EdgeCases

Just Add Mana 48 — Baking Bread, Pt 2

Cale listened as Damien explained everything he knew, keeping his expression carefully neutral in the process. Inside, though, his mind was whirling.

The Verdant Flame. No matter how many years passed, the name remained achingly familiar. Even now, Cale remembered a time when entire temples had been dedicated to it, when pilgrims had crossed entire worlds just to feel its warmth.

Bu...

Just Add Mana 47 — Baking Bread, Pt 1

Cale, Damien, and the golem that was definitely still Sisyphus inhabiting Syphus's body all stared at what was now seven jars of sourdough starter sitting in front of them.

"Um... do we really need this much of it?" Damien asked awkwardly. "Also, I feel like you shouldn't put this into food? Not to downplay our efforts down or anything. I just also don't want you to die."

Cale scoff...

Just Add Mana 46 — Yeast

"Yeast," Cale said, very patiently.

Damien stared at him. The poor dreadshade looked like he was getting increasingly confused rather than enlightened, which, frankly, was a little insulting. This explanation had worked perfectly well with Vesuvius!

Although Cale supposed that Vesuvius hadn't actually had to worry about how yeast worked. It wasn't really necessary for the vision, an...

Just Add Mana 45 — Escape

Serof Ontiladus was running out of time, and he knew it.

The Watchful Hive ran on a strict schedule, in large part because of its position off the eastern coast of Aersheld. Inconvenient as it was, the waters of the Endless Deep did a remarkable job shielding the enormous, tower-sized relic from would-be spies and scryers. The ocean around them created a strong magical interference field ...

Just Add Mana 44 — Fire Resonance, Pt 6

Cale learned mostly a single thing over the next few minutes, which was that the elemental god of fire was named Vesuvius.

The name felt vaguely familiar to Cale. Not enough for him to figure out what was familiar about it, but enough for him to realize he'd probably seen it before. He considered trying to figure that out for a moment before eventually deciding it didn't really matter; a ...

Just Add Mana 43 — Fire Resonance, Pt 5

Observer #27 was pretty sure that he hadn't heard that Brightscale professor correctly. It sounded like he'd said his student could destroy the Firestorm Scale, and that was patently ridiculous.

Of course, the idea that he'd misheard something was equally absurd. His scrying spells had a dozen redundancies to avoid interference and magical tampering, and his memory had been reinf...

Just Add Mana 42 — Fire Resonance, Pt 4

Cale didn't really know what had happened, though he did know that something had happened. He'd sensed something strange for a moment, something with an odd familiarity; stranger still was the fact that whatever changed, his mana core had responded with an odd twinge. He was pretty sure he'd experienced that before.

Oh well. That sort of thing happened all the time, anyway. As lo...

Just Add Mana 41 — Fire Resonance, Pt 3

Orguk Fangtruth was very proud of his mana reservoirs.

He had trained! Endured! He'd spent years racing through the mageblight swamps of the Illwyld on a daily basis long before he even applied to join the Brightscale Academy. His mana core had been large to start with, but the swamps had helped  train it into something truly monstrous: there was a reason most mages that attempted to...

Just Add Mana 40 — Fire Resonance, Pt 2

Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately, as far as Cale was concerned—he didn't immediately have to worry about the balancing scale, because the professor from the other academy was storming over. Graystalk himself looked neither surprised nor worried, so Cale was pretty sure he'd been expecting something like this.

The other professor was... interesting. She looked to be some sort of garg...

Just Add Mana 39 — Fire Resonance, Pt 1

Several things had happened when Cale attempted his cast of [Disorient]. The first among them, of course, were the messages from the Gift.

Mana overload detected! Attempting to compensate...

Adjusting spell construct...

[Disorient] has evolved into [Lesser Planar Reorientation]!

Cale was immediately deli...

Just Add Mana 38 — Status Update

Cale wasn't exactly sure how it worked, but there was apparently something rousing about giving lectures about the history of the Great Realms. He was far more awake than he had been about an hour ago. This, to him, seemed deeply offensive; the very idea that anything was more effective than his usual routine of staring straight at the sun until he woke up felt like blasphemy.

This meant ...

Just Add Mana 37 — Leviathan's Blessing

Flia was going to kill Cale when she woke up.

Not literally. She was far too grateful to the man to try to do something like that. But to just throw her into a conversation with the Leviathan? She wasn't ready! She hadn't even studied the Leviathan! Which wasn't for lack of trying, either. The Leviathan was the source of her curse, after all. She'd spent years trying to find out ...

Just Add Mana 36 — Impromptu Lecture

It took Cale a few moments to remember where he was when he woke up. Part of it was the resonance vision, which... it was too early to think about that. The other part of him was expecting to see the same gloomy ruins he'd been sheltering in for nearly thirty years, so when he opened his eyes to gentle morning light filtering in through stained glass windows...

Well, he came pretty close ...

Just Add Mana 35 — A Dragon's Plight, Pt 2

To say that Cale had mixed feelings about the conversation that followed would be a bit of an understatement.

Cale was largely immune to a wide variety of magics. He'd never spent much time questioning it, mostly because he far preferred using his time to explore the multiverse and contend with all the mysteries it had to offer. There were, however, some forms of magic his immunity didn't...

Just Add Mana 34 — A Dragon's Plight, Pt 1

The first thing Cale noticed was that Cyte was rather comfortably nestled within its blood obsidian box, sitting on Akkau's desk. There was no enchantment or ward to keep it trapped, either; instead, it nibbled happily on a pile of attunement papers Akkau had apparently left out for it, a sight that made Cale smirk slightly with amusement. Of all the things he'd been expecting out of this conve...

Just Add Mana 33 — Secrets and Sorcery, Pt 2

Leo wasn't really sure what he was expecting, but it wasn't this. Everything Cale had said about attuning made sense. It explained why he was having so much difficulty trying to shift the base aspect of his mana core, and even before Cale said anything, it told him in no uncertain terms that his approach had been flawed. In rejecting his core aspect, he was making it even more difficult to attu...

Just Add Mana 32 — Secrets and Sorcery, Pt 1

When they arrived back at the dorm, Cale was almost immediately drawn to the labyrinth door that was now mysteriously affixed to the back of his room. "Ooh," he said immediately, impressed. "So that's the door."

It looked identical to the one they'd seen in the labyrinth, so it wasn't the door itself that impressed him so much as the feat of magic it had likely taken to get it there. To d...

Just Add Mana 31 — Recovery

Cale's mind lingered on a few of Sternkessel's questions, even after the professor brought back the rest of the class. The questions were nothing he hadn't considered before—he'd asked about the possibility of there being a curse placed on humanity, among other things—but as much as the effect fit the profile of some sort of censorship curse, curses were always anchored on something. They h...

Just Add Mana 30 — A Class Act

Author's Note: Just noticed that Chapter 28 was missing a next chapter link, sorry! Make sure you didn't miss Chapter 29 (that's the one with the final encounter of the Inverted Spires, so to speak)!

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It was fairly well known among higher-tier mages that one did not ...

Just Add Mana 29 — Magical Geography, Pt 7

It took a bit of time, but Cale and the rest of his impromptu team were as ready as they would ever be.

Fighting something from the Abyss wasn't something he did very often. Really, fighting non-lethally wasn't something he did very often. The effect of the Thread of Fate meant many of his days were rather intense and eventful, but even then, Cale thought his first day in Utelia ...

Just Add Mana 28 — Magical Geography, Pt 6

Cale whistled as they pushed open the enormous golden doors that barred the entrance to the odd, spiral-shaped building at the heart of the Inverted Spires. Or, well, Leo pushed them open. Cale had taken one look at the size of them and immediately delegated the task to their resident minotaur, who rolled his eyes but didn't protest.

They'd been right about what this building was, at leas...

Just Add Mana 27 — Magical Geography, Pt 5

Shortly after manifesting the giant hammer and making both Leo and Damien gawk at him, Cale dismissed it and instead retrieved a tiny pin from one of his pockets. "Just kidding," he said, setting to work picking open the locks on one of the windows. "The windows look too nice to break. And I'm pretty sure there's some kind of window-related rule."

Which was, yet again, rather strange—bu...

Just Add Mana 26 — Magical Geography, Pt 4

Author's Note: Don't forget to read yesterday's extra chapter if you haven't already!

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Cale watched with interest as Leo finally cast a spell in front of him. Now that he thought about it, this was his first time seeing Leo actually use magic. And it was labyrinth aspe...

Just Add Mana 25 — Magical Geography, Pt 3

Cale had no idea what to call the thing that rose out of the ground, mostly because the first names that came to mind were all ridiculous. A large part of this was admittedly because it looked rather distinctly like an elephant, down to the massive ears and elongated trunk. The only major difference was the fact that it looked like it was made out of dense, translucent crystal that distorted an...