The next two days were much the same for Dylan.

In the morning, he’d warm up by jogging to the training facility and then run through a few basic exercises while holding as much energy as he felt he could handle. After that, he’d spend time experimenting with the limits of both his new and old cards.

In the afternoon, he’d spend an hour practicing with a mana gauntlet before joining Alyssa in helping the other newly awakened spar in the ring.

And in the evening, he’d sit for several hours meditating with a mana crystal.

Though the time was short, he felt like he was making a lot of progress.

On the first day, his biggest goal was to get a basic understanding of the new additions to his collection.

The Golden Domeberries card worked exactly as he’d imagined. When he played it, three ripe berries appeared in the air before him. They hovered for about a second before being carried by gravity into the hand he hastily positioned below.

After eating one, he found it tasted the same as the berries he’d had the night before. It released the same vital energy, and after making a quick cut on his skin, he felt the same tingling itch that typically accompanied accelerated healing.

They may not be super useful in a heated battle, he thought, but they can still play a role in extended conflicts. I’ll only need to find a quick moment to pop one in my mouth.

The tests with the Shadow Cloak and Phantom Shadow Squirrel cards were also relatively simple.

When Dylan targeted something with the spell, shadows would cover it, and as long as he continued to maintain the card’s channel, those shadows would remain. Better, if what they were attached to moved, they would follow, clinging tightly according to his will.

It wasn’t perfect. The effect was heavily dependent on the environment. Darker areas complemented the card’s ability to hide something, while brighter places made the card essentially worthless.

But as he was beginning to wonder whether or not the spell would actually be useful to him outside of a few specific circumstances, he discovered a surprising new application for the card that he hadn’t anticipated.

Through his tests, Dylan found that the smaller the area he targeted, the thicker the shadows became, and when he tried crouching to make himself as compact as possible, the resulting darkness reached a level that began to interfere with his vision. It wasn’t by much; it simply reminded him of standing in an unlit room, but it sparked something in his mind.

Grasping at the idea, he called Lucas over to the training mannequins to help with an experiment. He wanted the Ranger to use his bow to shoot at the targets while he tried to cloud the boy’s sight. When he played the card, he focused his mind on targeting the boy’s eyes and nothing else. And it worked.

A film of concentrated shadows shrouded the top half of Lucas’s face. The boy took longer to release each arrow, and his accuracy decreased.

It didn’t blind him, but it definitely affected his perception. In addition to the shadows making everything in the Ranger’s field of view murkier, they effectively cut off all of his peripheral vision. What he was able to see bled together, blurred by the matte darkness overcasting everything before him.

When Dylan listened to Lucas describe the experience, he was surprised at how effectively Shadow Cloak functioned as a debuff, especially considering how it was a relatively cheap spell to use. A summoning cost of one mana, an activation cost of one energy, and a maintenance cost of one mana per turn. He could continue to channel the card for much longer than the harder control method offered by Immobilize.

He considered that the tactic may not work as well against beings with keener senses, but as his magic power increased, Dylan assumed that the depth of the shadows the card could create would as well. The Phantom Shadow Squirrel’s skill description had essentially mentioned as much, and while the spell and the skill were different, they’d come from the same source and shared similar functions. He felt confident in his guess.

And as for the squirrel itself, when Dylan tested it, he discovered that it was small, fast, and proficient in hiding. Just as he’d known it would be. Its version of Shadow Cloak was even better at concealment than the card had been. As long there was a trace of shadow somewhere, the phantom could melt into it, the mist composing the creature’s body seeming to disperse in the air.

When he asked for help testing the ability, Risha found the squirrel in an instant, but a younger member of the guard who was only a few years out of the Tutorial said he could only see a vague outline after looking closely.

Once again, Dylan was pleasantly surprised. Even though it would be difficult to find practical uses for the phantom until he had more ways to exploit its stealth, he was hopeful that it would be a promising platform to build from. The right cards or the right skills could turn the squirrel into a spy or an assassin, and the potential application for Shadow Cloak as a keyword during future card creation offered even more possibilities.

But as he continued to work with it, Dylan found himself drawn to another of the squirrel’s advantages. It was cute. Watching it while he trained made him nostalgic for the simpler times he and his family had spent on short excursions into the forest. If it had a more independent mind and a longer summoning duration, he wouldn’t mind calling it out just as a way to release his stress.

Maybe I can get a complete body to make a new card out of. His thoughts rifled through what was left in the basement, but couldn’t find one of the squirrels. Forget it, he comforted himself. Fresher would be better. Besides, there are more important things to spend Blank Cards on at the moment.

The pull of a new turn brought Dylan back to his tests. When he drew a Phantom Rally, he decided to shift his focus to his archers. Boosting the squirrel’s ability to remain hidden wouldn’t be a particularly useful test.

He had something more important to learn. He still needed to know the exact effect of using Phantom Rally’s enhancement on an archer that had already charged its arrow, and after trying it a few times, he came to a conclusion. The salvage effect could immediately increase the power of a held shot by about fifty percent, but for the strength to fully double, the phantom would need to continue charging the arrow for an additional two to three seconds.

To Dylan, that meant that it might be possible to boost the power of his archers’ shots even further than what he’d seen the other day against Risha. It all depended on whether their bodies could handle the increased power of a fourth Phantom Rally for the brief moments between him discarding the card and them loosing their arrows.

He decided to do the most basic test he could think of to determine whether or not the idea was plausible. When he’d been in the ring with Risha, the archer had seemed more stable before it’d started to charge its shot. Only when it had begun to condense its arrow had it really begun to break apart.

So, the test he’d come up with was to simply have an archer stand around doing nothing while he continued to pump up its power. If it could handle four Phantom Rallies without immediately falling apart, then maybe one could charge and hold an arrow with three empowerments and then release it after receiving the immediate, partial effect of the fourth.

But unfortunately, the experiment did not go well.

The moment he discarded the fourth copy of Phantom Rally, the archer in front of him didn’t simply break apart like he’d thought it might. It exploded.

Mist and light erupted in a violent geyser from where the phantom had just been standing. The ground trembled, but before Dylan could properly feel it, a rapidly expanding cloud of glittering mist swept him clear into the air. The wave of power flung him across the training facility on its current, and when he touched the ground again, he bounced and tumbled nearly ten yards before coming to lie face down, coated old dirt and fresh wounds.

Ears ringing, blood running from the corners of his mouth, Dylan coughed and tried to sit up. But he couldn’t. Everything hurt and nothing seemed to work quite right.

Fuck, he thought. I think I came close to biting off my tongue.

It wasn’t until he felt a warm stream of energy kickstart and boost the regenerative effect of his resilience that he finally began to feel better.

Is someone helping me?

A rough hand flipped him over, and he was greeted by the sight of a crowd of people looking down at him. He couldn’t hear anything, and struggled to read their moving lips before Risha waved most of them away.

The only other person remaining was a slightly heavyset boy who’d closed his eyes in concentration. At some point, his hand had found its way to Dylan’s forehead and had begun glowing with a gentle light.

Owen…Weston? I think? So, he’s got a healing class now.

When Dylan was able to sit up under his own power, it was nearly twenty minutes later. He got an earful from Risha about being reckless and just nodded along and apologized. He really hadn’t considered the possibility of the archer exploding like it was an oversized version of one of its own overcharged arrows. He vowed to both Risha and himself to be more careful in the future.

Then he finally had a chance to talk with Owen. He thanked him for the healing, and then he tried to convince the boy to try to help him make a new card. It was all he could think about in the last few minutes of his convalescence. It took a few minutes, but eventually he managed to get the healer intrigued at the possibilities his cards could offer.

After Dylan had a chance to meditate to help restore some of his resilience, the two made a trip to the basement full of materials, and when they returned to the training grounds, the catalog held another new card.

The brand on its front depicted a pair of fern fronds entwining each other.

[Name: Verdant Dressing]

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

[Type: Spell]

[Summoning Cost: 2 Mana]

[Activation Cost: 2 Energy]

[Effect: Wraps a target in the fronds of an ethereal sangverve fern. Lasts 0.5 minutes. Speed the target’s physical regeneration.]

He’d finally managed to make a true healing card.

He’d have preferred it to have a more comprehensive effect, providing either a burst of instant healing in addition to the lingering regenerative boost or the ability to restore his target’s resilience in addition to helping speed physical regeneration. But even if the card wasn’t everything he’d wanted, it was a massive step forward.

When he checked the card’s detailed view, he found that it shared the same duration calculation with Giant Web, but the duration was its only listed scaling. He assumed that the card’s healing effect increased with his magic power, but until he could find a chance to test it, everything was just speculation.

The first time he played the card, he targeted himself. After receiving Owen’s extended treatment in the immediate aftermath of his mishap with Phantom Rally, spending time meditating, and getting an additional burst of healing to aid with card creation, Dylan’s body had mostly recovered. All that remained were a few smaller cuts and scrapes that his resilience and the energy Owen had provided had left alone in favor of prioritizing his more serious injuries.

When the card dissipated, a pair of transparent, pale-green fronds grew out from the vanishing motes of golden light. Feeling his connection to them, he directed the apparitions to heal him.

The fronds grew longer, reaching out to wind around and tightly plaster themselves against his body. They seemed to have no physical form, phasing directly through his clothes, and as they graced his skin, warm energy spread through him. But that energy was the only thing he felt from the fronds. Despite how the ghostly plants had encircled him, it was almost as if they weren’t there. There was no physical sensation or restriction to his movements.

Dylan raised his bare arm and found the fronds painted on him like a tattoo, and under their care, a small bruise slowly began to fade before his eyes.

Good, he thought. It didn’t have the most profound healing effect, but the card was practical enough to be considered a success.

Satisfied, he took a break to eat and then found Risha. He needed help picking a test site for Collapsing Earth. The training facility was starting to fill up, and he didn’t want to inconvenience anyone with the wide area of the spell or with the potential disruption its effect might cause.

When she heard the card’s details, the woman took him to the burnt farmland bordering the complex. Because there hadn’t been time to clear much of it yet, and because of the unfortunate fact that some of it was now ownerless, messing with the earth there wouldn’t bother anybody.

The two stood by and watched as Dylan played the card for the first time.

The nearly ten-foot-tall shadow of a clay bear appeared and reared back to slam its front paws into the ground. The phantom was made of very thin mist, and as its blow connected with the earth, it evaporated into the air.

For a brief moment, the ground trembled. But then it stopped.

Dylan frowned, and Risha asked, “That’s it?”

“Let me think for a moment.” He closed his eyes and muttered as he recalled the card’s text, “It uses the force of two times my magic power to act on a circle with a maximum radius of my magic power in feet…”

After repeating the line a few times, he had a guess about what had gone wrong, and the next time he played the card, he tried to control it to affect a smaller area.

The second bear was scaled down to match the smaller circle, but when it hit the earth, it had a much greater impact. Dylan nearly lost his footing as the ground cracked beneath him.

His third attempt saw a diminutive bear punching a five-foot-deep crater into the charred farmland.

The amount of magic power the card uses always remains the same, but that power needs to be evenly distributed across the spell’s area. The larger the circle, the more diluted the effect.

Dylan frown again. The card wasn’t as powerful as he’d imagined, and while its strength would grow with his own, so would the gap between the force the spell had access to and the area it could affect.

It is interesting that the bear phantom scales with the size of the circle though.

He tried to picture what it would look like when he’d reached his father’s stat level. A ghostly bear standing more than a hundred feet tall crashing into the earth with almost no effect.

He sighed and wondered if he could make an improved version of the card. Now that he had a better idea what he was doing with mana cores, if he could keep a better grasp on his intents during the process, he felt it should be possible. But that was for the future.

He ran one final test by summoning the ravager to stand beneath the bear’s paws, but the phantom limbs passed straight through the lizard. The spell only seemed to impact the earth; the bear was just a visual effect.

Once he was done, Dylan returned to the training grounds for his last round of tests before he went to help with sparring. The welves.

His training was simple and the cards worked pretty much as he’d expected. After giving the guard members hanging around a warning that he was about to summon copies of the monsters currently besieging the town, he repeated much the same exercises that he’d done when first working with the ravager.

Though obviously weaker than the lizard, the welves were generally more flexible than the phantoms and better able to accept complex commands.

Like with the ravager, the strings of consciousness connecting Dylan to the creatures were robust, and after adding his new experiences to what he’d already known, he began to draw conclusions about how those strings functioned.

At one end of the spectrum were the wisps summoned by Wisps of Knowledge. Their strings were thin and hollow. Dylan couldn’t get them to do anything without his continuous command, but enforcing that command was as simple as breathing.

In the middle were the phantoms. Medium sized strings that seemed to be filled with a misty sense of consciousness that mirrored the mist composing their bodies. They would carry out simple tasks, and while it wasn’t exactly the same kind of direct control as the wisps, his experience resonating with the soldiers had shown that a comparable state of command was possible.

And then there was the ravager. It had a thick string flooded with a strong sense of existence. It was able to complete complicated tasks, but the challenge of minutely controlling it was significantly greater.

It was like the width of the string represented how much information the connection could accommodate, while a string’s saturation represented how much of a mind and ability for independent action the attached summoned creature could display.

Complex commands or series of instructions required thicker strings to convey, and in order to assume direct control, Dylan needed to either overcome or resonate with the sense of consciousness running through it all. Empty strings like the wisps’ were easy to handle; resonating was more difficult.

Despite multiple attempts, he still hadn’t managed to replicate the feat with the soldiers. He grew more proficient in his ability to direct each of his creatures, but both the rhythm he’d entered when commanding the phantoms against the ravager and the expansion of his mind indicative of his mana technique eluded him.

He was disappointed but not discouraged. He knew he’d get there.

But reflecting back, he couldn’t stop himself from wondering about any other types of strings he hadn’t encountered yet and the unique challenges or opportunities they’d present. Thin but full. Thick but hollow.

Is that something I can learn to influence when making cards?

Dylan added the idea to the growing list of experiments he wanted to work on once he had a more stable card pool.

And enough mana and energy cards for two full decks.

One of the biggest improvements he’d get when he advanced his class tier was the ability to load an additional deck, but because each one of his cards was unique and could only exist in one loaded deck at a time, he’d need twice as many functional cards to support everything.

Even though he would most likely have several months to prepare, considering that he could only create one Blank Card a day, his time was still short if he wanted to be able to take full and immediate advantage of his advancement.

Hopefully, I can also figure out how to make Intermediate Energy cards before then. Filling two decks with Basic Energy just felt wasteful, and considering the generally increasing activation costs of his cards, it would also likely be insufficient.

Beyond surviving the fallout of Fairbasin’s dungeon break, Dylan’s goal was ultimately to push his stats up close to tier two before the beginning of the special Boon War that Chester had mentioned. He didn’t know how long he would have until it might begin, and all of the little things he needed to do to adequately prepare weighed down the back of his mind.

But he forced himself not to focus on anything beyond his next training tasks.

After spending some time practicing with a mana gauntlet, he walked to the sparring ring.

For the rest of the afternoon, he and Alyssa used their abilities to enhance the training experience of the other newly awakened. Sometimes they took turns, and sometimes they worked in tandem.

Depending on the preferences of his sparring partners, Dylan would swap between using the ravager or some combination of the welves.

One time, he’d even reshuffled in order to summon two ravagers and two pairs of the wolflike Young Welves in order to aid in a group fight. But because the burden of controlling so many different creatures had been too much for him, the match hadn’t lasted long. The welves were cleaned up quickly, and although the ravagers were tough opponents even without Dylan giving them too much direction, the numbers advantage they’d faced was too great for duo to last more than another couple of minutes.

In normal matches, one ravager was capable of drawing even with and even occasionally beating its less experienced opponents. Seeing that happen made Dylan feel both proud and helpless. He was only giving the lizard the broadest instructions on how to fight; he still couldn’t grasp how to best take control of it. The creature was a representation of his own power, but when it faced off against his peers in the ring, he didn’t feel like it was him who’d beaten them.

When the monster fought against tougher challengers and lost, he understood that it was only natural that a singular facet of his abilities wouldn’t be a match for someone skilled in using their class and well-practiced in combat, but at the same time, he wondered about what the outcome of those bouts would have been if he’d been able to properly control the ravager.

But for all his thoughts, he didn’t let himself forget that these sparring matches didn’t represent how well he’d do in a real battle. And the most important point he kept reminding himself of was that in addition to the other cards he could bring to the table, he’d also be bringing another target. The fastest way to beat the ravager would often be to simply ignore it and beat the person holding its reins.

To help ensure his personal security, Dylan decided to add one more round of physical training to his routine, and he jogged home carrying the weight of four energy.

After dinner, he went to his room early. He sat on his bed and meditated with a mana crystal to accelerate his advancement. And the following the day, he began to see real results.

Early the next morning, while resting following his warmup, his physical power broke through to tier one. He felt as if something had been unlocked within him. The amount of mana flowing through his muscles didn’t grow by more than he’d seen with his previous stat increases, but the ease of its circulation was incomparable.

Everything was more efficient, more powerful. He moved with more grace and could exert himself for longer. His physical capabilities blossomed.

When he compared how physical power had enhanced his body before crossing the tier one threshold with how it did after, Dylan felt as if the points in the stat were now operating with a multiplier. When he was still at tier zero, each point of physical power had seemed to add a set amount to his strength and stamina, but after reaching tier one, each of those points joined together and were augmented by the natural fluidity his body could now use to access their power.

Reveling in the new sensations, Dylan ran through an extra set of exercises, this time carrying five points of energy instead of four. It was exhausting but exhilarating, and as he fell to the ground once he’d finished, his eyes were beaming.

He considered testing his energy limits, but ultimately, he doubted he could go above eight. He didn’t know if he’d still collapse under that amount of pressure, but even if he might be able to remain standing, he guessed that he’d probably have too much trouble doing anything else for the exercise to be useful for anything more than holding weight.

But that could be another form of energy training all on its own, Dylan thought, but then he shook his head. It’s better to be safe.

He decided to wait until he’d raised his physical power a bit more before he tried adding the practice method to his usual training regimen.

When he stood again, he shifted his attention to the cards he wanted to test.

Over the past day, everyone who’d returned from the Tutorial with a combat class had been asked to gather in the sparring ring at noon. The announcement his father and Risha had told him about was coming.

Expecting the training grounds to be more crowded than usual, Dylan had arrived just before the rising sun; he wanted to be sure he had enough space to run the experiments he had in mind, and after calming down his excitement at his physical power advancing a tier, he got back to doing just that.

He told himself that what he’d planned to do was push the limits of a few of his cards, but when he ran a mental checklist of the tests he’d come up with, he couldn’t lie and say that was his only motivation.

He also wanted to have fun.