The years flew by as Zoe had fun relaxing and practicing her skills. Most of her time was spent either at Kaira park or out in the forests around Flester taking advantage of all the camping supplies she’d gotten so long ago.

She had worked on a few manipulation skills — Wind Manipulation was the first that she acquired. It was almost a full year of steady practice and studying. Watching people at Barlahai who advertised with their magics, wandering through the town looking for people with wind auras or other effects that shifted the mana around them.

More hours than she could count were spent at Kaira library researching mana and the elements. She learned lots along the way, about the nature of mana and how it worked. What kinds of motions the mana made as different effects were cast. How it reacted to rushing winds that held up somebody’s sign, or the violent churning while somebody put on a show with their water magic.

It helped her a lot with understanding what mana was, and what her Mana Manipulation skill was truly capable of. But it wasn’t easy to make the step from how the mana reacted to different effects, to creating those effects with mana. She could see the mana rush in, flood through the magic that was being cast. She could watch as it transformed and created something far more than just itself.

But it took far longer than she thought it would before she was able to create any effects through her mana that weren’t just using it as the semi corporeal material that it seemed to be. One day when she was sitting at her favourite bench in Kaira park and pushing the mana around in various patterns she’d seen before, she had her first success. It was small, a weak gust that lifted a corner of the page in the book she was reading through. But it was enough.

*Ding* You have unlocked the Wind Manipulation general skill.

[Wind Manipulation]

The wind bends to your will.

She had fun playing with the skill for a while, but found it lackluster compared to her Frost skill. The conclusion she came to was that manipulation skills were fun, but it was creation that made them powerful. Harnessing the air around her was difficult, she had to flood it with her mana first to grasp control of it.

With her Frost skill, as long as she had mana, she could create more Frost. There was no horrible delay in wrenching control of the ice from the world, she just created it and it was hers. For a while, she tried to upgrade the Wind Manipulation skill to the more generalized Wind skill that should exist.

But as before, she had no idea where to even begin with that. Moving air around with her mana manipulation alone was simple enough to understand, and yet still took her a year to have just the slightest effect.

To create air from nothing, with just her mana? What would even be the first step? What was wind? What was air? Zoe watched as she created Frost and the mana was pulled from her to form the ball that floated next to her.

The process was chaotic, and impossible to understand for her. It should be possible, in theory, if Richard was to be believed. And she had no reason to believe otherwise. But it was far beyond her capabilities, and she settled with collecting some more manipulation skills.

Earth was the next, and it only took another three months. Much of her practice and experience from getting Wind Manipulation applied to Earth Manipulation as well. The motions couldn’t be more different, but the theory was the same. She had to manipulate the mana to an effect.

Zoe already knew how mana worked, she knew where to look. It was simple, compared to when she had to learn everything from scratch. Studying the patterns that made up earth took a lot of time, and reverse engineering the effects to figure out what she needed to do was still challenging. But she had a system now, and it cut out a lot of the difficulty for her.

*Ding* You have unlocked the Earth Manipulation general skills.

[Earth Manipulation]

The earth bends to your will.

The next one Zoe wanted to work on was Space. She would daydream about opening portals and teleporting around wherever she wanted to go. One moment she’d be sitting in Emma’s tower with Oliver next to her. The next, she’d be up Moaning Point trying her luck on the next stage.

It excited her, and it might even help her with guiding Emma towards getting it at some point so she could make some progress towards not dying of old age.

But as the months passed, she didn’t feel like she’d made any progress on it at all. What even was space, to mana? How did it interact with mana? Space was all around, constantly, she thought.

Zoe had even found a few people who had space effects — John had powerful space magic, or maybe force? Either way, she couldn’t see anything. The mana just didn’t seem to care about space magic in the slightest bit, from what she could see. Maybe she missed something, some subtle movements that the mana made to accommodate the space magic.

She ended up giving up on Space Manipulation and moved on to Time Manipulation. If she could get it to a high enough level, she might be able to just slow down her opponents so much that they couldn’t pose a threat. Or maybe speed herself up, or grow a garden faster than normal.

But it had the same problem as Space. She ended up dubbing them as abstract elements in her mind. Elements that clearly existed, but which were too far outside her understanding of reality to piece together. She added Mental and Gravity to the list as well, and didn’t even bother trying to waste time on them yet.

Taxes weren’t as scary as she thought they would be. Zoe started selling charged mana orbs to Ren again rather than taking the massive cut to her income for him to employ her officially. Joe helped her out with the process, and a part of her cringed as she did it.

Being whisked away to another world and then stuck with taxes still really didn’t fit her idea of a great time, but the money was much better, and rather than having to work every day at Ren’s, she was able to just dump all of her excess mana into mana orbs.

He still only wanted one hundred fifty thousand mana every day, but storing many orbs that she could fill up meant that on days when she wasn’t doing something mana intensive she could get a backlog of filled orbs. And then on days when she did want to do something more mana intensive, she had that backlog of orbs to still sell off to Ren.

She showed up to his door almost every morning, and after the first few weeks he took down the job offering so Zoe wouldn’t have to deal with competition. She appreciated being able to show up at a more comfortable time, rather than having to rush there first thing in the morning before anybody else showed up.

It wasn’t the best job she had on offer, but it was consistent and easy for her. And once she got over her aversion of taxes, made her quite a substantial amount of money. Quite a lot was taken away for taxes — she made one hundred eighty two and a half gold every year gross, which catapulted her through a few tax brackets. Thankfully, the tax brackets worked as she remembered and she wasn’t penalized for making more money.

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The first five weren’t taxed. The next five were taxed at fifteen percent, so she lost seventy-five silver on it. The next forty gold were taxed at twenty-five percent. Then forty percent for the next fifty gold, and on the last eighty gold she made she paid sixty percent. Altogether, she ended up with one hundred two gold and twenty-five silver from her mana orbs every year from Ren.

Or she would have, but he stopped buying orbs altogether after two more years. Chloe had made it to her next class and their mana problems were solved. Zoe knew it wouldn’t last forever, as much as he said it wouldn’t be going anywhere, she had been taking advantage of it for several years at that point.

Before then, Zoe had made a little under two hundred and fifty gold total. More than enough for her to get a house one day, if she decided to go that route. Or maybe a really big storage item, instead. Or possibly even both.

It was an incredible amount of money for Zoe, and she wasn’t sure what to do with it all. She kept it in her storage bracelet and forgot about it for a while.

In her spare time, when she wasn’t trying to get a new manipulation skill, Zoe found herself either refining the skills she already had or trying to learn new ones. She wandered around town looking for anybody who might help her learn anything new.

She found quite a few people who offered training for many different skills. Carpentry was the first, and Zoe found herself quite taken aback by how much fun it was. She pictured it as making simple chairs and tables, but it was so much more. She created engravings, and learned how to emboss her creations, which made them look much better and also depending on the material she used, made her enchantments last much longer on them.

Smithing was a similar process. Slaving over the hot coals and hammering away on an anvil seemed so tedious at first. But Zoe found it so gratifying to create a dagger for herself. It wasn’t a good dagger, but she kept it in her bracelet as a memento anyway. The only issue was that outside of renting a forge, she had nowhere to actually practice and refine it.

Her laundry list of things she’d want in her house continued to grow. A forge, a big woodworking shop, somewhere to practice her martial skills. A nice kitchen, a big bathtub.

Zoe thought of the few hundred gold in her bracelet and wondered how much she’d end up needing to scale back her dreamhouse. Maybe one day when her skills were all high enough, she could find somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and create something all on her own. That would be satisfying, she thought.

A forge made by her, for her. A shop full of tools she’d made herself, with metals she found and forged on her own. The independence called to her, a fantasy that might even one day be possible. A beautiful home that she could waste decades away in.

Pottery was the most boring skill she’d acquired. It was messy and she had no use for plenty of pots. Even if she could make them in different shapes, carpentry just accomplished the creation of something so much better.

Mining surprised her a lot. She found it quite enjoyable, and spent quite a bit of time digging up some random bits of stone and metals she found while exploring around Flester. And the last skill she acquired was Fishing. Fishing was something she’d done when she was younger, and it was enjoyable enough here as well. But the real draw for her was when she went out onto a boat in the middle of the sea. Fishing in rivers didn’t have that same serenity she appreciated.

Sailing, if it was a skill, was something she wanted to get as soon as she could. Maybe her dream house would be on a floating island she could sail around the world.

Zoe tried looking for resistances over the years, but nobody that she found was able to offer her anything new. She spoke with Eliza a few times, and she offered to level the resistances that Zoe already had, but that was less interesting. Maybe someday when her pain resistance made enough of a difference, but for the time being, Zoe wanted new resistances, not to suffer just for higher level resistances.

Five years passed, and Zoe was surprised with a new feat.

*Ding* For accumulating a total of 1000 general skill levels, you have been awarded with the [Proficient] feat.

[Proficient]

You have accumulated a large wealth of skills and find pleasure from the refining your own capabilities.

She decided that was as good a reason as any to move on from Flester, and sat down in Kaira park to check her stat sheet. She had made it to level fifty-seven and had two hundred ninety stat points to play with.

Zoe dumped five points into Endurance to bring it up to her goal and wondered what to do with the rest. Her first goal was to try and find out if Intelligence affected her Frozen Arsenal. It had already made a very noticeable difference just levelling it up so much, so she didn’t think she wanted to get rid of it anyway. But if Intelligence affected it, then it was definitely staying.

She pumped seventy-five of her stat points into Intelligence and felt the surge of power rush through her as she shivered. Then she summoned a dagger of ice and scratched into the ground next to her. It sliced through with surprising ease. Zoe wasn’t sure if that meant that she would be able to deflect blows with her shield better or not, but it meant Intelligence had some effect, at least.

That left her with two hundred and ten points remaining. Part of her wanted to push her Intelligence to three hundred and then dump the rest into Wisdom. But she needed to temper her excitement at least a little.

Fifty points into Vitality, and then one hundred into Intelligence. The remaining sixty she would split evenly between Strength, Dexterity and Wisdom. Zoe shuddered as the system raced through her body and soul to accommodate the changes she made, and then took a final look over her stat sheet.

Name: Zoe Mara

Race: Human

——

Stat Points: 0

Strength: 70

Dexterity: 70

Vitality: 100

Endurance: 50

Intelligence: 250

Wisdom: 128

Health: 1000/1000

Stamina: 500/500

Mana: 5000/5000

——

Class 1: Earthian (57)

- Identify (76)

Class 2: Seasoned Frost

- Cold Affinity (89)

- Time Affinity (93)

- Restoration (32)

- Frozen Arsenal (73)

- Alacrity (109)

Class 3: Chrono Enchanter

- Time Affinity (91)

- Mana Affinity (86)

- Enchanted Mirror (68)

- Mana Manipulation (84)

- Immaculate Enchantments (31)

——

General Skills:

- Vampyric Regeneration (37)

- Vampyric Senses (87)

- Vampyric Resistance (27)

- Vampyric Immortality (8)

- Vampyric Charm (71)

- Vampyric Empathy (69)

- Gathering (41)

- Archery (72)

­- Meditation (118)

- Cooking (39)

- Dagger-fighting (47)

- Tracking (44)

- Stealth (63)

- Frost (86)

- Alchemy (6)

- Spear-fighting (23)

- Sword-fighting (27)

- Shield-fighting (31)

- Wind Manipulation (17)

- Earth Manipulation (13)

- Carpentry (33)

- Pottery (7)

- Fishing (15)

- Smithing (3)

- Mining (17)

Resistances:

- Mental (7)

- Poison (14)

­- Pain (5)

- Heat (1)

- Fire (1)

- Cold (5)

­- Disintegration (2)

- Time (3)

- Space (1)

- Water (1)

- Earth (1)

- Gravity (1)

- Ice (1)

- Wind (1)

- Lightning (1)

Feats:

- Patient Decider

- Master of Seasons

- Slayer of Frost

- Skilled

- Proficient

- Okiu’s blessing