Magic (The Magician Who Rose From Failure)

Magic is present in the light novel series Shikkaku kara Hajimeru Nariagari Madoushidou!: Jumon Kaihatsu Tokidoki Senki (Eng. The Magician Who Rose From Failure) by Gamei Hitsuji.

The Basics
"'Magic is the power to bring all sorts of phenomena to life, using mystical words to create spells.'" The magic of the series is based upon enacting spells by assembling words from the language of the Elder Tongue into sentences or phrases, speaking them out loud while envisioning the effect, and providing them with the right amount of aether, magical energy, at the moment of enacting the spell. A successful spell will give rise to a phenomenon that reflects the words used in the spell and the visualized intention of the magician.

Thus, the important aspects of a magician is their knowledge of the Elder Tongue, their ability to properly visualize the intended effect of their spells, and their available store of aether.

Elder Tongue
The Elder Tongue is a language whose roots were in the very origin of society in the world of the series. It is written in characters known as artglyphs (described as similar to real world astrological and zodiac symbols). Each word of the Elder Tongue holds power related to its meaning, and assembling these words into sentences or phrases creates a spell, waiting to be used.

In the series, there exists a work written in the Elder Tongue called the Ancient Chronicles, which consists of six titles; The Birth of Heaven and Earth, documenting the creation of the earth and sky; The Spiritual Age, a record of the time when spirits wandered the world; The Prophecy of Shadows, that predicts the entire history and future of the world; Documenting the Stars, that describes a scholar’s life as he follows the sky and the movements of the planets; The Magician’s Elegy, that speaks about civilization as it was when magic flourished; Demons and Society’s Collapse, which describes how four powerful demons will come and destroy the world.

It is said that the entirety of the Elder Tongue is recorded in the six titles of the Ancient Chronicles, but no modern people know for sure if that is true, since there is no one who can actually read all of words of the Elder Tongue. There are still lot of words that no one knows how to sound out, or what their meaning is. Parts of the Chronicles reads like nonsense, or defies having its context figured out by the reader, because of lack of understanding.

Just learning words and phrases of the Elder Tongue isn't enough to make full use of the language in magic. A magician has to have an understanding of where the words came from and how to use them as they were meant. A phrase’s original use in the Chronicles, or even the intent of the author when recording it, can alter the nature of a spell. By extension, one cannot make up a proper spell by simply cutting-and-pasting good bits from a text and put them together. Reading the Ancient Chronicles, which not only record the words, but also tells the stories which consists of them, is described as the best way to attain proper understanding of the language, which is vital for proper magic use.

Some words of the Elder Tongue inherently possess more power than others. Powerful words have a strong influence over the other words in a spell, and if this is not accounted for, the spell might end up with unintended effects. To optimize a spell, powerful words have to be tempered with additional words that limits their effect. Deriving the most efficient version of a spell is a long and arduous process. Some known words in the Elder Tongue are too overwhelming to be other than rarely used, if at all.

Proper speech is essential to a magician, since otherwise they wouldn’t be able to properly enunciate spells. Also, poor language acquisition in one's mother tongue leads to problems when learning artglyphs and the Elder Tongue. A common way to handle criminal magicians is to cut out their tongue or removing their teeth, impairing their speech.

The protagonist of the series has access to memories and knowledge from a past life in Japan on planet Earth (thus a version of the real world). This has allowed them to understand some words in the Elder Tongue and concepts described in the Ancient Chronicles that others of their world don't understand, most of it concepts in real-world physics such as gravity, and to create spells no one else have been able to create because of it.

Intention
In theory, as long as one memorizes the Elder Tongue, one can use magic to do almost anything, but what happens as a result of the words used in a spell largely depends on the magician's intention. When casting a spell, it is important for the magician to picture their intention vividly, to have an idea and a clear picture of the spell's result in their mind. If the magician fails do so, the spell will not work. The first thing one needs to create their own spells is imagination.

Perhaps more important to the spell than 'what' the magician imagine, is the 'way' in which they imagined it. The series gives an example in the form of a 'psychokinesis' spell that allows a magician to move objects. Most magicians enact the spell by imagining they are moving objects with their hands. The protagonist, who has memories of Earth fiction, instead pictures it as a psychic power. Both images make the spell work, but the protagonist observes that their use of the spell comes with much more freedom in ways to move objects than for other magicians.

Another important example concerns the feat of flying. Most people in the world believed that it is impossible to use magic to fly, because no one has successfully created a spell to do so, regardless of having tried many different ways. The protagonist, after listening to a philosophical explanation, comes to the conclusion that the reason everyone has failed to put together a functioning spell is because they are basing their wording and imagined intent on a faulty theory of gravity (reminiscent of Aristotle's theory). They then enact a spell of their own creation, using their imagining of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which makes them float almost weightless in the air, though the spell as it is does not allow them to move about freely by itself. By explaining a simplified version of the theory with the visual aid of a stone on a tarp, the protagonist helps some other people get enough of a proper image to perform their gravity spell themselves.

The protagonist, with their memories of real Earth events and Earth fiction, is able to use that in their spellcraft that allows them to create spells no one else in the world could come up with. One notable example is a spell that creates a bullet-like projectile from their fingertip that is instantly fired at incredible speed along a trajectory. Because of its speed, outside observers fails to see the projectile, only the effects it has on the things in its path (the same effect as a firearm's bullet). Because the protagonist is basing his visualization on knowledge no one else in the world has, and the spell essentially has no visible manifestation by itself, even if someone managed to memorize the words the protagonist used to enact the spell, it would be impossible for them to copy it, since they have no idea of the necessary image for the spell.

Aether
Aether is the name of magical energy in the series. To cast a spell, the magician has to provide the spell with the right amount of aether taken from their personal store of aether, which is then consumed upon the enactment of the spell. Just reciting the spell will not automatically consume the magician's aether from their personal store of aether. The right amount of aether for the spell has to be prepared before casting the spell. This means that a magic magician will have to learn to regulate their aether, manipulating its flow with their mind, to be able to provide just the right amount into each spell.

An important distinction for the series is that the amount of aether provided has to exactly match the amount the spell needs. The spell will fail not only if the magician provides to little aether, it will fail of the magician tries to provide too much aether as well; using too much aether doesn't improve the spell but makes it fail instead.

The exact amount of aether a spell requires to be cast depends upon each of the words used in the spell, and exactly how they are put together. More inherently powerful words and longer phrases means a larger amount of aether is required to cast it, but because the words and exact wording has such a great effect on the performance of a spell, it isn't always possible to reduce a spell's phrases without hampering its desired effect, even to reduce the required amount of aether.

Oddly enough, while the amount of aether required is dependent upon the words, wording and length of the spell, it doesn't necessarily reflect how "powerful" a spell is. The series depicts some examples of the protagonist making use of spells of their own invention, making use of some Earth science knowledge, that are relatively short in length and thus doesn't use that large amount of aether in comparison to some established attack spells, but that had effects of equal or even greater magnitude than some of those spells (while maybe not as visually impressive or flashy), which surprises or shocks some other magic magicians.

At the beginning of the series, it is stated that when learning or creating a new spell, a magician cannot anticipate beforehand the exact amount of aether they have to prepare for the spell. They will have to repeatedly try out the spell with different amounts of aether until they get a feeling about how much is the right amount. And then they have to remember the feeling of the right amount. It is stated that this is unavoidable since there is no way to measure aether.

The protagonist makes some discoveries that together with their Earth knowledge allows them to invent a device that can actually measure the amount of aether a magician is trying to release, and give it a numbered value in units. The invention is stated to be a game changer. Using the device, a magician who enacts a spell can give an exact number to the amount of aether the spell uses. That number can then be recorded and passed on, and another magician with the device can use it to train themselves to release that exact amount in aether by trying to match that number on the device, quickly learning the feeling of the right amount of aether for that spell, by-passing the previously unavoidable trial-and-error approach to finding the right amount of aether, vastly reducing the time needed for a magician to learn to properly enact a specific spell.

The feeling of one's magical power is described as a warm, shapeless glow, neither liquid nor vapor, in one's abdomen. If one learns to control it, it means it can be manipulated, focused, split up into parts, or sent outside one's body. If one keeps practicing, it can in time become as easy as using one's natural motor skills, and it builds stamina in manipulating one's power.

A character in the series mentions that after becoming skilled in manipulating one's own magic power, it is possible to feel magic from locations outside one's own body, which enables one to detect and track the location of people and other creatures that uses magic, or how many of them there are. The series describes that it is only this character that have discovered this skill and is keeping it as a secret technique, only telling the protagonist about it.

It is depicted in the series that the maximum amount of aether that a magician can have in their personal store varies from person to person and seems to be unchangeable since birth. There have been various tries to find a way to increase one's aether capacity, with no successful attempt as of yet depicted in their world's history.

Aether consumed by the enactment of spells will be replenished with time. If a magician doesn't possess enough aether in a given moment to provide the aether cost of a specific spell, they cannot use it, and by extension, if a magician spends all their store of aether, they cannot use any magic at all until it is replenished with time. This also means that spells that require an amount of aether beyond a magician's maximum possible amount of aether is simply beyond their ability to use.

Tempered Aether
Tempered aether is a special kind of aether created by "kneading" one's own aether, essentially packaging or compressing it, a process that takes great control over one's aether and considerable time. Once created, tempered aether is stored side-by-side by one's store of normal aether. Tempered aether is also sometimes called "hot aether", since while normal aether gives of a lukewarm impression, tempered aether feels more like hot steam.

Tempered aether can be released as a strong pulse, bearing physical force, which makes it useful as a weapon. Using tempered aether instead of regular aether when carving magical seals noticably enhances the effectiveness of the seals. It was also recently discovered that exposing regular Sorcerer's Silver to a strong pulse of tempered aether changes it into a new material that is aetherically reactive, expanding in the presence of regular aether, which enabled the invention of an aether measuring tool.

Seals
It is possible to carve out a spell in the form of arthglyphs on an object to give it a magical effect. Such a carved spell is known as a seal. Objects with seals work by themselves without the casting of a spell, making them usable by both magicians and non-magicians. Examples include Sol Glasses, which give of light.

To engrave seals, one needs a carving tool and Sorcerer's Silver, a substance with properties similar to mercury which is created by infusing regular silver with specially cultivated aether. Mixing it with pigment and metal powder and applying it to the tip of the carving tool as one carves is what give the seals their effects. Without Sorcerer’s Silver, carving artglyphs on an object has no effect.

The protagonist of the series discovered that using tempered aether rather than usual aether when carving seals make the seals more effective.