"Not that recently. A few hundred years ago?"

"Okay, that's very peculiar."

"Why?"

"If it'd been invented recently then it could be that there are other ways to do it that haven't been thought of, but this probably means that if there are they're really obscure, or there aren't, and it's weird that there'd be exactly this one specific thing."

"Other ways to do what, check channeling capacity? It was just that someone had to invent a spell for it and inventing spells is a wizard thing and fewer people wanted to be wizards when it might make you suddenly die."

"No, to expand channelling capacity."

"- oh I thought you meant the spell to detect CC, sorry, I was confused. Familiars are older."

"Makes it even weirder."

Shrug.

"I'll figure it out eventually, I'm sure."

"That'd be interesting."

"Yeah!"

Shopping?

Shopping! Korulen has some kind of magic credit arrangement and pays for his stuff.

Cool! He can have mundane stuff like clothes and toiletries and less mundane stuff like linkpaper and communcation crystals!

Yup! And then be walked back to school.

He thanks Korulen muchly, and wonders whether the library is still open.

Yup.

So he will read about Countries! And cities! And populations! And international relations!

He is in the nation of Esmaar, which is on the west edge of the square, approximately rectangular, and remarkable for having a purely ward-based defensive arrangement and no military. There are more countries too. They have cities in them, with populations. Nations interrelate.

...he's kinda annoyed by some of these countries. Sure, he's also from a theocracy, but. Ugh. These have role models around, they should know better. What's even their excuse?

(For that matter are their gods real? That might be an important question to know the answer to.)

There doesn't seem to be any consensus on matters of religion! At all!

So he feels relatively safe thinking gods are probably not real.

Is he close enough to being a student to be allowed to check out books?

Yup.

So he'll get something about introductory wizardry and something about that pattern where the reservoir changes size every now and then and check them out and return to his room to read them and/or stare at magical things until...

...he should probably eat soon, shouldn't he, what time is it?

Twelfth-and-naught!