After gaining Level 2 and working out how the Sigil Crafting Table worked, Saul was able to progress faster. He guessed—correctly—that another Sigil must be crafted to unlock the spell at the base of the Spell Tree, and that the Arcane Dust would be the key to that.
Picking up the two vials of Arcane Dust, he brought them to the Sigil Crafting Table and placed them in the section with the Arcane Dust symbol. Before placing them down, he inspected them closely. They were made of very thick, clear crystal, and the gold dust within them was so fine it would have dispersed into the air had the vials been opened.
Experimentally, he tried the stopper of the vial with his thumb, but though it appeared to be made of nothing more than thick wax, it was utterly immovable. Shrugging, he placed the vials on the table.
Workshop: Sigil Crafting Table
Arcane Dust Available: 200
Required to Craft Sigil: 200
Select: Craft Level 2 Spell Sigil
This time, the lightning from the red globe of crystal was the rich gleaming gold of ripe corn rather than the blood red of the Level Up Sigil crafting. Again, the lightning flashed round the room, accompanied by a deep mechanical thrumming like some huge engine under the earth. Again, the lightning coalesced into a ball of energy above the crystal, from which a gleaming Sigil appeared.
Instead of absorbing the Sigil into himself, Saul plucked it from where it hovered above the crystal. The Sigil was again heavier than expected. It seemed to be solid gold, and the surface was smooth and slick. It was beautiful, as if a master calligrapher had drawn an incredibly complex stylized rune, and a master sculptor had etched drawing into filigree.
Saul turned it thoughtfully in his hands for a moment, then padded softly across the thick pile of the red rug toward the shadowy spell tree.
Again, he crouched at the base of the tree, holding the Sigil in his right hand. He reached toward the sphere at the bottom of the trunk, the sphere that represented the first spell in his path toward mastery of magic. The shape of a Sigil flickered across the surface of the globe as Saul’s fingers brushed it, and then vanished.
Saul took a deep breath and placed the heavy golden Sigil he’d just crafted onto the surface of the sphere.
Flame flashed for a moment from the sphere, and the whole tree shuddered and glowed brightly. Then, the crafted Sigil melted onto the surface of the sphere. The colors became more vivid, and the sigil pattern Saul had previously glimpsed pulsed with light and settled to shine permanently.
The spell globe revolved slowly, and Saul felt a tingling in his hands and arms as the System flashed information across his field of vision.
School of Fire: New Spell Iterations Unlocked (Level 2)
New Spells Available:
Fireball (Combat: Ranged Attack)
Burning Hand (Combat: Melee Attack)
Firestorm (Combat: Area of Effect Attack)
Saul sat back on the carpet, gazing up at the spell tree. Level 2, and his first combat spells available. He had used fire spells in his old life, of course, but this was a new way of seeing them. What would these look like in combat?
There were five foundational Schools of Magic, and they were all represented here on the spell tree.
He looked at the branches that arched out from the trunk of the spell tree above the five foundational schools of magic.
“What will happen once I’ve unlocked the first five spells? All these other spells will begin to be unlocked, I guess, but there’s no telling what they are. It looks as if at that point, I’ll have to choose which direction to develop in, and that will depend on what I’m doing.”
He stood, stretched, and looked again around the Workshop, feeling a sense of deep satisfaction. This was not how he’d planned for his life to go, but he was here, he had made a start, and he was up to the task.
“System,” he said quietly. Immediately, the System’s base options appeared in front of him again.
System: Workshop Active
Select: Deactivate Workshop
Select: View System Soul
Rather than immediately leaving the Workshop, Saul selected View System Soul, and a new readout appeared.
System: Soul Details:
Name: Saul Kramitz
Level: 2
Spells Available: 6
Select: View Available Spell Details
Saul selected the last option.
System Soul: Spell Details
Spells available: Tier 1:
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School of Fire:
Generate heat (mild) (non-combat only)
Generate light (mild) (non-combat only)
Kindle Fire (non-combat only, chance of success, 50%)
Spells available: Tier 2:
School of Fire:
Fireball (Combat: Ranged Attack)
Burning Hand (Combat: Melee Attack)
Firestorm (Combat: Area of Effect Attack)
Saul nodded. So, this was how it would be. In the forest, before he’d found the village, he’d gotten into practice at activating the Level 1 School of Fire spells. In battle, he’d be able to use the combat spells effectively.
Clumsy, though, having to select them like that, he thought. Perhaps the System has some way of smoothing the process that will be unlocked later?
There was only one way to find out: continue to level up.
And he couldn’t do that by sitting around in the Workshop.
He returned to the main list of options, finding that he could do so simply by focusing his intention on doing so. When the list appeared, he selected Deactivate Workshop. The space around him faded from view, but just before the transition took full effect, Saul saw a new and unexpected readout from the System.
System: Rewards Gained!
Reward Details:
Class: Exploration
Arcane Dust:
Crafting Bonus, First Spell Sigil: 100
Experience points (XP):
Crafting Bonus, First Level Sigil: 100
Select: Absorb rewards to Workshop
Saul grinned and selected to absorb his bonus rewards to the Workshop. He caught a flickering glimpse of a pile of XP coins and a vial of Arcane Dust, and then he had a sensation of falling downward.
A moment later, he opened his eyes to the little room in the village where his body lay.
It was night. The fire was banked up, and there was no sign of the healer, Zorea. A slow smile spread across Saul’s face.
He had done it. He had taken his first steps to mastering the System.
* * *
Recovery did not come quickly, but it did come. As Saul came to understand more about the place and time he had landed in, he came to learn that it had been the depths of winter when he’d arrived in the village.
He had been lucky. They had not suffered a deep snowfall for over a week, and the rain had cleared the last of the previous snow, so that when Saul arrived at the village, he had only damp to contend with not snow and freezing temperatures.
Often, he wondered what the man whose body he now owned had been doing and what terrible fate had brought the man to that spot in such a sorry condition.
Sarkur had said that the man’s timeline ended just as Saul’s new one began. Saul took that to mean that the man had died just before Saul’s soul had come and inhabited the body.
Who had he been? Saul was not holding out much hope for an answer.
At first, his recovery took all his attention. Then, as he became more aware of the new body, he was oppressed by the strangeness of it.
It was not a pleasant feeling, and he missed the old version of himself. At first, he avoided looking too hard at his new body and would shudder and turn away from his reflection if he caught a glimpse of it.
But, in time, he overcame these reactions and grew to know the new physical confines his soul inhabited. They were very different from his old body.
The hair was blond where he’d always been dark, the arms were thin and emaciated where Saul’s had always been thick and strong. He spent time getting used to his new body as the winter passed and spent time also coming to face the fact that this body would need work before it would be able to do what he would need.
At first, Zorea was very much present. She was clearly both interested and a little scared by Saul, and he came to understand in time that he was very different from all the villagers.
The villagers were uniformly dark-haired and black-eyed, short, stocky solid people, and he must have seemed a very strange figure indeed, a tall blond man appearing half-dead out of the northern woods without explanation or even a backstory to give.
The truth was, he had no idea what to tell them, so he said that he had lost his memories and the only thing he could remember was waking up in the forest.
It was better than trying to explain he had been betrayed by the gods and had traveled back in time from the future. Somehow, he felt that probably wouldn’t go down well.
Zorea visited the hut where he’d been lodged often at first, but once he got his strength back, she seemed to sense he wanted privacy and came less often. She helped him to get whatever he needed—if they had it in the village.
She showed him where there was a deep well with a winch and a bucket not far from his little house, and he was permitted to go there and haul water for drinking and washing. Though the soldiers kept an eye on him, there was no sense he was a prisoner.
Zorea brought him his food—three meals a day, mostly root vegetables, goat’s meat, butter, cheese, and milk, and barley grains. It was not particularly inspiring food, but it was the best the mountains had to offer in winter, and Saul was grateful for it.
The only other person he’d seen who was not dark and stocky like the other mountain people was Captain Jerryl, the soldier who had been in charge of the Raptor squad. The captain visited a few times, but he seemed very much occupied, and when he found that Saul had little enough to say for himself and would need to be left to recover for some time, Captain Jerryl left Saul to get on with it.
So, Saul did just that.
The winter passed, and slowly but surely spring drew near. Come rain, snow, or sun, he made his main activity the hauling of water to his house for bathing. The mountain folks first found this highly amusing, but they soon got used to it. Saul had a wooden bathing tub in his house, and he filled this from the well twice a day, bathed, and then emptied it again.
The villagers thought he was bathing in cold water twice per day since the small amount of firewood allotted to him couldn’t heat that much water. Zorea was disapproving of this apparent cold water washing, but she did not interfere.
Meanwhile, in the privacy of his little hut, Saul was experimenting with magic.
He found that Generate Heat, a Tier 1 iteration of the School of Fire, could be used to heat the bathing water relatively quickly. He was glad of his privacy, for it would not have done for the villagers to see how he plunged his hands into the water, held them there for ten minutes or so, and then pulled his dripping hands and forearms from the water, leaving it steaming and rich with heat.
He took a great deal of pleasure in these baths and, over time, with the steady diet and the twice daily hauling of water, he regained some of his strength.
There was another advantage to all this. As well as being pleasant, and a good source of physical exercise, Saul gained small rewards of Experience Points and Arcane Dust for the continual use of the low-level magic.
The rewards were not large, and they were variable. Sometimes, he would be rewarded with 5 Gold XP and 5 Arcane Dust, sometimes 10 or even 15, and sometimes none at all.
There seemed no particular logic to it, and he would not have wanted to rely on using such low-level spells to gain enough XP and Arcane Dust for a level up.
However, since he could hardly be seen testing out his combat iterations of the School of Fire within the village, he contented himself with heating water for his bath daily.
He grew stronger and, eventually, as spring was lengthening the days toward the short mountain summer, he found that he had gathered enough resources to return to the Workshop and gain Level 3 and unlock the next spell in the sequence—the School of Stone.
This opened some new options.
Now, when he selected View Available Spell Details, he was presented with the options from the School of Stone:
Spells available:
School of Stone: Tier 1
Split Stone (Combat: Obstacle breaker)
Slingshot (Stealth Diversion, Only when Undetected)
Stoneskin (Combat: Increase Attack Resistance)
Spells available:
School of Stone: Tier 2:
Rock Troll (Combat: Summoned Creature)
Catapult (Combat: Ranged Attack)
Rockfall (Combat: Area of Attack)
He was very keen to try some of these, but there was no way he could do so without attracting undue attention, and he did not want to show off his magic just yet.
Though Captain Jerryl was not about much, and the villagers and soldiers he encountered were all friendly enough, Saul was still being kept under fairly close guard. There was a strong complement of soldiers in the village—not only the Raptor Riders, but also a company of well-equipped foot soldiers with halberds, shields, chainmail and plate armor, and shortswords at their sides.
Though a small force, these men all appeared to be hardened veterans, and Saul wondered what was going on in this village, and whether it might have a connection to the warlocks.
But, for now, he simply watched and waited, not knowing yet who to trust. Time passed, and he waited for an opportunity to test his combat spells.