I woke up. Not knowing where I was I looked around, and my eyes saw. Fear. Fear in the form of a man. Just by being near him I could tell, he was dangerous.

I looked at mom hoping for her to say it was all going to be fine, that I would be safe, but she kept glancing between the man and me with a grim look. Dad was standing in front of us , arm out to protect us. But everyone could see him shaking. He drew his short sword, and said some encouraging words. I blink.

A body hits the floor as a sword thuds on the grass, a warm sticky liquid covers my face. I put my hand up to the drops dripping down my face. I blink. Mom’s on the dirt, she says she loves me? This has to be a bad dream. I tell myself. I squeeze my eyes shut desperately.

———————

Alice woke up a few hours after her near death experience, she looked perfectly fine, but she did feel a bit dehydrated and weak though. Taking the opportunity to practice her magic, she slowly gathered her mana and pulled all the water near her into a ball. When she was done she had a partly cloudy blue-brown ball of water. If she remembered correctly the blue was from the mana in it while the brown stuff was impurities in the air. So even if brown water doesn’t seem drinkable it should still be safe. Alice tried to have a mouthful of it float into her mouth, it went really well if not for the main ball falling onto the ground.

Noting that she needed to practice a lot more, she stood up and continued walking to the closest rest site. On the way there she came across a moose, it just seemed to look at her suspiciously before distancing itself.

Alice eventually got close enough to see the rest site after a considerable time walking, she left sometime in the morning and it was now just a bit before noon so that meant about 5 hours of walking and maybe an hour of almost dying.

The rest site consisted of a well used fire pit which was just a circle of stones with ash and charcoal in it, a first aid kit strung up in a tree, and a sleeping bag hung up on a different tree. Alice started by getting the first aid kit and sleeping bag to a more comfortable place since they were too high for her. She climbed up the trees and dropped the sleeping bag after which she scaled the second tree but was careful to carry the first aid kit down carefully so that she didn’t break anything inside it.

Alice did think of using the first aid kit on the scrapes she had gotten from being bad at climbing up trees but decided against it. She decided to sharpen the one tool in her arsenal; magic. The first step would be to get her mana and give it an attribute, life would probably be good but it would work best if she understood how living things naturally heal wounds and since she had no idea about any of this it could at best do barely anything or cause any number of abnormalities.

Instead using a broader attribute would work better since if you simply use ‘healing’ magic needs no understanding of how the healing is actually done. So after getting her healing mana gathered, Alice poured the mana into her scrapes and after using around a quarter of her total capacity.

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Maybe I should learn how to use proper healing spells, Alice thought after wasting so much of her mana.

Now that Alice had her shelter, water and food sorted out, she wondered what came after surviving beasts and monsters. Of course, killing or at least confronting her parents murderer came first, no doubt about it, but that was a long term goal. What would she do in the immediate future? Well, getting stronger would help with whatever she decided to do so that would be a sub-goal of hers.

Thinking about it though, Alice was in this forest because it was the closest source of food, water and shelter. Now that her immediate survival was guaranteed, heading for civilisation would be her next target.

If she remembered correctly, North of the village was the closest town and following the road up would eventually get you to a city, unfortunately she couldn’t remember the names. East of the northern road was a river running parallel to the road, flowing south. And west of the road was the forest she was currently in, also known as The Demonic Forest due to the unnatural abundance of monsters in and around its centre. If you continued west from the village, you would pass straight through the heart of The Demonic Forest (About a month long walk) and out to the other side, where there was the capital city Cadreath.

Taking this information into account, heading for Cadreath would be the quickest but most dangerous choice, but when considering that the only other options were going around the edge of the forest, which would take way too long and leave her vulnerable to any people who might be hostile, or to pass through the ruined town on her way to the hopefully not ruined city, all with limited access to food and shelter; The Demonic Forest was the better option. However, that didn’t mean it was safe, which is why Alice was going to stay near the edge of the forest to gain some basic combat proficiency, and then move deeper in bit by bit. This would turn the one month journey into three, but was the best choice.

With her future plans decided, to set up her sleeping area. This just amounted to setting up the sleeping bag away from the fire pit and under a tree, and making a barrier of thick sharp-ish branches.

From there she read the incomplete textbook her mom had been making. It was split into many, many sections. It was to the point where it felt like it had too many pages for its thickness. The sections were: Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Geography, Math, Mana & Magic and what seemed like a diary of sorts at the back. The sections were then marked with whether they were useful in day to day life (Mana & Magic), simply good things to know about (Biology, Chemistry and Physics), or completely useless past the basics (Maths and Geography).

Alice read the first page of the Mana & Magic section. It read:

This section is about the mechanics and applications of Mana and Magic in a wide range of situations.

Areas of assumed knowledge (Alice I know these are fancy words, but it just means you should read these first) are: Motion and movement of particles ( Chapter 1 of both physics and chemistry) , Chemical composition of common molecules (Appendix of chemistry and found sparsely within both chemistry and biology), Simple chemical reactions ( Redox reactions and Displacement reactions: Chapters 3 and 5 respectively).

Ignoring the warning to read other sections first Alice continued reading. She could just barely follow along with what she had read but she knew she would barely remember it when she woke up. So Alice read through all the sections she was told to and looked for the explanation of any terms she couldn’t find.