The Truth of Magic - Chapter 45

Chapter 45: Preparing Divine Magic

Reyan sighed inwardly at how biased the Goddess was being.

This young fellow probably didn’t even know how expensive a space inside the shrine was.

All of Mystra’s wizard families and other ancient aristocratic families were trying to get a space.

All these powerful people had a ridiculous number of family members and relatives, and marrying each other made their network even more complex, never those more distant relatives that came from other towns to try and make use of their connections.

Since they wanted to keep the power that their families had, they would also work hard to groom their family members into spellcaster classes.

The path to becoming a wizard relied on one’s gifts, but becoming a cleric depended more on how much the gods liked you.

So, in general, there was nothing that anyone could do, and they couldn’t change the gods’ opinions of themselves.

You couldn’t possibly start singing the praises of some relative of yours while you prayed and asked the deity to make that relative a Level 1 Cleric.

Using these vacancies on the birthday of the gods was the most direct way of allowing each person to display what they were capable of, and it was easy to make arrangements for your own family to stand in the shrine.

Even though it was said that the Goddess of Magic was able to listen to the thoughts of every believer…

on such occasions like today, during that moment when she deliberately descends upon the shrine…

those cleric apprentices present in the shrine would definitely be noticed more than others.

Or rather, she would do her clergy in Arthur a favor and arrange for some of these cleric apprentices to become actual clerics.

And then there were those who could receive Divine Magic by just standing at the gate, like Zhao Xu.

If you were someone who was normally devout and finally became a cleric, nobody would say anything about that.

But now, it was obvious that at the moment when the Goddess of Magic descended, she liked the fellow standing at the entrance and just decided to grant him Divine Magic as well.

What would any of the 300 cleric apprentices who didn’t get to become an actual cleric think? Wouldn’t that prove that they weren’t good enough?

Reyan didn’t expect to run into something like that by bringing this young man, who looked so ordinary, here.

“Don’t talk about this now, and don’t use any of your divine magic. Go through the training course, then on the last day, tell them that you’ve received divine magic, then you can leave after you’re done registering yourself.”

Zhao Xu didn’t expect that to be Reyan’s suggestion, but he just nodded anyway.

Zhao Xu hadn’t spent the last nine years fighting in Arthur and learned nothing.

Now his base was The Final Scroll, and so the organization naturally didn’t want him to attract too much attention among the clergy.

At least he should be involved with these low-level clerics as little as possible.

After that, Reyan went up to talk to the middle-aged cleric again to make arrangements for Zhao Xu’s next step.

After some discussion, Zhao Xu followed Reyan as the cleric turned to bring them toward the inner hall.

Finally, the clergy had arranged a new dormitory room and a daily timetable for Zhao Xu.

There were many things written on this schedule, but, after looking at it carefully, the scheduled activities were very clear.

Every morning, there would be a mass prayer, followed by a study of theology books until noon. After lunch, he would go and receive the necessary training according to his needs.

As for his dormitory, it was still a single person room. But the area was much smaller than his rooms in the floating city, and if you were just that much fatter, you might have trouble even turning around.

The room was furnished very simply as well. There was nothing in the room besides a bed and a wooden desk.

After bringing Zhao Xu through all of this and completing the handover process, Reyan showed him where the contact office of the Wizard Association within the church was.

For the next few days, Reyan would be unable to stay by Zhao Xu’s side 24 hours a day, so, if Zhao Xu needed anything, he could go to the contact office and they would help Zhao Xu call Reyan.

After Reyan had told Zhao Xu everything he needed to, Reyan left with that middle-aged cleric.

It was the Goddess’ birthday, and there was more than just the part where the Goddess descended in the shrine. There were many celebrations and ceremonies planned for the rest of the day.

Reyan was a Contact Officer, so he had to keep helping everyone from the Wizard Association coming over.

In the end, Zhao Xu was left alone in the room.

For the rest of the day until night, the church wouldn’t make arrangements for any training since it was the Goddess’ birthday, so he had nothing to do too.

Zhao Xu sat on the bed and just randomly pulled out a theology book from the bookshelves along the wall.

But, after looking at it for barely 5 minutes, Zhao Xu just stuffed it right back into the shelf. And he stuffed it back hard.

Never mind how hard it was to pronounce all this jargon—these theology books were written in a complicated manner with many implied meanings, and it made his head hurt just reading them.

Zhao Xu could only feel amazed at how other people were able to read and absorb all these things.

He turned around and started to study the divine magic he had.

He couldn’t display it in front of others, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t use it in private.

The only irritating part was that the clerics usually had a fixed time to pray as a group.

The gods and deities would impart divine magic in bulk during this time to everyone.

If a cleric wanted to choose a different time to pray, then he would have to bet on whether the god was willing to be kind enough to impart him divine magic.

In his many years living in Arthur in his previous life, countless earthlings had tried to use the knowledge they knew from Earth to prove and to even try to analyze what sort of planet Arthur really was.

In the end, they all gave up and accepted the idea that Arthur wasn’t part of the original universe that Earth was from.

Arthur was in a system all its own.

As a result, everyone on the main plane of Arthur followed the same time zone no matter where they were and watched the terribly faraway sun rise and set every day together.

In his previous life, Zhao Xu had also tried hard to figure this out. He looked at all the models that others had drawn and finally decided to accept the concept of planes.

Zhao Xu sat cross-legged and started to meditate and pray in an attempt to get his divine magic going.

After flipping through the religious texts earlier, Zhao Xu had managed to learn the basic words for praying.

The good part was that Clerics’ divine magic wasn’t fussy and didn’t require 8 full hours of rest.

Slowly, Zhao Xu started to notice that there were some sparkles glowing within his mind.

The Divine Magic Spell Slots text in his character stats started to sway and it looked like they were going to light up instead of remaining grayed out.

During the process of Zhao Xu’s meditation, the image of the Goddess of Magic slowly became more and more detailed inside his mind.

The details on that face slowly became sharper.

In Arthur, the external features of all the gods were drawn in a more general and vague manner.

Those stone sculptures had managed to carve the gods such that they looked like gods but didn’t look like the gods themselves.

When Zhao Xu sat on that Arcane Throne and was summoned to the long river of history, he had seen Sisylvana before she became a goddess, so he hadn’t recognized her.

If he met her after she became a goddess, then she would have had the same presence as those statues. Even if he were blind, he wouldn’t have thought that she was some demoness or succubus.

Zhao Xu had also become one of the very few in Arthur who knew what the Goddess really looked like.

But, just as the Goddess’ outer appearance had formed within his mind…

the face that was about to come alive instantly turned into countless sparkles and fell away from each other.

Zhao Xu immediately saw that there were many balls of light within his mind, formed by all the little sparkles.

He focused his attention on these balls of light to find that these were actually proper descriptions of Divine Magic.

The balls of light each represented the divine magic that he could choose to prepare.

The bottom-most row were all the divine magic cantrips, then the row on top of that was a little larger in size and those were divine magic Level 1 spells.

As he looked at all these balls of light, Zhao Xu did a rough count. There were 12 cantrips and 25 Level 1 spells.

Compared to the method that the wizards had of learning one spell only after he had finished copying it out, Divine magic was much more generous and the gods just listed out all the spells you could choose from directly.

And he could choose from as many as 37 different spells.

Even though he was currently only able to prepare five or six divine magic spells.

Some of these divine magic spells were the same as arcane magic spells. For example, the cantrip Detect Magic. You could say that this spell had an arcane magic version as well as a divine magic version.

But at the same time, there were some spells that only had a divine magic version. Wizards couldn’t do anything about these spells and couldn’t learn them at all.

Zhao Xu hadn’t realized something yet.

Not every Level 9 Cleric was able to cast the divine magic Level 5 spell of Raise Dead.

These 12 cantrips and 25 Level 1 spells were the most basic package.

There were more than 25 Level 1 spells in divine magic, and there were some extended types of divine magic.

It was just like how his Level 1 Benign Transposition spell wasn’t part of the standard list and was a spell that you couldn’t learn if you didn’t have any access to special channels.

For the majority of Level 1 Clerics, they wouldn’t go past these 25 Level 1 Divine Magic spells while they were still at such a low level.

In fact, allowing them to choose from 10 divine magic spells was already a sign that they had passed the initial stage of becoming a Cleric. After slowly gaining the blessing of the gods, then they would be able to choose from even more divine magic spells.

Only those Level 1 Clerics who were closest to their god would get the full list of 25 Level 1 divine magic spells.