The day after they cleared the 61st floor, Yue decided to change up their training.

“All right, today we’ll be doing something different than practicing the control of mana, I’ll tell you the theory of how a spell is cast and how it works. When you will mana form in front of you, you think of a shape, like a square, sphere, etc.

“Without imagining a shape like that it’s much more difficult to impose your will on the mana. That construct of will is very important as it’s the vessel that you use to cast the magic spell.

“My primary construct is a sphere, it provides the most versatility in attack patterns so I use it. But the downside is that it’s very bad at defense, just like I’m very bad at defensive spells because I’ve never really needed them. So you can try to learn another construct that’s more suitable for defensive spells yourself.”

Yue gathers her will into a sphere in her hand. “You need to learn to make your ‘will’ take the shape of a sphere, this is what will be the foundation of your spell.

“Once you gather your will into a spherical shape, use that will to engrave the specific runes of the element you want to use onto the construct. Then modify those runes to act however you want them to. You can change them mid-spell, after it’s cast, even copy them.” Yue shows them the process of runes appearing on the will construct and it changing its properties to act like a fireball, she then changed it into a ball of water by modifying the runes.

Will wasn’t a visible thing but Yue used her mana to make a visible demonstration so that it’s easier for Masashi and Mai to do it themselves.

“Once those runes are cast, you use your control training to impose that will on the mana and suck it in to fuel the spell.

“I’ll be teaching you guys the runes for each element and each action that you want the spell to take. This is what’s going to take the most time since you guys do not know to engrave and enchant.”

‘It’s like programming the will construct to act in a specific way. I guess magic is the power to program the world, huh?’ Masashi thinks this after hearing Yue’s explanation.

“These things are very long-term, taking you anywhere from years to decades to learn to the point of becoming autonomous like me. After I teach you guys the main theories, you’ll have to practice for a very long time to use fluid magic in combat.”

“I want you to be able to stably gather your will into a spherical shape and hold it there for at least 5 minutes before I go on to teach you about the runes, so let’s get back to your main training.”

…

They spent the next few weeks following the same routine of training and dungeon clearing.

After 2 days of clearing the 61st floor, Mai and Masashi were finally able to concentrate their will into a spherical shape for 5 minutes before feeling fatigued.

On the day after that, they finally decided to get back to their [Tantric Energy] training to celebrate the completion of their goal.

As expected, Yue caught them since they were used to very hardcore stuff and soundproofing spells aren’t very effective on Yue.

That was followed by an embarrassing conversation where Masashi convinced Yue to not act like a voyeur during his and Mai’s private time.

In return, he promised that she doesn’t have to sleep alone anymore. She can sleep in their bed after they’re done with their thing.

The next month went by like this as Yue taught Mai and Masashi the basic runes that could be used to cast magic, although even after a month they were only 1% of the way to casting anything they want with runes.

For now, they only have the rudimentary commands for the mana such as, ‘ball of fire’ and ‘ball of water.’

Mai and Masashi strengthened their physiques and tattoos using two-thirds of the [Tantric Energy] produced while the last third went to their mana pools as usual. The inner world kept getting bigger after absorbing the residue [Tantric Energy].

Although they’d stopped focusing solely on the growth brought by the system, they were still leveling up like crazy since the monsters were getting very strong for their levels.

The regular physique enhancements increased their stats a lot so they were very strong for their levels. This also got them to level up much faster. They also finally used most of the stat points that they were hoarding. They put them at the end, to balance out all their stats into rounded numbers.

{ <Status>

Name: Masashi

Age: 26

Class: The Gamer

Titles: N/A

Level: 1089 (EXP 27%)

Race: [High Human]

HP: 6600/6600

SP: 6500/6500

MP: 3458360/3458360

STR: 4200

END: 4500

DEX: 4000

INT: 4800

WIS: 4500

CHA: 5000

LUK: ???

Regen Rate: 22500 (Per Min)

Mana Regen: 9300

Stat Points: 308

}

{ <Status>

Name: Mai

Age: 26

Class: The Gamer’s Wife

Titles: N/A

Level: 1028 (EXP 58%)

Race: [High Human]

HP: 6300/6300

SP: 6550/6550

MP: 3408360/3408360

STR: 4000

END: 4300

DEX: 4500

INT: 4700

WIS: 4500

CHA: ∞

LUK: ???

Regen Rate: 21500 (Per Min)

Mana Regen: 9200

Stat Points: 17

}

Looking at their stats one could see that they had an unprecedentedly explosive growth in the 4 months that they’ve been in Tortus. Their leveling speed has also been extremely fast since The Labyrinth is the perfect leveling ground for a gamer. To give some perspective, 4 floors in this place are equivalent to that entire instant dungeon that they cleared back in their previous world.

Another convenient thing was that the system stats were the same as the stat points that were shown on the status plates that everyone in [Tortus] used. So it was easy to see that they were unprecedently strong.

After two weeks of training, Masashi and Mai were able to maintain the will sphere for an hour under some minor interferences from Yue to make things more difficult for them and get better practice since a mage with similar skills might also be able to affect their mental capacities and prevent them from using Fluid magic stably.

When they were able to maintain that, Yue asked them to maintain two spheres at the same time, to be able to multitask. Once they got proficient at that, they would be able to increase the number of spells that they could cast simultaneously with practice.

By the end of the month, they were able to accomplish this too. They had incredible mental faculties so they tried simultaneous thought processing, basically thinking two things at the same time, and using them to maintain the two spheres. To increase the number, all they needed was more thought streams and their mind to be able to handle that kind of multitasking.

Yue can divide her mind into tens of weaker thought streams to multicast spells without any problem. That’s what centuries of meditation can do to the mental prowess of a person.

As long as they practiced more they could increase the number of spells that they could cast simultaneously.

Before entering the 100th floor.

“Your basics are now considered complete, we can finally start casting actual spells.”

“I want you to try to cast Fluid magic using what you know so far.”

Both of them generated a sphere of their will in the palm of their hands.

Then Masashi and Mai inscribed the runes that said, ‘weak flame’ and ‘ ball of earth’ respectively.

After the runes part was done, they got to the mana part of the spell, they infused their will into the sphere which was easy since it was a construct of their will itself.

With that, they imposed that infused will to gather the mana in the surroundings to fuel the mana.

They didn’t know how much mana would be required so they infused half of their spheres with mana before casting the spell.

Suddenly blazing flames erupted from Masashi’s hand and a huge boulder formed above Mai’s hand.

Even though they filled only half the sphere, the effects were still too much but they were able to control the intensity of the spell and decrease the sizes, maintaining a small stream of mana from the atmosphere to keep the spell maintained, they were able to manipulate the rate of absorption of mana through the will that they infused into the construct and could change the runes to turn the spell into something else using the will that they used to form the sphere in the first place.

“Splendid.” Yue clapped her hands at the duo, impressed by their learning.

She then noticed Mai frowning, “What is it, Mai?”

“I felt that the rock that I constructed was unstable or seemingly not suitable.

“You wanted to cast a defensive spell. The spherical construct is only suitable for offensive spells since they’re unstable and don’t need a big structure.

“I don’t use defensive spells since I’ve never needed to so I haven’t developed a shape that suits defensive spells. but you could try to use different shapes like cubes, hexagonal prisms, anything.”

“I see…” Mai seems deep in thought about the shape that she could use for defensive magic.

“Think about that stuff later, for now, show me an actual attack spell.” She tells both of them.

This time Mai and Masashi both used the ‘fireball’ runes on the sphere and constructed it into an actual fireball which launched itself at one of the walls of the 99th floor of the labyrinth.

Their first attempt took about 25 seconds. They spent the next 6 hours of their training time for the day doing nothing but learning how to cast their spells better. After every spell, Yue hit them with a rejuvenation spell to keep them in optimal shape.

By the end of the training, Mai was able to summon a fireball within 5 seconds and Masashi was able to summon one in 3 seconds.

They still weren’t able to continuously summon more spells before getting tired but they had a lot of progress.

“All right that’s enough for today, rest up for a while because we’ve got the last floor or at least a big floor to clear next.”

“Yeah… the 100th floor, eh?”

“It’ll be fine, we’ll take it like we’ve taken all the other floors.”