Chapter 4

I woke up to the sound of blessed silence. For the first time in 5 months I didn’t hear any bird singing in the trees over me, which is weird, because I was literally sleeping in a tree.

Getting curious about this lack of singing I extended my mana sense to discover that the room I was in was weaved with strong silencing magic. Examining this net of magic woven through the walls allowed me to improve upon my S.E.P field a great deal. That plus the lack of noise upon my waking put me in a great mood to start the day.

Washing myself, I tried on for the first time the clothes that Ashley got for me. They fit me like a glove; she must have a keen eye. After donning the outfit I used the badge that Ashley gave me yesterday as a clip to tie my wolf skin cloak. I must admit with the new clothes and my cloak on I looked quite dashing.

Finished with my preparations I took the stair back to the first floor in order to see if they could give me some breakfast. The room was empty right now except for a barmaid I went over to the bar and asked “do you serve breakfast here please?” “Yes sir what would you like?” she responded with a practiced smile “some bacon and scrambled eggs if you have that.” “Yes sir we do please take a seat.Your order will be ready shortly.” I decided to take the seat furthest away from the stairs in the corner in order to look at how the adventurers handled each other in the morning.

It wasn’t long before the first patron came into the room, some come from outside the guild but most of them come from the third and fourth floors of the building they all sit at a table, nobody seemed to have noticed me when me breakfast arrived. I try to eat fast because the crowd is starting to make me anxious when Magnus comes to sit in front of me with a serious expression.

His expression makes me stop shoveling food in my mouth and with a heavy swallow I ask “what’s wrong? “ He replies by asking a question of his own “what are you planning to do now?” I reply with an honest “I don’t know; travel the world, see interesting places, meet interesting people, kill monsters …. You know just be free. Why?” he answer by asking another question “alone?”

It is at this moment that I understand what he was asking: if I wanted to join him and Elena on their adventures. ”the truth is Magnus that I am not good with people…. I prefer to meet people in small doses and on my own terms. I consider you a friend but I do not want company all day everyday like would happen if I joined your adventurer team. I think that i am versatile enough to compensate my being a solo adventurer. I’m sorry that I couldn’t accept your generous offer” “don’t worry about it lad” he replied while clapping my shoulder “I had a feeling you were going to say that. Still good luck out there on your own it’s a dangerous world.” ” I will and thank you for everything” I replied before he went out of earshot with Magnus’s question about what to do with myself in my mind I finish my meal, got up from the table paid the bill and headed to the board where I can see some quests that needed to be done.

While I would like nothing more than to fly around all day doing nothing but look at the world from on high I still need spending money and while the one gold from my initiation quest is a lot for common folks for adventurers it’s a different story… each time they leave a town they have to buy supplies, repair their weapons and armor and a dozen other things that make it so they have to be extremely careful with money.

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I on the other hand had less worries to have except for clothes I can make do with my Elemental manipulation; I could heat or cool myself depending of the temperature I had taken quite a few branches so that I too could live in a treehouse.

This morning before my conversation with Magnus I saw what I think was a mage of some sort. He carried a staff with a beautiful crystal on its top. This made me think of something that every sorcerer or magician needs… a focus to channel their power through. This led me back to my point of arrival all those months ago.

If I concentrated really hard and extended my senses I could nearly sense the spacial fracture that my arrival caused. Anyway I did not come here to reminisce I came here because I wanted a badass staff that I created myself.

After sitting in front of the tree that had helped me with its fruits and that I helped by feeding it my excess mana every time I cultivated beneath its branches this time I used my Elemental manipulation to gently separate the branch that I had taken the first fruit from without damaging anything. Once the branch was separated I hollowed it out and cut myself to fill the hollow piece of wood with my blood, I did that while stimulating my body to create more and more blood so that I didn’t die like an idiot. Once the wood was filled to the brim I put it in a basin that I filled with yet more of my blood so that my future staff was completely submerged in blood. Once that was done I stopped bleeding myself and closed the cut. After letting the staff submerged in my blood for the night I went to bed to rest while preparing myself as much as possible for what I would do the next night.

There are three states that matter can be in, liquid, like water solid, like ice and gaseous, like steam. What I was trying to do was compress all the blood in the basin to create a true blood gem. After what seemed like an eternity I stood tall with a round crystal in my right hand and a staff that stood at 1, 40 meter tall in my left hand.

Both items were the same color which was blood red and the gem produced a little light that was difficult to see in the light of the sun. Once both those items had been inspected and found to be without any obvious flaws I put the blood gem on top of the staff and manipulated the blood soaked wood to wrap and affix the gem atop the staff. Once the gem was fully embedded in the Staff a small energy pulse traveled from the staff and into my body. While the staff was mostly for show and as a test for future equipment the fact that it allowed me more control of my spells was welcomed.

But I wasn’t really here just to create my staff and reminisce the goblins were apparently not the only vermin that were starting to cause problems in the area. While I had exterminated the goblins that were living to the west of my starting point, eastwards some scouts had spotted what looked like a Kobold warren. Kobolds are small bipedal creatures with scales that were a nuisance because they like to dig beneath the ground and if left alone long enough they started to create sinkholes that could be dangerous.

To deal with them I took control of the stream that came from my little hill and simply flooded the warrens. The kobolds that didn’t drown were forced to emerge from their little hole where I waited for them with an air blade. I got so distracted by how boring this turned out to be that I let one of their shamans send an earth spike my way, if I didn’t reflexively cast my wind shield at the last moment I would have died! After verifying that I had killed every one of them and burned the corpses to ash to avoid having to bury them, I retreated to my little home on my little hill and thought. I castigated myself heavily. I had been treated this new world like a game but this was life, my life and life is not a game.

I realized that from now on this was my life, not a game. And my life was precious! this realization led to my decision to spend another month in this little burrow on my hill… here I had all the essentials and I could fly in five minutes to Everwoods if I needed to. I would spend the next few months to change my mindset, create true spells instead of the various funny spells from before and try to find out more about magic through meditation.