Pestilence: Rise Of The Pure Undead

"I see that none of you have heard of the last aspect, and it is perfectly understandable, chances are, your former instructors haven't either, since it is a new addition, it will take some time before the knowledge spreads, and it is an important aspect that always should have been measured" Rosemary explained with a vibrant smile, it wasn't uncommon for the new aspects to be brought up.

Typically, they were either covered by an already existing one, or simply plain wrong, this new one had been deemed to fit however.

"It has been given the provisory name of 'know', and if you know anything about the convention of researches and our scientific community, provisory means that it will be the official name for the many years to come" she reached for something underneath her desk, pulling out a familiar-looking orb, all of the students had interacted with such things before, it was a tool used to measure one's mana aspect.

"We'll end this simple lesson by gauging your guys's know, any idea what it could refer to?" their teacher asked them, knowing full well that the appellation told pretty much nothing about what it was about, but she could always be surprised.

No one seemed willing to try, until one hand rose, content that someone had the spine to shoot their idea in the dark, Rosemary gestured for Helena to speak.

'Absolute mad woman' Milo smiled to himself, looking at her perfectly stoic face, he had just seen her completely at loss mere seconds ago, she was positively trying to bullcrap her way to victory.

"It could be referring to how much… One's own mana knows who its owner is?" she narrowed her eyelids, everyone waiting for Rosemary's response, who was just standing there, her arms crossed and looking just as usual.

One boy in the back pulled on the collar of his shirt, getting hot despite the state of the art cooling system equipped into the entirety of this academy.

"That is close enough, it is used to refer to how much one's one mana and spells can affect the user, whether they can be hurt by them, and if so, how much, it also deals with other, non-explicitly harmful effects, such as, whether or not a mage will be affected by the pushback of an explosion they caused, or if they can feel the heat coming from their own fire spell"

"Of course, one can grow better to avoid drawbacks, or be affected by their offensive spells if need be" quickly ushering people to get in line and test on this aspect for themselves, as it turns out, the know generally fell into two categories.

One was either affected by all phenomena caused by their offensive spells, or were only slightly protected from the harmful effects, no one found themselves perfectly immune, neither of those three options seemed to be ideal in the eyes of Rosemary however.

Their teacher believed that one should learn to master this aspect of their mana, since it made one much more flexible, being unaffected by the effects of your spells could allow one to unleash a violently harmful spell at point blank without any worries, but possessing perfect immunity wasn't exactly a great thing either, this meant that one couldn't use their offensive spells with flexibility at all, the blast of a spell couldn't be used to propel oneself for example.

Or if one were to be attacked by a spell from within, they would find it impossible to deal with it since it would inevitably involve harming oneself with their own mana to fight back, that second idea was unlikely to happen, but Rosemary had encountered such things.

Once again, it all came down to whether one wanted to excel at magic, or stick to the fundamentals, all great mages need to either master their mana, or be lunatics and use it in the most unconventional of ways.

A little bit of both could carry one a long way.

"Alright then, I'll dismiss you for now, next lesson, we'll continue with theoretical knowledge, mana cores, mana crystallisation and all that relates to them, now shoo"

_____________

Loimos was in a bit of a tight spot, he was in a little of a pickle one could say, perhaps it might be correct to say that he was faced with a nearly insurmountable problem.

There was indeed a crypt contained within Weafewand, but unlike in Findpasser, it wasn't simply surrounded by highly ineffective fences, the entire thing had been encased with enchanted iron, covered with runes, magic circles, sigils and even surrounded by an entire array, the entire thing was also floating up in the sky, in sight of everybody, and under surveillance by guards that were definitely much more of a problem that the regular schmucks Loimos had encountered many times.

They were more comparable to the guard captain of Throdqdmond, Robert had been, and would probably still be a difficult opponent for Loimos to face, even with all his new tricks and enhanced physical capacities.

These men and women probably weren't as great with the sword as the captain had been, but they were trained in extensive mana usage and armed with otherwise more threatening equipment, the undead would get pieced up with efficiently.

Adding all of this to the fact that his peculiar mana instantly got their attention, Loimos had no way of breaking in at the moment.

He would first need to get rid of the guards, also make sure that no one else could just see him making his way up there, and then he would have to break through the hefty defences.

Now that was a devious challenge, thankfully, Loimos had plenty of time, since he was dead.

Faraday would tend to say that mana was the most prominently used energy, for it was the most plentiful on the continent, and thus, quite a few people had talent and large reserves of it within their bodies, he had enumerated a rather lengthy list of other energies, said that this was barely a few examples, and that the average person actually had some amount of every single energy, with only a few exceptions, such as life and death force, those two excluded one another.

Whilst they each had slight differences and favoured applications, the principles caught with mana could be applied to them as well, meaning that by listening in and asking progressively more precise questions to anyone he met around here concerning mana, he could actually use this knowledge for death force.

Faraday may be a powerful mage, but he himself admitted that he was more of a fighter than anything, which was part of the reason he was utterly unable to learn a zone, he mostly used his metal mana to hit harder, making him not the greatest person to teach such things.