Sword God in a World of Magic

The jester was digging inside one of its ears with its fingers in boredom.

"Technically, there are no levels for Concepts," the jester said.

"Theoretically, you could comprehend a level five Concept while being a Peak True Mage, and it would only be marginally more powerful than the level one Concept."

"The goal is to learn everything about a given thing. The more you know about a thing, the stronger you become."

"Let's take water, for example. The generally accepted level one Concept for a Water Affinity is Drop, as in raindrop. You know how drops form, how they act, and what they do."

"The generally accepted level five Concept for a Water Affinity is Ocean. You effectively know the power of a huge body of water. You know what makes it an ocean and what makes it different from rain, rivers, lakes, and so on."

"However, if you only know what oceans do but don't know how anything else works, it's not really that useful. A real ocean has streams inside it, and you don't know what they do if you didn't comprehend the level four Concept of a Water Affinity, Stream."

"An ocean also produces and receives rain, which means you need the level two Concept, Rain, and to properly use that, you need the level one Concept, drop."

"So, while you could use the more general knowledge of an ocean, you lack all the specifics."

"Think of it as a car but without an engine, tires, seats, and so on. It's the thing that combines basically everything, but it's not really that useful if stuff is missing."

"Theoretically, you can comprehend the Concepts in any order you want, and higher level Concepts don't necessarily need to be that much harder to comprehend."

"Let's take the generally accepted level two Concept Rain and the level one Concept Drop, for example."

is much more difficult than comprehending Drop.

would be easier to comprehend than

"Quite unintuitive, eh?"

didn't react, but

That made no sense.

combination requirement

the method to combine the two. By combining them, Drop is increasing

you actually are not learning two things but three things, two

knowing what an individual Drop does, making it very difficult. After that, comprehending Drop would have a difficulty of about 3.5

Concept before a level one Concept, but

"But it is possible."

"So, about

the jester said, "Entropy is

keep its first four Concepts secret since you already guessed them. If I were to put a level to them, I would

water, for example, these four Concepts don't lead into one

the first two are basically mandatory to comprehend first, but you could decide if you want to comprehend River or Lake next. Rain leads into both of them, and they don't particularly

a bit more difficult than understanding Lake, which is why River is generally accepted as the level four Concept

is the case for your first

Concepts are separate, but they all lead

as soon as you know one, comprehending the

Subtraction would be a four. If you were to comprehend them in order, it would be 1, 5, 15, 50. If you were to comprehend them in

a bit easier than a True Mage comprehending a level one Concept, but comprehending Subtraction second would be more difficult than learning a Pure level two Concept. It would