Cardinal: God Spell

Sora limped through the thick forest of the 4th Zone with a heavy grimace, he didn't know how many challengers were left, he wasn't sure if Lima had given up his hunt or not, and he was in no feasible shape to get into a serious fight, forget the elite students at this point the basic second-year students would have no problem eliminating him. Realising this Sora stopped his meaningless movement and sat cross-legged beneath a tree trunk.

About 5 hours had passed since the first round had started and not only was he dangerously low on mana, but he was physically exhausted as well. To start with he simply relaxed and let himself meditate. For 1 hour he did nothing but calm his mind and meditate, frankly, it was only after he did this that he noticed the first benefit of this trial. The mana within it was at least a quarter as rich as one would find in the actual Divine tower. His cultivation speed here, at the very least, would be 3 times as fast as usual allowing him to form stars in 8 hours, compared to his usual 2 days this was a holy grail that would see him potentially rise to the top of the basic level before the second round even commenced.

At this moment Sora realised 3 things; The first was that he was severely underinformed and was naïve to the ways things worked, had he been the wiser he would have realised the 2 other points much sooner. Secondly, He realised that despite him feeling plenty of magical energy flowing around it was students moving to a convenient place to cultivate, the armour and weapons were for added protection on the odd chance of an ambush. Lastly, he realised what the actual point of the 1st round of the Divine trial was; It was to judge a mage's decision-making, why on earth would it be possible for a basic mage in year 1 to fairly compete with the much stronger much more experienced fighters in the upper years.

They simply were not required to, while a mage could theoretically take out all the others and win the tournament like that, no one in hell had the mana base to pull it off. Hell, even the strongest guy in the zone was preserving mana against a small fry like Sora because he was aware of the threat all the other 4th year students presented should they decide he needed to go.

That then begs the question, how is a weaker, helpless 1st year supposed to compete with the more powerful 4th years?? The answer lay in the very badges they wore. The badges were set to track the wearer's mana levels and mana activity, while casting magic got you a few skill points the only way to increase your ranking consistently was to channel more mana than anyone else present. This round tested both the resources one could produce to help them gather as much mana as possible in the shortest time possible and pit that against the same abilities of every other student in the school.

4th years ignored this fact and decided to wait to till the challenge month to get anything done, they were here to settle social, increase their cultivation, and political disputes. Frankly, they didn't care who won the tournament so long as there were enough older years for them to challenge among the list. The younger years could then fight for whatever limited number of spots were left to them by the older years and the Divine Tower slots would be assigned that way.

Sora was now going to play the best of both worlds, he would thoroughly abuse the benefits this round provided and slowly eliminate the other participants now and again to keep the number going down. There were still over 40 participants within this zone so he was more than good on cannon fodder to tear apart, not that he was aware of this. Sora entered a state of deep meditation and spent the next 5 hours recovering his mana reserves in full.

The process was a lot more mentally tasking than even Sora Imagined since he was recovering a significantly greater amount of mana than when he was practising how to cast magic the first time. In the end, though, he finished up by the end of the 5th hour and got up to stretch out a bit. The process of refilling his mana reserves gave his mana veins the workout they needed to begin healing his body naturally. He wasn't suddenly at full strength or anything, but he could at least move around somewhat freely again.

Sora needed some time to rest before he started cultivating and decided to analyse his last exchange with Lima. He had fused 5 precision basic fireballs with 5 precision basic sparks and just barely managed to defend himself from the force of a profound spell. In truth, the reason he survived had nothing to do with his skill as a mage and everything to do with the fact that mages of this era were significantly weaker than they should be. Not only were the spells in this Era weaker than the standard on top of not being at full power yet but the mages weren't nearly as cruel as back in his time.

Sora had come to the realisation that he had let his newfound love for magic and its due process soften him up and reverted him to that once Naïve punk who went above and beyond in any form of magi research without any form of haste or desire to truly find an answer. Back then his priority in researching magic wasn't to do favours or even to learn the limitations of magic, it was simply to know more about how it worked not caring about how feasible some of the tests were.

Sora decided that he needed to change his approach to magic immediately, he already knew what he wanted in his magic path as well as why he wanted it, there was no use in competing with this backwater generation limited by their dreams of simply escaping the ice cap. His dreams and theirs weren't even remotely comparable and he needed to act as such; to think he was satisfied with meagrely surviving a fight against a modern age profound mage, if he could be called that going by the usual standard.

For starters, Sora wasn't going to limit himself to the basic idea of what spells were, everyone and their mother could cast a spell if given enough time and resources, but not everyone could truly make something unique out of their magic; he was here to raise the standard of magic not become the best at using an outdated system. With that in mind, Sora decided to finish the project he had started before he had died way back when, and now that he was a mage he could test out his theories himself with the need to call in ridiculous favours that would only benefit those that helped him with his tests.

Lightning was a bit difficult to work on right away so he would work on the fire magic basic spell, Fireball. Everyone knew how it worked at this point, embers would contort into a ball at the centre of your palm and once all embers were gathered and solidified the mage could shoot out an explosive ball of fire. Ignoring the lack of overall control a mage has over this spell the main problem with the spell is it's lack of penetrative force and natural precision; even the ember trail Sora applied to his fireball spell was only a temporary fix as more than anyone Sora knew that even a wind mage would easily bypass that if they knew how.

What the spell needed was a solid medium to channel the spell through to give it that driven force it needed to both pierce targets and explode. The first medium Sora wanted to apply was a sword and that was how he developed the Fire sword way back when, frankly he created a series of spells founded in swordsmanship. The problem with that was that when you channelled magic through an item instead of your body you lacked control of the direction of the spell once it was cast which was limited to a crippling degree for any magician that knew their stuff.

This was where Sora developed his final masterpiece; blending martial arts and magic. Since channelling magic through swords and spears was ineffective, it was best to find other more versatile mediums to channel magic; the simplest and most effective being one's own body. After a few years of theorising Sora developed two Basic Fire magic theories that went untested during his death; Striking theory and his Flow theory. Sora believed that the smaller the medium the more refined and precise a spell would be and he was right; now why was this the case??

When a mage casts a fireball through their palm they are utilising an organ called the Mana Arteries. The same way normal veins carry blood to your heart, the mana vein carries mana to a mage's mana core directly; In that same line of thought the way your normal arteries carry blood from your heart to your tissues; The mana core sends mana to your elemental core, that mana is 'ignited' to become the respective elemental energy of the element being cast that elemental energy is then fed through your Mana arteries out to the medium of which your are casting your spell.

One might be tempted to ask what the relation was, and that would only be right. Humans as a race have by far the most versatile and diverse set of mana arteries among all life, they are the only race of creatures that don't directly channel mana through their muscles forcing the magical energy through many filtrations. Humans channel raw magical power at its best and most pure. There's a problem though; Humans have too many mana artery paths, and each path has its unique purpose and function and purpose; it is so much so that they have biological limiters that prevent them from accessing them.

Without these limiters, humans would have access to unlimited magical power without any means to control it, every one of them would essentially be a walking magical nuke on ridiculous scales; frankly, this limiter is the only reason humans were mistaken for weaklings. Their mana Veins and arteries were locked away closing off all their mana paths, because of that lack of magic humans lost the natural nourishment of mana they would usually have to grant them longer lives with greater periods of youth.

As a result, the human life span dropped from potentially hundreds of millions of years to the meagre 70 to 100 years they lived and the pre-magic Era. Only when humanity was almost wiped out and mana flooded the 'earth' within the Ice cap did humans rediscover their mana veins and regain access to a fraction of the magic that managed to kill creatures like Ravel the Ancient stage Cerberus.

Humans missed the perfect chance to complete their discovery of their magic prowess after the initial war as those who were willing to do so were either dead in battle or being suppressed by world powers that were scared of the power dynamic in the world shifting as a result of the research.

In any case, The reason a smaller medium means a more powerful and more precise spell is that without the biological filters, other races have humans burn elemental energy the longer it spends in the mana veins so they need a shorter less complicated path to keep the full power of their cast. There are naturally less complicated mana artery paths in small parts of the human body so it is generally more convenient as a whole.