Xavier grinned.

He’d just cast his Portal spell, and was testing it out. The portal he’d created was smaller than he’d expected. He hadn’t held an intention in his mind—something the spirit he’d summoned with Otherworldly Communion had told him he would need to do if he wished to affect the size and shape of the portal.

He had wanted to see what the spell would look like if he cast it naturally, without trying to alter it.

The portal he’d created was wider than his head—about the size of a large dinner plate. Certainly not large enough for him to step through it. The portal anchored to him was directly in front of him, while its twin was about twenty feet away. Both portals were inside his time dilation field.

He did want to test what happened when he had one portal inside the time bubble and one outside, but he wasn’t ready to try that yet.

The portal itself was a shimmering purple. In his mind, he’d been imagining it as blue. Probably because of all the sci-fi television he’d watched growing up. The surface of the portal rippled and looked remarkably like water. That, he found, eerily strange.

Xavier examined the portal. He couldn’t feel a breeze coming through it, like the other mage-made portals he’d had experience with in the past, but that was because he was standing in a time dilation field. The wind outside of it was too slow to affect the wind inside, so the air became still.

He hesitated, for only a split-second, then he put his arm through it and watched as it came out the other side twenty feet away.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Xavier chuckled at the sight of his hand. He waved over at himself. It was very disorientating. Certainly something he would need to get used to.

When he’d first saw the portal magic category, he’d hoped that he would be able to see what was on the other side of the portal when he created one, as though it was like looking through a pane of glass at the other location. He was a little disappointed that wasn’t possible.

All the more reason to get some sort of far-sight ability. But I don’t need one of those right now.

Xavier pulled his hand back out through the portal and took a few things out of his Storage Ring. Then, he spent what was probably far too much time throwing things into the portal and watching as the came out of the other one, and vice versa.

Things could only ever enter through one side of the portal, which he knew made perfect sense. The other side of the portals—the portals just hung in the air as he walked around them, held up by nothing but magic—was completely flat. He could clearly see this with his Farscope, but he liked looking at it with the naked eye.

A few times, Xavier tested what happened when something touched the opposite side of the portal. He tossed an apple at it. It went straight through, as though the portal wasn’t even there at all.

Xavier contemplated what that would mean. If someone were shooting arrows, say, at his chest, he would need to ensure when he cast the Portal spell, that he created a portal facing in the right direction—otherwise he would fail to redirect the arrow’s flight, and casting the spell would be useless.

Xavier tilted his head to the side, wondering about all the different applications he could use the portals for, especially as he grew in power with the spell. Considering how strong his Intelligence attribute was, the wizened old spirit had said he should be rather strong in the spell as it was, but that more applications of it would come as he experimented.

That reminded him a lot of how the Time Alteration spell worked. Whenever he’d learnt how to alter the size and shape of the time dilation field, or reverse the flow of time inside of it, or expand it on the fly, he’d gained ranks with it.

The Portal spell acted in a similar way. All he needed to do was experiment, and that was something he could have a bit of fun with.

Once he had played with the first portal he’d created for a while, he looked at the cooldown.

Portal has a cooldown of 1 minute. It cannot be used for another 1 minute.

Xavier sighed. Of course the cooldown on the spell hadn’t moved. He deactivated the time dilation field and watched the countdown timer on the cooldown start to tick by.

That’s better.

A minute cooldown was far too long for the types of applications he wanted to use this spell for. Considering how powerful his attributes were, it made him wonder just how long the cooldown of this spell would have been if he’d gained it as a Level 1 Mage with only eight or ten points in Intelligence.

Would it have taken an hour to cooldown? Longer?

The wizened spirit had told him that the cooldown would change significantly not only as the spell’s rank improved, but also as Xavier mastered the spell. At first, making the portal larger would be mentally taxing, and so the cooldown would take longer.

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As he grew in proficiency, casting the spell many times over, it would become easier and easier for him to use. Then, the cooldown would reduce.

Xavier was curious about that. Even though he hadn’t had another spell that worked quite like that, he was glad that this one did. He wanted to improve it as much as possible. A minute was a drastically long time for him in a fight these days and would likely mean for shorter encounters he’d only get to use the spell a single time.

And that just wasn’t how he imagined things going.

If I have access to basically any spell, maybe there are spells out there that can help with the cooldown of other spells. I already know that’s an option with imbued abilities…

It certainly seemed like it would be a possibility. One that he would have to look into in the future. He ordered his mind, placing that thought somewhere he’d be able to pull it back out later.

As having one portal remaining active didn’t affect his ability to cast the spell a second time, Xavier kept the first set of portals up. He wanted to see how long they would last.

After some time inspecting his own mind, he found that he could feel that the portals were active. He could easily will them to shut down. He wondered if they would shut down instantly, or if there would be a delay. That was something he would test out later.

As time passed, he felt a slight amount of mental effort at keeping the portal active. He also saw that as long as the portal remained active, it ate at his Spirit Energy. His Spirit Energy was incredibly robust, so it honestly didn’t matter to him how much this spell used.

Xavier cast the second set of portals. This time, he made sure to create a portal large enough that he could step through. If he wanted to use this spell to move around the battlefield more effectively, then he would have to be able to actually move through it.

The casting of the spell definitely took more time than he wished, but that too, he knew, would diminish with practice.

[Portal has taken a step forward on the path!

Portal is now a Rank 2 spell.

One cannot walk backward on the path.

Xavier raised an eyebrow.

That was fast.

After casting Portal for a second time, another portal stood in front of him. It was large enough for him to step through, but it still felt a little small for his liking. The other, twin portal was roughly ten feet away this time.

Xavier took a deep breath, as though he were about to plunge into deep waters—a habit he knew he would have to dispense, as he couldn’t very well telegraph the use of this spell even more—then he stepped through. He made sure to retract his wings into his back as he did so, just to make sure they wouldn’t be clipped by the sides of the portal.

I’ll definitely have to make them bigger in the future.

When he stepped out the other side, he felt a slight sense of disorientation. But it was nothing that he hadn’t felt before whenever he was teleported somewhere by the System.

This felt far better than being teleported, however, as he was the one in control of where the portals came out. It was a little bit like back on Earth, pre-integration—whenever he was a passenger in a car, he got a bit motion sick. But whenever he drove? That motion sickness was nowhere to be found.

It was entirely different when you were the one in control.

Xavier felt giddy as he stepped back through the portal again. He leapt from one to the other and laughed to himself.

He was probably having far too much fun with this. But what was the harm in having a bit of fun? He was doing magic! Why shouldn’t he enjoy it?

He checked on the cooldown and frowned.

Portal has a cooldown of 3 minutes. It cannot be used for another 2 minutes and 3 seconds.

The cooldown was three times as long when he created a larger portal, but that cooldown had started before he’d reached Rank 2 in the spell, and definitely before he’d gained any proficiency with it.

He would be able to shorten that cooldown significantly.

Xavier practised and experimented with the spell for hours in that clearing. He lost count of the numbers of portals created. Small portals, large portals, massive portals—ones that only lasted for a split-second, as he didn’t yet have the ability to properly cast them.

He trained until the sun went down, then he trained some more. Eventually, as he trained, he activated Aura of Fear. He was sick of beasts wandering into his little clearing and attacking him without provocation. He couldn’t train inside of his time dilation field either, otherwise the cooldown would never move.

The Aura of Fear skill prevented any beasts from entering the area while it was activated. Xavier was impressed, though he doubted it would work on beasts that were truly powerful—ones that were actually strong enough to face him.

He trained all through the night.

When the sun rose on the seventh day since he’d acquired the spell, its rays pouring over the great forest of the hundredth floor, he was starting to feel satisfied with his proficiency.

Xavier was able to push the Portal spell incredibly far in a short period of time, something he knew was only possible because of his grade and attributes, and the guidance he’d received from the spirit during his use of Otherworldly Communion. He’d also learnt to incorporate his Split Mind skill into the training, which greatly helped him.

As of that morning, his training with the spell consisted only of using it in that clearing, and only using it outside of combat. He had a lot of theories about how he could use it in combat, but he hadn’t actually tested them out yet. He’d been trying his utmost to reduce the cooldown on the spell so he could make it significantly more effective in battle.

The spell wasn’t all the way to Rank 100, and it certainly wasn’t beyond that—now that he was D Grade, he would eventually be able to bring all of his spells and skills to Rank 150—but in those mere seven days that he’d been training with it he’d managed to get it all the way to Rank 75. That, he thought, was an incredible feat, considering it probably took years for Denizens starting with the spell to get it that far.

At one point during his training, he’d had to pause and go after the beast from the noticeboard. He needed to complete at least one Hunt Quest per week if he wished to remain on the hundredth floor. He’d made quick work of the beast—not bothering to utilise his new spell—then returned to his practice.

Now, it was time he ventured out and actually used the Portal spell on an enemy.

Not just on one enemy. On lots of enemies.

Xavier grinned. He figured he would make a game of testing out the new spell. There was a particular enemy that he had faced recently that he found more interesting than the others.

The Forest Dryads.

He leapt into the air, his wings flapping outward at his back, and soared over the great forest in search of their territory once more.

This was going to be an interesting fight.