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."

than comprehending Drop. You

on Rain first, it would be easier to comprehend than if you were to comprehend Drop first and Rain

"Quite unintuitive, eh?"

didn't react, but

That made no sense.

because the combination requirement switches places," the jester

to combine the two.

two Pure Concepts of one Affinity, you actually are not learning two

difficulty of five because you would have to comprehend Rain without knowing what an individual Drop does, making it very difficult. After that, comprehending Drop would have a difficulty of about 3.5 due to also having to

means you can comprehend a level two Concept before a level one Concept, but it would

"But it is possible."

nodded. "So,

"Entropy is a

four Concepts secret since you already guessed them. If I were to put a level to them, I would say Temperature is the easiest, followed by Twilight, followed by Addition, followed by

example, these

mandatory to comprehend first, but you could decide if you want to comprehend River or Lake next. Rain leads into both of them, and

more difficult than understanding Lake, which is why River is generally accepted as the level four Concept while Lake is the level three Concept, but you could also comprehend

case for your first four

first four Concepts are separate, but they all lead into the

as soon as you know one,

and 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 the

is already on the level of a High Mage, while everyone else has to comprehend level one Concepts while being on the level of a True Mage. Comprehending Addition first would be a bit easier than a True Mage comprehending a level one Concept, but comprehending Subtraction second would be more difficult than learning a