"Hagh."
Andreas collapsed onto the training ground floor and stayed there. Today's session was finally over.
'Why does the training keep getting harder?'
He lay still for a moment, letting his body remember what it felt like to not be moving, then dragged himself upright and began the walk back to his room. Halfway there a thought surfaced and wouldn't leave.
'I wonder how large my mana reserve actually is.'
He changed direction.
The mages quarters were deeper in the palace, past the administrative wing, and on the way there Andreas moved through several corridors where healing mages and battle mages clustered in small groups between duties. He caught fragments of conversation as he passed.
"It seems the lord called us again."
"Yes, these days the lord has been increasing his—"
'Are they talking about father?'
Andreas slowed slightly, but the conversation moved on and he kept walking. He didn't know much about his father beyond what others told him. He knew he was meant to succeed him. He knew the territory would one day be his responsibility. But the man himself remained distant and abstract in a way Andreas had long since stopped examining. He was considerably closer to Arden and Barderossa than to his own father, and he had made peace with that fact so thoroughly that it barely registered as a fact at all anymore.
He didn't crave his father's affection. Why would he.
He pushed open the door to Barderossa's private study without knocking.
*Bang*.
"Barderossa, can we measure my mana?"
Barderossa startled badly enough that the spell diagram he had been working on scattered across his desk. He looked up at his young master standing in the doorway with the expression of a man who has absorbed many such entrances and has not yet fully made his peace with them.
"Young Master, as a matter of courtesy one generally knocks before entering."
Andreas stepped inside without acknowledging this.
"So can we measure my mana?"
Barderossa took a long slow breath, set down his work, and stood.
"Please wait. I will retrieve the necessary equipment."
Left alone in the study Andreas immediately began looking at everything. The room was dense with instruments and materials he only partially recognized, and one in particular caught his attention immediately, a cube roughly one meter on each side, fashioned from mythril, hollow on the inside with rune carvings covering the exterior surface.
'Let me see, that rune is hold, that one is toughen, I don't recognize that one. And there is a mana stone set into it. A large one.'
He was reaching for the surface when Barderossa returned, stopped in the doorway, and visibly elected not to address what he was seeing.
"Young Master, I have brought the measurement equipment. Would you—"
"Barderossa, what does this do?"
The last of Barderossa's will to redirect the conversation quietly left him.
"It is a spirit trap."
"What is that?"
"Spirits are a peculiar race, young Master. They mindlessly favor elves and are instinctively hostile toward demons, which makes forming a contract with one exceptionally difficult under normal circumstances. This device allows one to place a small amount of elf hair inside, use it to summon a spirit, and then contain the spirit until it agrees to a contract."
'Ohh.'
"Is there one inside right now?"
"Unfortunately no. I have been attempting to summon a water spirit for some time, but nothing beyond minor water elementals has responded to the call. And even if a sufficiently powerful spirit did appear, there is a reasonable chance it would simply break through the containment, so the entire endeavor is difficult from multiple directions." He set the measurement equipment on the cleared portion of his desk and gestured toward it. "Young Master, did you not come here to measure your mana?"
"Yes, let's do it quickly."
The device Barderossa had brought was a glass box, sealed on all sides, with several runes inscribed along its interior walls and a clean precise scale sitting at its center. Andreas watched as Barderossa channeled mana into the runes in a specific sequence and activated them.
"What did you just do?"
"I evacuated all of the air from the interior so that nothing interferes with the scale's reading."
"How did you do that?"
"That I will explain in another lesson. For now, young Master, could you compress your entire mana reserve as completely as you are able and deposit it onto the right side of the scale?"
Andreas was curious about the air evacuation and filed it for later. He turned his attention inward. The mana stored in his core responded immediately, compressing under his direction with the practiced ease of something he had been doing for years now. As it compressed beyond a certain threshold he felt a familiar lightheadedness, the sensation of something large being made very small, and he guided it carefully outward. As it left his body the pressure transformed it, the mana passing from semi-liquid to something denser, and it settled onto the right side of the scale in a small concentrated mass that caught the light strangely.
The scale began to tilt.
Barderossa activated a secondary spell alongside it, producing a precisely measured counterweight. One gram of conjured stone placed on the left side. The scale barely responded. Two grams. Three. At three grams the scale was nearly level. He added incrementally and the balance settled at three point eight.
"You may release it now, young Master."
Andreas let go. The compressed mana dispersed instantly, dissolving back into the air of the sealed box and then dissipating entirely as Barderossa deactivated the vacuum runes.
"Does that mean I have 380 UM?"
"Yes, young Master."
Andreas left the study with considerably more satisfaction than he had entered it with. Barderossa settled back into his chair in the quiet that followed, breathing in the faintly impure residual mana Andreas had left behind, the trace signature of something that had passed through this room and would not be here again.
'380 UM. When I was his age, did I even have 70?'
He sat with that for
a moment.
'I truly do envy his talent.'
"Tsk." He picked up his pen. "Such useless thoughts."