
Also, if they run out of spell slots, then they couldn’t do anything and they wouldn’t be available after just a short period of rest. They would have to go through those 8 hours of rest first, before continuing to prepare the spell slots the next day.
When Wizards studied spells, they had to copy them onto their own spellbooks, and that was the only way they could prepare spells.
As the level of the spell increased, the number of pages it took up also increased. 2
So, unless the wizards used a Blessing Book from the goddess to copy their spells in, they always had to bring a thick spellbook with them wherever they went. 1
If a wizard lost his own spellbook, then he would be like a chef without kitchen tools. You couldn’t cook anything even if you had all the food in the world. 2
In general, a lot of wizards became very poor and desperate for money because they had to copy spells. They weren’t like Clerics, who obtained Divine Spells from the gods, so they could prepare them anytime and didn’t have to go through all this trouble.
But even with such strict conditions, Wizards were still able to turn the tides because their list of spells, Feats, Prestige Classes and Items were all ridiculously powerful.
But Zhao Xu was more concerned with what he was going to choose. According to Arthur’s usual guidelines, new Wizards would usually be given an ordinary spellbook for free, and they could copy all the cantrips into it for free.
In general, one Level 0 spell would take up half a page in a spellbook, while a Level 1 spell would take up one page.
At the same time, they could also pick three spells to copy for free from the Wizard Association’s library they were in.
Since everyone was super poor at the start, these three starting spells would determine how powerful a new wizard would be in battle.
Zhao Xu was reading the book in front of him, but he already couldn’t stop himself from dreaming about which Level 1 spells he would choose to copy.