Three hundred and fifty people had passed the entrance examination and they were now standing in a hall waiting to be addressed.
" Good evening and congratulations on your entrance into the imperial magic academy, my name is Olaf von Shultz the chancellor of this great institution." The chancellor said, his face bearing no emotion.
" As a gift for your entrance, you will be given ten thousand tokens which would act as the only currency available in the campus.
You will also receive an accomodation that would provide for your various necessities including your uniforms and other personal items.
In this great academy you will receive lessons and training pertinent to your attributes and forge you into mages that protect the empire with all their hearts.
Here are the rules, for you to build character all fights are legal only death matches are to be sanctioned by the faculty.
Do not attempt to leave the academy without permission and you must always dress in the school uniform .
Your examinations and tests would come in form of missions and this affects your ranking. Your ranking also determines the level of resources that you would be allowed to consume. You will also be able to carry out missions on your own, these missions provide tokens also.
High ranking students will also earn the right to graduate earlier than their peers so good luck and God be with you."
Mason received the key to his room and the card containing his ten thousand tokens .
His accomodations was a 600 square feet studio apartment equipped with a kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom all furnished .
In the wardrobe there were three sets of uniforms black trousers, white shirt and a red coat.
Soon he fell into a deep sleep and by five AM he was a wake. He went for a run which was still hard for him but he continued, he also tried doing pushups and situps but it was certain, it would take a considerably long time or a miracle before he would reach his desired point.
His prayers for a miracle got answered in the orientation class where they were thought how to manipulate mana to enter the body and kickstart the dormant magical powers in their bodies.
They were meant to stay in a quiet and serene environment, clear their minds of any distractions and then try to let their minds absorb the mana particles in the air.
When he went back to his room, he took a shower and then sat of the floor , cleared his mind from disturbing thoughts and focused on feeling the energy.
He couldn't tell how long he had been in that position but then suddenly he could feel the energy, he could feel mana. Subconsciously, he started absorbing the energy, it felt addictive all that power just pouring into him .
He absorbed till now more energy would go into his body , it was then that he knew that he had reached his limits.
When he opened his eye, he saw some blackish green substance coming off his body, this was the impurities that left the body as a result of mana entering the body .
After cleaning up, he went outside to test his new found agility . He decided to run and within ten minutes he had covered a distance of ten miles and without breaking a sweat. It was then that he knew that he had surpassed human limitations, no wonder magic was so intoxicating.
The next day in class , the instructor asked that those who had started to feel mana should step forward, there was going to be points awarded for this achievement but Mason never stepped forward. He watched as the students competed to be on top, a kind of chaos he wanted to avoid at all cost.
All he wanted to do was to find an opportunity to continue with his research in a perfectly stable environment as possible.
Just as he expected the nobles and the children of guild executives started targeting commoners who had decided to run shoulders with them while competing.
He quietly left the class , there was nothing important for him to be doing there .
It was only after three days that he stepped forward as someone who could feel magic and landed himself in the fifty first position on the leaderboard.
Next thing he did was to choose his subjects which were class 1 rune magic , class 1 forging and class 1 combat and weapons studies.
These turned out to be great as he learnt so much while still keeping a low profile. In the the rune magic class he understood that carving runes aside from the concentration requirement was a lot like computer programming but only with magic. He could now understand why even when rune mages had no natural combat technique, they were still respected and sought after by many guilds and government agencies.
He was also learning how to use telekinesis and could now lift items under ten kilograms it was a welcome development for him and he was exhilarated .
He only had problems with weapons training, he was actually very proficient with the knife but weapons like swords , spears and other melee weapons seemed foreign to him , he could barely pass as average. His hand to hand combat techniques which was also unique as he used different kinds of martial arts that he mastered in his previous life.
But as a soldier there was one thing that was missing from him , he missed the feeling he got from firing a weapon, the bang that meant sudden death for his enemies.
He just wished that he could get access to a gun but guns were not a thing on this earth, they had not even been invented.
But he then thought to himself, he was already intimate with the blueprints of several firearms and he had access to some materials due to his forging classes. There was no harm in him actually making the weapon especially as it was for his own personal use. So he made up his mind that to make up for his inadequacy with cold weapons , he would make firearms.