Sherry started teaching about Enchanters. Her tone, mannerisms, choice of words she used to explain the things she did, all told Ning that her primary focus while teaching wasn't the adults, but the little kids.
He understood that, but still listening to a teacher use child-like language to teach the rest of the class felt ridiculous to him.
Still, he learned quite a few things from her that he probably would have needed a lot of time to learn about.
The enchanters had it very easy. Their system of Aether was the easiest to learn and master, and it also had many different applications that an Invoker didn't have.
Enchanters could use their Aether as Telekinesis, or they could use it to strengthen something or to head something. To make something buzz. As long as one's imagination of something was accurate, one could do nearly anything.
The amount of Aether they used depended on the size, shape, material, intensity, and various other factors. So, no one could really quantify how much Aether would be used for just a simple task.
On the other side of the spectrum were Invokers. Invokers could only create stuff. They couldn't even manipulate what they created. Creating stuff itself was a difficult task to begin with as well.
Just imagination didn't help one while creating. Imagination was just there to turn a concept in the mind into a physical form. Invokers still needed to know the making of an object before they created it.
They needed to have interacted with something before or knew enough about it from just learning about it before they could make it.
This was why creating stuff required more time than just simply manipulating one. This was why Invokers were frowned upon during battle and were rarely accepted in military positions.
The amount of Aether used by an Invoker depended on the object they created, the complexity of the object, and so on.
Sherry gave an example of it. She had Marie, the other girl from the adult who was an invoker, create a block of ice for the room.
Marie seemed to have had practice before and in just a few seconds, she managed to create a block of ice about half a meter wide.
The little kids watched in awe. They were still young, so they weren't advanced enough in the ways of Aether and could only create small stuff. So when they saw the massive block of ice forming on the table, they couldn't help but be surprised.
Sherry put forth her hand and the block of ice floated in mid-air. She then placed it next to the door of the classroom and started heating it. Pretty soon, the ice turned into water, and the water into steam and flew into the sky.
The students were all very surprised at this. Even the adult ones were surprised because of how fast Sherry was able to make the block of ice disappear. They couldn't help but wonder just what her rank was.
Sherry looked back at the shocked class and smiled. She then looked at Marie and said, "I want you to create ice once again."
"Okay," Marie responded and looked in front of her to create ice there.
"However," Sherry interrupted Marie's thinking, bringing the attention back to her. "This time, I want the block of ice to look like me."
Marie was about to nod when she realized what was being asked of her. "Sorry, teacher. Do you want me to make an ice sculpture?" she asked with a confused voice.
"Yes," Sherry said. "That is exactly what I want you to do. Since you were able to create an ice block, you should be able to create that too right?"
"Um, I've never tried making a statue before, but I can try," Marie said. She looked at Sherry as well as she could to imprint the image onto her mind and then used that image to imagine an ice version of it.
Thinking of something that she had never seen before was hard, but since knew about ice, she really didn't have to imagine an ice sculpture itself.
White mist drifted from her hands onto the table that started to take form into a humanoid shape. The mist then started to solidify into ice.
At first, there was nothing to the ice but the vague shape of a human, but slowly it started taking better shape as details started to appear on it.
The tiny details were hard to remember, and Marie had to open her eyes multiple times to look at sherry in front of her.
In the end, after 5 minutes, with a head full of beads of sweat, Marie managed to create… a rather ugly statue of Sherry.
The details weren't all very accurate, and that could be blamed on the artistic talent of Marie. However, the time it took for her to make the statue had very little to do with her artistic talent.
She wiped her forehead and looked up front to see the smiling face of Sherry. "How was it?" Sherry asked.
"It… it was hard," Marie said.
"Good, and how low are you on Aether?" Sherry asked.
Marie focused on herself and her eyes went wide when she realized that she had lost half of her Aether already. That much aether would take at least a day to gather back.
"What? How?" Marie asked with surprise.
"Complexity," Sherry answered. "The more complex a task, the harder it is to create, and required more Aether."
"What I asked her to do was rather easy to do. All she had to do was create Ice and give it shape. But, imagine I told her to make the shape out of metal. And not one metal, but multiple ones."
"Make an arm out of steel. A leg out of iron. The head from bronze. The clothes from brass."
"She wouldn't have a problem with the shape, but now the material is adding to the complexity of what she had to create."
"Of course, it gets easier with time and you learn more and more how to create something efficiently.. But, the cost of aether forever remains the same."
