Time passed by in a lazy fashion. Peaceful days spent playing with Sylphy, trying my best to abuse my youth and <Healing> to catch up and smack my arrogant Dad with a sword, either seeing Sylphy off by handing over to Mister Laws or walking her home, and then working on various magical experiments late in the night.

And doing my best to ignore the three who were releasing about five years worth of pent up sexual tension.

Seriously. I thought that my mom was kinky and loud, but Mama Lily...

Well. Your first time of anything had a big impact on your life afterwards. It seemed like she, uh... had a certain inclination towards certain roles. And ropes. And other things that I tried my best to pretend I never saw.

Fortunately for me, I figured out a way to combine barrier and wind mana to dampen sound.

Only took me like... five years.

Hah...

But anyway, time passed and before I knew it, I had turned six.

In that time, I figured a few things out.

First, Sylphy was a certified genius who could do whatever the heck she wanted with mana as long as she had enough. And while she didn't double her mana every day like I did from dumping my mana and reabsorbing it every night, her growth rate was still exponential.

Not to mention she could somehow pull in water and wind mana whenever she was running low and naturally use those as easily as if they were her own mana.

Meanwhile I had to actually send chunks of my own mana out to manipulate ambient mana...

Was it because I thought too much? Master Roxy was similar to Sylphy too... She just waved her wand and things worked.

Whatever. The point was, Sylphy was a magical genius.

Of course, I didn't let that show. Instead of being amazed, I praised her hard work and creativity. I also told her a little white lie about magic being able to do whatever the user imagined just to see what she could pull off.

As to the result of that little white lie?

...Well. Turns out that might not have been a lie.

Seriously. When I told her that incantations were just memory aids and that magic circles were just special shapes to help imagine the spell working, she came up with her own incantations and shapes.

For example. <Splash Flow>?

'Water, bubble up and splash!'

<Water Ball>?

'Water, bounce!'

...It was one thing for me to be able to shorten incantations like that because I developed a whole new magical system that took advantage of the combined elements to structure things.

It was another thing entirely for a child to be able to shorten it just because they didn't know better and had it work.

I wasn't envious. Not at all. Nope.

Still, it was interesting. And since it worked for Sylphy, all the power to her.

Us mere mortals though had to figure out how to make it work in a way that made sense instead of just taking leaps in logic and creativity and... however else she just willed things into existence.

But that was fine. It was more fun trying to figure out how to break something down and explain it in a logical fashion than it was to just wibbly wobbly make it work.

Like that magic circle formation I gave to Master Roxy. And the magical tree I made for my mom.

Both of them were basically bundles of mana slapped together with ducttape and wishes, but they worked. I just had to reverse engineer them and find out *why* they worked.

Well, an alternate explanation why they worked. Because 'I said so' seemed to be a viable path for magic spells apparently...

Anyway. That was the first thing I figured out: magic could be brute forced with a strong enough will, belief, or image a la Sylphy.

The second thing I figured out was that I... accidentally turned into a monster. Well, in terms of mana.

As I explained earlier, I kept doubling my mana every day by dumping it and then reabsorbing it the next day. It was handy since it put me right to sleep to avoid the awkward intimate noises filling the house at night. It was also handy because reabsorbing it the next morning made me wide awake and fully rested.

Which made me think that there might be a visceral connection between the body and mana... like magic circuits or something similar.

And so I was curious and paid careful attention to when I reabsorbed my mana.

Part of it flowed into my blood vessels, flowing around like it was actually blood. But a lot of it just... disappeared. At least until I pulled it back out. Then it mysteriously showed up out of the blue.

I was confused for a while... and then I realized how that was happening. Or rather, what *must* have been happening.

Somehow or another, the excess mana I drew back in was folding back in on itself.

I hadn't thought too much of it since I made it a habit a long time ago. Not only that, but I never really tried using up all of my mana with spells anymore. Plus, when I drew out my mana I always made it into the same floating crimson orb that never changed.

But one day I decided to do a bit of testing with my mana. While my parents were going at it, I snuck outside and did some experimenting.

It wasn't much. I just wanted to see how much water I could make if I converted my mana. So, I pulled out a tiny thread as always and did the ol' convert directly to element thing like usual.

And then I had to think fast as a literal lake started to fall from the sky.

Thankfully, seeing Sylphy mess around with water mana so much and cleaning up her mistakes trained me on how to quickly convert water back into mana and disperse it. But if it wasn't for that... Well, I was pretty sure that my moms weren't planning to get as wet as they were going to be that night if a lake fell onto the house.

Anyway... I was starting to think that I might have done something ridiculous with my training.

I didn't know what happened exactly. It could have been because I constantly cast <Healing> on my body whenever I was training, because I was cycling mana my entire life, or because drawing out and reabsorbing mana like I did had a weird synergy effect on my body.

All I knew was that it was probably a really good idea for me to keep a careful check on my temper and definitely not use incantation magic any time soon. Opening the floodgates with my mana as it was now *really* wouldn't be a good idea.

Fortunately, there was a third thing I discovered that helped with that: I could create magic circles from scratch.

To put it simply, while the magic circles I learned from Master Roxy and the books worked, as I thought they weren't optimal. In fact, they were super convoluted with a lot of redundancies and extraneous elements.

To elaborate... it was like somebody used calculus to try and solve an addition problem. Like trying to solve 2 + 2 by breaking it up into 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, using trigonometric identities to turn each into sines and cosines to get something like (sin^2 + cos^2) + (sin^2 + cos^2) + (sin^2 + cos^2) + (sin^2 + cos^2), reducing it to 4(sin^2 + cos^2), reducing *that* to 4(1) and then ending up with 4.

Or you could have just, you know, put two and two together.

In short, it was inefficient and also difficult for an average person to use.

Which would explain why no one bothered with them anymore except for super complicated spells that had chants that could be printed as a whole book by themselves.

So I fixed that.

My <Magic Arrays> approach already kind of did that by breaking the fundamentals of a spell into abstracted elements, but I took it a step further.

To sum up my new magic circles into steps:

1. Draw a containment circle out of mana to resist internal pressure from the spell

2. Determine the shape that would convert mana into a designated element and inscribe it in the center of the circle

3. Layer a shape that tweaks one aspect of the output of the mana, like the size or speed

4. Repeat step 3 until the desired outcome is achieved

5. Direct said circle to the target

6. Remove the circle

The hard part was figuring out all the shapes that tweaked the aspects of mana in different ways... But there was a shortcut.

By using my mana as the source of said magic circle, and cheating a bit like Sylphy and just imagining the result, it automatically shaped the circle, so all I had to do was just record it.

Thankfully, the years of visualization and memory practice paid off for that. I didn't even want to think how much of a hassle it would be if I couldn't perfectly recreate-

Wait.

...Oh.

Okay. I take it back. Maybe I wasn't that smart after all.

Come to think of it, the magic circles I saw could just be the result of sloppy recording.

And if I think about the magic circles I knew and the ones I made... Yeah, if you squint and tilt your head funny...

I sighed and then flopped back onto my bed. Staring at the ceiling, I muttered, "Dammit. And here I thought I was onto something..."

Well... At least I could make a better record for people in the future-

Ah. There wasn't a printing press to make books widespread. Gotta remember to make that at some point too...

"Hah..." I rolled over in my bed and muttered, "So much to do..."

There was sorting out all of my magic research, trying to figure out a way to stop Whitey from showing his ugly mug around here again, figuring out how to smack the crap out of Dad and wipe that arrogant smirk off his face, helping Sylphy be the best magician she could be...

Where should I even start?

"...Alright. Starting tomorrow, we work on crafting things. Magic items, alchemy, 3D printing... we'll start there. That and figuring out how to beat Dad. Then we need to make some protective charms for everyone... Yeah. That's good enough for now."

So with that in mind... let's get some rest.

"Oh Milis. Oh Milis! OH MILIS!!!"

...And improve my sound dampening magic barrier to sound cancellation because GODDAMMIT DAD! Could you just not make Mom moan so much!? I do *not* need to hear that!

I groaned and then pulled my pillow over my head.

...If only the morning came as fast as my parents did...