After the spectacular end of the third round, the fourth round started immediately. There were only 60 of the best participants left and fifty of them will be going home after this round. For the fifth and the final round only 10 participants would be left to compete for the championship.

What the participants needed to do in the fourth round was easy. They needed to show how well they were able to mana itself. Mana control was one of the most important abilities that a mage needed to have and in this case that would be the main ability which would be put to test. That would not be the only ability though, other things like mana sense and magic design would also be tested.

There would be a special machine that would be used to do all the measurements. It was truly a high tech machine that allowed mages to control mana from magic stone to perform various tasks. Mainly it was used to paint using mana as that was the easiest way to see how much control a person had on their mana.

Control your own mana was relatively easy and someone's control would only be put to test when they tried to handle mana from a different source. So for the fourth round, the remaining participants needed to control the natural mana from magic stones to draw on the magic canvas using this device.

This sounded easy but was actually a very hard thing to do. First one needed to sense the mana properly to judge what kind of colour it would create. For this job one needed to have a very acute sense of mana. Next they needed to use their gadget to control the mana and to paint on the canvas. All the colours of mana were mixed up together, separating them was not an easy thing to do.

After that was done, then they would need to control the mana to draw on the canvas. Not everyone was a good artist, so the judges were not going to score the participants on how good their picture looked. Actually there will be another magical device that would judge how well all the colours were separated and to what degree and that item would also give the participants a score based on that.

...

So, the fourth round started and everyone got busy with drawing. To maintain fairness, all the participants were using the same source of mana. This was done because some natural mana could be harder to control than other natural mana. So as everyone was using the same source no one could complain that their mana was harder to control than others.

The previous round was actually Mekina's speciality as she had been modifying spells for many many years. So her being good at it was given. And in the same way this round was extremely well suited for Dorothy. As she had been controlling mana from a very young age and had been tinkering with many magic items, her mana sense and mana control was just on a whole different level.

Mekina was also excellent when it came to mana control. Controlling mana was one of her specialties as modifying spells and her former job also needed this ability. But still she was nowhere near Dorothy's level of mana control at least at this moment. But still she did her best to perform as well as possible.

There was a time limit of one hour to finish a picture and Dorothy was done in just 40 minutes or so. And she made an amazing piece that anyone would be willing to pay money to buy and decorate their home with. It was a picture of a grassland with a flowing river. She was unable to make anything more intricate as there were very few options of colours available to her for the painting. So she had to limit the colours used in the painting. But still it was definitely a very beautiful piece.

Mekina was quite a creative person and she was also good at drawing. So the painting she made was also quite good. But it was evident that Dorothy was knowledgeable about painting and had studied it. On the other hand, Mekina was self taught and drew whatever she felt like.

In her picture there was a house with a tiled roof. She took a completely different approach than Dorothy and had used as many colours as possible in her painting. It looked very vibrant but there was no depth to it. But that did not matter anyway as this was not a painting competition but a magic competition.

Soon the time limit of 1 hour was over and everyone stopped painting. There were still quite a few people left who had not finished their painting yet but were made to stop. But that was not really a problem as having a completed painting was not a requirement.

Most of the paintings were about the nature but quite a few participants took an unorthodox approach. There was one participant who had just dots of colours on his canvas and this was a perfectly fine demonstration as this was enough for the magic item to score his work.

Very soon the results were out. Unsurprisingly after a defeat in the previous round, Dorothy returned to the top position once again with an astonishing score of 98 out of hundred. This magic was taking one of the top A rank mages magic control as 100 points and rating all the participants based on that. So a score of 98 meant that Dorothy's mana control was almost as good as his.

The person who was sent had scored only a 81. It was quite a bit lower than the top scorer but when one realised that his score was getting compared to a top class A rank mage, they understood that his score was amazing. Dorothy was just way too special. Yes the second ranker was a short glasses wearing boy. He had been performing quite well in the whole competition and had managed to continuously rank among the top ten in every round of the tournament.

As for the person in the third position, it was Mekina, she had a little bit of hope that she might be able to rank second but she was still satisfied with her third position. She was going to the final of this grand event and that was making her extremely happy. She was ready to give her 120 percent in the last and the final round.

Surprisingly the boy who had just painted dots in this round was able to rank in the seventh place which was an amazing result. He had always been barely able to qualify for the next rounds but after this performance of his quite a few people took notice of him.

Another participant who was gaining a lot of notice was the winner of the second round, Ganyu. She did not do very well in the previous round and ranked 41st to get qualified. But in this round she did well once again and ranked fifth and qualified for the finals.

With that only the top 10 were going to the last round to fight for the championship.

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