“What happened to her?” The pity in Tavia’s voice couldn’t be mistaken.
Seris was slumped against the house’s wall, bemoaning her life and trying her best to keep the many, many cakes she had eaten inside her stomach. Cal felt a pang of regret at having to speed back to the Northern Wastes. However, the fear of damage to his crops made it necessary in his mind.
He had managed to reduce the trip to less than thirty minutes, but looking at Seris, he wondered if it was worth it.
“Poor girl,” Tavia knelt beside Seris and gently patted her back. “Do you need me to take you to a healer? My carriage will let us get to town quickly.”
Seris heard the word ‘quickly’ and turned greener than she already was. It looked like she was going to fail to keep the food inside her stomach.
“I’m—” Cal was interrupted.
“No! No more talk about trips! I want to keep my delicious desserts inside!” Seris wriggled around like she was about to die, then froze as she looked at Cal. “I left a slice of cake in the restaurant!” She proceeded to look even more miserable than she already was.
Cal really had been feeling apologetic, but the mention of cake erased almost all of his sympathy. If she could cry about uneaten dessert, the issue clearly wasn’t as severe as she made it.
“I have some work to do. Keep an eye on her, Tavia,” Cal left after his fellow guild member nodded without looking at him. Tavia was more concerned about consoling Seris.
He walked to the planted patch and noticed the soil almost looked dry. If he hadn’t returned at full speed, the disaster he feared might have actually happened. He cast [Rainfall] and watched it revitalize the soil.
Tavia and Seris are much closer than I expected. Cal looked in their direction. And they’ve only met a few times.
He wasn’t complaining about it. It was more of a fascination with how fast they clicked together. He didn’t think it was possible to get along so quickly.
It took Oleg and I nearly a year before we bothered to care about something as unimportant as the other’s feelings.
Cal glanced at them again with furrowed brows.
This may be how they are. They became comfortable with me in no time at all.
He finished watering the crops and studied the part of the field next to the patch. The slurry of water and powdered crystals he had spread across the patch had almost settled, but it still needed a few more hours before he could proceed to the last step and add the mulch.
Cal noticed that Tavia and Seris had disappeared, likely moving inside the house. He had no desire to join them. At least, not when the replacement furnishings hadn’t arrived yet. The Overseer mentioned an order that should arrive closer to the end of the day, and he assumed that it would be delivered together with the furnishings.
I might as well study the spell booklets.
He made a short hop to the makeshift flat top of the rocky rubble and took a seat. It was then he realized that the ’short hop’ was well over twenty feet high.
… I really need to measure my physical limits at some point. With how weak most guild members are, I might be able to overpower them in a battle purely due to my strength while they are Initiates.
Cal’s fantasy of powering his way through battles with his fists would probably stay a fantasy. Still, the image it brought up amused him. He chuckled as he pulled out the booklet for [Liquid Core].
Liquid Core
Description: Create a ball of water. The size can range from a marble to the limit of what your mana can handle.
Effect: Can be manipulated for various purposes. The most common being a blunt weapon.
Learning [Rainfall] took care of most of the basics of learning water spells. [Liquid Core] needed the knowledge of how water acted in different conditions. Temperature changes and pressure, to name a few.
Cal’s eyebrows kept going higher as he read through the booklet. He intended to reread it multiple times to ensure he didn’t misunderstand anything. Especially since it contained the details of water in the form of steam to a state where it was nearly solid.
It wouldn’t be possible for him to conjure steam since he had no fire element, but it should be easy to do if he somehow possessed it in the future. As for true ice, the booklet hinted that it needed something more than just a high affinity with water, but he wouldn’t know until he made an attempt.
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The biggest thing that stood out from this was mist. The booklet contained information on making a water ball weak enough to resemble mist rather than a liquid ball.
Cal’s first thought was to create a new spell, combining [Rainfall] and [Liquid Core] to make a large cloud of mist on the ground. He would have to figure out how to stop gathering water vapor just before it formed rain clouds and well after it could be considered fog.
It’s something to think about later. It could be a waste of time since there’s no guarantee I can replicate the conditions of [Mist Walker]… plus, I’ll have to activate the skill to know how it works. Even if I could only create a severely weakened version, it would be a breakthrough.
He went through the booklet a few more times before the information it contained was imprinted in his mind. The majority contained details of water in different states, while the rest explained how to use mana to manipulate the ball of water.
Cal didn’t consider this to be much more difficult than [Rainfall], but once again, he suspected that this might be due to his high water affinity.
He pocketed the booklet and pulled on his mana. The starting process was similar to [Rainfall].
Mana trickled out of Cal’s palm, and water vapor was pulled from the surrounding environment. It quickly formed a ball of fog that was a few feet larger than him in width. It strongly resembled the stormy grey of a rain cloud, so this by itself was an accomplishment.
Reading the booklet gave him a better idea of how to gain minute control over the water element. The ball of fog was what he failed to create with [Rainfall] since he had only been able to create clouds that covered around a hundred square feet at minimum.
Cal couldn’t sense any noticeable decline in his mana, so creating a fog of this size was effortless. The cost occurred when he started to compress the ball of fog. The mana drawn out of his mana core increased rapidly.
The size of the conjured ball was reduced by half when it suddenly gained a consistency that resembled fine mist. He drew the ball closer, noticing that the action cost him some mana, and curiously reached out with his free hand.
He could feel the tiny droplets of water cooling his skin, but nothing else happened. He had grand ideas of the interface giving him a surprise message about something related to [Mist Walker], but that was killed quickly.
Cal sighed and drew his arm back before continuing with his experimentation. He continued to compress the ball and had spent a tenth of his mana capacity before succeeding in making it liquid water.
It’s less than a foot wide and already drew so much mana. I can feel how inefficient the process was. It will take some practice before I perfect the [Trait].
He continued compressing the ball of water, testing whether the booklet was correct when it implied it wasn’t possible to turn it into ice. In addition to compression, he flooded the water ball with his mana, as the booklet instructed.
Cal could feel his mana spend increase drastically. He could sense that the water ball had become more dense than before, but it had nothing to do with ice. The mana he injected forced it to be more compact than water naturally was without turning it into ice.
The moment he took away his mana, it would immediately revert. And no matter how much more pressure he applied or the quantity of mana he injected, the water ball didn’t change. All it accomplished was wasting his mana.
Cal frowned when his mana capacity dipped below fifty percent, depleting at a rate that would consume everything in a few seconds.
He cut off the excess spend of mana and stared at the ball of water hovering before him. It didn’t make much sense to him, but he wasn’t one to waste time by insisting on something that would fail no matter his effort.
The cost to keep the ball active was negligible. Cal estimated that he could keep it as it was for days with the way it sipped on his mana.
He moved to aim the ball of water out of the bounds of his field. The spell effect mentioned the most common use in battle was as a blunt weapon. He had a better idea.
Cal aimed for a random stone in the distance before amassing his mana and releasing it in one shot.
The ball of water shot toward the target, reaching it in less than a blink of an eye. He expected a deafening boom from the collision, but the result was just a soft splash with the ball of water deconstructing on contact. The stone was unfazed.
He quickly realized what happened.
The mana I infused into the ball dissipated before impact. The density was lost, and so was any chance of damage to the stone. My mana wasn’t going to waste like I assumed.
Cal waited patiently for several minutes for his mana to recover to max capacity before trying again. A few seconds later, he once again had a ball of water floating before him.
He didn’t spare more mana than was necessary and dumped it all into the ball.
Cal picked the same stone as the target and launched the water ball with his remaining mana.
BOOM!
The stone no longer existed. A wide hole had taken its place.
That worked.
Cal already planned to make the whole process efficient, but now he was adding the next step: making it possible to conjure multiple balls of water at the same time.
It could allow him to suppress any threats long before they came close to him.
“What was that!?”
Cal turned to see Seris and Tavia staring at him. The hills of rubble blocked them from seeing the area where he launched the water ball.
“I’m testing a new spell!”
“Oh! Can I see?” Seris might have posed that as a question, but she was already scrambling up the hill.
It looks like she got over her nausea.
Cal didn’t deny her, but it wouldn’t be impressive. Not after what she saw Tavia do. Speaking of…
“Where are you going?” Cal asked as Tavia headed to the stables.
“Lumina!” Tavia yelled back. “I want to make sure the things I’ve ordered are correct. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
A wide smile appeared on Cal’s face. “Thank you for your hard work! I’ll be waiting for you to return with furnishing in reasonable colors!”
He chuckled when Tavia glared at him out of her carriage as she left the field.
“Cal,” Seris poked him as soon as she stood beside him at the peak. “Show me the new spell.”
Cal’s lips twitched at her boldness. He was more convinced than even that she hadn’t seen whatever he did to Tarn.
“You didn’t want to go with Tavia? I remember you were reluctant to leave Lumina.”
Seris turned a light shade of green. “Let’s not talk about going anywhere, please.”
Cal looked away to hide his smile when she uneasily put her hands on her stomach.