With no more System messages to read, I open my eyes and stand, looking down at the edge of the ruined ritual circle.

Just the short while that I lay on the floor while reading has left me fully recovered, every ache and pain from the ritual gone without a trace. I as I clean up the mess, salvaging what might be useful and rolling the rest in the burned hide to drag it out of the cave, I can already feel the difference Awakening has made in my body. Every motion is faster, every object seems lighter.

While dragging the hide I think to try the active part of Arcane Body, burning mana to enhance my strength. It takes me just a moment to focus on increasing my strength before I fell a strange trickle as the back of my neck and my burden seems to vanish, the sudden increase in strength causing me to fling myself across the cave, hide still in hand. I go sprawling flat on my back. The strength fades before I can recover myself, and I can feel the roll of tiger hide increase in apparent weight gradually on top of me.

A quick check of my mana shows that I spent a whole point of mana on that brief burst of power. I know most mages start out taking about twenty-four hours to recover their mana fully, so that brief pulse cost me more than two hours of regeneration. I knew that practicing with my skills was always going to be necessary, both to increase my control and reducing their cost, but this seems a little extreme. Most general skills, at least at the first Tier, cost fractional points of mana and produce proportionally small results. Starting mages just don't have the power, stamina, or control to qualify for anything else.

Maybe it is because of all the upgrades? Is the additional power they provide overriding the inherent weaknesses of first tier skills? I need to do some testing to see just what my new limits are.

I decide to spend the next two tendays doing that very necessary testing, venturing out into the woods only for foraging food and fire wood, eating what I preserved of the tigers meat and the edible tubers I find growing on the banks of the creek. I swear the mana in the air of this place makes the plants grow back as fast as I harvest them. Each day I follow a routine I worked out in the first few days, spending each morning pushing my body to its limits, mostly by repeatedly moving the rocks of the cave around. I spend my mana as fast as I get it, keeping my regeneration working overtime. I discover that the exchange from mana to health also works in reverse, and use that fact to train just a little bit more.

Each night I push my mental skill, working arbitrary word problems in my head and drawing puzzles out in the dirt. I really don't have any of the tools usually used to sharpen mental skills, so I have to make do. After a couple of days I figure out that I can create new pages in my soul system, filling out a short book with notes about my time in the cave. I even transcribe the booklet containing the Awakening instructions, hoping that even if the book is lost or damaged I can carry at least that knowledge out of this cavern with me.

I spend a long time studying the rippling lights in the den, watching the mana that keeps them active move through the air, and the illusions that hide the entrances, seeing how it looks from different angles and distances. I use Arcane Mind to boost my perception, zooming in on the tiny currents and eddies of mana as the wriggle and writhe through a repeating pattern. I can feel the skill grappling with the mana in the air, trying to find patterns in the eddies and currents. Something is weird about this effect, something familiar, but no amount of mana run through Arcane Mind will reveal its secrets. I record every thing that I see, a dozen pages of notes to review later, securely saved in the system.

Every day yields small but consistent gains in experience, as well as a better understanding of my Skills. As best I can figure, both my strength and speed have more than doubled since my awakening, but not quite tripled. Actively using mana to boost myself results in an additional doubling, at a cost of about one half of a mana point per second.

Mental boosts are harder to quantify, but seem to be similar in magnitude. Repeatedly dumping my health and mana pools have also given me a good idea of their regeneration. My mana alone regenerates fully approximately every eighteen hours, my health by itself a bit more than two full days. Both of those numbers are much faster than I expected to start with. Eventually I figure out that on my Summary, the Title beside my name is not just for decoration.

Available Titles

You may only have one active at a time.

Awakened of the Deep (3)

- You regenerate (30%) faster while in the Labyrinth.

Titles are not common, and I know almost nothing about them, but this one seem quite strong. Ill take what help I can get, if only I can get home alive.

All of my efforts in the last twenty days have yielded nineteen experience points, putting me at an even one-hundred. I am so close to Tier Two, just sixteen points away. But experience has slowed to a trickle, and I am running out of Tiger meat. This whole time, I have not dared to hunt in the woods, never venturing further that line of sight from the cave.

The time has come to venture out into the dungeon, to find more food and hopefully a new method of training my skills.

I know dungeons have some method of gaining experience quickly, but the adults have always been close lipped about the details. Instead they just say it's too dangerous, and I should stay on the surface, grinding slowly through the Tiers like everyone else. Maybe there are Skill Challenges? Or more Quests? Books of secret knowledge, like the ritual instructions I found? The only way to fid out is to venture forth into the legendary dangers of the Dungeon.

I gather my gear, much lighter now that I am more or less permanently encamped in this cave, and pause at the entrance and sweep the tree line for any sign of motion. Unlike in a natural wood, I have seen no small critters moving in these trees. No squirrels in the branches, no rabbits or mice in the grasses. Even more unsettling, I can hear birds chirp from the trees, but in the two tendays I have been here I have not seen so much as a feather. On my limited forays out for food and firewood I have not seen any evidence of creatures smaller than a deer. There are deer - judging by the tracks on the banks of the creek - and most likely more tigers - judging by the the artwork on the chest in the cave - but what else lives in here I do not know. I have chosen to emerge as close to noon as possible, minimizing the chance that I run into tigers. At least on the outside they hunt in the dark, especially those that have evolved into Shade Tigers.

But who knows what strange rules apply here, cut off from the wider world. My plan is to stay close to the creek, where at least one side is guaranteed to be cat free, and try to find a deer to restock my meat supplies. If I can't find one I'll scout out a few places where I can potentially trap one. This is going to be a short outing either way, as I am aiming to return well before dark.

I keep my fathers spear ready, its heavy weight a comfort to my nervous hands. I can carry it much easier now that I have Tiered up, though it is still heavier than one meant for me would ever be. But the third Tier materials are a powerful advantage, hard enough to stand up to anything less than direct conflict with the Tiger that brought me here.

I don't make it far before I see my first deer, barely a hundred stride from the cave, with its head down to drink from the stream. It is a huge buck deer, darkly colored, with blood red antlers and hooves. Something seems off about the shape of his head, but I cannot see what it is from this angle.

As soon as I see him I freeze, careful not to spook him. I had planned to use new speed to just rush any deer I saw, but the creek is between us; the ground underfoot is mud and wet rocks, not ideal for a sprint. Before I can come up with a back up plan the buck raises his head, sees me and charges. As he moves, I spot the reason for the different head shape. His eyes are set forward, like a predators, and his teeth are bared, revealing meat eating canines.

The loose footing does not seem to hinder him as he crosses the water in a few quick steps, lowering his head to point his antlers at me. I have just enough time to leap away from the water, scrambling behind a sturdy pine tree as he charges up the bank. He slams into the wood with a crunch, sending a shower of needles to the forest floor, and leaving his rack imbedded into the trunk.

With adrenaline roaring in my ears, I don't waste any time, slamming my spearpoint down into his neck while he is trapped, aiming back into torso, for his heart. But his flesh is tough, and his muscles are strong. Unlike the Tiger, this time I do not have my bodyweight behind the blow to drive it through his mana reinforced flesh. Faster than I can blink, he bunches his muscles, tearing free of the tree and trapping the spearhead in his shoulder. I cannot free the weapon from his grip. It is all I can do to hold on to the haft of the spear, one sturdy piece of wood all that separates me from a messy death, gored by an animal that should have been an herbivore.

He drives me backwards through the woods, picking up speed as he sweeps me off my feet. The ride stops abruptly as he slams me into a tree, his momentum doing what my strength could not, skewering him front to back. The but of the spear drives backwards into my ribcage with a crack, before sliding off to the side. Both of us drop like puppets with our strings cut.

I can feel the drastic loss of strength that comes from my mana bottoming out, a familiar feeling during training. Even the passive parts of my skills have deactivated, as they are fueled by the mana that must cover what my health bar cannot. When I finally recover enough to get a breath in I pull up my summary sheet to see just what the damage is.

Status Summary

Greg Brondrel, Awakened of the Deep (3).

15 Years Old; Tier 1, Level 10, 7/21 XP

Health ( 2 / 10 )* , Mana ( 0 / 10 )

General Skills (2 Slots)

1. 'Deep Arcane Body (2)'

2. 'Deep Arcane Mind (2)'

That was too close. Focusing on the asterisk next to my health bar it expands to read.

Cracked ribs, General Trauma (40 hours) - Health recovers at half speed until this debuff is removed.

Breathing hurts, each breath sending a twinge lancing up my side. I run my hands up and down both sides of my torso, but there are no bleeding wounds, or protruding ribs, so the injury seems to be only pain when I breathe. Or, as I discover when I try to stand, bend or twist my torso. The pain almost makes my give up on dragging the deer home, but I have learned that the physical changes that come from awakening sharply raised my pain tolerance. Or maybe just increased my stubbornness. So, after taking a few steps around the deer to get a feel for how much this is going to hurt, I grab an hind leg and start dragging.