Chapter 5

I spent the next year like that, One month of meditation to become more in tune and cultivate my mana with brief interludes to imagine and design spells. At the end of the month I would go to the guild and look for an extermination request that would allow me to test my spells in combat. Once I completed the quest, I got my money and left to go back to my hill and spend the next month just like I had spent the last one. For a year I worked like a machine to improve myself. And it showed; my thoughts felt sharp, my senses worked overtime and I could maintain a skintight and invisible air shield between the world and myself permanently, even while sleeping.

I even tried to see how I would do as a fighter instead of a caster; I channeled my mana into my muscles, tendon, ligaments and bones and manage to kill an entire cave full of goblins with just the power of my body….I didn’t like it at all. It left me covered in gore and took two hours for something that I could have done with magic in 5 minutes. It made me really grateful for the gift that I received upon entering this world.

Today would be the last time that I would finish a quest in this guild hall. This time it had been humans that needed to be dealt with. I was shocked the first time I was handed an extermination quest to kill bandits that had raided a caravan. After I took the quest I was afraid that I would not be able to bring myself to kill another person. I was wrong; as soon as I saw what the bandits had done to the women captured, they became as insignificant to me as any other vermin I cut off their throats and while they bled to death I went to tend to the women. As soon as the women were clothed and a little less shocked I guided them to the road where the rest of the caravan waited. Before they could start thanking me for doing my job I returned to the bandits’ camp and I spent the night hanging their corpses from trees along the road.

The warning had worked. Until today that is, this time the bandits didn’t even have the chance to raid anything. I was talking to Ashley when the scout came with a report of bandits just a few kilometers south of Everwoods. I took the quest immediately seeing as I wanted to perfect my chain lightning spell and it works better on people with swords to conduct the current. After my test and a few wind blades to the throat to be thorough I came back and here I was. The year had passed in the blink of an eye but now, finally I would begin my exploration of this new world.

After a heartfelt goodbye to Ashley, Magnus and Elena, I decided to start my exploration by seeing how the dungeon that Magnus, Elena and I had discovered had developed. I heard a few stories and descriptions when I went to the guild for my monthly quest but I wanted to experience it firsthand.

From what I heard the dungeon had gotten a second floor about 4 month ago so I flew to the site; some newbie adventurers were already queuing to enter. Being an A rank adventurer I could enter without waiting as long as I reigned in my aura. These thoughts about aura made memories of a conversation with Ashley about this very subject “your aura is the mana that is expelled naturally out of your body, you should probably train yourself in suppressing it, in some cultures not reigning in our aura could be considered a challenge” I asked the guard at the entrance why I should suppress my aura and he responded with what I expected: a powerful aura like mine in a newborn dungeon like this one could cause it to lash out and become too aggressive, which could increase the number of deaths in the dungeon.

So I took a firm grip on my mana and squeezed all of it in my body behind a barrier that I created in my skin it wasn’t exactly comfortable but I could see the use of it. For example with slight tweaks here and there I could become invisible and with my suppressed mana would be difficult to sense.

After I reigned in my aura I finally entered the dungeon, what I found on the first floor was little more than an advanced and more labyrinthine version of what we found the first time so I rushed myself a little to find the boss which had changed from what I had remembered, this boss was a goblin shaman that really liked his fireballs. After testing what the goblin could do for a minute or so I took its head off with a wind blade. After killing the boss and earning a silver coin and a wand able to cast the spell fireball 5 times I headed to the second floor. While the loot was trash to me, you could pay yourself a decent meal with a silver coin. It was just useless to me because I am completely self-sufficient…. I just need a seed, that are kept in stasis, and mana to grow myself my own food directly.

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While I was thinking of the loot, my feet led me down the stairs to the second floor. It was a veritable jungle. It was moments like these that reminded me that I was literally no longer on Altera, but in a pocket dimension. Anyway after a moment to look around, and see what kind of threats I might encounter, I continued to follow the trail that was barely visible through the thick foliage. I was ambushed by snakes and other small venomous animals all the way to the clearing where the boss was waiting for me: It was a panther, the same kind Talia is. I let the boss get a glancing blow on me once or twice because I didn’t want to completely spit on its pride but even these few blows never got past my skintight barrier. After pretending to struggle for 5 minutes or so I killed the boss and got the loot, this time it was a claw-shaped dagger and 3 silver coins.

Before leaving I extracted the carcass of a massive grizzly bear that I killed for a mission a month ago from my Bag of Holding. I seriously loved Ashley for giving it to me; everything that was put in it was held in stasis until you took it out again and to put anything inside of it all you had to do was place your hand on the item and thinking on it going into your bag, there were only 2 restrictions that I could find after a few tests the first one was the size of what you wanted to put in; you couldn’t put an entire house inside for example, the second was that you could not put any animal or human inside as long as they were alive.

My offering to the dungeon made I proceeded to leave. It had taken about an hour but there was plenty of daylight left. I decided that I would travel to the Wild lands first. west of the central forest on the Terrarian continent. Leaving from the dungeon directly west should put me in the Wild lands close to the borders of the beastkin kingdom of Karabor.

According to legends in the distant past the Wild lands was a flat land full of tall grass where all people could enjoy an idyllic life, when I was told this part of the story I was skeptical but the second part interested me much more; it is said that there was a group of evil mages that tried to open a portal to allow demons to invade Altera but that a group of heroes managed to interrupt the ritual that would have opened the portal. The destabilization of a ritual with enough power to reach another world and tear through space was so cataclysmic that it left the lands where the ritual took place a place of perpetual chaos.

It is also said that only the greatest of mages can survive in the Wild lands all other die due to the harsh environment or the great beasts that were mutated by all the energy released when the ritual was broken.

I should have probably chosen a less dangerous and unpredictable area of this new world first but no matter how much this year and a half changed me it didn’t change the fact that I didn’t like interacting with strangers. The only reason I made friends with Magnus in the first place was because I was lost alone in the wilderness and I needed a guide, even then I kept a wind barrier between me and them at all time these first few days and Ashley became a friend only because Magnus introduced us and I was forced to speak to her to take quests for the guild. Don’t get me wrong I was, I think, a good friend and I would help my friends with anything they asked of me but someone had to do something to earn my trust like Magnus and Ashley had done for me.

So, after a last look from the air at Everwoods and my little hill with the great trees that had grown even bigger as I fed it my mana during my cultivation sessions I took off in the direction of my first true adventure.

I flew through the day, spent my night securely behind magical barriers that were every bit as strong as the one that protected my little hill on the first month if not stronger, I also added an alarm that would wake me up should anything managed to cross this barrier.

The flight from Everwoods to the Wild lands took just short of 4 days but I knew immediately that this was going to be truly dangerous. Patches of the ground were frozen solid, tornadoes stopped and started on dime lakes of lava would suddenly appear without warning, it looked hellish. I pondered turning back and heading south to Karabor; the beastkin kingdom. But I found my courage and took the first step towards the unknown.