Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotional Incompetent [A Magical Academy LitRPG]

The aetheric reaction equation for Sedimentary Recall was relatively simple: 50% Earthen Environment + 25% Emotional Channeling (Any) + 25% Mnemonic: 'sediment, steady, recall'. The environment was no problem—the cave practically groaned with stone. The emotional channeling would be the trickiest part, not because it was impossible for him to attempt, but because he would have to channel shame in front of two pairs of eyes.

Still, he cast. The words left him in a tight whisper, and amber sparks spiraled off his fingertips, dazzling briefly before sinking into the glossy rock. He waited for a comment; any comment.

To his surprise, nobody commented. Not Sven with his easy grin, not Liene with her constant undercurrent of teasing. They only watched.

Fabrisse pinched the glossy stone between thumb and forefinger, shutting out Sven's amused presence and Liene's flickering wisps. He whispered the trigger phrase, grounding each syllable in rhythm:

"Sediment, steady, recall."

The resonance swelled, then stuttered, like a flame deprived of air.

His jaw twitched. That was fine. Expected, even. He slid to the next promising shard, one that seemed to warp the light along its fractured edge. Again he whispered, again the resonance stirred. A tremor tickled through the cavern wall, enough to make Sven's hovering orbs waver. But when Fabrisse tried to reach deeper—nothing.

He huffed, glancing sidelong at Sven, who only twirled his staff without saying anything. Fabrisse strode farther down the slope until the others had to shuffle after him. The third stone he picked seemed right. Its sheen was like a mirror, and it possessed the grain that bent beneath his touch.

Fabrisse froze. Three times? What even was the probability of failing a fifty-eight percent chance three times in a row? It has to be like 1% or something.

He closed his eyes, running the numbers like shuffling stones on an abacus. The probability of missing a fifty-eight percent chance three times in a row was only about 7.4%. Not impossible, but rare enough to sting.

"Fabri?" Liene's voice rang out in his ears. He startled, realizing she'd crouched beside him, the little glow she'd conjured bobbing just over her shoulder. "You've been very quiet. Did you get anything?"

Her eyes were bright, expectant. She couldn't see the [Failure] notifications floating across his vision. To her, it probably looked like he'd been lost in some deep trance of earth-whispering, not rolling dice with reality and losing.

"Did you get anything?" Liene asked again, leaning in.

Fabrisse cleared his throat. "Not . . . conclusive. The resonance signature is unstable. There's interference in the grain structure, probably from overlapping events. I'll need more samples before I can isolate a viable imprint."

Sven's staff tapped once against the stone, easy and rhythmic. "Don't worry, Kestovar. Probability always finds a way to humble us." The way he said it made it sound encouraging, but he didn't have to call out Fabrisse's failure like that.

Liene turned to Sven. "Or maybe it's not about probability at all. You don't rush stone into speaking, do you? You have to be patient and keep your focus—" Her gaze drifted past Fabrisse's shoulder. "—oh, look at that! It's sparkling. Do you see it? When the light hits—"

Sparkling?

His head whipped around so fast his neck popped. Sparkling meant particulate compression, light-scatter diffraction, imprint. What if it wasn't just any stone, but a rare seismic shard? A memory-veined crystal, buried here for centuries, waiting for him to uncover—

He only found mica flakes winking in the cavern wall. The most common, utterly mundane, absolutely worthless glitterstone imaginable. Every apprentice in first-year geology knew the stuff: brittle, flaky, shallow as pond ice, and everywhere you didn't want it to be. This was the earth's way of mocking your expectations.

Still, Liene's eyes were shining, and her little glow-dome bobbed as she leaned in closer. She probably thought she'd stumbled on some secret relic of the deep strata. Of course she did. She knew nothing about rocks.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He didn't want to betray her expectation by dismissing the rock outright. Against all reason, he pressed his fingers to the mica. The flakes crumbled under his touch, gritty and insubstantial, but he whispered anyway, shaping the words in the old rhythm:

"Sediment, steady, recall."

Amber motes spiraled from his hand and seeped into the stone. For once, the resonance didn't collapse.It surged smoothly, obediently, like the spell finally wanted to cooperate. His heart gave a single hopeful kick—

Fabrisse's shoulders sagged. Of course. Of course it worked now.

Liene clasped her hands together, leaning so close her hair nearly brushed the stone. "So? How rare is it?"

"It's . . . mica." He murmured.

Her smile dimmed but didn't vanish. "Well, at least it's very pretty mica."

He pinched the bridge of his nose but said nothing.

"Hey, Kestovar." Sven had wandered a few paces downslope, staff balanced on his shoulder, the orbs bobbing in lazy orbit. He jabbed the staff's end toward a darker recess where the rock folded in on itself. "What about there?"

Fabrisse stared at him. That corner wasn't obvious at all; the grain was tighter, the color shift subtle, a faint ripple in the stone's sheen like light bending through water. He squinted, the prickling certainty rising in him that this—this—was a far better candidate than any of the shards he'd wasted energy on so far.

"Possibly," he admitted, trying to keep his voice level. As he moved closer, he could already feel the itch in his fingers, ready to test the resonance.

How had Sven noticed it? The way Sven had pointed hadn't been idle, like tossing dice. It seemed as though he knew where to look.

Fabrisse turned back and caught Sven leaning casually against the cavern wall with the same grin. Nothing in his posture suggested the patience or study Earth required.

Any good spellcaster wouldn't choose Earth. Maybe he'd just gotten spectacularly and speculatively lucky.

He crouched beside the fold Sven had pointed out. The stone here gleamed beautifully, and there was even a ripple across its surface as if it remembered light from some other age. This was promising. Too promising.

"Sediment, steady, recall."

The aether roared back at him, a depth he could barely contain. His chest tightened, exhilaration flooding in. Finally. Finally—

Huh?

Epic? I thought there's nothing above common in this cave? "What—" His throat closed. "That's not—"

The resonance had already guttered out, leaving him clutching the rock like a child grasping at smoke.

"Nothing?" Sven asked lightly, though his eyes glinted with a shade too much curiosity.

"Not . . . nothing." Fabrisse released the stone and flexed his fingers. "It's above my clearance."

"Oh? That's great. It's your find; keep it," Sven said.

"I don't know what to do with an Epic-tier rock . . ." He hadn't even figured out the subtype of this rock yet.

Sven chuckled, brushing stone dust from his sleeve. "Epic-tier strata have their uses. Usually they're cut down and worked into passive enchantments in artifacts. A skilled artificer would know what to do with it." He tilted his head, grin widening.

Fabrisse swallowed. Enchantments, of course, needed more than just theoretical Earth thaumaturgy to make work. In fact, some would argue you didn't need Earth at all; enchanting was another discipline in and of itself. The enchanters and artificers didn't bother tracing grain lines or memorizing fracture patterns. They only needed enough to tell which rocks were valuable to inlay on a blade or socket into a staff.

Then what's Earth Thaumaturgy good for? Just to find these rocks? Damn. Earth Thaumaturgy really is redundant.

He slipped the stone into his back pocket, and the Eidralith flashed him a notification:

As he'd guessed, Liene had already wandered a few steps upslope, humming to herself as she bent over some pale quartz nodules and doing some light calligraphy with her fingers.

That left him with Sven.

"Not bad for a day's work," Sven said, tapping his staff against his boot heel. "Do you need to keep searching, or are you content with this one?"

"I need something less rare," he muttered.

Sven raised a brow. "Less rare?"

"Yes," Fabrisse said, a touch sharper than he intended.

Sven's grin widened. He angled his staff toward another wall of darkened stone, as if inviting Fabrisse to try again.

Fabrisse followed the line of Sven's staff, squinting at the wall of darkened stone. At first it looked unremarkable, since it was just basalt. Common, cheap, carved into kitchen mortars, washbasins, door weights. Household stone.

Household stone, huh?

Oh.

Common didn't mean worthless. In fact, it meant the opposite: handled every day, pressed into the rhythm of human lives, saturated with the small repetitions of touch and memory. That was where imprints loved to hide.

Fabrisse stared back at Sven, and he just gestured toward the corner with his head.

No. This wasn't luck. Sven definitely knew Earth.