Chapter 760: Strange Changes at Sea
Mystryl shot him a sideways look. "Tom, first you need to get your identity straight. You’re my student. How can you hold yourself to the standard of an ordinary arcanist?"
"I have high hopes for you. You have this space, and you have that strange talent with no visible ceiling. Surpassing me someday isn’t out of the question."
"If that day ever comes, you’d better summon someone even stronger than me to guide us forward. So we’re in a win-win relationship, which means I’m naturally going to ask a bit more of you."
Tom stared at the elegant goddess of magic in front of him and felt like he’d just met his match.
They said gods were cold and didn’t understand people. Mystryl had said so herself, otherwise something as big as Karsus’s Folly never would have happened. But judging by what she’d just pulled, this goddess understood people just fine.
First she raised his status, then she talked about her hopes for the future, then she tied it all up as a win-win. After that speech, he couldn’t find a single reason to refuse.
But in the study space, it had always been him leaving other people speechless. With a mouth like his, he’d been undefeated here. Even Morgan got so annoyed with him sometimes that she wanted to bite him.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Mystryl arched an eyebrow. "Don’t tell me you want to learn magic like some mediocre arcanist."
Tom nodded solemnly. "Yep. I’m trash."
Now it was Mystryl’s turn to be struck dumb. Even back on Faer?n, Tom’s strength would have counted as a decent expert, one step away from being called a High Arcanist. For his age, it was practically a once-in-ten-thousand-years miracle. Anyone with that kind of achievement should have an ego the size of a house. Instead, this guy had no pride at all, and was weirdly... down-to-earth?
So down-to-earth that he’d dug straight through to the underworld.
Seeing the shock on her face, Tom finally smiled. He’d clawed one back at last.
As for face, he didn’t have any to lose.
Between his failed life before and the miserable start he’d gotten in this one, Tom had learned that dignity was the most useless thing in the world, unless you could trade it for something bigger. So no matter how strong he became, he’d never develop the mindset of a proper powerhouse. Even with Andros’ invincible aura inherited, his sense of morals and shame hadn’t gone up a single notch.
Seeing that smug, got-away-with-it grin, Mystryl caught on. She rolled her eyes at him with a world of charm and rapped the blackboard with her pointer.
"Say whatever you like, but the teacher sets the pace of the lesson. All right, listen up. I’ve told you before that this world’s wizard system is a lot like the sorcerer bloodline system in my world. It cares a great deal about inherited talent. Those with talent find everything easy, and those without it can do everything perfectly and still never get the effect they should."
"Don’t arcanists care about talent too?" Tom shot back.
"Talent decides the ceiling for everything," Mystryl said, as if it were obvious. "Take Karsus. He was the most brilliant High Arcanist Faer?n has ever seen, but he got where he did through talent plus hard work. Without either one, he never would have reached that level."
"But not everything is a talent contest from the start. Effort and knowledge at least decide the floor." She tapped her head. "This is the downside of your world never having had a god of magic. Actually, there’s no trace of any gods ever being born here."
"Nobody ever worked out a proper path for you. Everyone’s just been feeling their way along on instinct, so naturally no real system ever formed. You’re used to treating spells as fixed formulas, and you rarely stop to ask why the formulas work. A real arcanist can’t just memorize results. She has to know how the results come about."
"What I’m going to teach you is how to dissect the model behind a spell and systematize all of it. Yes, like that magic circuit in your body that hasn’t fully formed yet. It’s a built-in network, except one lives in the body and the other lives in a spell array."
"Your bloodline lets your body do the casting for you. The knowledge I’m giving you lets you understand the deeper root of it, and dig out your own potential better."
Tom worked hard to soak up everything Mystryl said. Most of it was theory and metaphysics, full of abstract concepts that were hard to grasp, because it clashed with everything he’d understood about magic until now.
To keep up with Mystryl, he shamelessly switched on turbo mode and threw everything he had into absorbing the new ideas.
Even so, progress wasn’t looking good.
...
..
Over the next two days, apart from spending time with the girls who lived in London, he spent half of every day in Mystryl’s classroom and with her after class.
After several days, he still hadn’t found the feeling. According to Mystryl, this was the standard trouble of people who were too gifted. The result was the same, and the power even greater thanks to raw talent, but the process was all wrong.
And Tom’s troubles were naturally bigger than an ordinary genius’s. Not only was his talent higher, he’d also received a stretch of wrong-headed training, and his body had already turned it into instinct. Changing an instinct is always painful.
Really, it wasn’t that Tom was dumb. Mystryl had simply started him on the hardest material right away. Translated into Muggle schooling, if Tom got the hang of it now, he’d be at doctorate level. With a jump that big, the difficulty was only natural.
Honestly, Mystryl was already surprised at how fast he was moving. Just look at the others, who were still struggling through the runes she’d passed down to them.
Still, after a few days of grinding himself into the ground, Tom wasn’t empty-handed. He’d already set up the rune array in Dalaran to absorb life energy and fragments of world rules, and successfully transplanted the World Tree there. With "Hera’s Bathwater" to irrigate it on top of that, it would probably ripen one more round by summer.
Just as Tom was getting dizzy and half out of his mind from studying, a warning alert went off in his head.
At first he was too foggy to remember what it was about. His brain churned for a moment before he suddenly recalled the New Mayflower sailing across the Atlantic. His figure flickered, and after several Apparitions in a row, he appeared inside the ship’s cabin.
His sudden arrival startled the professor who’d been pacing anxiously in the room. Seeing it was Tom, the professor let out a breath of relief. "Mr. Riddle, you’re finally back."
"Something happen?" Tom asked directly.
The professor nodded gravely. "Come out and see for yourself. I can’t really say what’s going on."
Hearing a faint howling in his ears, Tom didn’t hesitate and strode toward the deck.
The students in the cabins had clearly noticed something was off. Plenty of doors along the corridor stood open, with heads poking out to look around, and some people were asking each other in low voices what was happening.
Tom didn’t stop. He pushed through the crowd and shoved open the door to the deck.
A fierce wind slammed into his face.
Above, an endless blanket of black clouds covered the whole stretch of sea. The sky over the ocean looked even bigger than it did over land, and far more oppressive. Looking around, he couldn’t see a single glimmer of light. The heavy clouds pressed low over the water as if they might collapse at any moment.
The sea itself was anything but calm. The wind howled, and waves a dozen meters high crashed one after another against the magical barrier around the hull with a dull roar.
Even with the magic protecting it, the Mayflower rocked violently. Many students were crowded at the small cabin windows, staring blankly at this end-of-the-world scene.
No wonder the Ilvermorny professor had triggered the alarm and called him back. This was definitely not normal.
Tom frowned and began searching for the source of these strange changes.
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