Zoe looked at the skills and felt a little unsure about her decision. It seemed like an amazing class, for somebody else. For Zoe though, many of the skills just didn’t interest her all that much. Growing plants faster, or creating a zone of healing for people? Who would even be healed by that while she was alone in a dungeon or flying through the air?
The class bonuses were great — although Mana Sight meant that whatever this class ended up being, it wouldn’t stick around forever. Wasting a class bonus slot on something she already had wasn’t a great idea in her mind. And she didn’t expect to have a massive mana capacity bonus from the class since it didn’t mention anything about mana capacity, but seeing just even more mana regeneration disappointed her. In a moment, she could replace the class with another Everlasting Enchanter and her maximum distance per Cosmic Step would go from a couple kilometers to maybe even ten.
She sighed and teleported out into the forests east of Darpi, falling to the ground in a three point hero landing and smiling to a camera that didn’t exist. If nothing else, the elements governed by Elemental Shaman would be different to her current Elemental Manipulation, and that would make it worth taking for a while at least.
Zoe started with the least exciting skills, in her opinion. She pushed the system to give her Elemental Creation, and all four of the Nature skills. As soon as she did, she noticed a sensation she wasn’t used to. The plant life that surrounded her came to life, begging for her attention. The grass beneath her feet screamed for light, while the trees that desperately reached to the sky wished for water.
She focused on her Elemental Creation skill and pushed mana into a tree next to her, and watched as her mana flooded into the tree to reach to its roots and canopies. Not at all like when she enchanted something — that was destructive, mana ripping through something to restructure its foundations. The tree welcomed her mana and even pulled on it like a child grasping for food. Her mana rushed through the tree and branches grew from the trunk, reaching further into the sky. Leaves sprouted from the branches, filling the canopy with a beautiful, vibrant green colour.
Zoe stopped the flow of mana and watched as the remnants continued pushing the tree to grow for a few moments before the last of her mana was spent. It wasn’t going to create a new Kaira library anytime soon, but in just a brief minute the tree had changed. Compared to the other trees nearby it looked far healthier and lively, though she wondered what use it would have for her.
She turned her attention to the other skills, starting with Nature’s Decay. Zoe focused on the tree she had grown and pushed her mana into Nature’s Decay.
*Ding* You have been affected by the [Nature’s Decay] skill. Increased stats for one minute.
Zoe checked her stat sheet as soon as she got the notification, but there was no indication of the increased stats anywhere that she could see. She wandered around the forest, draining life from the trees she passed for a few minutes but couldn’t notice any changes until she stopped and let the buff expire.
When it did, she felt the world speed up as her quickness slowed down. Each step felt just a little bit heavier as she continued wandering through the forest. It wasn’t a major difference, but it was noticeable. It just built up so gradually that she couldn’t notice it, she supposed.
Would it be more significant if she were facing off against more powerful foes, with more health to drain from? She wasn’t sure, but she was excited to try it out next time she found a dungeon that didn’t restrict her level.
Nature’s Clearing was far simpler to understand. She focused on the skill, pushing mana into it and a dim green light expanded out to a circle reaching about seven feet away from her. The light had a soft pulsating glow to it, and the system responded with one of the longer messages she’d seen from it.
*Ding* You are within Zoe Mara’s [Nature’s Clearing]. Increased health regeneration. Increased resistance to Mental, Poison, Pain, Heat, Fire, Cold, Disintegration, Time, Space, Gravity, Ice, Wind, Lightning, Sound, Bone, Flora damage types. Reduced damage dealt to other creatures within [Nature’s Clearing].
Zoe double checked her resistances when she got the notification, and noted that every resistance the skill provided was one that she had. Would they stack, giving her even more resistance to those damage types, or would they only apply to people that didn’t already have the resistances? She also wasn’t sure how much more health regeneration the aura provided, and wasn’t interested in injuring herself to find out.
She cancelled the skill and pushed mana into Nature’s Assistance. An enormous amount of mana rushed from Zoe, flooding the ground before her. After almost twenty seconds of a shocking drain to her mana, a leafy bowling ball with stubby wooden sticks for legs and bright lime green eyes grew from the dirt in front of her. Zoe drained a nearby tree with Nature’s Decay and watched as the tree became visibly damaged.
The leaves darkened and dried, the branches became splintered and the tree screamed for water and life. Zoe urged the leafy green bowling ball familiar she’d summoned to heal the tree, and it waddled over to the tree. A dim green light similar to Zoe’s aura washed over the tree and began to mend the damage Zoe had done. The leaves popped back to their vibrant greens, the splintered branches repaired themselves and the tree’s desperate cries for help turned to silence.
Zoe pushed mana into the skill again, and another leafy green bowling ball formed in front of her. Was there a limit on how many she could have? Did they have a time limit, or would they just use up the mana she provided them with and disappear? Did they use mana to just sit around, or only when they were healing something? If Zoe could create them and leave them with friends for portable healing stations, then that would make the class far better than she thought it was.
She left the leafy green bowling balls where they were and turned her attention to something else — her mana. The amount the skill drained from her was immense, and it made her curious how long it would take her to recover her full pool of mana now.
A moment later, she appeared two kilometers away floating in the sky. Her mana flashed to near zero in an instant, and a fraction of a second later it was back to full. Zoe laughed as she drifted back down to the ground in a suit of earth. Before Elemental Shaman, it would have taken her several seconds to recover that much. Now it was less than a second. Even if she couldn’t teleport farther, she could teleport far faster.
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Any faster and she wouldn’t even be able to take advantage of it. At this point, the main limitation to her teleportation was just the time it took her to see where her next destination would be so she doesn’t end up dead in the middle of an unexpected tree.
Zoe tried Nature’s Recovery, but the only thing she could notice about the skill was that it didn’t work on objects that weren’t flora, and didn’t require touch like her Restoration did. The range was quite small — only a few feet away from her, but that might be the difference between life and death someday, she supposed. The actual health it recovered was a mystery to her, until she felt motivated to hurt herself to test it. Restoration was already potent enough to keep her alive. In a pinch, she wouldn’t be relying on new skills anyway.
Before she switched the skills out to try other ones, Zoe decided to test the enchantments. Elemental Creation did the same thing as an enchantment. It created a well of mana that would be consumed to enhance the plants around it. Quite useful if she could manage a self sufficient enchantment and ever got around to making her garden.
Nature’s Decay drew life from whatever it touched, converting it to mana to power the enchantment. Zoe couldn’t think of any specific use for it, but it seemed like a very useful enchantment. The mana it could get from a tree was far superior to her normal mana enchantment of Meditation and Enchanting, and in only a single skill. But it required draining health — or life, whatever the difference was, from something to power itself.
Nature’s Clearing provided the exact same benefit as Zoe using the skill, but was by far the most mana hungry enchantment she’d ever seen. Even with as much mana as she could fit in an object, the enchantment did little more than a momentary flash of green and a system message that no longer applied the moment she even noticed it. But if she could somehow manage to make it sustain itself, then it would likely be an extraordinarily expensive enchantment to sell, and quite a comfort to give to her friends.
Though, Zoe was nowhere near even being able to think about making it sustain itself. The mana cost was far too intense for anything she’d tried before.
Nature’s Assistance worked very similar to Cosmic Familiar, though it allowed her to activate enchantments with her Wood and Water skills, rather than with Cosmic skills. Which made her quite excited for what elements the Elemental Manipulation would govern.
Nature’s Recovery was another simple healing enchantment, repairing minor damages to the object, but only if the skill would work on that object anyway. When she enchanted a coin with the skill, it did nothing. But if she enchanted a branch, it recovered any damage she did to it when she pushed mana into it.
Zoe pushed the system to switch her skills, taking Elemental Affinity, Elemental Manipulation and Elemental Growth. First she jumped into Elemental Manipulation to see which elements were governed by Elemental Shaman. This Elemental Manipulation seemed to control Earth, Water, Wood and Decay — or some kind of rotting effect, anyway.
Which seemed odd, since Water, Earth and Wood were already combined to flora, but Zoe didn’t mind. The skill was new, and she was excited to see what would happen if she replicated the skill with her own mana. Would it add to her existing Elemental skill, or would it replace it with this variation? Would she had to piece apart the components and add it in to the pattern to add new elements to her Elemental skill?
Was it even worth doing that, anyway? Other than the Decaying part, Zoe already had everything this Elemental Manipulation offered. She shrugged. One day she’d do it just for fun, even if the Elemental Skill never got much use.
It raised the question though, of what her Elemental Affinity applied to. Would it apply to all of her elements, or just the ones this variant of Elemental Manipulation had control over? Logic said that it would only apply to the same elements her Elemental Manipulation applied to, and with the power she wielded now the only way to test it would be to devastate a large section of the forest. Which she wasn’t interested in doing.
Maybe one day when she had somewhere less beautiful to destroy.
She turned her attention to Elemental Growth, finding it to be somewhat of a mix between Enchanting and Elemental Creation. The tree welcomed her mana like with her Creation skill, but her mana seemed to overstep as it forced its way through the tree and pushed elemental mana through its trunk and branches, letting Zoe imbue the tree with different effects.
Wood forced the tree to grow branches that swung violently around it, scraping into the dirt and nearby trees. Water made the tree’s branches drip with water, and with enough mana water poured from the tree and flooded the ground below it with water that reached up over Zoe’s feet.
Earth caused the ground surrounding the tree to quake, forming uneven terrain that was difficult to traverse. And last was decay which did nothing until Zoe touched the tree and felt her health rip out of her. She checked her vitals as she leaned against the tree.
Health: 87243/88200… 86675/88200…86131/88200…
She continued leaning against the tree for a minute until her health dropped down to about fifty thousand, and then activated Nature’s Clearing. She dismissed the notification she got and watched as her health recovered far faster than when she left it to its natural regeneration — just over ten per second. Which for a level one skill, didn’t seem that bad. Even at level one hundred eighteen, Restoration was about three thousand health per second with all of her bonuses.
And that was only to one person at a time that she was touching and who had taken that damage within a recent enough time frame for the skill to care about it. For Zoe, Restoration was far better, but Nature’s Clearing seemed useful if she ever ran into a group of wounded people somewhere. Nature’s Recovery in comparison was capable of restoring just about twenty five health per second.
As an Enchantment, Elemental Growth was underwhelming. It acted as a proxy of sorts for the elements themselves, letting her create a coin enchanted with Earth or Decay, but not adding anything extra of its own. At least not that she could see. Even when she enchanted a branch, or brought the enchantment up to a tree it didn’t seem to react in any meaningful way. Decay itself was new, causing the object she enchanted to eat away at whatever it was placed on and slowly fall into a hole it carved. Useful for digging, Zoe thought.
Zoe sat down and leaned against one of the trees to think about her skill choices, which seemed rather simple. Elemental Affinity, Nature’s Decay, Nature’s Clearing and Nature’s Assistance were all must haves. And between the remaining choices, both Elemental Manipulation and Nature’s Recovery were worthless. The former would be a general skill someday, and the latter didn’t beat out her Restoration.
Which left Elemental Growth and Elemental Creation. Growth was the obvious choice for now, though if she still had the class when she was back home for a while she’d swap it out for Creation to help get her garden going.