Time passes.

Every day, I train my spellcraft and try to get better with the one actual spell I have. Of, course, I also do other stuff, but that’s for later.

The first couple days I managed to focus mostly on just moving the small gravity well around, but that doesn’t keep me entertained for long. So, before I am able to perform it anywhere near an instinctual level, I try something else.

Reversal. The popular depiction of spacetime as a piece of cloth with planets being small balls that distend it may be incomplete, but it did give me an idea. Why not make a hill? After all, the spell is called distort spacetime, not create gravity or whatever.

And it works! More or less.

It’s a bit weaker than the usual method, but that’s mostly from not being used to using the spell in that way. And indeed, only a couple days later it’s already at about the same level as the pulling version. Not that the System gives it levels.

Which allows me a new, and more importantly fun, way to train. By activating the pull version and letting s small rock fly at the source, I can then try to switch it for the push version at just the right time. If I time it correctly, the stone bounces up and down.

That takes me a few days. At first, I was always too late, but once I figured out the method to shift the effect from one extreme to the other it was a breeze.

Which pushed me onto the next stage of training. It’s more or less the same, except that now I’m not shooting straight up, but also to the side. This forces me to actually try and move the spell. Nothing like some good motivation, am I right?

But eventually even that got old, so I had to figure out a new game to play. And while I had an idea, I didn’t know whether it would even be possible.

So I got to work, trying to have two instances of the spell active at once. That took me a while to figure out. You’d think, as did I, that having a skill like parallel processing would help a lot, but uh-uh. No such luck.

I could easily have two separate thought lines running at the same time, but when both of them activated the spell separately it never worked. Sometimes it’d just sputter out without doing anything except wasting mana. Other times it’s activate, then immediately cancel and activate again. One time I even got a similar backlash to when that ritual got interrupted.

Turns out, the solution was in meditation.

I hadn’t forgotten to keep practising that skill either. And it took me less time than it took for me to switch spell training the first time to figure out how to sense my own mana pool. Well, or something to that effect. I can tell how much more juice I have in the tank before I have to recover, but it’s only a vague feeling.

As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a mana pool or similar. But I’m still searching. If nothing else, it makes the vague feeling more concrete.

Anyway, one time I tried casting while concentrating on this feeling and noticed the problem. Whether t be the spell itself or whatever is fuelling it, it always took the shortest path. Which means that it exited from my front and headed in a straight line towards where I intended the spell to go.

Which caused a double casting to fail, since the two ‘streams’ collided and interfered with each other. After that it only took a few more days to figure out how to force the two spells to travel apart.

Once I had that down, I could practise it in the new game I invented. Well, invented is a strong word.

It’s basically just that thing that people, who shoot with bows, do to ceramic disks. Except that I’m the one who throws the disk and also shoots the arrow. And there are no disks and arrows but only rocks. And there’s no bow but a spell.

It’s only after I manage all this do I realize that instead I could have trained quickly cancelling and casting the spell in different locations and achieve the same effect. Whatever.

At least it gives me some variety, allowing me to switch between the two variations of the game.

Of course, that isn’t the only thing I did. I already touched upon the meditation part, but that’s something I only did when recovering from low mana, and even then not always.

At some point I decided to start my day with casual jog around the lake. While remaining silent, of course. I wouldn’t just waste time like that for no reason. I was training a skill. And maintain my physique. It’d be embarrassing if the peak mortal status for my body stat dropped.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The next step in my routine was food. Freshly harvested each day, which resulted in an ugly patch of the woods with scarred trees. So, I tried to spread out my harvesting a little bit.

For the first couple of days this was fine. But then even the magic enhanced spaghetti began to get stale. So, I tried some different flavours. Let me tell you, it’s weird eating pasta but tasting cake. And this was also more or less the only time I experimented with freeform magic.

And then I’d train my spell. But not even fortified mind is enough to keep me to such a barebones routine. That’s why, whenever I had to recover mana, and was too bored to meditate, I crafted something.

And, another bonus reason was to level my improvised implements skill. But that’s beside the point.

It took me less than a week to have a huge pile of pottery. An obscenely large pile. And yes, admittedly they’re not the best pots in the world, but I had them. And it was becoming difficult to store all of them. Because be they mass produced or not, I was still proud to them, and maybe a little attached.

I needed to find a different hobby. Which only took me half a day.

I needed a knife. And not the barely functional edge of a split rock. And my new pastime was born. I started spending every free moment sharpening a rock. By rubbing it against another rock. Now, I don’t know if that’s how you’re supposed to do it, but it worked. Even if it took excruciatingly long.

But I persevered and soon had a knife. Or rather, the blade of one. This is where I took one of the bigger risks of my stay here. Or at least, the biggest known risk.

The ritual that formed my bed informed me pretty clearly that shaping matter like that is quite costly. But and this is a big but, I also told myself that a knife is much smaller than a bed. And besides, I can also sense when I’m running low on mana now. I’ll be able to stop. Hopefully.

So, I took the risk. And it paid off. Sure, I almost did run out of mana again, but I hadn’t. and in the end, I had a nice knife. The handle made of wood, perfectly fusing with the stone edge. And it cut beautifully. Maybe even at the level of some lower quality modern knives.

But that’s the only other time I experimented with freeform magic.

The rest of my time I spent developing my language a bit more. Sure, I made use of it when casting spells, but it still wasn’t complete. And it felt wrong to come up with words on the spot whenever I needed a new incantation.

I even begun working on the whole grammar aspect. Along with some early writing system for it.

And that’s how I spent the time, however long it’s been. I lost count after a while.

In the end, I think I made some really good progress. I mean, just look.

Level Up!

Silent step – level 32 -> 47

Fortified mind – level 39 -> 58

Languages – level 18 -> 30

General knowledge – level 30 -> 36

Visualize – level 35 -> 49

Parallel processing – level 40 -> 61

Improvised implements – level 24 -> 32

Meditation – level 23 -> 41

On one hand, it feels a bit low for the time I spent on it. On the other… big numbers!

Now then, other than all that, I also had some time to think. About a variety of things, but also the eating skill I wanted.

Due to a variety of reason, but mostly because I don’t even have the inkling of an idea about how to get the other version, I’ve decided that I’d be for the best being able to get more from the food I eat. Who knows what the skill will end up being, but I’m willing to give it a try.

But what about the whole, the System doesn’t recognize things not done actively as eligible for skills? Well, I’ve had time to think it through and I think it may not be so much actively versus passively performed, but it may depend on whether I am, at least on some level, aware that I’m doing it.

And so I put all this brainpower to use and tried to remember as much about the digestive system as I could remember. And if my theory is correct, then if I eat something now while keeping in mind what’s actually happening in my body, is should get a skill out of it.

So, let’s try this.

The first part is mechanical digestion, with a bit of chemical. I chew the boiled bark, tasting the magically induced fish flavour, while letting my saliva soak through it. Yeah, ok. I can see why people aren’t aware of what’s going on inside them. Even imagining it is disgusting. Though this may be a situation where my visualization skill works against me.

A swallow and the mixture of food and saliva travels down my neck. There are two pipes there, one going to the lungs and one to the stomach. I can’t remember their names, but the stomach one is nearer to the front side of the neck.

Then, it enters the stomach. More chemical digestion follows, this time with a slight side of mechanical. At least I think so? I’m pretty sure that the stomach does both.

Anyway, the stomach acid dissolves the food. Meanwhile the stomach walls are coated in the opposite of an acid so that they don’t dissolve. What’s it called… base? Something like that, I’m sure.

After it’s dissolved it head into the small intestine. The walls of which are all wrinkly like, which allows more nutrients to get absorbed. I think there’s also some enzymes or something released here, though I could be vert wrong about that. Probably not enzymes, but some kind of solution.

After that it’s onto the other, bigger intestine, which is mostly just more of the same. maybe with a focus on water, I’m not sure. And then, well, we all know what comes next.

A couple minutes later I’m done and ready to check my available skills.

I’ve actually also experimented a bit with this and learned two things. I can pull out just a specific skill if I have it available or a broader category of skills, for example nutritional in this case. The other thing I managed to do is close that window without rejecting or accepting all the skill there. So, no more worrying about qualifying for a skill a second time!

Well then, here it is.

You have learned the skill: Digestive system!

Accept?

Hah, it’s a bit funny for the System to offer me a skill with the word system in it. But yes, accept.

Now then, onto some more interesting things. I think I may just have had the prefect idea of how to turn my spell into a proper telekinesis. I’m just going to have to combine what I’ve learned so far into the perfect blend.