Dave woke me up at midnight and I took over his spot on the watch post.

After about an hour of sitting there and being bored, I started to consider what I could do to keep busy.

I eventually figured it was time to figure out how elements and affinities worked.

Removing the previous in and out Life-force ports I had in place for magic missile I decided to test something that wouldnt make as much noise as magic missile did.

I carefully let just a small amount of Life-force into my hand and I started to play around with it. I considered how attuning it to an element might work. Eventually, I decided to just try forcing it into becoming an element.

I decided to try the cliche fire element, focusing on the small strand of life-force in my hand again I just mentally told it to become fire attuned. As I sort of expected it didn’t work.

My next thought was to think about what fire means to me. I imagined heat and consumption as my mental fire burned through the fuel it was given and pressed that thought into the Life-force. I was pleased when the Life-force took on a flickery red glow.

Something bright also shined in my eyes, opening them I could now see that it was another box popup.

You gained a 10% fire affinity!

Affinity represents what an element means to you. individually stacking meanings of an element on top of each other is extremely inconvenient when attempting to cast a spell in battle! affinity "saves" that meaning in an easy to access form. Just telling life-force to convert to an element you hold an affinity for will apply your meanings to it. keep in mind however that increasing your affinity with an element requires you to layer meaning on top of existing meaning.

A higher affinity practically means your spells will be more powerful. However, depending on the element, you could even have your spell taken control of by someone with a higher affinity!

Dismissing the popup I once again looked at the bit of fire attuned Life-force in my hand. Deciding to attempt something with it I pointed my finger away from me and imagined it coming out of my finger like a blowtorch.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Opening my eyes I could see a small gout of flame coming from the tip of my finger. Out of curiosity I brought my other hand up near the flame, not feeling any heat I got braver and stuck my pinky finger through the flame.

It felt like nothing at all, I considered that maybe my own fire wouldnt hurt me but just to be safe I brought my finger near the wood bench I was sat at and was happy to see that before I even got close the wood started to smolder and smoke.

It was at this point that my handy 6th sense told me something was wrong, like normal it took me a few seconds but I figured out what was confusing me. I had been playing around with my little finger torch for at least 2 minutes, and it was still going. There was no way the life-force I had attuned was enough to last this long. Looking at my hand mentally again I was pretty interested by what I saw.

For one, the in-port on the back of my hand had reopened again, and secondly, the Life-force coming in through that port was automatically turning into fire attuned Life-force when it reached my finger.

Looking a bit more in-depth it almost looked like the Life-force went through some sort of filter then became fire attuned. Looking even more closely at the filter I had a brain wave. I had complete control of my mental body, what was stopping me from putting up ‘automation’ like this filter.

Thinking about the process a bit like programming I first made an ‘if’ filter. Mentally I told the filter to not let any Life-force past it unless I snapped my fingers at which point it should let exactly a quarter-sized amount through before closing. I nearly shouted for joy when I saw a thin ‘film’ of something form over my finger mentally. I decided to test something that could have great potential if it worked, I first created another filter to convert the Life-force to fire attuned Life-force. Then I created a final filter that’s purpose was to instruct the life-force into a small fireball that I could control mentally.

I added a few safeguards like making it so I could dismiss the fireball by thinking ‘stop’ and decided to test it out.

I opened my eyes and excitedly snapped my fingers. I nearly exploded with joy when a little ball of fire emerged from my finger. Mentally I commanded the ball to orbit my finger and it did just that. Saying ‘stop’ mentally the little ball winked out of existence and I physically jumped up in excitement.

I was so excited that I missed a blue box popup that I noticed now.

Mental Imprinting

A skill that few ever learn, allows you to create runic imprints that instruct Life-force to act a certain way

I considered the popup for a moment. It was extremely vague in comparison to other popups I had gotten previously, the one thing I could definitely take away from it though was that what I had unlocked was probably pretty rare.

Looking up at the sky I could assume it was probably about 4-5 A.M. so I considered what I would do with the rest of my time on watch. Eventually, I decided I would attempt to increase my affinity with fire.

I started to further consider what fire meant. I started with what I had used to get the affinity, heat and consumption but then I began to further layer more meaning on top, I better defined how fire existed, the actually chemical reaction (seemingly unchanged despite the popup days ago about some base reactions being changed) how oxygen was the fuel, I strengthened the image of fire in my mind until I could think of no more additions.

Taking a look at my status screen I was pleased to see that my fire affinity grew to 56%, this also confused me though. I resolved to think more about what other aspects might influence fire affinity.

At this point, I decided that I had done enough research for one night and I started to watch the forest for any movement.