And are shrens any physically different?

Nope. It's very puzzling.

Okay so either they are wrong about shrens being physically different or they're wrong about flight being powered by physics. He's betting on the latter.

He reads up some more on dragons and then decides he'd better take Keo up on that shopping suggestion before it gets too late. He returns the books to their appropriate shelves and goes back to Korulen's room.

Korulen's in it! She looks sheepishly at him.

"Hi! So your mum volunteered you to help me with shopping?"

"Uh, yeah. Do you want to go now?"

"If you have something else you need to do doesn't need to be now, I just thought I'd better do that before I forgot."

"I can go now." She goes out of her room and heads for the lift. "Can you fly?"

"Theoretically yes, but until I find a way to get any new magic in this world I wanna conserve my mana."

"How does that work? Front entrance," she tells the lift, and off it goes.

"My world has four kinds of mages, and my kind cannot generate any magic for themself. We can, however, see, sense, manipulate, and borrow magic of the other three kinds, and I can see all—or, at least, a lot—of the magic around here, so I expect I'll be able to figure out a way to get some for myself. If I can't then eventually I'll run out of mana and be unable to do any kind of magic."

"Oh. How do you usually borrow it?"

"It's a primitive mental action, for my kind of mage. With my kind of magic, I can just see it, and metaphorically reach for it and... take it. The wizardry reservoir did not like my first attempts but I might try something after I find out more about it, usually borrowing is easy and doesn't need understanding but that may be because my kind of magic knows innately more about the other three kinds than it does about this world's kinds."

"...you should be really careful, a lot of important stuff runs on magic."

"I... don't think I'm gonna break magic by looking at it and trying to use it. Especially not wizardry, the reservoir is really big."

"Yeah but if you took some magic out of a magic item or a ward or something."

"Oh, yeah, I wouldn't do that until and unless I knew how to do it, for one, and actually wanted to destroy said item, for two, which I wouldn't do all willy nilly any more than I'd drop a vase on the floor to break it."

"Okay." The city in the distance starts very abruptly, jutting up with tall buildings next to the grassland.

Ooh city!

"We don't have cities like that—aesthetically—where I'm from."

"Oh? What about it?"

"Starting abruptly like that, and having such tall buildings. I mean, some cities have tall buildings, but they're mostly built on top of the floating platforms above swamps. And there are the castles."

"I'm not sure Esmaar has any castles in current use. It starts abruptly because that's where the ward ends, it might petition for a ward expansion soon... why aren't your buildings tall?"

"I think it's mostly an aesthetic thing? And also a population thing, we have, like, a few hundred thousand, maybe a few million people living on the whole continent?"

"I think this one city has more than a million people."

"Whoa. Yeah. That'll be why."