Alice really needed to find a safe way to experiment with magic, preferably quickly. She could see the potential of chanted magic now, though it seemed like safety took a back seat to effectiveness.

Somehow her practice had taken her to an hour or so after noon, which she of course blamed on the meditation, but that also meant lunchtime. No matter how not-hungry she found herself, she thought it would still be a good idea to eat. It would probably be good to actually sort out her skills and stat points as well, since with her comparatively high level she wouldn’t be getting many more for a while.

That also reminded her, why didn’t she get some kind of earth magic skill! She’d done something new that pushed her limits. There was also the stupid thing that had probably been bad for her, so there should have been an achievement as well. Though maybe trying and failing shouldn’t be rewarded? She would probably get the skill if she succeeded at what she was trying to do. Which would mean more time spent on practice, though it would only be a matter of time at this rate.

Name:

Alice

Level:

13

Race:

Human(age:10)

Vitality:

244

Endurance:

244

Speed:

244

Strength:

244

Wisdom:

244

Total stat points:

4096

Passive Skills:

[Navigation:Lvl 4], [Survival Skills (Forest): Lvl 6, [General Magic Proficiency: Lvl 4],[Fire Magic Proficiency Lvl 4], [Language Proficiency (Common): Lvl 5]

Active Skills:

[Basic Identification: Lvl 2], [Eye of Fate: Lvl 1], [Language Proficiency(Goblin): Lvl 5]

Divine Skills:

[Protection of Fate], [Fate Vision (Minor)], [Deus Ex Machina], [Flames of Vengeance], [Protection of The System], [Artificial Active Skills], [Timeless Skills]

Achievements:

[Born Skeptic], [Accident Prone], [Unlucky], [Survivalist], [Lucky], [Melting Pot], [Divine Love], [Ambitious Spell Caster], [Masterful Healer]

Quite strangely it seemed that her stats were spread evenly by default now. No longer was there an option to assign them individually, though it wasn’t too important to her since she probably would have done it this way anyway.

Just in case, she tried to re-allocate her stats to be more speed focused, finding that it did still work, just at a glacial pace. It took minutes at this point for her speed to tick up by one.

That was good to know but Alice wasn’t sure how important it would be long term She was going to be assigning most of them to skills after all. She would have to be careful though, as far as she knew there was no way to get back what she put into skills.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Checking the options Alice found them exactly the same as they were before: Elevation, combination and upgrading. Wanting to see what an elevated skill would look like, she thought of elevating her [Fire Magic Proficiency Lvl 4] spending 8 stat points on it and moving it to her active skills section. Oddly enough it was shown as level 1, while not actually changing the number of her “Total stat points”.

Her new skill being level 1 wasn’t too surprising since the last skill she got through [Artificial Active Skills] was also level 1, though part of her had hoped it was something to do with using a divine skill for it instead of that just being the way things were.

Using the skill created a neat ball of fire she could move around at will, using 27% for the initial creation and a constant drain of 3 every few seconds. She found manipulating its shape quite easy, though not nearly as well as she could her own mana. She could make as many fireballs as she wanted, but never larger than her head. They also got incredibly hard to control after 3, even 2 was pushing it. On the bright side, this wasn’t a ball of aspected mana, it was pure, actual fire.

Though it felt like cheating, a direct conversion of mana to fire like this was sadly beyond her capabilities, but knowing it was possible was great motivation. Eventually she’d be able to do that, all by herself. Though that dream was a long way away.

Next up was leveling the skill up. It seemed each level added to it made the max size of the ball larger, but did nothing for her control or the cost. She pushed it up to 5 as a good resting point, spending another 60 stat points on it.

Somehow that still left her total stat points unchanged. Something fishy was going on here, but she just wasn’t sure what.

Eh. She’d find out eventually.

Something more interesting to her though, was what a combination of [Flames of Vengeance] and [Fire Magic Proficiency] would look like. She also wanted to get the earth magic skill soon, though she wouldn’t elevate it to see if there was some benefit to delaying.

With two new items added to her list she went for a quick lunch break. The walk was quick and uneventful, though she did notice some obvious signs of a conflict: blood, gouged bark, and trampled earth mainly.

While this was quite rare - this being the first time a while she had seen something like this- it really should have been more common in all honesty. Though she had to admit her being comatose for so much of that time probably affected her perception of the matter. That aside, there was absolutely nothing of note.

Until she got to her hut. The wards were fine, but some of her screer corpse was gone! It probably had something to do with her offering. Though it took quite some time for that to work if if it was the case. It could also be theft of some kind. Unlikely but still possible.

Not seeing an immediate solution, she decided to test her theories first. She prepared another portion of screer, then another, noting the scaled skins she had before cooking them both.

Normally she would do this outside, but with her new skill she thought it would be fine. She did make sure to start as small as she could. Only now realizing that since the largest ball she could make still cost 27 mana despite all the level ups, that meant anything smaller was cheaper! The level 1 size of her head was now way cheaper. How much? Cheap enough that there was barely a cost! About 9 mana now.

Though it still produced smoke for some reason. That annoyed her enough that she had to the door to increase airflow. As soon she had made enough screer for two, she said another prayer before eating her own. As before, the second portion lay there untouched when she left.

Before long Alice had let her thoughts fade away as she thought of how to get her earth magic skill. It was likely that she just needed to successfully turn dirt into stone, which seemed like something she was on the cusp of being able to do. As she approached her familiar clearing though, Alice found something she hadn’t seen in much too long: Animal tracks. Normally there was no sign of any life, but either the animals were becoming more reckless, or they were becoming more common.

Looking at the tracks Alice found they were some combination of hoofed and pawed creature, implying some sort of chase. Thankfully the hunter wasn’t a wolf, and the prey didn’t look to be something she’d seen before. Compared to the size of its hooves, the depth of the prints suggested the creature was impossibly light, while the pawed creature seemed unusually heavy. Not wanting to get involved, Alice ignored the interesting trail and continued on her way.

It wasn’t working. For some reason completely unknown to her, dirt stayed dirt. She knew for a fact it was possible, and she knew she should be able to do it, but there was just something missing. Alice contemplated asking for help, or even just elevating her [General Magic Proficiency] skill just so she could be done with it.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t. And there was one reason for that: She didn’t want to, she had to do this for herself.

With that out of the way, she got back to figuring out how to break the laws of reality. The first time she’d gathered earth mana and used it to form a spear of dirt before changing the aspecting to stone. When whatever force was behind magic did it, it seemed like mana went in but had no effect on the dirt, before that mana aspected to stone and the dirt started transforming. The only difference in methodology was that Alice’s mana could be seen in the dirt.

Not really sure how to do that, Alice poured mana into the ground with her mana sense active. She quickly noticed that her mana appeared differently from what was already in the earth. It seemed hers was a lot more even and uniform than it should have been. It felt like comparing a drawing to reality. No matter how similar it looked, it would always look kind of… flat. Not normally at least. Maybe that was it? Get her mana to exactly mirror what was already there?

Alice tried that and saw that while she could get it more detailed and closer to ‘natural earth’, there was simply too much detail to match. Not to mention that there was more than just earth mana in there.

From a simple count there were at least 10 different aspects, with some of them being different enough to tell apart, but similar enough that she struggled to find how they were different. Earth and dirt were apparently different forms of mana. There were even differences based on water content! Alice was all for trying to improve no matter the difficulty, but that level of detail was just ridiculous. That would be like a sculptor adding every single pore and hair on a life-sized replica! Nowhere close to impossible, but it still took decades to get to such a level of skill.

Though that analogy got Alice thinking, maybe the issue wasn’t how much detail there was to add, but how she went about adding it?

Maybe that was how she could finally make this work?