Magic plays a significant role in the world of "Mushoku Tensei," a popular Japanese light novel series written by Rifujin na Magonote. In this fantasy world, the level of magical power possessed by individuals, known as "Magic Levels," is an essential aspect. Magic Levels in "Mushoku Tensei" refer to a person's talent and ability to harness and manipulate magical energy. In this universe, everyone is born with a predetermined Magic Level, which determines their potential in mastering magic. The scale ranges from 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Magic Levels not only signify a person's innate magical capability but also affect their overall strength and potential as a magic user.
In the end, it's very difficult to understand this part in depth, because we don't see Rudeus studying it. I hope you guys enjoyed this. If you disagree with anything, please let me know and I'll correct it.
However, the useful ones such as boots that increase your speed are extremely valuable, since their abilities can be activated without consuming the user s own mana. Stone Gatling A weapon that Rudeus had Roxy with one of Roxy s friends develop, after taking Hitogami s suggestion to create a magic tool that shoots magic that only Rudeus can handle, for the fight against Orsted.
Magic Levels not only signify a person's innate magical capability but also affect their overall strength and potential as a magic user. Individuals with higher Magic Levels have the ability to cast more potent spells and are generally more skilled in combat. Magic Levels can be improved through training and experience.
USEFUL NOTES: The Magic System of Mushoku Tensei
So, the next entry in my Useful Notes series is about one of my favourite aspects of this world, its magic system. If you find any mistakes or inaccuracies, please tell me where the information is in the books and I'll check it and change accordingly.
This post concerns itself with the the mechanics of magic in the context of the worldbuilding of Mushoku Tensei, so I tried keeping it as general as possible, trying to understand the laws of nature the compose this world. Maybe seeing more concrete examples of how magic and techniques are used in this world can aind in understanding the whole (especially with techniques). For that, you can check my post about The Adventurers Guild, swordsmanship styles, magicians, the life of adventurers, and the ranking systems
EDIT: New text about tōki .
1) What is Magic?
Magic is a very diffcult thing to define, so I'll go with the wikipedia definition: Magic is the application of beliefs, rituals or actions employed in the belief that they can subdue or manipulate natural or supernatural beings and forces. Magic in fiction is the endowment of characters or objects in works of fiction with powers that do not naturally occur in the real world.
In the Six-Faced-World, magic is the manipulation of mana. Mana seems to be the essencial substance of this world, which can be anything, everything, and even nothing. Mana in its raw state seems to be very unstable at times and extremely unpredictable. It is my pet theory that this is the instability referred to in the creation story of the Six-Face-World and what caused the Creator (or Creation God) to weave the six worlds together, so that magic could travel from one world to another and the whole could be stabler. If that's the case, with the collapse of the other five worlds, most of the mana now concentrates in the human world, which might have made it less stable.
It seems that magic somehow both affects and is affected by this world and the creatures living in it. It's probably not a coincidence that the Demon Continent resembles the Demon World, that the Great Forest resembles the Beast World. What isn't clear is if these areas were a piece of their world subconsciously brought by the refugees from the collapse or if their concentration in those areas changed those parts of the Human World to be more similar to their world. However, we see no confirmation of floating stones in the Sky continent, and there doesn't seem to be any explanation for Bergaritt.
Magic also seems to infuse entire group of people, giving them new characteristics that become intrinsic to them and can be passed on to their descendants, such as the migurd telepathy, the demon eye of the superds and other Magic Tribes, the regeneration of the Immortal Tribe, and the extremely long lifespan of several tribes. Certain groups of people also seem to have more affinity with certain types of magic than others.
2) How does Magic affect individuals?
Magic doesn't only make large scale changes to the world and its people. It may also affect specific individuals for no specific reason, giving them an extremely varied range of properties, characteristics, and abilities. This seems to happen more often in places of higher mana density.
a) When magic affects animals or dead creatures, it turns them into monsters, making them stronger and wilder. Monsters are a big problem in the Six-Face-World and have to be constantly culled and suppressed.
b) When magic affects a place, it's called a labyrinth. The mana concentration increases, as well as the concentration of monsters in it. The labyrinth will have a core, where its magic will be concentrated. Labyrinths also tend to continuously grow and expand, similar to a cancer or the protomolecule from The Expanse, until its core is destroyed. Anything that remains in a labyrinth for too long will be affected by its magic. This seems to be how most magic stones and items are created.
c) Magical Crystal are basically crystallisations of mana and are at the core of a labyrinth. They can be used as magic batteries, which makes them extremely valuable for magicians and to power certain magic circles. Most of them don't seem to recharge naturally, though it might be possible that some do. It is possible for them to be recharged by magic circles though.
d) Magical items are the equipment left by monsters or adventures inside a labyrinth. Over time, they accumulate magical energy and gain certain magical properties (abilities). These properties happen all at random, which means that most of them are considered trash, no more than funny curiosities. However, the useful ones (such as boots that increase your speed) are extremely valuable, since their abilities can be activated without consuming the user's own mana.
e) When people are affected by magic in this way, it is called a curse or a blessing. Humans use the word curse for what is considered a negative effect and blessing for what is considered a positive effect. However, they are both the same thing in essence and this judgement of value is one used by people who misundestand the nature of magic. They also seem to use the word "curse" for things we'd recognise as mental illnesses and know not to be magical in nature. It makes sense since this is a world based on Medieval Europe. For the sake of simplicity, we'll simple call them curses. Curses can be anything, from being hated by all people to being trusted by all people, time manipulation, mind reading, and super strength that comes with a very specific type of touki. Humans affected by this are usually called miko.
3) Magic & Techniques
There are two basic ways of performing magic in Mushoku Tensei: Spells (magic proper) and Techniques. Most people seem to believe that techniques are not magic, but some observations made by very powerful and/or ancient characters lead to the conclusion that they are just different ways of approaching magical energy and feats. To perform magic, one spends raw mana in order to change reality. Meanwhile, most techiniques we see in the story are related to combat skills and use Touki (Battle Aura/Fighting Spirit).
The interesting dynamic about magic in the world of Mushoku Tensei is that it is pretty much nigh omnipotent. You can do almost anything with it, if you know how to do it and have the mana available. This is the catch about magic in this world, it is not a sentient force. In the Harry Potter series Molly Weasley uses magic to wash the dishes and clean the room. To perform that in Mushoku Tensei you would need to make the objects float (Gravity magic is extremely rare) and then move them in the desired way while spending mana to maintain the effect, so it is not viable.
When a character says that they cannot heal something with healing or purifying/detoxification magic, what they are actually saying is that they don't know the magical way to do that. We see healing magic being used to heal wounds and diseases, cure nausea, clean poison from the body, mend broken bones, and even regrow limbs. However, blood clots, aneurysms, cancer, malformation of certain organs at birth are not things the people of this world understand, so they haven't created spells to cure those. With that in mind, we come to the three ways we know how to do magic: magic circles, spells, and voiceless magic.
3.1.1) Magic Circles
Magic circles seem to be the original form of magic in the world of Mushoku Tensei. In the story they have been compared to circuit boards and that seems to be accurate. From what we see in the story, drawing a magic circle does seem similar to coding or speaking a new language. Sometimes, when you can talk about cars in another language, but not about films. A person knowledgeable on the subject matter may look at a circle and understand its purpose. I tried to keep this spoiler-free, but the best example is seen in Volume 17, when Rudeus accidentally summons Arumanfi to be his guardian beast. He comments on the complexity of the circle and brings it to Perugius, who changes the imagery on the patterns and sends a new one that allows Rudeus to summon Leo . This episode also tells us that even if instructions on the circle are specific, the person casting still has some autonomy and makes some decisions.
Magic circles are also the most common way for magic knowledge to develop and evolve. Magicians will test new patterns and power the circles to see what happens. Sometimes the result will be a dud, nothing happens, but the mana will still be spent. However, if mistakes are made there can also be a disaster.
One interesting aspect of this system is that a person doesn't even need to be able to perform magic to study and draw magic circles, which also means that a person doesn't have to be able to draw the magic circle to be able to use it, they just need the mana. Either from themselves or from magic crystals.
And this brings us to the actual drawing of the circles. Once used, circles disappear. Certain substances and processes need to be used for the circle to remain, and that's where we come to magic tools/implements. Magic circles can be inscribed anywhere. It is quite common to inscribe them into objects, so that anyone holding that object can perform that effect. Those objects are called magic tools/implements (depending on the translation, I like tools. Anything we can do with technology could be made inscribing magic circles into an object. The main limitation is the same as for us: energy, fuel. While we have invested a lot of time into researching new forms of procuring and storing energy, magic has made this world a little bit complacent. This deserves another text, but, suffice to say that magic tools use the mana pool of the caster, and most people don't have a very large mana pool, so one needs to get creative when building those. It is even possible to restrict the amount of mana to use a given tool to a minimum, to prevent other people from using it. Since he has such an absurd mana pool, Rudeus does that with some of his more powerful items. It is also possible to power them with magical crystals, but those are in short supply.
Saying it in the simplest possible way, incantations are magic circles expressed as sound. The story tells us that initially the incatations were too long to be practical. However, at some point it was possible to reduce them, and they became much more common place and it's easy to see how. Imagine yourself a wizard going to battle and you have to look into you bag for the proper spell. That isn't practical. It's much better to learn the chants for all the spells and you can choose according to the situation. Some magicians are also able to reduce even more the incantations, making their casting time even shorter.
Just as it is with magic circles, incantations still might leave a lot of details for the caster to work out. With the most basic attack spells, it would be the power and speed of the attack. However, when Rudeus does his Cumulonimbus test, the spell opens doors for the caster to also manipulate the winds and maybe even the air temperature. So being a magician isn't only a matter of memorising the incantations. Just as with any other skill, one has to practice to gain more precision and control. For an example, Rudeus trained his Stone Cannon so he could just knock out his opponents without killing them. Training also enables the magician to be able to cast with less concentration.
3.1.3) Silent casting
Rudeus' book in volume one tells us that doing magic with incantations if something people know to be possible, but extremely difficult. Ranoa Magic University has a couple hundred teachers on staff, but only one of them was actually capable of doing spells without an incantatio. I think to have a closer look at how incantations work.
While many other stories resort to some weird ancient mystical language, incantations in Mushoku Tensei are done in the common language. I we pay attention to them they seem like a chant that at the same time praises and gives orders to some mystical entity. I'm not sure how far into the detailed specifics Managote-sensei went, but my personal theory is that the incantations put you into a state of mind that connects you with the aspect of reality you want tomanipulate and primes you for the effect.
By sheer luck, Rudeus tried to put himself in that state of mind to help his casting and ended up casting without the incantation. He theorised that in a tense combat situation, incantations were probably be more efficient than closing your eyes to put you in that state of mind. This means more training to be able to do it with less concentration.
Rudeus used basic scientific knowledge from our world to better understand how his magic influenced reality, and became quite good at elemental magic. However, he still remained unable to cast healing magic without incantations and he believes that it was because of his lack of knowledge in biology. However, Sylphie was eventually able to silently cast healing magic. Silent casting also made it much easier to perform melded magic and also more freely manipulate reality, since you are not constrained by the limits of the incantation.
They theorised that them being children, with more flexible brains helped them learn silent casting. That is certainly true, but I don't think that it is a hard line. I think that the lack of the scientific method in this world is probably a bigger problem. Since magic is already quite efficient in this world, they seem to have little incentive to research newer form, so there aren't very many academics doing it. To be safe, teaching kids earlier seems to be a more efficient route to go., which brings us to our next topic.
3.1.4) Mana capacity and spell power
People seemed to believe that a person's mana capacity was set at birth. That's once again most likely to a lack of scientific method. Basically, that's just how they perceived the world and that was ok. Rudeus tried to test it out as a kid and reached his limit quite fast, since his mana capacity was tiny. This allowed him to exhaust his mana every day without much effort. As he grows older, exhausting his mana every day becomes more difficult. Most magicians are very jealous of using up their mana reserves because they become useless without mana.
A way to deal with it is using magic wands and staffs to expand the power of their mana. Wands and staffs amplify the mana used to cast spells, making the spells effectively cheaper. For an example, Rudeus' staff, Acqua Heartia multiplies by 5 mana spent on water spells. So, one could cast a spell that costs 10 mana by only spending 2 points.
The mana cost of a spell is directly connect to its power and complexity. Also, one can make a lower-level spell more powerful by pumping mana into it. However, there seems to be a limit to how much mana a person can pump into a spell, based on their raw power.
3.1.5) The different types of magic
The way they classify the different types of magic in the books is flawed, but it also makes sense. First, we have attack magic, but it is essentially elemental magic based on the Greek elements. I guess this makes sense because this would be the most obvious way of using the elements and of attacking. However, we do learn that dwarves use fire and earth magic to improve their weapon forging skills. The problem in flexibility is related to the limitations of the incantation system. If silent magic were more common, they'd probably call it elemental magic. One interesting thing is that most Saint-ranked spells we see are melded magic, using more than one element. Also, the King-level water spell "Lightning" basically starts as a "Cumulonimbus" and adds the lightning on top of that.
For some weird reason, Healing magic includes barrier magic, but my guess is that they just wanted to reduce the types of magic. Basically, there are two types of Healing magic: Healing magic proper and Detoxification/Purification magic. Healing magic heals structural/physical damage to the body, with King-level magic being able to regenerate limbs. The show goes out of its way to show that healing magic works by accelerating natural metabolic processes. Detoxification magic cleans the body of impurities. We see Rudeus using it on Eris to deal with her sea sickness, we see it used for drunkedness, and to deal with the effects of a succubus.
Summoning Magic is a weird branch. Its specificity and complexity means that it can only be done with magic circles. We don't get many explanations about it, but it seems to be able to basically create spirits and entities out of thin air. It is closely related to teleport magic as well. Teleport magic can be extremely dangerous so the only truly safe way of doing it is by two connected circles.
3.2) Techniques and Tōki
EDIT: Wrote a more detailed text about tōki here .
While magic uses mana to alter reality, techniques seem to amplify a person capabilities, enabling them to accomplish fantastic feats without burning as much mana as magic. The vast majority of the techniques we see in this story are combat-related and require the person to be wearing tōki.
Tōki (which can be translated as Battle Aura of Fighting Spirit) is a layer of compressed magical energy a person wraps around their body to increase their strength, stamina, agility, speed, reflexes and even damage resistance. These improvements seem to be uniform, but there is a techique from the North-God style to "reorganise" the Touki to increase reduce strength and increase speed.
Touki gets developed through physical exercise. Anyone who exercises enough will start to develop Touki, though there are people who seem unable to wear it, no matter how much mana they have or how much they exercise. Wearing touki is absolutely necessary to learn swordsman techniques at the advanced level and above. Though it seems that not every single technique requires Touki.
Some of the techniques we see in the story are: a) when Paul slices that rock with a wooden sword. He probably also used his Touki to protect his weapon from breaking as well; b) the sword-throwing technique of the North-God style; c) the Long Sword of Light, the most important move of the Sword-God style, which gives a person the rank of Sword-Saint. This is the technique that Ghislaine used on the kidnappers; d) Flow, the main defensive technique of the Water-God style.
It is interesting to note that Orsted is able to use "Flow" and "The Long Sword of Light" without a sword, which also indicates their magic nature. The same goes for the techniques used to defend against magic attacks but we don't see those in the story, we just know of them. The North King Wii Taa's way of using a shiny armor to confuse his opponents is probably a technique as well. The same goes for the ability to sense Killing Intent. The Water God style also seems to have techniques to read people's intentions and moods. Ruijerd also teaches Eris a techique to manipulate an enemy's Killing Intent.
In the end, it's very difficult to understand this part in depth, because we don't see Rudeus studying it. I hope you guys enjoyed this. If you disagree with anything, please let me know and I'll correct it.
Magic also seems to infuse entire group of people, giving them new characteristics that become intrinsic to them and can be passed on to their descendants, such as the migurd telepathy, the demon eye of the superds and other Magic Tribes, the regeneration of the Immortal Tribe, and the extremely long lifespan of several tribes. Certain groups of people also seem to have more affinity with certain types of magic than others.
By practicing various magic techniques and continuously engaging in battles, individuals can gradually increase their Magic Level. However, it requires a considerable amount of effort and dedication to raise one's Magic Level significantly. Some exceptional individuals in "Mushoku Tensei" possess Magic Levels above 10, known as "Epic Magic Level." These individuals are considered prodigies and have enormous potential in mastering multiple types of magic. Magic Levels also determine an individual's status and position in society. In this world, magic is a crucial element in various aspects, such as combat, craftsmanship, and even everyday tasks. Therefore, individuals with higher Magic Levels often hold esteemed positions and are respected by others. In conclusion, Magic Levels in "Mushoku Tensei" are an essential aspect of the story's universe. They represent a person's innate magical talent, their potential for growth, and their overall strength. These levels not only affect a character's individual capabilities but also their position in society. The concept of Magic Levels adds depth and complexity to the story and plays a significant role in shaping the world and its characters..
Reviews for "Magic Levels and the Hierarchical Structure of Society in Muzhoku Tensei"
1. John Doe - 2/5 - I had high hopes for "Magic Levels Muzhoku Tensei," but I was left disappointed. The story felt unoriginal, with cliché fantasy elements and a predictable plotline. The characters lacked depth and development, making it hard to relate to or care about them. The pacing was also quite slow, dragging on in several parts. Overall, it failed to captivate me and didn't live up to the hype.
2. Jane Smith - 1/5 - I couldn't finish "Magic Levels Muzhoku Tensei" as it was simply unbearable for me. The writing style was convoluted and disjointed, making it difficult to understand and follow the story. The world-building was lacking depth and coherence, leaving me feeling confused and uninterested. Additionally, the excessive fan service and sexual content felt unnecessary and out of place. It's definitely not a novel I would recommend.
3. Alex Johnson - 2/5 - Although "Magic Levels Muzhoku Tensei" had an intriguing concept, it failed to deliver. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked any real complexity, making them forgettable and uninteresting. The plotline felt rushed and underdeveloped, with many loose ends left unresolved. The dialogue was also quite weak, lacking natural flow and realistic interaction. Overall, it was a disappointing read that didn't live up to its potential.