After school, Claude went to Eriksson's private jetty as the fishing boat needed a final coat of paint. It would take another five days for it to dry before it could be launched.
So, Claude, Welikro and Borkal went over to help out and turned into painters to paint Eriksson's beloved fishing boat from top to bottom.
Eriksson took a lot of ingredients from home and held another barbecue at the pier in the name of celebrating the completion of the fishing boat. After the four of them had their fill, they chatted and bragged for a long time before going back to their respective homes to look for their mothers.
It was already quite late when Claude got home. His mother heard the commotion downstairs and grumbled a little. "Why did you come home so late? Are you hungry?
There's still some food in the kitchen. "
Claude brushed her off and went to wash up. When he went upstairs, the snowhound heard him and started whimpering by his sister's bedroom door. Claude scolded the snowhound a few times through the door, but it was smart enough not to make a sound.
After returning to the attic, he lit the oil lamp and laid on his bed. He picked up Landes's diary and prepared to go to sleep after reading a few more pages.
He had to admit that Landes's diary was much more interesting than the biographies of famous people. At the very least, those famous people wouldn't talk about how they were bullied by their classmates in school.
But after flipping through two pages, Claude jumped out of bed. The pleasant surprise was far beyond his expectations.
On that page, Landes described in great detail how he started to train in meditation and even included the key points and diagrams of the technique.
That means I can start meditating as well … Claude suppressed the ecstasy in his heart and the urge to shout at the heavens. He searched for her in the crowd for three hundred times, but when he turned around, she was already there, in the dimly lit area.
Never in his wildest dreams did he think that the key to learning magic would be hidden in Landes's diary.
Had he discovered that earlier, Claude would've used the diary to study hard after returning from Egret instead of tossing it aside and wasting more than a month's time.
I thought the diary would only be about daily trivia and stuff like that. Who would teach people how to meditate and learn magic in a diary … Claude muttered to himself.
That's right. How could someone who could remember being bullied for years and even write down the name of an apprentice magus in his diary not write down the process of his promotion from an apprentice magus to a rune magus in his diary? That should be something that he was most proud of.
Perhaps when he was writing his diary, he was thinking that even if they ignored him and isolated him, he was still smarter than them and would become an official Magician faster than them.
Claude suppressed his excitement and continued reading.
As expected, Landes's smug mood was all written down in the diary. In it, he ridiculed the other apprentices who were in the same batch as him. "You're richer than me and you're more popular with the rune magi than I am.
You look down on me and like to bully me. But what happened in the end?
I only need three months to successfully circulate my mana and become a first-rank rune magus. You'll have to call me 'teacher' when you see me … Hahaha … "
As expected of a genius. Of course, he didn't forget to thank Tawari who had been teaching him with all his heart in the diary.
Without his guidance, Landes wouldn't have been able to become a first-rank rune magus so quickly.
Under normal circumstances, a magic apprentice with an elemental affinity of seven to eight would take a year to a year and a half to become a first-rank rune mage, and this was assuming that the rune mages in charge of teaching them would do their best to guide them. Otherwise, it would take two to three years, unless the magic apprentice was suddenly enlightened and comprehended the key points of meditation on his own.
Becoming a battlemage was a little more troublesome and would take two to three years.
While they were practicing meditation, they also had to learn more hand seals and techniques to fight against magic. At the same time, they also had to strengthen their physical fitness.
The good thing was that the legacy of a battlemage wasn't as messy as that of a rune magus. For the battlemages, even if they were apprentices now, they would be comrades once they became first-rank battlemages.
No one would leave their back to a teammate who hated them in battle …
For example, there was a female apprentice magus who had been in the tower for five years. Tawari knew her too.
He said that the girl's talent in magic was not very good, and her elemental affinity was only six. She should have been eliminated, but her family was rich, and they bribed the Magician who went to take the test to send her to the Mage Tower at the age of fourteen.
For the first three years, her family fared rather well. They would send a large amount of gifts and money to the tower every year.
But in the fourth year, that family offended a magic tower in another region. Loenk wasn't willing to stand up for them, so he watched as the family was destroyed, leaving only her as an acolyte in the magic tower.
Without her family's money and resources, the apprentice magus's progress was very slow.
Left with no choice, she could only become the lover of a fifth-ring rune magus who was highly regarded by Loenk. Only then was she able to gain a foothold in the tower.
However, she had been in the tower for five years and still hadn't become a first-rank rune magus. Her lover, the fifth-ring rune magus, couldn't help her much either.
Loenk said that if she couldn't become a first-rank rune magus before the age of twenty, she would no longer have a place in the tower.
She only had two options left. One was to pack her luggage and go home. The other was to sign a death contract and become an ordinary maid.
Right now, she only had a year left.
Back then, Landes still didn't understand why there was such a huge difference in progress between having nine and six elemental affinity. If not for Tawari forbidding him from revealing his meditation to anyone, he might've really gone to talk to the apprentice magus out of sympathy and help her become a first-rank rune magus as soon as possible.
Unable to show off in front of others, Landes could only record his triumphs and insights in the diary. Even though he had already become a third-tier rune magus when he wrote the diary, he could still clearly remember the excitement and joy he felt when he successfully became a first-tier rune magus through meditation. At the same time, he recorded even more insights and insights from his breakthrough.
To mortals, magi were mysterious and feared. They possessed superhuman strength and could control everything in the world. They could easily use magic to hunt down ferocious magical beasts and build majestic buildings that mortals couldn't even imagine. Their world was as high and mighty as the gods. Any magus was an existence that mortals looked up to and worshipped.
But in Landes' diary, the source of a magus' power was recorded in a very simple and clear manner.
Through meditation, one could attract the omnipresent elements in the world into one's body and successfully convert them into mana for the magus to use.
The key was that the magus' body had to be a vessel. The more mana they could store, the higher their rank would be.
A few days ago, Landes' diary recorded that Tawari had told him some secrets about the world of magic. These were things that the rune magi who taught their apprentices about magic purposely ignored.
For example, magi from the first to the fifth ring were considered low-ranked magi in the world of magic.
Advancing from the fifth ring to the sixth ring was a breakthrough from the low-ranked to the mid-ranked. Be it meditation, magic techniques or effects, they would all undergo a huge change.
However, this knowledge was held in the hands of the Silver Noble Families, and they weren't willing to divulge it to outsiders.
So in the current world of Faslan, the fifth ring was already the peak for a magus.
Magi from the sixth to the eighth circle were all mid-ranked magi, such as the master of the Mage Tower, Loenk. He was a seventh-circle magus, one of the few who stood at the very top of Faslan's magic world. He was also a member of the magic council.
The ninth to twelfth rings were all high-ranked magi. There were only seven of them in the current Faslan world, and the Council of the Nine Rings was the highest authority in the world of magic. No magus dared to go against their orders.
Legend had it that a magus above the twelfth ring was the path to godhood, but in the past two thousand years, not a single magus had managed to become a twelfth ring grand magus.
In the world of magic, grand magi had already become an ancient legend.
The key to becoming a magus from an apprentice magus was meditation.
In the three thousand years of magic civilization, magic resources had become increasingly scarce, and magic techniques that required a lot of resources had also been phased out.
There were only two or three types of meditation techniques that didn't require any magic resources for apprentices and low-level mages. These meditation techniques mainly relied on the cultivator's own accumulation of magic power and comprehension. As long as one was talented in magic, they would eventually become a fifth-circle mage after some time.
Landes drew a standard hexagram in his diary and used it to decipher the meditation technique the apprentices practiced.
This meditation technique's official name was Hexagram Meditation Technique.
When an apprentice started training, they had to relax their body and not think about anything, but they couldn't fall asleep.
Then, he would feel the emptiness and use his mental strength to draw a standard hexagram pattern in this emptiness. Soon, he would feel many light spots flashing in the surrounding space. These light spots were the ubiquitous elemental photons in the world. These elemental photons would be attracted by the hexagram and wrap around each corner of the hexagram …
The apprentice had to do their best to attract the elemental photons to the corners of the hexagram. The most important thing was to use their elemental affinity to attract the photons that were suitable for them.
Take Landes, for example. His affinity with the fire element was nine, so it was much easier and faster for him to absorb the fire element photons compared to the other elemental photons. He could fill up the six corners of the hexagram in a shorter time.
Next, the apprentice would have to convert the elemental photons into their own mana.
From a certain perspective, the hexagram drawn with spiritual force was like a well. The hexagon in the middle was the mouth of the well, and the six triangles on the sides were the railings.