The Major Discovery of Magic

The Major Discovery of Magic by Leah Renerst
The discovery, or rather rediscovery of mana and subsequently magic was quite the unremarkable event. It really wasn't until two centuries later that the human realm, commonly known as the human expansion, saw the first widespread use of magic. So what happened in 25 D.N. that transformed the often claustrophobic art of static ritual casting into the worldwide phenomenon that supports the livelihoods of millions of humans today? Industrialisation, or more specifically, 25 D.N. marks the first time that mana manipulation was used for industrial production in Orion. Over the course of the following six years, we started to see a gradual shift from traditional and labour intensive, power sources into a system that was almost entirely powered through magical devices. Of course, for a period of time after the implementation of this system, we saw a massive rise in the unethical employment of magically gifted individuals in what was practically slave labour, in order to channel mana into these massive industrial-scale machines. It was the inhumane treatment of the magical community which led me to begin my research in 28 D.N on the magical core as a way of removing the magician from the equation.

In 35 D.M I was finally succeeded in my goal making the first entirely independent magical device that was able to draw magical energy from the very air and transform it into useable mana. Here I must credit C. Exodus for granting me access to some of Normandy's pre-war research papers, which held the first mentions of automated magic casting. It's a shame that Nicholas IV threw his great country into chaos. We can only dream of where the former supernation would have advanced to without decades of bloody war.

Initially, the magical core was ridiculously inefficient in its conversion. If memory serves correctly it was roughly 2 magicules/second which was under 5% of even the weakest magician of the time. Thankfully I was able to raise the efficiency of the magical core to 213 magicules/second which was significantly more efficient than any known magician at the time. Not that I could take much credit for the endless work of my friend, Periah, over in the trading district for bringing a more generalised and compact version of the mana core to the global market, allowing the rest of the human expansion outside Orion to receive the benefits of my technology.

This technicality aside, at the turn of the 80th decade the old magical households that were formed during the rediscovery of magic in 148 B.N began to reemerge from the shadows. These fairly old and powerful houses were no longer afraid of being shunned by society, instead, they rose to meet the challenge of the new magic technologies that sought to make the very idea of the magician obsolete.

-Leah Renerst

[The Major Discovery of Magic pg. 3] Published 70 A.N