I learned something new on Tuesday. It raining cats and dogs wasn't a reason good enough to cancel the practical casting class. No word was given on the contrary before the appointed time, so our class could only drag ourselves out to the back field and cover ourselves from the weather by any means we could.

  The show-offs used magic. As a model case, Alice Silla maintained a telekinetic cover overhead to deflect the downpour, adjusting it based on the wind direction. But tricks like that expected the caster to have enough mana capacity to spare.

  You don’t suppose Silla was doing it because I told her to practice Telekinesis…?

  I had to be overthinking again.

  For a standard novice, supporting an active shielding took too much effort, and exhausting yourself before a casting class was like going sprinting before a marathon. Maybe not the smartest move. So the majority of us relied on less magical umbrellas and raincoats. I was in the raincoat group myself, because my pseudo telekinesis was too noisy, and maintaining multiple processes simultaneously was difficult with the dragon rings.

  A rational mage chose the most efficient method.

  As an extreme dissident, the Archmage’s granddaughter didn’t seem to give a hoot about the rain, using no magic, no umbrellas, no raincoats, not even a poncho. Only in her uniform, she was drenched like a dog already.

  Where were you raised? In the mountains?

  Professor Woodrow waited for us in the greenery, equipped with a frilly, light pink umbrella.

  “Good afternoon, class. How has your day been, thus far?”

  A line of somber faces answered the professor with forced smiles and sighs.

  “Why, what's got you down? We have such wonderful rainfall today, don’t you think?”

  The class interpreted that as a joke and laughed a little easier, but Professor Woodrow wasn't joking around. She really thought it was a pleasant day.

  “Water. The element many mages dread. Since, while relatively easy to conjure, it's difficult to hold control of. It's not terribly destructive either. You have to throw quite a bit of water at your opponent at very high velocity before it becomes an inconvenience. The fire we learned about the other day works so much better and looks so very dramatic too. However, I am personally less fond of murder and very fond of water. The forest, the grass, animals, us, all living things thrive through water and welcome it. But that's not our topic today, alas.”

  Close by on the lawn stood a table, covered by a purple cloth. The professor snapped her fingers to make the illusory cloth melt away and showed a formation of thirty empty bottles.

  “The theme of today's class is air,” she said. “A very divisive element. It being largely invisible to the naked eye, made up of gases too thin to see, it takes some individuals great mental exertions to grasp how to best wield it. Whereas for others it comes as easy as breathing. It is an element that highlights the benefits of matching affinity, but is by no means impossible for those without. I could ramble your ears off about oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and monoxide, and so forth, and have twenty-six people sleeping while standing. I won't do that today. I've found these things are better mastered through a more hands-on approach. Please come and take a bottle for yourself, one for each.”

  Looking none the wiser, the students went to pick up their own bottles and returned to their places. The professor could at least have treated us to a drink if she was going to lecture us in this deluge, but the bottles were indeed empty and dry and without a cap.

  “The day's exercise is quite simple,” Professor Woodrow told us. “I want you to fill your bottles. With rainwater. That'll be all. Once you're done, bring your bottle back here to me and you can go carry on with your day. The third year alchemy students will have use for your water in the greenhouse later.”

  “Professor?” Henry Raynold hesitantly spoke up. “If I may, what does this assignment have to do with air magic?”

  “Well, Mr Raynold,” the professor replied, “you have 80 minutes to this task, and your bottle has quite a small mouth. I doubt you shall finish in time if you merely hold it in your hand. Moreover, the forecast promises rainfall total of 2.44 inches today. And you have a 0.9-liter bottle. So even if you stood out here in the field forlornly all night, the task would stay incomplete. Need I say more?”

  The point began to dawn on even the densest of students.

  “Yes. Obtaining a semblance of control over air currents is the key to success. Certainly, the task could also be completed with Telekinesis, as exhibited there very elegantly by Ms Silla, or by conjuring water directly into the bottle. In which case, the water will contain your mana and expose the trick, and I will deduct ten points for your folly. If you cheat at school, you only cheat yourself. But failure will not be penalized, as long as you sincerely give it your best. Go on then.”

  “Will the one who finishes first get a reward?” Turing jokingly asked.

  “Yes,” the old woman replied. “You will get to fill another bottle. Thirty of them were ordered.”

  “Uhh...”

  Nobody looked like they wanted to win this race.

  “Well,” Professor Woodrow slowly resumed, “the feat may be worth some points too. About thirty or so? For poetry's sake.”

  Everyone spread out across the green field and began to catch rain in their bottles, looking like lunatics. I clutched the neck of my glass, like strangling a goose, and thought to see the reason why people fell to alcoholism.

  To have any shot at finishing in time, the caster would have to form a sort of air cone with a top as wide as possible and shrinking down to the size of the bottle’s mouth, to effectively gather the water and let none go to waste.

  As if I could do that.

  Sure, I could impose a downward spiral vector on the air, no problem. That was still business as usual. But no matter how I tried to lower the mana feed, the result was a steam cooker that evaporated all fluids and blew only hot air into the bottle in my hands. Warm air had the unfortunate tendency to rise up, as previously discussed, repelling the rain from my gathering system.

  After ten minutes of vain tweaking of imaginary values, my bottle remained remarkably empty of moisture even in the ceaseless downpour. In fact, even the lawn in a circle around me had dried up and I was sweating in my stuffy raincoat. I'd made an open-air sauna.

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  Damn it. If I took this parched bottle back to Professor Woodrow, she’d think I was messing with her and deduct points again. If I fell to minus thirty, I'd fail the course, and I was at minus five already. But what could I do? Piss in the bottle?

  How were my classmates faring?

  A short distance away, Alice Silla was advising her roommate, Elisa, her own bottle standing in the grass, already full up to the neck. How was that even technically possible?

  So they were friends?

  Silla had a soft, gentle look on her face, like an older sister lecturing her smaller sibling. A face completely unlike the ice-cold mask she usually showed in the classroom.

  “See? That's the way. You can do it, if only you try.”

  Elisa Canth was dwarvishly short and not very pretty, her hair cut in the crude pot-style that didn't suit anyone, her face always timidly downcast and hidden under the bangs. The small, sporadic breeze she could conjure wasn’t filling her bottle too fast, but she had the right principle down, thanks to her tutor, and I was even losing to that girl.

  I looked elsewhere.

  Northward was a small group of more female students assembled around Audrey Trudeau. The class queen bee. They seemed more invested in chatting about unrelated things, holding their bottles only for show, occasionally prodding the wind. When they noticed me staring, they responded with the “Well, what is it?”-gesture, scowling and sticking out their tongues.

  I looked away. Close by the treeline stood Diar Konoron all by herself, far apart from the rest, staring up at the heavens, holding out the bottle in her hands like a beggar holds her cup, and she was quite clearly casting nothing.

  Did she think some stray god would take pity on her?

  What a class this was.

  I thought again.

  “…”

  What about using space magic?

  Not using air may have counted as cheating, but space also exerted indirect influence, and shouldn't have left traces of my mana in the water. Nobody would be able to identify the method.

  Even after reading two volumes of the research, I didn't have a very comprehensive grasp of “space” yet. I had a feeling the author didn't understand his subject so well himself. The enigmatic Professor Ryndell…

  According to the book, space was swayed by mass and energy.

  Aether may not have been real, but our reality was still bound to an elusive framework of sorts that wasn't wholly unchanging. Observing distant objects of immense mass, stars and planets, light could be seen to bend around them, producing a peculiar lensing effect. Even though lightwaves, having no mass themselves, shouldn't have been affected by the pull of gravity, as the aether experiments had demonstrated.

  Therefore, it wasn't the lightwaves that bent but the fabric of reality they passed through. Inherently bound to spacetime, unable to detach from it, photons could only curve along with it.

  But gravity was a so-called weak force. A colossal mass was required to exert perceptible influence even at cosmically close ranges. It wasn't noticeable around individual people, or even spells. And I certainly couldn't conjure energy comparable to stars, even at my peak. If anyone could, life on this planet would already have ended.

  But maybe I didn't have to go that far.

  Trying to create a gravity well to manipulate space would've been putting the cart before the horse. Magic allowed me to drop attraction out of the equation entirely and simulate the curvature without natural force. The key was the concept of relativity. Having a frame of reference.

  If the bottle in my hand were the only physical thing that existed in the universe, it would be impossible to tell if it were five inches wide, or five miles, or five lightyears. But if I took the surrounding field as a reference frame, then these two elements would confirm each other's scale, relative to their distance in space. Then, to gauge the scale of the rain, I had to take the sky as another reference frame. The speed, direction, and size of the downpour could only be discerned based on the change that occurred between its starting point and termination point in spacetime.

  Thinking I had all the necessary elements assembled, I began to channel mana into technical instructions. Instead of an air cone, I would create a space cone, and funnel the rain into my bottle. As long as the mage had clear enough visualization, strength of will, and sufficient energy, it could somewhat make up for the lack of hard data.

  It couldn't turn the impossible possible, as per the First Law. If my approach was mistaken, nothing would happen. But I had a feeling my theory was close enough to the truth.

  I closed my eyes and sank into a state of profound thought.

  I would never have dared to focus so fully on only one thing on a battlefield, with countless perils around me. Even when wielding the most advanced rituals, some small part of humanity always clung to me like a piece of sticky gum. Wariness of danger. Fear of failure. Joy of success. Pride over status. Annoyance. Pain. Grief. This mortal layer always kept me from reaching true perfection in execution. It left me incomplete.

  But there was nothing threatening my life here. Nobody whose evaluation meant anything to me. Nothing to prove. The school's backyard and other students were shut out of my conscious attention. The trees, the buildings, all melted into a white nothingness. All that was left was the framework I'd assembled in thought, myself in it, and the flow of energy connecting us. Me, the Source, the world. All in their proper places, components in the simple, clean mechanism dedicated to channeling mana, conjuring, and breathing.

  Here, in this grassland, under the weeping skies, I felt I’d arrived at something ancient and holy at the deepest heart of sorcery. A singularity of intent. A unity of being. Seeking nothing, only doing. This experience hadn't come to me at war, through death and fire, but in plain water and air. All that was left for me was the cold glass bottle and the small drops one by one pouring into it. Tremors. Vibrations. Sounds. This utterly inconsequential assignment, the result of which didn't really mean anything to anyone and changed nothing.

  Meaning in the lack of purpose.

  I couldn't tell how long had passed when I opened my eyes again. Maybe ten minutes, maybe a full hour. The bottle overflowed and cold rainwater washed over my fingers and knuckles, startling me back to my senses. Only a few students remained in the field, the others long finished and gone. I wasn't near the first place, but so what. Thoroughly relaxed, fully at peace inside, I went and took the bottle back to Professor Woodrow.

  “Ms Ruthford,” the old lady greeted me with a reserved nod.

  After the fire class, she'd had very few smiles to spare for me. She set her umbrella to hover over us and received the bottle, and as soon as she had the thing in her hands, her face fell.

  “What have you done?” the witch demanded of me in shock.

  I blinked, puzzled by the reaction. “What do you mean, professor?”

  “Don't play smart with me, young lady! How is your bottle this obscenely heavy?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  I went to the nearby table to pick up another one of the returned bottles, and held it on the left hand and then took my own on the right hand, and compared them.

  One liter of water weighed about one kilogram. An easy rate to remember. So the 0.9l bottles, when filled close to the limit, weighed a little less than a kilogram each. Except mine, which was as heavy as three or four other bottles on its own.

  Strange. Now how could that be explained? Was this a side effect of space magic? My bending of scales somehow increased the mass of the water. The book did say mass was technically an inert sort of energy, so maybe it wasn't only rain I collected in there…?

  “So?” the Professor questioned me. “Ms Ruthford, what did you put into this bottle?”

  How was I supposed to know that?

  I sighed and answered,

  “My tears.”

  I had to stand through a 5-minute speed lecture about how my attitude was not appropriate and had five more points deducted. But that was fine. It was a good class.