In bed that night, I laid awake, staring at the ceiling with the gentle but painfully annoying feeling that I had forgotten something important. I spent probably a good 30 minutes trying to figure out what I had possibly forgotten before it hit me.

“The quest!” Duh, how could I have forgotten that? I laughed at myself just a little. It was like back on earth, I hadn’t been able to go a day without forgetting something. Car keys? Phone? Wallet? Constantly misplaced. That and my brain deciding to take me on tangents during work to the point that I would stop paying attention to what people were saying had been hell back in my old life. You wouldn’t think it would be that bad, really, but little events like forgetting to grab groceries or that my keys were still in my desk after the doors to the office had been locked had been far too regular of occurrences, and had made every day anxious and frustrating beyond belief.

But that was then, and this was now. And right now, I have a quest log to look at. “The more I live here, the more like a game this turns into.”

I let my Paradigm Shift Device take the form of a tablet once again, and moved over to the section labeled Quests. It had three subtabs, ‘In Progress’ , 'Ready to be turned in’ and ‘Completed’ that I could choose from. I quickly chose ‘Ready to be turned in’ and took a look at the screen.

Quests

* Ready to be turned in

* Going on a wolf hunt - You caught a big one! A direwolf was threatening Maugdlin Village. You were able to kill it before it formed a pack.

* Rewards: 200 Fate points, Ability Core

* Turn in? Yes / No

I quickly tapped yes, and yelped in surprise as a small, colorless round orb roughly the size of a golf ball landed in my lap. I held it in my hands and rolled it about, feeling the incredible smoothness of it. It glided almost frictionlessly across my palm, and was actually quite difficult to hold between my fingers, as there was no real texture my fingers could squeeze. If I exerted even a tiny bit of force, it would slip from my hands like it was covered in grease.

I put the orb, which I was sure was the Ability Core to the side for a brief moment, and checked my new total fate points as well, finding them to have gone up just a bit more than 200. Previously, the points had totalled 677, but they were reading 881 now. “Where did the extra four come from?” I wondered quietly, but the PSD offered no answers, and I certainly wasn’t going to spend the fate points required to ask the goddess that question. I could test out theories on that on my own later.

Next, I scanned the orb with the device, wanting to be sure it was what I thought it was.

Ability Core - Untyped - A core holding the potential for any kind of ability. Requires a focus core to be used. There is no way to know what kind of power will be granted.

Okay… I stared at the core in wonder. So this was the path to power, the way to get stronger. And the information from the PSD gave me a few hints as well. If there were untyped cores, then there must be typed cores as well. Cores that would give either specific powers, or perhaps one of a set? Was it worth using this core here, now, or should I wait and try to create a powerset that I liked.

I could hazard a guess that the focus core you had probably defined your ability set as a whole. Someone with the sword focus would get skills that made them better with a sword, things like that. My focus was ‘barrier’ which sounded very defensive. If there were typed ability cores available, I might be able to force the abilities I received into a direction that would give me more offensive skills, and then I wouldn’t need to rely so heavily on Ophelia.

Frankly, I just didn’t know enough. Which was starting to become far too common a refrain in my own head. I NEEDED to get an education on this world, more than just asking Ophelia about whatever random topics popped into my mind.

“You know what, fuck it. I can’t go wrong with another barrier ability after all.” I gently lifted the orb up off the mattress, cupped in one of my hands, and squeezed my fingers lightly around it. I could feel how to use it when I touched it. The mana channels, meridians, that had been carved into my body seemed to almost connect to the orb, and I pushed some mana through, into the orb. It lit up with a gentle white light, and began to dissolve, seemingly disappearing. But I could feel it moving through my meridians.

It was painful, the channels burned through my body were lighting up and shifting with the new addition to them, but the sphere was far less painful than the focus core, and I could handle it relatively easily. It wasn’t even as painful as the wolf’s attacks earlier that day.

When it ended, I could feel what the new ability was and how to use it, but I checked my PSD anyways, just to be sure.

[Mana Barrier]

* [Conjuration]

* [Force] [Barrier]

* Casting Time: None

* Cooldown: 10 seconds

* Mana Cost: Medium, Channeled

* Creates a hexagonal barrier made of force. The barrier stops anything from passing through. Mana must be constantly channeled into the barrier, or the barrier will fall. Additional Mana is expended when anything tries to breach the barrier, relative to the force of breach attempt. A larger barrier requires a larger initial investment of mana.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” I whisper-shouted in excitement. This was proper barrier magic, a plane of force that could stop as many attacks as my mana pool could handle. I could tell just from the shape of the ability in my mind that it was far less efficient with mana on an attack for attack basis in most cases, but with this ability, I could easily stop simultaneous attacks at once, or simply wall of a section of enemies. It seemed to have a range of about 30 feet, from what I could feel, but I would have to test that more.

Either way, it was a perfect counterpart to Shattering Barrier, which was an excellent tool to stop single attacks, and it felt like a wonderful addition to my repertoire. Even if the spell was a bit mana hungry.

I gave it a test cast, and the spell formed an almost invisible plane of force in the shape of a hexagon. The ‘standard’ size seemed to be about 6 feet in diameter, and half an inch thick. It took a small but noticeable chunk of mana to create it, and as I held it in place, I could feel my mana leaving my body faster than it came back in. I pressed a hand to the barrier, and it shimmered into visibility. The harder I pushed, the faster my mana drained. But the drain wasn’t particularly fast. Even when I kicked it, my mana hardly drained at all. It seemed the standard flow was up to the task of my own weak strikes. If I had to guess, I could hold the barrier for about 10 minutes as long as nothing was actively attacking it.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I let the magic fade, and could once again feel the ability slip from my grasp. Some of my mana channels seemed to be emptied of power, and I couldn’t force them to fill up again. While they were empty, the spell was out of my grasp, I couldn’t recast it. But once 10 seconds had passed, the meridians re-opened, and I could once more use the ability.

“So the cooldown isn’t arbitrary. Pushing the mana through the pathways does something to them, and the cooldown is actually how long it takes for the pathways to heal themselves, or refill, or whatever that is.”

That night, I played around with the ability a bit more, getting a good feel for it. I could cast it in any orientation, and even stand on top of it. I even managed to jump and cast it under my feet, making it look like I was levitating. The greatest weakness of the ability was that once the barrier was in place, it wasn’t moving anywhere. If I wanted it somewhere else, I had to dismiss it and wait for the cooldown to end. I also couldn’t use more than one at a time, so the placement had to be correct, or the ability was gone until my pathways were ready once more.

Still, it was an excellent addition, and covered a huge weakness of shattering barrier, the ability to block multiple attacks at the same time, especially weak ones. I had been quite afraid that someone would simply pepper my barriers with weak, multitudinous attacks until my mana was drained, but mana barrier would eat that kind of attack without a second thought.

Happy with my new power, I went to sleep that night feeling curious about the next day. For the first time since my arrival, I felt optimistic. Even if I didn’t have a concrete plan for my new life, just working on gaining new abilities would be enough to make me happy for a while and I could figure out the rest along the way.

----------------------------------------

The next day, Ophelia and I collected our reward money. The village was run by a small-time lord, Baron Drusbar, who seemed less than happy to hand us the coins. 2 gold coins and 30 silver ones, counted out slowly and carefully then placed in a bag. According to Ophelia, this amount was about as much as one of the farmers would make in profit in a year or so, but was simultaneously almost nothing to a combat focused adventuring type.

The money system was a bit confusing, but if I had the amounts right, it was MMO standard. 100 copper to a silver, 100 silver to a gold. Which meant we had about 23,000 copper coins. You could rent a house in the village and feed a family for roughly 30 copper a day, which meant this amount of money could let us live in this village for almost a year and a half, albeit without any extra conveniences. Not too shabby for a day’s work.

Once we had the money, we visited a couple of different shops around town. Since spring was here, travel was beginning to open up. Originally, our plan had been to carefully pick our spending and travel north by foot, and the shops definitely sold the provisions for it. But wagons were beginning to travel as well. Instead of spending weeks walking, we decided to just hire a carriage to take us north, as Ophelia’s home was only a day’s walk from the city itself.

That cost us a whopping 60 silver coins, which I complained about as we continued shopping.

“60 silver? Seriously?” I groaned, thinking about how much food that could have purchased. Or books, maybe I could have bought a book!

“It’s worth the expense, we talked about this. It will save us over a week of walking.”

“But 60? Why do they need so much for a quick trip?” I asked, looking over my shoulder to glare daggers at the building housing the caravan’s shopfront.

“The money goes towards guards for the caravan, food for everyone aboard, food for the horses, all kinds of things. Traveling is expensive.” She was starting to get annoyed with me again, I could tell.

“Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. I just never held a year's worth of living expenses in my hand before. Giving it up so fast just hurts.” I let out a sigh, feeling defeated. “My robes have nearly finished repairing themselves after that fight with the wolf, but my back and chest still have pretty fresh wounds. Are there things like healing potions here?”

She nodded, looking surprised. “Did you not have those in your world?”

“Nah. We had something called medical science. They could do some pretty amazing things, but we always had to wait for injuries to heal. It could take weeks. Healing potions were something only in fantasy for us.”

She changed direction as we spoke, leading us into the more commercial area of town. Stalls manned by men and women alike lined the street, hawking their wares to anyone who passed by. Most of it was daily goods, things like bread, dried meat, and even cookware. A few bored looking merchants looked up as we passed, and tried to sell us coats, rugs, and one even tried to get us to purchase a carpet for an ungodly price.

“High quality, hand made! No magic used, so you know it’s safe! Just 5 gold!” I quickly pulled my eyes away, trying to keep my mouth from hitting the floor. I knew carpets had taken weeks or even months to make before mass production, but damn, that price was just enormous.

Once we had passed, I glanced at Ophelia. “Why did he say it was ‘safe’?”

“In the smaller villages, there is this idea that people in the big city will weave spells into items made with magic. It's not… untrue, necessarily, as enchanted items do exist. But nobody would bother selling trapped or magical items in a place like this. There just isn’t enough money here to make it worth it.”

I frowned but shrugged. We eventually made it to the alchemists shop, a small building that looked almost exactly like you would expect on the inside. Dried herbs and other things I didn’t recognize hung from the ceiling haphazardly, and a tall, wiry man was standing over a small cast iron cauldron, stirring slowly as he tapped out a rhythm on his leg. He made us wait while he finished his stirring, then sold us a small vial of red liquid for a full gold.

I raised an eyebrow at the price, as it was over half what we had left, but Ophelia seemed confident, so we paid, and I drank the vial. Almost immediately, relief blossomed in my body. I could feel the wounds on my back closing shut, the bandages becoming itchy as they were pushed out of the way. On my chest, the cauterized wounds which had began to look kinda nasty were healed completely, leaving just fresh pink scars in their place.

“That is insane how well that works. And it's only a gold?”

“They are impressive, but you can’t take another one for a full day. They are great for emergencies, but….” She looked at me, as if waiting for something.

And then I felt it. I slumped forward in sudden exhaustion as if all the energy had been sapped from my body. Like I had been awake and without food for over a day while doing hard labor, every part of me screamed for rest, while my stomach begged for food. “Oh, I get it…” I groaned. The healing potion accelerated natural healing to an extreme extent, rather than magically healing wounds. So it sucked out your energy reserves like a bitch.

“They are no replacement for a good healer, but it's as good as you can get in a small village like this.” She gave me a mischievous grin before taking me to a food stall. I ate my fill, then twice more until the hunger in my stomach settled.

“Should have told me first…” I grumbled, still chewing on the last bite of a meat skewer.

“True. But this was more fun!” She giggled, which might have been the first time I had heard her really laugh, ever. It was light and beautiful, and really brought home the fact that this seemingly well trained warrior had both a sense of humor and a lighter side to her.

I sighed, but then rolled my eyes and smiled. “Alright, alright, you win this round. Let's go catch that caravan before they leave with our money, yeah?”