The Empire of Reimia (3)

Marey began his training, barely awake and with a rare sense of unwavering determination for his restless, unstable mind. In his initial attempts to create an insect – he first chose a wasp – Marey failed: time after time, the creation turned out to be a piece of dead, striped matter. He remembered Asteris again. "Always start with the complex – from the simple," his uncle had taught him. "By breaking down the whole into parts and understanding everything individually, you will master the whole." From the simple. Why a wasp? Can he even mentally imagine a wasp in the smallest details, down to the color of its mandibles and the pattern of its reticulated wings? It would be much wiser to choose a simple insect – an ant, for example. Break it down into parts. An entity is the sum of matter and life energy. First, he will create matter, then – life. Reasoning this way, Marey returned to practice, already having a clear plan, and after a few hours, he achieved success – a perfectly alive and tangible ant crawled across the table. Marey devoted all his time and energy to magic; by the end of the month, he already confidently mastered his first summoning spell: a bucket in his room was overflowing with the fruits of his experiments: insects of all kinds and colors lay there in an unappetizing, sticky mass. Usually neat, sometimes to the point of pedantry, Marey neglected both his room and his own appearance. He arrived at the combat training session with greasy hair and a sparse stubble. He endured it not too badly, especially considering his long-standing illness – after all, beatings were nothing new to him, and his self-esteem suffered more than his body, but he couldn't get out of bed all the next day. "Fury, indeed. I thought these pampered nobles were exaggerating, but no. And what a whim – to subject me, a sick man with such a rare gift, to this on par with future soldiers. I hope they don't let me die during the testing, because I wouldn't vouch for my lungs..."

Added 9 minutes later
Marey approached the combat training test as an unavoidable evil, the history test – with genuine interest, although he hardly prepared, and the emperor's statement – with great anxiety. If he were to renounce in favor of his brother, that would still be understandable, but not like this... Marey was overcome by a bad premonition. Restless times are beginning, and he should be ready. For what – the sorcerer didn't know yet, but whatever awaited the country in the future, he would either be a participant in the upcoming events or become their victim. /Revan, can we still work on it during the first week? I want to mentor a skill./