Jack takes a few moments to simply feel his own body, to ensure that all his limbs are there and intact. If nothing else, his body is in one piece. To say nothing of the success or failure of his plan.
As a distraction from checking on that, he looks around him in a circle. Ahead of where he initially found himself is a river, flowing too slow to make sound but fast enough that he can see the water stretching over a rock midstream. Besides the rocky beachhead, the rest of his environs is forest, so it seems.
The large oak trees interspersed between various types Jack can’t identify create the impression in his mind like an old-growth forest, untouched by humans. The rocks forming a small beach are the only thing that looks vaguely out of place, and probably only because he doesn’t remember seeing anything like it before.
The rocks are pretty painful on his feet too, bare as they are. Luckily for Jack, the air isn’t cold enough to make his naked body feel uncomfortable. Yet.
“A- O- I- Ah- U- Ch- K- L- R-” Jack’s rather loud test of his voice is swiftly accompanied by him properly stretching his limbs. As he cracks his neck, a feeling rises in his throat, beginning like a bit of pressure. As he begins stretching his legs, it mounts to a warm heat in his chest, and by the time he would be moving on to stretching his back, the tension in his chest can no longer be suppressed. “I’M BACK, BABY!”
Unable to contain his excitement any longer, Jack check the three things that determine his plan’s success or failure. Firstly, his magical capacity. A delighted smile and mildly deranged cackle arise from the man as the sight of his low magical capacity and poor mana quality.
“Yes! Perfect! Next, next!” Jack’s pitch and tone pick up more and more fervor as the second quality of his body is ascertained. “Perfect! Absolutely no elemental affinity or divine blessings!”
What would normally be grounds to consider someone subhuman in the eyes of a magician instead brings Jack utter elation, and he’s yet to even check if his third criteria is met. Even with his immense skill from his past life, those two previous restrictions are probably good enough for his goal, and yet still, he checks his third parameter.
“Absolutely zero innate potential for storing spells… fuck~ Yes!” The third nail in the coffin that would signal the true death of any mortal being’s potential to be useful in any magical capacity, and the third and final specification of Jack’s reincarnation spell. “This body… It’s perfect… Truly… The gods must honor me…”
For minutes Jack stands still, hugging himself with both arms and tilting his head towards the clear sky, until a shiver sends him from his peculiar euphoria at last. Now holding his arms to his chest for a different reason, he summons every bit of strength he can muster, is delighted when that amount is still low, and begins casting his first spell of his new life.
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Such poor quality mana… It’s so inefficient! Perfect! Well then… heat, a little bit, constantly, just enough to warm my body to a safe level without draining my potential for combat casting later… Jack puts his hands together, then stretches an incredibly thin layer of magic over his arms by pulling his hands apart slowly. The magic film spreads over him, bringing him a level of warmth on par with a single layer of stretched cotton, despite consuming over half of his body’s magic and nullifying his magic regeneration while active.
Ignoring how uncomfortable he still kind of is, what with still being naked and all, Jack takes his first steps into the forest, mentally keeping note of the location of the river for later. After all, he’ll need water to drink, and he needs to explore the forest for food to eat, he isn’t powerful enough to simply ignore those needs anymore.
Inconveniences like that, plus his lack of clothing, and other things of that sort bug him, and probably will continue to do so, but Jack resolves to power through. After all, he’s done it, The Rainbow Mage has returned, and he’ll be able to actually enjoy his climb to the top this time.
Night falls around two hours after Jack had woken up, or perhaps arrived would be a better term, when he thinks about it. He’d managed to gather a decent amount of usable firewood, a couple of other sticks he can probably turn into useful tools, and a little bit of food in the form of a bird he shot out of the air when testing basic attack spells.
Now that the sun is gone, he’s left to make himself a fire, admittedly one of his weaker areas if the use of magic wasn’t on the table. Jack doesn’t know how to make fire using just sticks like he’d read about, or which rocks could help make a spark, but that doesn’t really matter. After ending his warming spell and feeling the bitter chill against his naked skin, he snaps in the direction of a small pile of firewood and a little ball of flame expands rapidly into a campfire.
After taking a moment to warm himself, he grabs forth one of the ‘tool’ sticks, and begins the arduous process of mentally finding a way to cook his little bit of bird meat. The feathers need to be removed… How do I cook it without burning it? Put it on the end of a stick? How will I know it’s cooked all the way through? Such worries go through his mind as he begins scratching away wood on one end of the soon-to-be spear with a stone. It doesn’t have a head anymore, so I don’t need to worry about that… What if I tie its feet together, and hang it off of this spear? That might work…
The cold sends another shiver down his spine, and he inches closer to the fire. It’s large enough now to provide decent warmth, but the few insects in the air and the chill at his back are still deeply unpleasant, to say nothing of the feeling of his bare ass on the hard ground. Still, he doesn’t regret his choice, not yet, though Jack does lament the cooking of whatever that warrior girl’s name was in his past life. Jaine, I think? Sorry I never appreciated your cooking more.
Eventually, he manages to get the poorly defeathered bird to dangle off of his makeshift spear enough to hold it over the fire without outright burning it. Magic probably could’ve helped cook his food, but even with the taxing warmth spell removed, between that, the spell used to kill the bird, and the spell used to light the fire, and the spell used to defeather the bird, he’s only got about a quarter of his magic left, and the rate it is replenishing is very, very slow.
“Should I sleep or not… I don’t want to get attacked by a wolf or something in my sleep…” Jack tosses another piece of wood onto the fire, checks the status of his bird, then continues speaking to himself. “I think I can go a day or two without sleeping, currently. I’ll be fine… Hopef-”
Jack stops all his thoughts for a moment at the sound of two heavy, stomping thuds ahead of him. Looking up over the fire, he sees two pinpricks of reflected light just a few feet outside the edge of the firelight’s illumination. Straining his ears, he can just barely make out heavy breathing over the cackling flames.
A bead of sweat begins slipping down the side of his face, and Jack reaches his hands for two different objects. The first is the second crude spear he made, and the second is one of the alight sticks from the fire. Then the beast charges.