I’m a Wizard

 

I’m a Wizard

Translator: Isabelle Emerson

 

 

Prologue

 

 

I went out after I finished cleaning.

Then, I looked up at the store’s sign, pleased.

 

Café Wizard.

 

I looked at the neat handwriting filling the sing.

It had been a year since I opened the store, but I still felt happy whenever I looked at the sign.

 

Café Wizard was the store I had created with the utmost care from bottom to top.

I had even made the sign myself.

After I spent a few minutes looking at the sign happily, one of the morning part timers, Lee Soyoung, arrived.

 

“Good morning.”

 

Soyoung greeted me with a bright smile.

It was a smile that made people feel good.

Naturally, I smiled and waved back at her.

Soyoung nodded shyly and went inside to prepare for opening.

 

Café Wizard had eight part-timers, 6 girls and 2 boys, who I chose with great care.

The standard was appearance and personality. There probably weren’t many places that had part-timers like this.

However, for me it was very simple to accomplish.

 

Since there wasn’t much time left before we opened, customers began to gather.

There were always a lot of customers.

Within a few days of opening news about the café had spread through word of mouth, and since then, we had never had any trouble with business.

Once a customer had stopped by to drink coffee once, they would certainly come again. And almost everyone became a regular.

 

The café was quite large so there were a lot of seats inside, but there was almost never a vacant seat.

Our prices were a bit expensive, but no one was unhappy about it.

 Everything worked out well. I knew it would.

 

This was Café Wizard.

And I was a wizard.

Chapter 1: Café Wizard

 

 

Ban Taesoo, the owner of Café Wizard, was having a normal day just like any other.

It had been a year since he opened the café, but it was already quite famous in the area.

First of all, all the part-time workers, including Ban Taesoo, had an attractive appearance.

 

Ban Taesoo was the best of them all.

Of course, this wasn’t surprising. Because he was a wizard.

The higher the magic ability of a wizard, the better their appearance would be.

As one’s mana grew, the body naturally balanced itself and excess waste was discharged, improving one’s skin and appearance. One’s height would even increase.

 

Ban Taesoo felt people’s gazes on him but continued to do his work while trying his best not to care.

Café Wizard’s specialty was drip coffee made by Ban Taesoo.

Coffee was made a sold through the coffee machine, but the key ingredient was to add a little bit of this drip coffee.  

 

Ban Taesoo kept the completed drip coffee in a large container.

 

‘And one spoon of mana.’

 

After filling the container with coffee, he would push a bit of mana to it. The amount of mana going in had to be consistent. There had been a lot of trial and error to find the right amount.

Anyway, the completed drop coffee had an excellent flavor.

Adding just a little bit to the machine-made coffee would completely change the flavor of the coffee.

Of course, it was important to put the right amount into the mix. However, anyone could figure out the right amount because the cups had been prepared in advance.

 

Once a person had a drink full of magic, they would keep coming back for more.

It wasn’t an addiction; it was just what the body wanted.

The right amount of magic would elicit a positive response from the general population, though wizards would be immune.

For example, it would relieve fatigue, discharge waste, and burn excess fat and convert it to energy.

Of course, the changes wouldn’t be too drastic. It had to be consumed steadily over a long period of time to have even a slight effect.

 

It had been a year since he had created the café. Operations had entered a period of stability.

That meant that Ban Taesoo didn’t have much to do.

If it were someone else, they would have created another branch or become a franchise at this point.

However, Ban Taesoo had no intention of doing that.

It was better to use his time carefully and study magic a little more.

 

Ban Taesoo began his magical journey on his 17^th birthday. Of course, he wasn’t sure if that was really his birthday. Ban Taesoo was an orphan.

In exchange for entering the magical path, Ban Taesoo gave up all memories of the first 17 years of his life.

Instead, he gained knowledge of magic that came to his mind naturally.

 

The first bit of knowledge that came to his mind was the basics of magic.

After learning the basics perfectly, the knowledge of the next step came to mind.

After completing each step, the next one would appear.

Losing 17 years of memories truly didn’t go to waste.

Looking at the atmosphere, he had never thought he would make such a happy memory.

It was a bit of a waste that the studies he’d been doing had been reset, but even that wasn’t much of a setback.

After collecting information it seemed that he hadn’t been much of a model student.

Anyways, to study magic, one didn’t only need mana. One needed to have a variety of knowledge.

From then on, he studied like crazy.

 

The first time Ban Taesoo had completed a magic spell, he had been fascinated. And he had a hunch he’d never be able to escape that fascination again.

Even now it was the same. In order to study magic, he studied various topics.

To become a wizard he gathered magic, and as he developed his mana through training it wasn’t just his body that got better. His intellect got better too.

As a result, Ban Taesoo went to university.

It wasn’t the best university in the country, but he entered the department of physics in a fairly famous university.

 

While in university, Ban Taesoo had a part time job while he studied.

The power of a wizard was enormous.

Whatever he did, it turned out well. With a powerful body and brilliant intellect, nothing was difficult for him.

Although his intellect was skewed towards magic, his intelligence wasn’t going anywhere.

There was no one who could keep up with Taesoo’s ability in studying things outside of magic.

 

After attending university for two years, Taesoo decided he needed more stability in order to study magic. So, he prepared to manage Café Wizard.

The founding of Café Wizard was done with perfect planning.

He prepared for a year before opening his business, and thus was able to make a lot of money within the first year of opening.

 

In the meantime, Ban Taesoo didn’t neglect his studies.

Academic studies were nicely linked to magic studies, so they created a strange synergy which led to growth in both areas.

And now he was about to graduate.

 

Ban Taesoo continued to make coffee while lost in his thoughts. He mechanically poured drip coffee into the container and pushed his mana into it. As a result, he ended up filling eight containers.

They usually used around one container in a day, though on weekends it was a little more, so this was about a week’s worth of coffee.

 

After finishing his work, he felt at ease. Wasn’t this sense of security what everyone desired?

It was still the morning, so his day was relatively free.

There wouldn’t be much to do between now and lunchtime. Lee Sooyoung and Han Seohyun, two of the part times, would cover most things that needed to be done. As long as there were no large groups of customers.

 

Ban Taesoo sat in his seat behind the counter and shuffled through some papers.

These days, he felt like he had hit a wall in his magical studies.

Trying to find a breakthrough, he was reading and analyzing papers on various fields in hopes of finding something that could be applied to magic.

Mainly he was reading math-related papers.

It wasn’t the first time he had hit a wall like this. He had been in this situation several times, and each time he had come up with a brilliant solution.

The last time he was stuck, he had had a breakthrough while reading a paper on physics.

 

Magic was becoming more and more complicated. And it had become important to establish concepts in various ways using high-level math skills.

Anyways, these days when he wasn’t working at the café it was his job to search through theses on math.

No, even in the café he often looked through papers on his laptop.

That, or he surfed the web for various articles and news reports.

 

Wizards shouldn’t just study. They had to be exposed to a variety of things.

Imagination was just as important as mathematical or conceptual knowledge.

Wizards were supposed to bring the things they imagined out into reality.

 

‘Will this thesis be helpful?’

 

I felt like something was tickling the forefront of my brain, but I couldn’t put my finger on it so I was getting impatient.

 

‘At this rate it doesn’t seem like it.’

 

Taesoo took a deep breath to calm his impatience and looked around.

Without him noticing, the store had filled with several customers.

Everyone was talking, reading, or working on something with their laptops open.

The scene was no different from usual. It was a simple and peaceful routine.

 

It helped calm him.

There was no point in being impatient. He was still young. It had only been six years since he started practicing magic. He had plenty of time.

Wizards lived longer anyways as they gathered more magic.

 

‘Well, it’s not like I’m going to fight another wizard.’

 

Taesoo grinned as he muttered to himself.

When he first became a wizard, his greatest worry was that there would be another wizard around.

He had no idea what they would think or what would happen if they found him. So, for the first few years of his magical career he lived in fear, always watching his back.

He was basically risking his life studying magic.

 

That was why the first magic he mastered was that of perception. He trained himself to sense magic and searched for the presence of another wizard.

Therefore, perceptive magic was still his greatest skill among everything he had learned.

With his excellent perceptive abilities, he traveled the country in search of another wizard.

He invested years into his search and still found nothing.

 

‘I was horribly reckless.’

 

If there was a high-level wizard around, wouldn’t he have been able to sense perception magic?

Conversely, he only used it to calculate information. Being in a situation where one didn’t know how the relationship would work out was a very dangerous thing.

Fortunately, nothing bad happened, but Taesoo was beginning to feel like he was the only wizard in the world.

 

Come to think of it, wasn’t the process of learning magic strange? Once one was done learning one thing, the next step would automatically come to mind.

He was confident that there were no other wizards around, so he was able to just open a café like this.

Magic was engraved throughout the café.

Even the sign outside was engraved with magic that would attract people’s attention and invoke their favor. The café was also engraved with magic that would prevent damage.

That was the real reason why the background of the café sign, behind the words Café Wizard, was full of mysterious magical patterns.

 

The inside of the store was also engraved with magic to maintain cleanliness.

He still cleaned every day, but it was just a rough sweep of the broom. Nevertheless, the store was always clean. That was the power of magic.

In addition, various other magic tricks were hidden around the store.

Because of the magical effects, the guests didn’t expose their actual state.

They didn’t bother the employees any more than they needed to.

The employees also paid little attention to things other than their work.

In addition to the great taste of the coffee, there were other reasons for the café’s success.

His first goal – starting the café successfully – was almost complete.

 

Ban Taesoo had set his second goal.

The second goal was to purchase the building where the café was located.

Ultimately, he wanted to create a few businesses that would run on their own.

Then, he could focus completely on his magic.

Wasn’t that every wizard’s dream?

Ban Taesoo believed that his future would be full of peace, stability, and magic.

 

While thinking, Taesoo casually looked towards the café entrance.

While looking at the sign outside, he noticed a couple about to come in the café.  

Suddenly, he felt goosebumps on the back of his neck.

 

‘A wizard?’

 

The faint scent of mana tickled his nose.