As someone who's picked up a few Tian spells himself, the difference is night and day -- but explaining that, succinctly and sensibly, to someone wandering into the difference between static magic and Awakened Magick is not exactly easy and this definitely isn't the time for it.

"Martial arts," he says with a decisive nod. "Everything is martial arts. Some of it I'm better at than other parts, though. We have a --" One finger rotates in the air, a mental pause as he's trying to think of how to describe it. "A sort of convention, since Mages all come at their magick from entirely different perspectives, that bundles up what we can do into 'Spheres'. So if I acupuncture someone back to health or a priest prays them well or a giant steam-hissing machine fixes them up with weirdass healing radiation, that all falls under the Sphere of Life, if you see what I'm saying."